skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Machinarium suffers 90% piracy rate, offers $5 amnesty sale
Well, there's a huge asymmetry between a car hitting a bike and vice-versa. So I'd guess it's not that the bike can't be held responsible, but that the potential downside for a biker is death, while the car would likely just suffer some dents.

Whether or not that causes reckless behavior on the biker's part, I don't know. But I can imagine the argument.
From Design Thinking to Game Thinking
Bikes already have the infrastructure, they are called "roads".
Haha, I feel that guy, I'd pay extra couple hundred bucks too, just to be away from apple fan boys.
See, this is why people are stupid in this country.

Obama: "I'm trying to fix healthcare"
Republicans: "He's trying to kill your grandmother"

Washington Post: "Obama, Republicans disagree over whether healthcare plan will mandate euthanasia"
Off topic, but I absolutely cannot stand the way that this site renders and behaves on an iPad. What's wrong with it? It wobbles all over the place and the text looks non-native and jagged.

Sort it out, Baptiste!
Beware selection and survivor bias.
http://www.retrologic.com/jargon/H/hacker-humor.html

Not that I want HN to become a joke-a-day site but accidental-hacker-humor like this is a unusual enough find that I can deal with the rare exception.
Isn't it interesting that 'worse' and 'very poorly' imply a negative value judgement?

We seem to (well, at least I seem to) instinctively dislike the child of privilege, but at the same time I'm very interested in passing on whatever success I manage to have in life to my descendants, and systems and societies that make it more difficult for me to do so strike me as completely unfair.

There's a bit of a contradiction here.
I'm paraphrasing Jay Leno who was being interviewed on a car show, so take this with the appropriate number of grains of salt, but ...

I'd like to see cars go the way of the horse. Horses used to be used for transportation, everybody had one, and they were abused to a huge degree. Then cars came along, and now horses are kept just by enthusiasts who care for them a great deal and go riding for fun every once in a while.

I think the best of both worlds would be for [insert your car alternative of choice here] to develop enough to replace the car for commuting and errands, with just a few thousand cars for people who like to drive them around tracks or through the countryside every once in a while.
Hyundai Says Its Cars Will Average 50 M.P.G. by 2025
I've never bought the front brake argument. As a bicyclist, motorcyclist, and physicist, I know that 100% of your stopping power is on the front brake, exactly because (as you say) the front brake can make you do a forward flip. This means that all your weight is on the front wheel, and the only thing you can do with your rear brake is make the rear wheel lose traction, and that will indeed make a bad situation worse.

The answer is to become proficient in the use of your front brake and commit the proper brake pressure to muscle memory so that you do not grab at it and skip the front wheel before weight has shifted, or do a "stoppie". Practice maximum braking from speed, it could save your life!

There is one counter-argument to this: In situations with poor traction (on snow, ice, sand, etc.) you don't have enough traction to shift all your weight to the front. In those cases, the optimal case is judicious use of both brakes. But if you bike on such surfaces, you have much more to learn anyway...

Second lesson: People rely too much on brakes. In most high-speed situations, swerving is a better action. (Due to the way braking distance vs turning distance scales with speed.) Practice change direction quickly to avoid obstacles in your path!

Sorry for the long post, but it was fresh in my mind: My wife got side swiped by a car turning right yesterday. She's fine, but we had a long discussion about bicycle proficiency and the futility of being "dead right".
At initial stages, potential recruits are not even told that Goldman is the client.

Well, yeah. That's because if the recruiter tells you where the job is, you'll go directly to the client and keep the 30% of your salary that the recruiter gets to yourself.
A Brief Look at New Routing Techniques in Rails 3
Puma Speed Cat, Puma Shoes,Puma Trainers,Puma Cat Shoes
The "Why" is missing in this article. Anyone care to comment?
The plural of anecdote is not data.

If you're a VC investing $50M in a company, you don't wait for data before trying to protect that investment.

I don't object to the preference in general, but any multiplier greater than 1.0 is a red flag for me.

