skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is one of my irrational prejudices regarding programming. It annoys me a little when people talk about their favorite language being "as fast as C" or "X times slower/faster than C," because such things simply aren't properties of languages, but of particular implementations on particular architectures. It bothers me almost as much as when people try to claim that "C/C++" is a programming language. :P

I admit, this really just makes me sound like some old kook with a huge beard who lives in the old programmers' home, or something, but I manage to restrain myself from commenting about it most of the time. So, rather than listen to me, I propose checking out the c2 wiki's page on the subject: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AsFastAsCee .
Trying to do both would have been a more unfair choice, and the much safer and easier road to take.
"Patches welcome."

Edit: That is, if you work with professionals.
What about regular phone lines? If those telephone poles were down doesn't that mean they also had no service?
When the iPad gets a camera, the app could key off a particular color. A violinist could wear a special ring on the bowing hand with that color, which could be quickly waved at the camera to turn the page.
Flyspeck: generating a formal proof of the Kepler Conjecture
This is absolutely crazy.

Has there been any modeling done to attempt to predict what will happen? This is a great time to make a prediction and see how well it holds later.
Absolutely incredible. Emotional state is even more powerful than logic. The baby knows the mother is right there and could still sense something was wrong.
Shanghai prepares for Expo 2010 [Boston.com Big Picture]
I think that this is probably a fluke. Amazon is not in the habit of sacrificing long-term values such as their reputation for a short-sighted gain.

Jeff Bezos has explicitly claimed this in similar situations in the past:

"Indeed, some of the most important things Amazon has done have seemed like tactical losers to established companies who were looking at the short term. But Amazon has always been fixated on improving the consumer experience regardless of conventional wisdom, according to Bezos’s comments in HBR: 'In the very earliest days (I’m taking you back to 1995), when we started posting customer reviews, a customer might trash a book and the publisher wouldn’t like it. I would get letters from publishers saying, ‘Why do you allow negative reviews on your website? Why don’t you just show the positive reviews?’ One letter in particular said, ‘Maybe you don’t understand your business. You make money when you sell things.’ But I thought to myself, We don’t make money when we sell things; we make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.'"

http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/02/25/how-amazon-innovat...
I really like the idea but I have to agree that the survey does seem "scammy". If I didn't come across this on HN, I wouldn't even consider getting involved. As it is, I might do it if I remember in the next couple days.
And Japanese people think Americans can't do nuance. :)
I think his point was not that you need to go yet farther to court the privacy niche but that you're going to have a very tough time doing so, no matter how hard you try. Google makes billions of dollars a year off of their search, so people can have pretty good faith that they won't do anything to make people wary of searching with them.

So you'll catch a small niche of crazies (but small in the scope of the Internet may still be pretty big) and maybe get yourself in some more people's minds as "that place to search if I ever need to run search queries that might get subpoenaed."

The solution, though, is NOT to invest lots of time, energy, and money into make people think of you as better for privacy. You're currently the only search engine that logs so little, so you've got that niche (within people who know about you). Go court some other niches and work on making your overall product better.
Just revoked Twitbet access to my account after it autosent a Tweet for me without any [edit: enough] warning or pause for approval. Please don't do that.
Kinda like the patent office :)
In my case, I'm glad both my first and last names are incredibly common, to the point where I'm almost un-Google-able unless you already know quite a bit about me.
I'm not sure that's correct. As far as I can tell, young conservatives identify more closely with 'conservatism' than with the party. Which is why young conservatives are drawn to things like the Tea Party rallies/movement. I think the ideology—more than the political structure of the party—is what motivates the youth.

But that's not really any different from liberalism. Most youth on the left identify themselves as 'progressives' and part of the 'progressive movement' rather than identifying themselves with the Democratic party apparatus.
Ooh. I'd be tempted to move from Denver to Boulder for Fiber Internet.
I picked all the teams then logged into twitter using the sign into twitter button. The submit your bracket button never disabled. What am I missing?
I think that your avg also has to be positive. Mine was negative, but my karma was at 205 and I wasn't able to downvote.
Modeling can't solved all problems. I guess they may drop some dummies from high latitude helium balloons in advance and use sensors to record some data against predictions from modelings.
While I'm not calling you a liar, why don't you either:

1. Post your company name, or
2. Post an email address that isn't AT gmail.com

It just gives you a bit more reputability, which I think is important when you're fishing for $50,000.
I still get spam from colleagues who signed into Quichup years ago and gave it access to their gmail accounts.

