skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, WebTorrent enables plenty of really great, novel use cases for BitTorrent technology, but it will remain a second-rate BitTorrent client in the eyes of most existing BitTorrent users without great interop. Although I personally do like these new WebTorrent-based web services, there's no guarantee that any of them will ever reach critical mass in terms of adoption, whereas BitTorrent itself has long since reached critical mass. To say that "normal clients don't really matter" simply because WebTorrent can enable new use cases for BitTorrent (that haven't shown any significant traction) really seems like you're missing the proverbial forest for the trees.
I really like the idea, but I will caution you to not get overly confident that this process will be a permanent solution. I know a little something about infection control and biofilm. In a nutshell, when antibiotics were discovered, they announced it was the end of disease. Fast forward a few decades and the current reality is that we are dealing with scary super bugs that are antibiotic resistant.

Infections are living organisms. Thus, keeping them at bay will always be an ongoing battle. And battles evolve. As each side learns new tactics, old tactics stop working.

So while new materials can play a role in that, I believe new processes will play a bigger role. I will suggest that, as you develop your products, you do so with an eye towards ease of use in terms of properly flushing them, cleaning them etc. If you can make it easier and more convenient for people to clean them, insert them in a manner that keeps them sterile and so on, this will have more lasting value in the battle against infection than merely upgrading the material.

But thank you for working on this vital area. I wish you nothing but good luck.
Sounds interesting, but an example game, game board, or ruleset should be available before I login. I'm not going to register to figure out how to play.
> Back in the middle ages, when the French conquered Britain, the ruling class spoke French and the peasants spoke English.

This features quite a bit in War and Peace, too. As tensions increase between France and Russia as Napoleon takes over much of Europe and war between the countries looms, you'll find Russian nobility taking Russian language classes, because their first language is French!
Financial literacy is important, but honestly most of these loans shouldn't be given out in the first place.

If I take out a loan for a house, I provide evidence that I will be able to pay it back, and there is the collateral of the house in case I don't. Banks won't give out a loan unless there is a reasonable chance that they will make a good return on their investment. As far as I can tell, banks are prevented from making those same kinds of calculations for student loans.
Only if you don't care about the environment. Autonomous vehicles, even electric ones, are inefficient compared to mass transit.
That's pretty interesting. Is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system?
If it's any consolation, I wish I could pick up that behaviour. Might have saved me a fair bit of unpleasantness.
Yes, but once people protested, they admitted their mistake and reverted it. AFAIK their position now is that they won't go out of their way to support third party bulbs unless the manufacturer joins their "friends of Hue" program, but their hub firmware isn't blocking them and should work with other bulbs that meet certain specs.
I would not be surprised that the documents were very clear about the risks to Yahoo!'s future. The last thing someone would want is a lawsuit claiming that some risk wasn't disclosed.
I like the idea of "anyone can be a tour guide" as a gig economy company. But my experience is that professional, fulltime guides are much better guides within the arguments you made. Specially about deep knowledge about specific spots. What made you think otherwise?

Your benefits look much more like group tour vs personal tour (not pro guide vs local guide). Wouldnt this be your value proposition?

And assuming you have a local, personal guide and people want it. How do you train these guides? How do ensure their quality?
Those are all dating apps/services. If you're a guy who wants to do it, you have to have two other single male friends who are willing to do it with you. If you're new in town and don't know anyone, you're sh out of luck. You can use Krewe if you're one of the 60 million people in the US who says they're lonely.

Groupers also a one time event, with people from all over town. Krewe is meant to get you to see the same group over and over again.

I do know people who have done Grouper and have loved it. Six seems like a pretty cozy number. You can fit into a booth at a bar, and hold a single group conversation pretty comfortably.
What sort of simulation would you do that has not been done at Boeing, UW, etc.?

I am an aerospace/mechanical engineer. I think that the manufacturing aspects of this would be far more difficult to overcome than the mathematics of proving the idea as viable. In other words, it works in theory but in reality you can't make a tube with smooth enough connection points etc. Will you look at that too?

If you get this and are looking for minions let me know.
I think kids are perfectly capable of understanding it, and most of the time they do. They just think to themselves "I'll just get a $100k salary and pay it off in no time, because it's easy and I'm special".

Source: Pretty similar to my life story.
The rapid ride roads are shared but have many sections where buses have dedicated lanes to bypass congestion (and often get signal priority).

And you really can't "just as easily" put rail on that road. Laying rail is expensive. To make a dedicated bus lane, you just paint it. Much much cheaper.
Sure, for bitmaps fonts or pixel hinting the signal processing framework doesn't provide much insight. However, the word aliasing itself refers to a concept from signal processing, and in my opinion, it's easiest to think of anti-aliasing from the signal processing perspective.

