skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're serious about starting that site and need help, email me and I'll you set up.

I people like Derek are mentioned a lot because they're know how to express their ideas. After doing over 300 interviews, I can tell you that it's not a common trait.

But I like your idea of learning from new people. If I can help, let me know.
Irony is, that it works with competitor's chips (Intel), but not with their own (AMD).
It should be obvious that they love some regulation, but not all of it. For example if AT&T and Verizon are so keen on it then why are they spending so much money fighting net neutrality regulation?

Regulatory oversight of big players in one market to stop them crushing smaller players in dependent markets doesn't have to impose any obligations at all on those smaller players. Think about the App Store - if Apple were regulated so that they had to approve Google Voice-like apps, which Application Writers would that impose obligations on?

Regulations are also sometimes set up so that they only touch big players. Monopoly regulation being the prime example.

Finally some startups have actually gained advantage from regulation by ignoring it and choosing to accept the risk of their LLC possibly being sued. That's a heck of a lot cheaper than thousands of lawyer-hours and huge technical complexity. Skype and 911 is a good example.
Couldn't they at least change the questions that were in no way relevant to Derek?
That's the formal codification of football - Association Football, Rugby Football (both League and Union). The games themselves have been around for hundreds of years.

Really, though, it's a cultural thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rugby_league is pretty typical.
Rate my startup: Feedlooks, a web-based RSS reader
Designed this out of my own frustration with current web-based RSS readers:

As a blogger, I was wondering why I was spending my time working on the blog design if most feed readers would strip off the visuals anyway.

All I needed was a web app that would list new items since I last checked, and would show the actual web content in full visual glory once I clicked on an item. (Without opening a new tab).

Hence Feedlooks. The bet is that there is a chunk of the RSS reader market that feels a similar need.

I'm looking for ideas and suggestions on how to get traction, comments on the app itself, and possible business opportunities.

Thanks!

http://www.feedlooks.com
I've always wondered why elevators don't have a "cancel" button. Many, many times, I've have pressed the wrong floor button forcing me to stop and then continue to the right floor. Not mention the smart ass kid that presses every button just before I enter the elevator ;)
Apple and FaceTime: Apple's plan to make the network operators irrelevant
It's questionable whether she had no role in creating the money he made while they were married; marriage is usually a bit of a partnership, with a lot of mutual support. You can allege that he would've been just as successful if he hadn't been married during that period, but that's a hard counterfactual to prove, and depends essentially on arguing that his marriage, having kids, etc. provided no support at all that in any way contributed to his success during that period. And if you're going to indulge in those kinds of counterfactuals, then maybe he doesn't deserve his money either, because hey, maybe if he wasn't at PayPal, someone else would've done just a good a job, so he only got his money by essentially having the luck to be "married" to PayPal?

You might be able to make that argument if he hadn't already founded a company and sold it for over $300M before he married her. Paypal itself had already been founded and was well under way before they married. It's disingenuous at best to ascribe any of his success to her.

That's one reason that legally, money made while married is assumed to be evenly split, absent a separate agreement. I don't have any particular insight into his situation, but if, say, my parents had gotten divorced when I was a kid, I would've considered it fair if they split the money evenly, even though my dad officially made all of it.

That is a holdover from when women didn't work, which is why it makes sense with respect to your parents.

Plus, if you put it the other way, he's keeping 90-95% of their shared wealth, over a billion dollars, and yet is unhappy with that, because he wants more? It doesn't sound like it has anything to do with control over his companies, either; the amount of stock she's asking for wouldn't affect controlling stakes at all. Seems like it's purely the money: either it's just greed (he has a ton, but wants even more), or some variety of spite (he doesn't care about the money, but doesn't want his ex-wife to get it).

He's the one that worked for the money. What was her contribution, sex and moral support? That's the most expensive hooker in history. Seems that the best bet for successful men is to refuse to marry. Even if the wife signs a pre-nup, they can still keep the man in court for years to force a settlement.

The real issue here is the duplicity of the womens lib movement. It's fair, equal, and all that jazz until it hurts women financially. Some time ago, a girl asked me to go to dinner with her, and while we were there, she spent a great deal of time telling me all about her political views, especially about women's rights. Of course, when the bill comes, she pushes it over to me. We're equal, women deserve everything the same as men, etc., until the bill comes, then it's "you should buy me dinner because I'm a pretty girl and you're supposed to." I'd have bought dinner anyway, but don't lecture me if it's all just bullshit. Same situation here.
> Anyone faking an injury on my pitch used to get a red card for conduct detrimental to the game.

Sorry, this is flat-out dangerous.

You are not 100% certain who is really injured and who is not faking, and you are incentivising players who may not be sure whether or not they are injured to play on.

