skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We should look at how we can improve the ROI for education.

Millions across the world, especially in developing countries, drop out of school because they (and/or their guardians)
see no benefit from long-term investment in education. Others who somehow manage to stay in formal institutions are exposed to decontextualized education that they cannot realize their full potential.

There will be many different solutions to it. One of them could be a large-scale, technology-immersed learning system that teaches a broad range of topics to students through a vocation. The vocation could be decided based on the learner's interest and the local resources. For example, in northern Nepal, child walk through perilous snow-covered hills and mountains to recover Yarsagumba ("Himalayan viagra"), a fungus with aphrodisiac and medicinal value. Instead, the kids can be educated progressively in details about different aspects surrounding Yarsagumba - mountain climbing, biological systems, business, marketing (where they could sell the collected Yarsagumba), greenhouse and high-tech farming systems, technology, etc. - without disturbing their Yarsamgumba collecting activity.

This is a simple example. Since a diverse topics are being taught and practiced, learners would not be restricted in the same vocation.
Can you elaborate on that ?
I hope it is obvious that it is impossible for someone to grasp the entire dynamic of your experience based on a few short posts. This requires a long conversation where one would explore and try to understand the entire context. I can't fault your or praise you in any way, not enough data.

In general, though, I'd say business owners (and good managers) are hungry for good employees who "get it". And, if they are smart, they'll recognize these employees.

But you also don't want one-hit-wonders. What you are after are people dedicated to the long term mission. Anyone can bust ass for a few months, get a raise and then proceed to rest on their laurels.

Recognition for good people often comes in the way of raises and promotions over time. You might invest a few years at a company doing good work and contributing value yet not necessarily see much in the way of praise and adoration. And then, one day, you get a promotion. Because people are watching and paying attention. That's the way it works in some places.
Follow in the footsteps of Joan B. Kroc and fund the advancement of peacebuilding and social justice.

http://www.sandiego.edu/peacestudies/about/
Death and two-factor authentication
Well, sure. But then you have to worry about how well the website is storing your passwords. Meh, password managers are the way to go to be honest.
Lift-off for Europe's space laser network
Id be happy to hire anyone who got fired under these circumstances
I think you're oversimplifying an extremely large and complex thing. How does a post like this "play to the common denominator"? https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/3y3fj...
A great resource for people looking to start a startup.

The lecture about accounting and legal aspects of startups cleared up a lot of doubts I had.Very consice.
Scaling and automation of biological, medical, and biomedical research. There are huge tracks of research areas which essentially are technologically backwards. From poor usage of statistics (see all the the replication issues in cancer research, psychology, and etc) to the lack of high quality programming tools to efficiently solve problems. More startups building cheap, applicable, and open-specification hardware with open source software could be a huge boon. The hardware and equipment situation of many scientific labs is stuck in the 90's at best and often based on equipment developed in the 50's and 60's.

Having just finished a master's in material science in applied bio-mechanical research I am personally aware of the lack of basic equipment and tools. Machine learning techniques for example could be applied to many areas of experimental research in biological settings but most labs do not have the time, money, or expertise to apply it. Another possible option would be a sort of "professional software development co-op" for scientific research. Being able to buy (subsidized) development resources might be incredibly helpful. The cost could possibly be offset by forming partnerships to commercialize valuable research, similar to a YC model where the few successes could fund the other.

The system for basic scientific research also seems broken. Much of the data used in many fields (especially nuclear research) is based on (very excellent) research from the 50's. We're essentially riding on accrued capital which will likely reach a limiting point in the coming decades.
The Tragic Fate of the People That Stop Sleeping
> Python's "enforcement" (or rather, strong PEP-8 suggestions) of 80 characters per line teaches you to come up with a lot of ways to avoid nesting.

> The most useful one, and the one that drives me crazy when I see it, is when people write code like this:

But... your example doesn't show any ways to avoid nesting. There's just as much nesting after as before.

Your change makes the code less tall, which is a problem I've had with Python, but it has nothing to do with nesting at all.

I'm actually fond of a third approach:

if something:
return do something
else:
return do something else

I like the ocaml-style philosophy that it's an error if your condition check isn't capable of handling all possible conditions.
The best design is something that combines the native look and feel with a dash of style. You don't have to be 100% native UI elements, just very close to it.
> If you're planning on getting DDoSd

This, don't do it, far better to not get DDoSd ;-)
We Filed 100 Support Tickets to Learn How to Send Better Customer Service Emails
I recently saw a talk by a member of a German team that created a Cuneiform font to go with Unicode's support for the writing system. His book is here: http://www.typografie.de/shop/index.php/en/digitale-keilschr...