For example, look at the images in [1] (also a rather old paper). The box filter results (i.e. where the pixel value is set to the average of covered area) are less than ideal.

[1] Quadrature Prefiltering for High Quality
Antialiasing: http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~jet/Publications/quadfilt95....
We know that it does need FDA approval and trials. What we are hoping is that we can file what is known as a 510(k).
A 510(k) is a process where we tell the FDA "Hey look at these guys, we are doing pretty much the same thing" and we can skip most of the hard and expensive part. We don't know yet if we can file a 510(k) or if we need to go through the whole process.
Sure autonomous vehicles can solve it.

I believe that if every car on the road was autonomous tomorrow that traffic flow rates (cars/hour) would at least double. Maybe even triple.

The amount of congestion from human bullshit is insane. Cars slow down entering tunnels for no reason. Cars slow down leaving tunnels when their eyes adjust to the brightness. I-90 gets slower on sunny days than on cloudy days. I-5 north out of Seattle backs up because of a hill. I get excited if I can go a full week with an accident on 90 causing backup. Even when it's cleared to the side humans rubber neck.

And that's just getting started. Once we start making changes to street design to enable autonomous it gets even better. Elimination of street parking alone would do wonder.

Things get really fun when riders don't need to get their car back. When it's a ride share model. Parking garages are relatively inefficient now. You need to be able to get any car out at any time. But what if you didn't? What if you just needed a car. It'd be a first-in, first-out queue. We'd be able to cram 3x to 4x as many cars in a garage.

You'd also be able to order a car that fits your needs. Most trips don't require a trunk. Most cars for most trips could be smart car sized. You'd only need a bigger car if, well, you needed it.

No. I believe that asking for more light rail is asking for a faster horse. It's ancient technology. We should be looking forwards, not backwards.
47% does not pay a penny for tax

That's not actually true. The (mostly) correct version is that 40-some percent of the adult US population does not pay federal income tax. The number of "working age Americans" who actually pay no net federal taxes is actually less than 5%: http://zfacts.com/47-percent

When you factor in state taxes the number drops even farther. Include sales taxes, and it's probably zero. Saying that "almost half don't pay federal income tax" is still striking, but should be kept in context.
Yes, 17 year-olds are being indoctrinated into the idea that a degree is the Key To Success, but it's not like the issue of having to pay back the loans isn't brought up.

I went to college not to terribly long ago, and I remember having conversations with various people (guidance councilors, parents, teachers, peers, etc.) about career prospects and the kind of income one can expect. In fact, I switched to Computer Science precisely because of a conversation with a fellow student regarding future income potential.

I also saw many/most fellow students actively ignore or avoid the issue of future debt. Granted, they were supported in their behavior by various authority figures, but they still had a choice.

Of course, the solution isn't to complain about the stupidity of teenagers. Personally, I think the solution is fixing how the banks give out loans in the first place (i.e. allowing them to refuse to issue loans unless they think they'll get their money back).
I work in a big beauraucric .gov. We had a guy who majored in robotics and was one of the best programmers hired in some time. (Iirc, he had some health challenges that made getting underpaid attractive)

He got demoted to some horrible computer operator position because an audit of HR revealed his degree, and the auditors found that robotics wasn't computer sciencey enough.

The union grieved it and he was eventually made whole a few years later.
The rails are never that flat. A tram still needs a suspension system. Not as much as a bus, perhaps, but it still needs one.
"As Americans, you may have this impression that mass transit is a horrible thing for poor people. That impression comes from busses"

This cannot be overstated.

There is nothing in the urban, built environment that is as terrible aesthetically and functionally as some big lumbering bus bonking its way through the city (and usually belching black smoke as it goes).

I am a huge advocate of public transit and I will do anything to not ride a bus.

Always remember the quote from Steve Jobs about tablets and the stylus:

"If you see a (bus), they blew it."

edit: Yes, yes I know all about BRT. Lipstick on a pig.
Ouch! $100 per month minimum plan... for me to get started building my replacement for local government that is a high barrier to entry. I suppose at least I can host it myself though, it is very impressive software.

I guess what I want is to take over all the branches of the government and replace them with forum software. But not the forum software we have seen today, an as yet unrealised possibility of what forum software could be!

So thus far having looked at Discourse how does it implement my ideas:

1) Nope, tagging in the HN style doesn't exists AFAIK.

2) Yes, mobile

3) Yes, Skinnable

4) Hosted/Can create your own DNS/Community/Rules/etc

5, 6, 7) It seems more focused on finding solutions to specific problems (I'm using the twitter API does it do X) rather than having a broad discussion and them being able to select answers from that discussion to refine into a crowd sourcing campaign.

8) Grouping of threads by tag and different tag types.

9) Discourse have a business model that's pretty sound. Charge for hosting.