This behaviour is absolutely Evil. Why do companies think that we want such coup d'etats in our accounts?
Neither Comcast nor Verizon use POTS lines around here. Everything is routed across their cable/fiber network. While the poles themselves were down, a majority of the wiring was still intact. The power went out as a result of over 400 transformers blowing, and a manual shutdown of most circuits for safety. Enough of the lines were connected in order for Verizon's fiber to remain connected (most of which is not underground here), and the same was true of Comcast's coax... it just didn't have the signal strength to make it back to the CO without power.
Ask YC: Would you fund an adult themed start up?
First a preamble - I know and realize the history for big exits with these types of enterprises is notoriously bad and usually I think that is a mismanagement issue related to the senior leaders in these companies. But my question for HN would be - would you consider funding a adult themed start up for the YC program, and is there a line which you wouldn't cross?

Three categories of adult themed I might be thinking of:

"Maxim" style, where it's targetted at males, but doesn't have nudity.

"Playboy" style, which is similar to "Maxim" style but does have nudity.

"Porntube" style which is full on pornography.

Personally I think there is big potential in the disjointed and mostly pirated adult themed sites of today. Three benefits I see of this business could be:

- easy(easier) to gain traction, several sites I know which launched in the 2008-2009 time frame have reached top 100 sites globally.
- lack of innovation in this space, mostly pirated content and taking an existing paradigm and switching it to adult themed (playboy does an online version of their magazine, various you tube copy cats)
- large profit potential, I know several low(er) traffic sites which are making plenty off ads, there is an IPO potential here I'm sure

Long story short, I have several ideas for adult themed "hacks" which could be big.

But the fact reminds I know of no YC funded adult themed web sites and am not sure the YC program would support such a thing.

I posted this to HN also to generate some hopefully insightful discussion.
Do you have some sort of leader board so I can see how I am ranking Vs everyone else over time?
Does Apple do a complete code review of every app they approve? Your walled garden isn't protecting you from anything.
I found this in the comments:

There is no problem:

People who are stupid enough to buy this sort of thing won't have anything important enough to store anyway.

Its not their stuff I'm worried about. They buy these things, then believe that they've enhanced their security, and then confidently (and thus believably) promise you that the have taken measures to keep the data you give them safe.

Fake security, especially the "it looks just like on tv!" kind, does way more harm than it seems like it will at first.
Programming languages DO have speed
Right next to the "Submit" button, it says that the tweet will be sent out. Also, the button itself says "Save and Tweet Your March Madness Bracket"
If its an algorithm that makes the choices - why would businesses get phone calls asking for money to put them back up?

They've only really addressed half the story.

Kind of upsets me too, I have friends that work at Yelp.
To be fair, it does clearly say that you must send out a tweet to be eligible. I didn't go through the process so I don't know if it made it clear that it would do that for you.
And something more recent to show that the trend has continued? Romania has elections every 4 years, I believe. That paper was published after one round of elections. There's been a few rounds since.
You know, it's not really necessary to use visual mode for those mappings. You could even get away with doing this and it works just the same:

nmap s ysi
nmap S ysa
As described, there's no actual extortion going on, just a bunch of positive reviews disappearing off of a page, and a bunch of hearsay. Is this sarcasm? Trolling?
This was an excellent episode of a great show. Highly recommended listening.
Oh it's more than that. Ever tried to write a trie in C? Yea I didn't think so. C/C++ are great languages for missing the forest for the trees. I'd call Java is faster than C/C++ for this very reason.
The World’s First Printed Building
I would advise against anything like angel investing. You're not in a position where liquidity concerns wouldn't pop up, so having access to your money (should you need it) is important. Angel investing means tying down your cash for years...

I personally suggest you follow Nassim Taleb's advice (he of Black Swan fame), which you seem to be doing by keeping the majority in conservative,safe investments and looking to score big with the remaining. If you're looking for home-runs, I suggest options trading. There's a lot of volatility in the market, and if you time things right you should be able to generate a handsome return.

Good luck!
Ask HN: Cheap color copies for flyers?
I need a quick way to get as many color copies of a flyer as possible. I'm on a college campus with a startup that will benefit from this, but paying $0.50 / copy at kinko's is unacceptable. Any tips?
This is the most amazing thing I have ever heard. This man has found a way to effectively sell his own poop to others for $3000! He's a walking factory!
Correct!

However, I should confess that I usually write it as ii:

for (int ii = 0; ii < items.length; ii++) ...
For those on Macs, there's a TextMate bundle here:

http://nullstyle.com/2008/11/09/ann-clojure-textmate-bundle-...

Works well, though it contains its own clojure install, which may not be ideal. It looks fairly hackable though.

If you do install it, you have to edit a project (folder) in TextMate, otherwise starting the repl will fail. Minor wrinkle.
Google ignores robots.txt
Facebook surpasses Google in weekly market share of visits in US
Those mappings aren't doing what you expect, because s and S in visual mode do the same thing. And instead of mapping all the text objects like that and using visual mode, you should just do this instead:

nmap s ys
nmap S yS
I tried Conque and didn't care for it, refreshing was slow and I favored the detached approach.