I agree with your other 9 points, though.
Top Programming Languages to Keep You Employed - Application Development
You're right, that answer isn't correct. I still think that particular input should be tested, though (you say it is - did you leave out that part of your testing program? It should be possible to construct a program that fails on such inputs.)

I don't think I've found a real "bug" yet. You include, but don't use, stdlib.h; you exit with status 0, even on error; but these are nitpicks, not what you mean. I'll think a bit more.
Well now, that page seems to have been created 6 months ago, so I'd argue it's pretty new.
The guy ran off on his wife with a 24-year-old actress. A wife who helped him raise 5 kids and who stood by him through thick and thin when he was building companies like PayPal and Tesla and SpaceX (they met in college). I don't have a lot of sympathy for someone who pulls something like that and doesn't expect to take a hit in the pocketbook for it.
Try actually executing on that rhetorical flourish at the end. You might be surprised how much traction you get with it, even outside of the "angel-investor all-star caste."
I tested that case when you mentioned it. All routines submitted pass it correctly, so I haven't worried about it too much. To do so would be to stray too far from the original intention. I think it's hard to write a natural looking routine that fails that test.

I return 0 in all cases because my test succeeds, even if the routine it's testing fails. It's up to my shell to decide what to do about that error. As it stands it reports the error, but it has succeeded in doing so, so it hasn't failed.

But that's not the point, as you say.

And the real bug is still there.
Actually, only 10 million speakers.
I'm reminded of a quote of David Ogilvy, of the ad agency Ogilvy and Mather:

"As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motorcycles, chopping down posters by the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?"
Fair enough, I suppose.
Why digital license plates are a great idea
So you're arguing that, even though he signed a contract (yes, marriage is a legal contract, and you shouldn't sign it if you don't agree with the terms), he should be able to back out of it, because of some general dislike for "the womens lib movement"? If he wanted to sign a different contract, he could've asked for a prenuptial agreement (which is common among the wealthy), or not gotten married. But he didn't; he signed the contract, so now he should honor it according to the terms he agreed to, and any attempt to weasel out of them is duplicitous bullshit. Should PayPal be able to back out of its contract with him post-IPO, and decide that it didn't want to give him that much money after all, because he didn't "deserve" it?

And yes, I do think moral support plus raising five of your children is sufficient support to deserve half the money you made in that period. If he thought otherwise, he shouldn't have signed a contract saying so. Since he did, the only honorable thing to do is to honor his obligations, not the current pathetic show he's making of trying to claw his way out of them after the fact.
Here's what worked for me, and this echos more than one other commentator:

Write down contemporaneous notes from the lectures. For me, like "what", this commits it to memory, I hardly ever referred back to them.

For math based subjects, do the problem sets as they are due. In these subjects, things tend to build upon themselves, so this is not something you can do at the last moment. Even if there are no formally due problem sets, do enough work so that you really understand the material; if you don't, you're just fooling yourself.

I never "crammed" at the last minute (although one disaster marred term had me learning the last of the material in one subject in my normal fashion and pace the night before the exam, which I then aced), but be as sure as you can to get a good night's sleep before the day of the exam.

Anyway, as you note, in high school it may not matter so much, but you do have to get your foundations one way or another if you're going to go on to college in a math based major. So get serious about establishing your foundation before then. There were a few gaps in mine (I went to a low quality high school where my last math teacher simply refused to teach his class) and they caused quite a bit of suffering when I got to college.
I think his wife became more popular here than he did, because of her show. You can't transplant greatness to get Americans interested in a sport. They must be american, and Americans who constantly beat up on Europeans like Lance Armstrong is always good for American ratings, even if overall Americas interest in cycling is only superficial. But, Lance did make it a lot bigger.
What was her contribution, sex and moral support?

She is the mother of his five children.
I have only ever seen this true in movies. A newbie doesn't know how to count cards, feel out bluffs, or develop a strategy. Given enough money and time they'll feel their way around the unspoken rules. But no one I know rolls up to a table pulls a royal flush and walks out away the winner.
Isn't there a risk to expose a company to a "white revolution" by shareholders ?
I'm OK with the code being used in a commercial product so long as that doesn't prohibit others from using it as well (in other words, I wouldn't want Microsoft to somehow copyright a function my code provides that would get anyone else who uses that function sued).

Don't get me wrong, I don't see this as a possibility but I'd like to save others the trouble.
If you read the page it says the term was first used in 2007.
Benchmark all USB Flash drives over the world
Another meta comment: Let me start by saying I do not think you have deliberately abused the HN point system. You already have a high score and presumably don't care about the number growing.

That being said... this is an interesting way to game one's HN score.