10) Directory of useful people on each forum who can be paid to do stuff...

11) How are we discussing these YC programs - I think there is a lot of room for improvement being able to tag posts to the top of the thread and give a TLDR of the salient points in a thread.

Maybe people can summarise questions and break things down into pieces that can be answered in a more coherent package.

If deemed suitable by the community the thread could then be acted on through a crowd sourcing campaign.

Imagine if we were to organise society with a piece of forum software how would it look and what would people get in return for helping their community - probably more voting rights and better ability to change things/make a difference.
> I'm surprised how difficult it is to understand what it is they want to make

YC partners complain about this all the time too.

> not a single one has mentioned how it's a business and how they will make money

I hope you asked them!
Lawyers will be lawyers
This practice happens all the time with books that are successful. Other books leech on to the traffic by using the same keywords, but what you'll notice is that the quality of the books is very poor because the author's heart and soul are not invested in the project. Startups that do well, like books, seem to all enjoy the participation of leadership and creativity aligned around a passionate interest in the problem, creative or logical or both.
UPDATE: It turns out the database that was claimed captured by hacking is actually a semi-public data. What's correct is the origin of the source of the database. However that database having limited information about voters are shared by the state agency and distributed to the political parties before the public polls by the mandate of voting laws. The database is actually from 2010 and was not obtained by hacking or anything but leaked by one of the political parties.

When I saw the news I did download the database and searched for myself. My information was not there. Because I am not a registered voter since I live in States. However all my siblings' and parents' information there unfortunately.

There's a fierce political rivalry in Turkey increasingly becoming uglier by day. The story was smelling from the beginning anyway, like implicating president, accusing cronyism and trying to score for some political agenda.
You are technically right, but in reality, the difference is immense.
What would be a use case for using one of these FPGAs rather than something like a Raspberry Pi with a traditional microcontroller?

I'm genuinely interested. I've been really curious about FPGAs but I don't know what a good use case there is for them for a hobbyist.
You're certainly welcome to. It's up to you.
> That's also fascinating, because in the US, wanting to be rich is seen as a very positive thing. Everyone is supposed to be living the American Dream and improving their lives, but reaching the end goal is a bad state? Hilarious.

It's more complicated than that. It's people who start with wealth who are looked down on, not people who come from modest means to achieve wealth. The default assumption is that these individuals bought their way into whatever success they have, never have to work for anything, and never experience hardship.
Good point, which allows them to make lending decisions for political rather than purely economic reasons.
I make very good bank writing software an selling my services. I certainly would not miss this trifling monthly expense. As a business owner I can write it off. I absolutely LOVE TextExpander, it makes my life better.

No way in hell I'm paying $5 per month for it though. If I don't, hard to imagine many who will. What idiots!

Also, now we'll see what Katie and Macsparky are made-of, won't we? I imagine the hitherto well deserved fawning over an excellent, #winning product is going to end PDQ. We'll see.

I expect an expeditious climb-down from whatever the folks at Smile have been perching-on.

And what of PDF Pen? That's also a massively interesting question.
Seattle was founded by lumber barons selling building materials to San Francisco. You guys kept lighting your town on fire, we kept sending wood and you sent back dirt and rocks which we used to fill in the mud.

We even stole your gold rush idea. Thanks for that. Great idea.

Basically we've been sucking you guys dry for 150 years :p
Even if the cars drive themselves there's still not enough lanes to let them flow right now, much less in 20+ years. There was a study done that found Seattle's needs _22_ lanes of highway to meet the current demand. However because of how the highway system was originally built through the city we're stuck with 6-8 lanes at best. We need mass transit to get cars off the roads and reduce traffic.
How many schools successfully do the well-rounded bit? How many students care? I had a 1.8 average in general studies and a 3.5 average in math / CS, so there's my bias. And honestly the CS and math was poorly taught most of the time. Not a top 20 school (coulve gone to UT, but that's another story), but still a well regarded school.

Meanwhile, my well-rounded education comes from independent study of this and that and places like HN. I guarantee you that I can identify quality information and know more about government than most of my peers.
This is a problem that only this generation, and maybe part of the one after it will need to face. The answer is simple, and we're on the cusp of getting there.

Like any other industry, education needs to be unbundled. The idea that you need to live in a dorm, in a psuedo-society, for four years, taking a broad set of courses is dated and helps nobody but those offering that experience. I predict in a generation we'll have the people making hiring decisions more and more jaded about the value of these educations and less likely to keep perpetuating the myth that you need a degree from a school to do a job. Instead, we'll see more and more certification programs, or micro-degrees, specializing in subjects that matter to the student.