I do, however, encourage everyone to try out the different options to find what works for them, what works for me doesn't work for everyone. Conque is a really neat plugin, it's definitely worth a shot for people shopping around.
Little children, babies included are pretty clever. Eye contact right after being born, tracking people, recognizing faces of close family at a few days to a few weeks.

I never get enough of observing these little minds at work and how they take in the world around them, fascinating.
Great suggestions.

I agree that it's a quality idea. I think I'd say a bit more up front to explain how the $5k works and what's involved. I'd introduce another colour to your palette as it's a bit limited right now. With the disabled button in the bottom right, explain underneath that it will activate when "x" more picks have been made. As picks are made (and there are, say, 10 left), highlight the missing ones with yellow or red perhaps. When I was mucking around, I missed a couple.

The name is a bit scammy (everyone is skeptical of anything with "bet" in it) so you could consider something with "Challenge" instead. Or keep the nice, short URL, and bring "Challenge" into the heading.

I run www.hoops.com.au which is an Australian basketball forum and can plug your site there if you'd like. Not sure how many people there are Twitter users though. I also have a few basketball people (players, bloggers, fans) following me on Twitter if you want me to spread the word. Email is isaac & triplezero = com ` au.
Sure, and this is a great thing. However, as my reply quoted, it was in response to "lacked any sort of violence." 1000+ dead and many more injured is a poor definition of "any sort of violence."

And I admitted that I was wrong, right away. You're beating a dead horse to death if this is your main reason behind your statements.

Not lacking any violence at all doesn't mean that Romania had an incredibly violent revolution. Its not that black and white.

1,000 people dying is incredibly sad, yes. But, the death toll could have been much, much worse. The military could have sided with the government, not the people. There could have been an ethnic division within the country. The Soviet Union could have reversed the Sinatra Doctrine and stepped in.
Ask Kinko's how many flyers you need to print to qualify for bulk pricing.
the answer is no.

p.s. "lack of innovation in this space"...I'm pretty sure it's the other way around. From what I understand porn has been driving innovation for a lot of things
You just wrote a program that loses money.
I just had to use SuperDuper to restore my drive that failed on Friday. Painless and easy.

All I had to do was put the new drive in place of the old drive and boot from the USB drive. After booting in restore the USB drive to the new drive and all was OK in the world again.
A rare case where the comments attached to the blog post are better than the discussion on HN. 99% of the time, it's the opposite (to the point that I often check out the comments on HN first, before reading the linked article itself).
I don't think you're being intentionally deceptive. It just needs to be more clear that the tweet will be sent for the user.
The title of this blog post is sensationalistic. As described by the author himself, Yelp's actions seem completely justified. A burst of 15 positive reviews from new users in a short period would make a user like me suspicious.

And assuming that the 15 reviews garnered an average score of 4.5 stars, it would have placed the business in the top 3-5 ranked business in all of Bedford, MA (its hometown). If Yelp allowed such rankings, it'd be a slippery slope into spamville.
'Clean' Smells Inspire Moral High Ground
yeah, instinctively i was expecting to be prompted to 'share my bracket' or the like.
Link to full study:

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/02/02/095679761036...
I've by coincidence and lack of foresight become the owner of a site that has an adult component, even though that was not what we had in mind when we started out.

We've had contact with VCs and some very large companies that we have partnered with, and invariably the one thing that floats to the top is brand damage.

This is the big fear of any large player, as soon as there is even the remotest risk of that you have a problem.

That pretty much rules out your second and third option, leaving the first.

And YC being a tech oriented investor rather than a media company I figure that that would not be their cup of tea either, but in the end the best way to find out is to ask Paul Graham directly or to simply apply.

My guess is you'll be turned down, but that's worth very little, it's just a guess. Based on the companies that they've invested in in the past and what I know about the people behind YC.

The first is something that you'd have to spend quite a bit of time and money on mocking up to the point where you can show a potential investor what you're planning to do.

The people you'd pitch to would probably be established players in the market that are looking at expanding their offering without taking on more employees.

Personally, I'd rather get out than in to such a line of business, the website that I run with the 'adult component' has been quietly on the market for years but so far no takers.
:h shell-window
there's nothing there?
Ask HN: Best resource for collaboratively analyzing startup ideas?
Is there a website where people go to research and share startup ideas and discuss market size, existing solutions by other companies, etc?

I'm not talking about articles written about startup ideas. I mean an active forum/portal designed for this purpose.
I'm not talking politicians, I'm talking the tea partiers -- the world's changing and it's not easy for everybody. A feeling that the world is changing and the easy ride we had is going away seems to be a powerful undercurrent there, to me at least. YMMV.
Keep in mind, you might very well be facing somebody who feels the need to prove himself. If this is the case, then the issue is marginally technical; his need to be right is his prime motivation.

Your first response was perfect IMO.