(It's pronounced cune-iform, apparently, rather than cune-ay-ee-form with a diphthong)
Having scanned through these lectures, one thing really jumps out at me. There is a serious lack of diversity here. That may seem trivial, but these guys seem to fit a very narrow range of experiences. Even their accents are nearly identical. I would suggest trying to learn from people of a wider background. There are plenty of great startups on this planet not founded by t-shirt-clad brogramers.

The one exception to this pattern is lecture 18, legal and accounting. Watch that lecture. Note the accent change. Note the change of pacing, the polite pauses and lack of a constant train of thought. Legal and accounting are professional fields. These are people from a different background than the other lecturers. Aggressive modes of speech may be cool in founder land, but they do not fly in established professions. If you want to separate yourself from the crowd, if you want to be taken seriously by a wider audience, learn to speak and present as these women.
Although Tunnelblick is named in the article, it uses Sparkle securely (https: always) and is not vulnerable to these attacks.
4) Put secrets in that bucket (duh)
But isn't this largely a social / psychological problem - I assume around 70% of people who commute spend 70% of their time in front of a computer.. so could work from home 3 days per week, if it was socially acceptable to do that.

We've solved things like this before [ daylight saving is a useful group hallucination ] so working from home 3 days per week, or say working a 2hr offset shift could be packaged in a socially digestible form.
Hours of commuting and working per week: (2 + 8) * 5 = 50.

Hours of living on weekdays per week, exclude sleep: 6 * 5 = 30.

Hours of living on weekends per week, exclude sleep: 32.

Total hours living per week: 62

Total hours working per week: 50

You're right, it's not an even 50% split.

There's 6 hours of free time a day, plus 32 hours on the weekend.

Three nights a week I watch a movie or a couple of episodes on netflix (90 minutes), I play an hour or two of games (90 minutes), I write code for another hour or two (90 minutes), and the rest of the time is spent eating dinner.

Two nights a week, I forgo gaming and netflix to hangout with family and friends. I still manage to code. It may be on the train, but I do it.

And there's the weekend.

You know what? I have a good life, and fucked or not, I am grateful for it.

If a company is paying you for your time, what do you expect to be doing, if not to do what the company wants you to do?

If you want to not do what others want you to do, and still receive a regular pay check, that's called taking on welfare.
So what was wrong with HAProxy?
Yeah, it's called empathy for your users.
So that's 6 months of sales versus 3 months for the Surface, so not directly comparable.
iTerm2 is my 20% project.
In Peru, Vultures Go High-Tech to Fight Garbage
Nobody 'enjoys' their mortgages. Mortgages are responsible for making housing less affordable for everyone.

In the old days when people actually saved up to buy a house, the average house would cost something like 4 times the average person's annual salary. Today, we're looking at 10 to 20 times.

Mortgages allow people who would otherwise not have been able to afford a house to buy it outright - This increases the demand for housing and thus drives prices up. In the old days, people worked hard to achieve the American dream (it was an optimistic pursuit). Today, people work hard to avoid bankruptcy (we have become a fear-driven society).

As for 'investing in companies' - Big firms like Goldman Sachs mostly invest in big corporations which enslave people for profit. People in finance are more interested in helping big companies create and maintain strategic monopolies than allowing new companies to improve people's lives. Monopolies are profitable and don't require any R&D investment.

As for savings accounts, well they're not so bad, but what is the point of having a savings account if you have no money to put in it?
Also, with all the new automated payment features offered, people are encouraged to spend all their little money on things that they don't need. That means everything significant has to be purchased using credit.

What's worse is that all of these evils leverage off of each other to make things even worse overall. For example, the rise of corporations means that people are forced to move to big cities to find jobs (since jobs are harder to find in smaller towns - Because small businesses there are being crushed by corporations), this drives city apartment prices up, which increases the amount of mortgage people have to take to buy a house, which increases peoples' dependence on their jobs and reduces their ability to negotiate better salaries and prevents them from improving their conditions of living.

As corporations take a hold on agriculture, the nutritional quality of food keeps going down (see http://calmscience.net/2015/12/11/tale-of-tasteless-tomatoes...) and the standard of living of the working class keeps dropping lower and lower.
One thought, the only simulation that prevented all other traffic lights or subsequent streets from bogging down in traffic, was to ensure at that particular time, no cars advanced at a certain speed.

Your wait may be a locally suboptimal outcome to ensure everyone else has a globally less miserable existence.

So as another participant in the system, thank you for sacrificing a little so that we can be better overall.