Personally I think a preference of (1.1)^[# years since investment] would be more fair (otherwise founders can make money by simply investing in treasury bonds). But I don't plan on taking funding anyway, so it's a moot point.
good luck, you will not find anyone.
yikes, not good. it's being done through PadPressed.com , app we released last week. Just put out a new version and it's using a new cached plugin. Can you please email me a screenshot: j@jasonlbaptiste.com Thanks!
From a European/Asian perspective. Example: Barcode scanner/price comparer iPhone app. Although we have many local price comparison services; there is no such app to read (most of) the barcodes where I live.

> people from other places might feel excluded anyway.

I apologize for narrowing this down to Europe/Asia, this should apply everywhere at least a couple months behind US in adopting technology.
> "The typical iPhone user is going to be so enamored of his or her phone, he'll insist on showing..."

In my experience, that is not remotely typical. I've yet to encounter a single person like that.

That said, I have met people who get that worked up about: DeWalt Tools, John Deere tractors, Home Brewing, BMW cars and Harley Davidson motorcycles.

But I never had cause to assume those people were typical representations of a fanbase.
Congratulations Bump, for helping Max Levchin's original vision for PayPal, as described in Founders at Work, come to fruition.
I would assume they picked the examples because it's singularityhub. Most of their readers are likely to be technology/gadget centric and a message about more tech centric activities was probably expected to resonate better than a message about something as "old fashioned" as reading a book.

Beside, be honest. What percentage of the population do you think actually spends more time reading books than watching TV and surfing the internet?

BTW: According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, watching TV accounted for more than half the total leisure time for Americans 15 years and older. (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm)
"I just don't want to see some zealot telling me I can't have a car, and that I am some sort of evil person for having one."

In the US, it's basically illegal to build any kind of development that doesn't require a car or two. Some exceptions, like Kentlands in MD, or Stapleton in Denver, require developers to prepare plans in advance, lobby for variances to zoning and parking requirements. It's also harder to get financing for non-standard projects. All this means that unless you're building a standard subdivision, an office park, or a strip mall, you're at a competitive disadvantage and incur higher costs and risks.

Let there be no illusion that the "market" provided the built environment we have.
Biking by itself is not that dangerous. Biking near cars is dangerous. If you want to drive around in a 2 ton vehicle with the power to kill, you better damn be responsible for it.

Also, there is an imbalance in incentives to not get in an accident. If a car and a bike get in a wreck, the person driving has almost no risk of injury where the person on bike is at risk of dying or getting seriously injured, depending on the situation. This law gives people driving a little more reason to be more careful.

Also, keep in mind in the US, if a car hits a pedestrian, the driver's insurance always pays no matter whose at fault.
The Making of a Design Thinker
I'm assuming you have an ipad. The problem occurs in landscape mode. Try scrolling and you'll see what I mean.
"10 years" working with HTML? No wonder he didn't know. My first web browser was Mosaic, running via Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3.11 on a 14.4k modem. (This was in '94, I think). Back then, we all knew what hypertext was, because the term was in common use, and the default background for web pages was a lovely #C0C0C0.

It's totally a generation gap thing. Just a few years difference and so much is taken for granted. My joints feel sore just thinking about it. I'm going to listen to some ABBA, now...
Steve Blank is Right About the Need for Lean VCs
It is my experience that the risks are exponentially higher the further you get from the "flagship" product. This is also true for Firefox - if you don't update as updates become available you will soon find yourself with something bad on your machine if you're not careful (and on Windows). Plus, while Windows 7 built-in protection isn't great (which, if they went past IE6 they should upgrade the OS too), it does prevent some massive system-wide changes and rootkits.
Vitamin D and Multiple Sclerosis
Win 3 Copies of How to Build a Successful Blog Business by Collis Ta’eed
We’re really happy to announce a new edition of our Inspired Giveaway series, this time in collaboration with Collis Ta’eed – the mastermind behind Envato, Tuts+ & Rockable Press.
Indeed, I've become a hypocrite myself - I used to abhor private education when I was younger (although I didn't actually have any contact with anyone who had been privately educated when I was at school). Now that I can afford it and the benefits are obvious I send my son to private school where you do get an "unfair" advantage.
I'm one of the few that wanted a foldable Air with full OSX instead of a bigger iPod.