In situations like this you need to manage a person, not software nor a project. If he's in a sibling reporting branch, you may want to discuss the situation with your lead. He may decide to go ahead with the modification in the interest of good relations. If he does, you must understand this is not a judgment from your lead on the quality of your work.
This would be awesome...although I wonder how far out the fiber would go since I actually live in Limestone County.
I agree that this'd be great to have. I'm not sure if people would take kindly to every HN article turning into "Review my Startup" (or, maybe they would?) I'm not aware of such a forum though yet.
Kind of reminds me of the surrogate mother experiment which shows the importance of contact to a developing monkey.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow#Surrogate_mother_e...
> From what I understand porn has been driving innovation for a lot of things

Absolutely. First credit card payments, first (live) video delivery, first affiliate systems and so on.
The Most Expensive Cities in the World
I wouldn't go for funding. Porn seems like the sort of thing you can bootstrap yourself. Hell, it seems like the sort of thing that would bootstrap itself. It also seems like the sort of thing that doesn't need a huge amount of attention (set up a simple uploading video server, set some upload caps so you don't get spam, and check back on it once in a while), so you can do it while you work somewhere else.

Dang, this is starting to sound like a not bad idea.

(I'm with vaksel too: remember Betamax? I don't, but I've heard stories that porn didn't choose it, so it died.)
Fair enough downvoters - I can see why mine was a bad question. I actually just happened to have need for a software license for a potential software deal and was planning to ring up our lawyer, and just hadn't cognitively put 2+2 together that all those checkboxes I had clicked and all those readmes I had yeah-yeah-yeah'd through were relevant for the matter at hand. So yes, I realize there like a million free software licenses.
No, I wouldn't. I believe that peddling pornography is the same as peddling drugs -- both are addictive, dangerous substances that do great harm to families. No matter how much easy money is in it (and there's a lot), I would keep my name and any money I had as far away from it as possible.
Just to be clear, I was talking about Cocos2d (http://code.google.com/p/cocos2d-iphone/), a game programming library for the iPhone, not Cocoa. Although, I suppose JSCore might be a little easier to bind to things in.
AppEngine is not blocked from here... What is bloked in China is google group and some parts of google code (sigh)...

For accessing any website, I just use a ssh tunnel to a vps in the US and have almost no loss of speed or latency when reaching US websites... So it's really not a bother...

If you have any questions on living in China, you can get in touch with me, my email is in my profile...
... or more likely, they're just a few days behind.
I'm currently enrolled in a class that uses this book:

Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Forms: A Unified Approach by Hubbard and Hubbard.

http://matrixeditions.com/

This book should totally be listed. Though it doesn't fit particularly well in any category, it provides a pretty good intro to a number of higher math topics.
I doubt YC would fund an adult site, but who knows?

I'm not categorically against it though. For one thing, porn is a proven money maker, and as evidenced here at least some of your potential competition won't touch it.

Regarding the 3 styles, I think #3 (hardcore) is the only one that would work as a startup. To be blunt, the less hardcore the porn the prettier the models have to be, and you can't afford Maxim or Playboy tier models.
Er, I was pretty clearly talking about buying from third party sellers, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
This is the third or fourth example of Goodwin's law this week.
This question has come up before, and IIRC the answer was "no, because VCs don't want to touch porn sites".
Deposit checks by taking a photo . . .
Ask HN: Review my site/app about beautiful code
I realize the news agencies will spout that kind of stuff, but the commenters don't have to go along with it.
Hella fast, what's it built on?

Professional curiosity. :)
Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide (TED)
It's actually quite useful. Memory is often the scarce resource on web servers. This helps you troubleshoot Ruby memory leaks, which could end up saving you a lot of money in server costs (and speed up the performance of your app).
Very cool to see this, as I did something like this recently with our 4-5 month old and her reactions were almost exactly the same.
Verizon FIOS vs Comcast might be a better title, no?
Free Porn Videos - XVIDEOS.COM
It makes me feel bad for the baby. "Why isn't mommy playing with me? What happened?!"
Boring, navel gazing semantics.
So is Philly: http://gigabitphilly.com/
As a parent of two, that's exactly what I expected to see. The mother shows a lot of control, that had to be hard, even for a short period.
I doubt doing it once matters, but isn't there something kind of bad about having a baby escalate signals until it cries, and then responding with attention as soon as it does? I guess there's no other way to do the experiment and then calm the kid down but it seems a little weird to watch.
> ..addictive, dangerous substances that do great harm to families.

Wait, what? For one, I hardly think that porn the primary cause of any damage to a family; I would think that any family damage blamed on it probably has some deeper seated problems than porn. I further think that you would be hard pressed to prove that it is dangerous, especially when people are seeing actual naked people all the time without any damage. Addictive is arguable until the cows come home, mainly because addictive is a very subjective word.