A little food for thought, while driving in another country with less adherence to the laws, the operating custom seemed to be stop if it is red OR if safe, go. Ironically, this prevailing attitude resulted in fewer accidents as people drove more cautiously.
Thanks for that response. I didnt expect to get that much useful information.
Does anyone have advice on getting an EB-5 visa without getting scammed?

As a Canadian who has been looking at moving to the US (warmer weather, higher pay), and is fortunate enough to be able to afford the $500k needed (via a modest startup exit), the EB-5 looks awfully tempting. You avoid the lottery/indentured servitude of the H-1B, and, unlike TN status, it allows for immigration intent.
On a similar note, I recall noting that the all of the Independence Day fireworks injury articles I saw last July reported male victims.
Everyone is different. Some people stagnate without switching contexts frequently enough. That happens to me sometimes.
> Isn't arbitrarily-long nesting or matching any sort of palindrome, where you count up and down, the classic case of something you should never do with a regex, because they're finite automata?

Yes, but features like backtracking and backreferences (or recursive referencing) make regex implementations non-regular regular expressions. That comes with a whole heap of issues (pathologically exponential complexities in any circumstance where backtracking is inolved).
Even though static analysis of C/C++ works reasonably well in Coverity (at least enough to buy and use the product), there are enough false positives and corner cases that make the thought of "automatic" fixes unrealistic. It finds serious bugs but it also gets tripped up on certain patterns without modeling or embedding pseudo-pragmas for it to process.
NASA's 'impossible' EM Drive works: German researcher confirms (2015)
I have 10%, the Friday at the end of every two-week sprint (today in fact).
Getting some tomatoes thrown your way, but I think your sentiment has merit. In what other industry is it really a thing to feel deprived if you don't get to spend 20% of your working hours exercising your creativity? I think it's worth recognizing that defending the sanctity of your personal creative time is a pretty nice problem to have. For many, it's not even up for discussion.
post of the year, seriously. That is what I was going to say. Just do it. A few hours a day, just do it.
> vim has its positive points (it's an excellent way for a human to edit line-oriented text), but ultimately it too falls down in the general case

I think the only thing that Vim doesn't do that it should is actually use a proper language for scripting. Emacs has elisp, but Vim has VimScript which is a horribly stunted langauge.

Aside from that, I much prefer vim to emacs. Just because everything is mode-based, and the keybindings don't require 10 hands to do anything.
Education.

Everyone knows it's broken,not effective anymore and literally a waste of time and money. More so if you had the oppurtunity to experience what education means in third world countries.Spoiler alert : it's a joke that will make you cry.

It needs to be fixed as quickly as possible and research needs to be done for alternatives to help people in the process of learning.Online education is a good start, but we need something more effective.

By not fixing education, we are creating generations of people with just pieces of paper(called degrees), having no real knowledge or even the thirst for knowledge. Maybe I am not vocalizing my thoughts well enough, but you just need to look at the state of education in third world countries to understand my depression about education.
Stop future Shkrelis and free orphan drugs with a non-profit that only needs to maintain the credible threat of drug redevelopment/research:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10577132
To be clear, the author pins this on GMO, but the article he cites mentions no such thing.
Revolutionizing Kernel Development: Testing with Rump (2010)
Surely any org that depends on internet presence would plan against DDoS attacks. That's like internet 101.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=39004.0
I think you can figure out why I can't pretty easily.
/r/headphones and /r/mechanicalkeyboards are nice.
The vast majority of decent new restaurants fail because they don't have enough money to last until business picks up. Most small restaurant owners have just enough money to open, and they assume they'll be making enough to pay expenses within a month or two.

But unless you're in a fantastic location, or already have a great reputation before you open, it takes time to build a steady customer base.
tl;dr: no it doesn't; no it wasn't
Rinse and repeat? I could be missing something, but are we saying we should adopt the mentality that we are too good for any job we might find ourselves in? It sounds a bit arrogant to automatically assume that what you've chosen to divert your attention to has merit, and anyone who thinks otherwise is an asshole... I could be misreading, but your tone seems to veer more towards self-centeredness than empowerment.
It's funny you mentioned that rm's purpose in life is to delete files. I'm reminded of a common saying in the unix world.

Everything is a file.
What always leaves a puzzled look on my face (as a Windows user) is .tar.gz. What does .tar do in the case where there's nothing but a single gzipped file being archived?
I wonder if this can be re-purposed to find zero-day exploits.
At least provide https.
Hey man,
I cannot understate this, iTerm2 is the best part of my dev environment. I cannot thank you enough for this.
I mean, sure, if you don't have any people in your life who wonder why the fuck did you just vanish for a day.
Delivering internet (and maybe even have core infrastructure like DNS) via satellites (like Google and SpaceX, but not-for-profit) and allowing citizen funding (like planetary foundation)
That was my question. $7-8 for 6 pack of beer seems exceptionally good value for a city like SF.
Now that I think about it, every old schoolhouse I've come across was turned into a bar.
Crime investigation and forensic tools. Move "CSI" from science fiction closer to reality. Apply solid scientific principles and automation to cut costs and prevent human errors.