Comment on stories. Once it became obvious that a particular comment is popular/well-received (200+ points) clarify it a bit and post it to your blog. Then submit it as a story back to HN and get another (200+ points).

I found your original comment really interesting and the formatting on your blog way easier on the eyes than HN comments so I'm not complaining or anything.... just thought it an interesting (and inadvertent) example of how to abuse the HN point system.
Vintage computers inspire next generation of scientists
That's good to hear, I'd like to "have good manners" as a way of putting it, but it's good to know that I can release the code and wait to see how much interest there is before I invest additional time pruning and creating documentation.
Are people really that puzzled by how elevators work?

Listen, here are how 99% of the elevators I've used work.

You press a button for where you want to go. Up, or down.

You wait. Then, when the elevator arrives, generally the elevator will have some indicator that your car has arrived. Usually a sound and an arrow that lights up indicating the direction the elevator is heading next.

You get in. Press your button, and when you get to your next stop, you get off.

Now, you might see an elevator open up, and you'll get on. You'll press a button, and it will go in the opposite direction. That's because most elevators operate on FIFO. Obviously, with more complex systems, they can dispatch based on distance, but basically, if the elevator is coming up from the first floor, and a guy on the 5th floor pressed the button first, then you, being on the 3rd floor will just need to wait as the elevator passes you by. Of course it might open. Someone needs to get off.
World’s Hardest Game
assume the brain dissipates 1/10 of this; 200 kilocals per day.

The human brain is pretty hungry. http://www.pnas.org/content/99/16/10237.full says around 1/5th of resting human metabolism is to power the brain. So double all numbers in that post.

This puts an upper limit on how much the brain can calculate, assuming it is an irreversible computer: 5 10^19 64 bit ops per second.*

It's one thing to put a theoretical upper limit on the human brain's computational abilities. It's another thing to claim the human brain actually performs anywhere near that level. Using the same math, a lawnmower engine puts out 1,000 joules per second, so the upper bound on its computational ability is 10^22 ops/sec. I think more than one equation is needed to get a good idea of the brain's performance.

Evolved brains are highly suboptimal. There's no evolution fairy waving a wand and selecting solely for brainpower. Much of the selection pressure is for basic things like famine resistance. Even when selecting for intelligence, evolution can only make incremental improvements. It's going to have trouble stumbling on something like the wheel or the impeller. And it shows. Brains have no API, no debugger, and they certainly aren't end-user modifiable. I can't, by thinking, dedicate a small group of neurons to mental arithmetic. I have to expend significant effort to do the math in my head, and even then I'm not always correct.

Neurons fire at a rate of only 20 hertz or so, meaning any mental computation has to finish in 100-200 steps for a person to respond in real-time. The signals sent by neurons only travel at around 100 meters per second. That's 0.0000004c. Less than one one-millionth the speed of light! And that's not going to change soon, because evolution can't change substrates. It's forced to use neurons instead of silicon or carbon.

>Even if brains are computationally only 1/1000 of their theoretical efficiency

Based on what I've said above, I think brains are far far less efficient than that.
Never heard of him before now. It did first hear the theory from some internet source, but from what I just read about Deangelo it's sounds a little different.

In any case, every time I tried it it seemed to work and every time I deviated the relationship ended. Hardly scientific proof but the source I read had spent years surveying women to arrive at his conclusions.
What's a "white revolution"? Wikipedia only tells me about a group of idiots, and a program to give india a milk distribution platform.
Someone told me that is a culture thing, people in the bay area are known of worship "special people".

I sometimes get the feeling of: "oh, this dude sold his company for $(lot of money), he's so awesome!, I gotta upvote him". "oh, a VC guy that can give us money!, he's so awesome, I gotta follow him and upvote him".

I just gonna go ahead and compare that to South Florida (where I live), a place where having a Lamborghini is like having a Toyota or being a millionaire is nothing! Is it cool? YES!, will it make other people give you special care? absolutely NOT! actually if your Lamborghini is yellow, people laugh at you.
Google And Twitter Tell Appeals Court That 'Hot News' Doctrine Is Obsolete
It depends if your mindset is to think in terms of how it should work for the elevator, or in terms of how it should work for you. Some things take the first approach, others the second approach.