I believe it to already be happening - I don't look at education except as an afterthought when reviewing resumes. I don't have a degree, and I'm doing well in my field. The types of jobs where I've ever been discriminated for not having a degree I don't think I would have enjoyed anyway. Working at a 5000 person company that cares more about your score on an HR system than what you could really offer them? No thanks.
Not sure about the rest of the world but all* Australian supermarkets have a socks and undies section where you can pick up a 3 pack of black (or white) socks for about $9AUD.

*All in this case being the two major companies.
Good questions and thanks for the feedback!

We're currently focused on the development of the software and getting a shippable product.

Our target demographic is small and medium sized engineering firms, who then go on to use our software assist in the design of products for their customers. The social media campaign is simply a fast, cheap means of establishing an initial presence despite being currently unknown. It will also allow us to reach smaller, more agile players quite well. But yes, our goal is simply to allow widespread adoption of this technology rather than uproot the current solutions being used in limited amounts by very large firms.

Essentially, we aim to do for topology optimization what Microsoft did for operating systems.

"Better" depends on the problem at hand, though typical measures of performance are cheaper, lighter, stronger, etc.

You're right that this is certainly a computationally expensive field, however our value proposition to potential customers makes up for that. Our business partners will have a clear market advantage, being able to produce higher performing designs while having greater engineer productivity than their competitors.
When it is slow enough, that's called a culture shift. Your piano seller wants change fast enough to call it personal profit. Mass-produced pianos require mass media as local changes won't pay off the cost of the production machinery. Might as well stay with local craftsmen.

"Communication-based centralization" includes Louis XIV of France's centralization at Versailles, yes?
It's infuriating that it took this long for them to add West Seattle to a Seattle transit proposal. Every day I cringe at the thought of another accident or overturned semi on the West Seattle Bridge or 99 stopping traffic for 60-90 minutes.
Wheel chairs are a special case, maybe they should be handled as such ?

And as for strollers taking too much time: if 40 people can spend their time on the bus in peace an quite using their phone/resting, maybe time for strollers is a reasonable price to pay?

And we have'nt said anything about trying to solve that design problem somehow.
Well as people move towards using mobile and apps more and more, wouldn't they search Facebook on Google less and less?
I talked to a friend who was considering building this kind of startup recently. The two 'hard questions' that I found were:

1) How do you plan to deal with abuse? Connecting anonymous Internet users to people who are at their most vulnerable seems like a recipe ripe for disaster.

2) How do you plan to differentiate from, for instance, 7 Cups?
Funny, I specialize in RF/Microwave circuit design, and did just the same. Had a good job offer, and used that to leverage promotion and raise.
Every nation has some weird and unpleasant laws. You're going to have to cite a lot more really weird things about Sweden in particular if you want anyone to take you seriously.
You're justifying wasting money because the company is making money? While I think the tone of the comment above is pretty inflammatory, the person is totally right. It was the first thing I thought of when I read the title.

If you're spending $132k/mo on hosting to make only $782k/mo, you're doing it wrong.
I'd say anyone who says he's made a language/special vocabulary/style guide/editor that "makes it hard to write bullshit" really hasn't picked up on that.
What are good examples of where he's been wrong?
Those that can't pay it, simply can not, but those who can pay it don't want to suffer the individual penalties of doing so. Mess one's credit report up and now an individual has to hope not to get sued and harassed by collections calls and probably give up financing anything for the next 7 years whether it's a new credit card, car, or house.

There's also a small minority of people also savvy enough to pull off defaulting without the legal repercussions. Unless there is a coordinated effort, simply defaulting by one's self would be suicide.

There is also the risk/reward factor. Defaulting on 100-200k loans with no income? high risk, but also a high reward potential. Lawyers know you can extract blood from a stone. Defaulting on 5k worth of loans making 50-60k/year? High risk, low reward. Better to just make the payments for 1-3 years and be done with them.
You know a bowl of rice is less than $1 and the return on investment is probably higher... because you know, you can think clearer.
To be clear we solve some of the same problems. We just provide different solutions. StamPlay appears to be a visual development workflow where as Brightwork leverages the skills you already have and just provides a way to speed up backend development.

Both solutions offload infrastructure hosting and management.

To get started on the Brightwork platform all you need to understand is basic RESTful services, JSON and JavaScript.

Our hopes is that on boarding a new developer on the platform who has the aforementioned skills will only take about 10 mins of setup and learning time.

The main reason is that you only need to learn the Brightwork constructs: BrightStacks (vertical APIs, Data, Storage, etc), BrightPacks (pre-bundled code and workflow, e.g. user registration) and BrightBots (your code).

In the future we hope to build a community around BrightPacks. Allowing users to contribute. For Example, the Core BrightPack will offer user authentication and registration. However, it will not offer secondary SMS verification. Maybe someone would want to build that and offer it as a public BrightPack for others to leverage.

Thanks for all your feedback!