For example currently police don't have the resources to really investigate many crimes. So let's build small robots that automatically gather physical evidence from crime scenes such as DNA, blood, hair, fingerprints, fibers, etc. Make them cheap and reliable enough for every small town to afford. Then build automated analysis machines to look for evidence matches in databases and output statically valid match confidence scores.
Well, that's sort of my point, isn't it? No employee gives a single shit about a) management or b) shareholders. They care about themselves and other people in their position.

And it all works, because it doesn't matter if you don't care about the people with whom you're doing business. That's the beauty of the system.
I was sad to see assembly.com close down. Seemed like a pretty solid structure for this kind of endeavour.
An Illustrated Guide to Cryptographic Hashes
Exactly. And all the article itself is example of marvelous statistics: it's not really useful to know how many people died while taking a selfie or how many selfie-deaths were caused by running in front of a train. Implication is that it's about "selfie-taking trend is dangerous", but it's not. Much more interesting would be to compare how many death, caused by extremal activities were accompanied by taking a selfie — it's quite possible, that people die of running in front of a train as much as they did before, they just take selfies while doing it now.
Seafight Hack Tool 2016 No Survey
YC research brings (a little) money and hackers. You should focus on stuff not being worked on by hackers, or that is un-fundable by others.

Politics and incentives:
The FDA was invented to keep people safe from bad food and drugs. How do you incentivize the FDA to be conservative, but not too conservative? Is there some way that we can allow people to opt-out of the FDA that would be better for everyone?

Mental health:
Psychology research seems to be in the dark ages. It is expensive, ineffective, and often totally invalid (published results are often not reproducible). Can you figure out a new way to do psychology research?
100 year-old Florida woman wakes up to find a Kinkajou asleep in her bed
That's because the US government acts counter to US interests.
The End of Twitter
Interestingly, this is not even the first smuggling business that Y Combinator has funded: http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/13/backpack-connects-you-with-...
What's unsafe about this? You download a tarball, extract it, run an installer, and then you can run the program. If the archive get corrupted on the way, unxz will complain.

If it's about running programs from the internet you haven't code reviewed, then you could just review the sources and the installer before running install.sh?
It's convenient that they can justify the risk to democracy with information we aren't allowed to see. I guess we'll just have to take it on faith
>Then Israel turns around and publicly disrespects the US president.

Yeah... so what? The president isn't the United States. He's just a manager, temporarily.

Besides, there was plenty of disrespect flowing the other way, too. When Obama went out of his way to snub Netanyahu, did it bother you, or do you think somehow the office of the American president is worthy of more respect than that of the Israeli PM?
Software engineering. There has been very little experimental work done here, simply because it's incredibly expensive to perform interventional research. But if we had solid research which said "software development method X produces software faster and with fewer bugs than software development method Y" it would be a great boost to startups, and YC is ideally positioned to perform such research given that it is surrounded by (and funds) lots of software development projects.
Paper cited by article does not confirm it works: "Our test compaign therefore cannnot confirm nor refute the claims of the EMDrive but intends to independantly assess possible side-effects in the measurement methods used so far"

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=38577.msg14...

Wondering why didn't NASA send a EMDrive to space already and just see if it works or not on real conditions instead of testing it on a laboratory?
Goodbye, Parse.com – Migrating from Parse to Flask
> Of course they [MSFT] have a less stellar history of support.

Microsoft supported products:
Azure - six years, .Net & Active Directory - thirteen years, SQL Server - seventeen years, Visual Studio - nineteen years, and Excel - twenty nine years.
A better candy bar. Most of the commonly available ones are far too sweet and filled with cheap filler like peanuts or sugar spun air (I guess they call that nougat or something).

It's like they keep reducing the quality somehow... I can't put my finger on it. I swear candy bars were better quality when I was a kid. I know it seems small... but a really good candy bar would go a long way to improving my world! Disrupt Mars!
MACHINE REASONING -- something like the "Winograd Schema Challenge"
Globally open borders. Allowing people move freely (globally), following opportunity, seems like the best way to reduce global inequality. We allow everything else to move quite freely but if you've ever dated a foreigner or god forbid had to flee home you will understand the struggles people face when trying to move across restricted borders. It seems like a study into how globally open borders would affect inequality and the general well-being of global society would be a valuable endeavour.
Reasonably secure pair programming