The first time I saw an elevator I wanted it to come down to me and pick me up. BZZZT Wrong. I should have told it where I was going.
One of the best designs that actually saw was an elevator without calling buttons. To go somewhere you pressed the desired floor on the panel _outside_ the cabins. The cabins only had open/close/etc buttons and you were notified on the panel which cabin to take.
Sounds like a case of 'and now you have two problems'. The proposed solution addresses a problem that doesn't practically exist (few people, once they learn the meaning of the buttons, are confused about their function) by making elevators more inefficient by removing the directional call. Taking away the elevator position display also removes the elevator's progress indicator so on top of elevators now being slower for everybody, you can't estimate how long you might have to wait for one. Seems more like UI pessimization.
Firefox on Linux actually used to be faster through WINE. Insane, but true. I was also dual-booting, and that was an easy way to keep it in sync.
If they offered a 'cancel' button, the kid can also hit the 'cancel' button on his way out and destroy all the other floor choices people already picked.

I've seen elevators where if you quickly press a button couple of times, the button will turn off (if it were already on). This of course doesn't protect you from the mischievous kid who presses every button possible.
Interesting you should mention that. In this talk[1], Gary Vaynerchuk describes how he started a Lemonade business, hired all his friends to run the stands, and used the skills he developed doing that (and selling trading cards at the mall) to build his family's little liquor store into "WineLibrary.com" a 60M/yr business.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1447500
Ask HN: Profitable Web Startups
I'm wondering if sites like Reddit, Digg, Dropbox, Foursquare (any "famous" Web startups) are profitable or not and how long did it take to reach profitability. Just shoot the ones you know about or ask if you want to know about a specific startup.
Well, there's "Proofs without words" (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Kx2cjyzTIYkC) and its sequel (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wMpwQgAACAAJ). I'm not sure that's exactly what you meant, though.
I didn't mean to be disingenuous on my comment. I was trying to point out that suggesting more fine grained subjective rules conflicts with saying everything is anarchic because it may be subjective.

It's obvious that sports evolve. I think my overall feeling about this is that soccer IS evolving. Just not in that particular direction you and many others seem to want (i.e., more clear less-subjective rules, cameras, etc...).
The Promise of Telepresence, the Reality of Blogs, and Scaling Problems
Tesla's IPO Presentation Reveals Grand Future Product Plans
No one is disputing that their five children should be looked after and supported. However, money for this should be allocated on the basis of their need rather than Elon Musk's ability to pay, and I'm not sure how one could spend more than a couple of million per child.

In fact, beyond a certain point I'd suggest that having lots of money is probably a negative influence in a child's life.
Where does my money go? cuts in the UK budget 2010
Music Biz Wants Google To Stop Linking To The Pirate Bay - TorrentFreak
It's somewhat depressing to see this in action as well - but I don't really mind. It's easier for the nerds to stand out from the rest.
Or the aliens are using a faster-than-light (mass-less) communication method that we have not discovered yet.

Imagine our surprise if by the end of the century someone finally discovers the communication method and then that it's full of transmissions!
The author has a more recent version on his website, with more data:
http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~babcock/LeisureCollege_4.pdf

I wouldn't jump to conclusions, though. As far as I can see, this isn't peer-reviewed research, and it looks heavily based on few sources.

Some more discussion: http://permut.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/declining-standards-i...

(The formatting is also very unprofessional... not that it changes the analysis, but I tend to take it as a lack of attention to detail.)
For me the ubiquitous level of diving is one of the huge detractions for the sport, and no I don't subscribe to the school of thought that diving is part of the game. In my dream world there would be a 12 month ban on any player caught diving. After each game, the refs go through all the footage of the game's fouls, and any player that even looks like he's diving gets banned. If you didn't break a bone or tear a ligament, pick yourself up and stop fucking whining.
Well that's similar to the argument she's making; she signed a postnuptial agreement and is now trying to weasel out of it.
Taking Advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 with Modernizr
It's not just an expression of emotions. Modern players are trained to cheat and lie.
"if one team had one single chance of calling for a replay, it wouldn't kill the dynamic, but would solve the problem of nonaccredited goals or the Kaka situation with Ivory Coast."

This is roughly the system employed by the NFL, and it works fairly well. Coaches can challenge a number of calls per game (2, I think?) and are penalized with losing a timeout if their challenge turns out to be invalid. I don't know if there is an equivalent penalty that could be leveled at a soccer team for an invalid challenge.
The profit potential on the desktop and the pure web has always outstripped what iPhone apps are capable of. If it's a labor of love or if you just love Apple, by all means, develop for the iPhone. If profits are your goal, the iPhone is a severely limiting choice, for freelancers especially.
Write it and we will read it!
But the business bears the risk of running into significant debt if things go bad, as an employee you don't take that risk. Often business owners have invested significant capital in order to get things going, and they are not guaranteed a return on that investment.
I remember you can define algebras however you like with arbitrary commutativity and associativity rules but in this case you should also apply them and not assume they work in a certain way.

If -1 * -1 = -1, this algebra disallows distributivity rule and the calculation only proves that.