So, I do agree with Ballmer, and probably my next portable computer will be a Windows7 foldable laptop.
"E.g. the state gives lots of support for home ownership, including government sponsored mortgage guarantees. Or the power of all those crazy unions. "

Both of which has bankrupted many states..and the auto industry (union power).
I went ass-over-teakettle once on a tenspeed in Amsterdam traffic, I was very much in a hurry (trying to catch the train to work) and rode faster than the car traffic, a guy turned right into my 'lane' and I hit the front brake in a reflex. Too hard, I flipped right over and bounced off the pavement after doing a salto. Bad scrapes everywhere, fortunately nothing more serious than that (I used to be made of elastic, if I tried that today I'd be dead). I never realised that you could do that until it happened.

I was 'right' too, but since swerving wasn't an option and my front brake worked a bit better than expected I wonder if there would have been a better way to handle this (sliding sideways for instance). Accidents lurk in remarkably small corners. My nightmare scenario for a fixed gear cycle would be downhill at a good speed with a sudden obstruction. That would be the 'perfect storm'.

Glad to hear your wife is fine, bicyclists are on the bad side of any close encounters of the third kind with other traffic.
I am recent graduate, so I guess that explains a little. Normally, its being in touch with everyone. I moved here from Nepal 4 years ago and Facebook is a great way to be in touch with my high school friends. Maybe I like to keep an eye on what people are upto :) plus, lots of event planning and chat communication happen in facebook now. I see myself just leaving a msg on facebook than using my email client. It's very sad that how digital world is separating real life communications, eh?
Microsoft Drivers for PHP for SQL Server 2.0 released
> Even on our hottest days here in south Florida, one can easily bike a mile, fully dressed, without breaking a sweat.

Perhaps we're different, but I break a sweat in a couple minutes simply going outside in FL this time of year. Add riding a bike and I'm drenched.
Correct. Looking at it now and it looks okay and doesn't wobble. Weird.
I think there is an exception to this idea for startups that require data-centric scaling. If you are planning to grab as much data as you can and as quickly as possible, this could require scaling even when the user count itself is small. I had a startup that ground to a halt because I hadn't anticipated the sheer amount of data that the app would collect even before I had more than a handful of users. Of course, that isn't the traditional kind of scaling that people talk about.
See also this about OODA loops: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.clojure.user/34272
But being the NY Times, are we sure they didn't just jump the gun again and it's all misrepresented? MAYBE THEY RIDE MOPEDS.
What a cute idea. I'd help out a fellow academic, but I don't have an iPhone :(

I liked your page on how the data will be used too. Seems like you've put a lot of thought into privacy and stuff. Good job!

Good luck & it'll be interesting to see what sort of data you uncover!
They need to update their dictionary. For password1:

It would take
About 117 days
for a desktop PC to crack your password
Where do you live?

Does it reach 95 degress F with almost 100% humidity in the summer and -50 degrees F in the winter? Does it ever snow 12 inches+ at a time? Is there every freezing rain followed by inches of snow covering it?

My point is, what works in California doesn't work in Fargo or Minneapolis. Even driving a diesel automobile. They gel up bad. Same with electric cars, the temperature (hot and cold) kills batteries.

If I lived in Santa Barbara, yeah, biking to work would be awesome.
To accomplish this, it helps to keep a list of important problems that haven't been solved yet. As you hear about incremental improvements, it may suddenly be within reach, when popular knowledge says otherwise. Online video was obviously going to be a killer app: one Victoria's Secret Live fashion show brought the Internet to its knees several years before Youtube existed. There just wasn't a way to do it well before the cards fell into place: Flash video cut through the Gordian Knot of browser video plugins, and low-cost server infrastructures finally became cheap enough to store petabytes of video. The casual observer may miss the events, and many may jump in too early, but it helps to know what problems need to be solved.
Working from home, waiting for breakfast to be made.
Is there an "official" name for that statistic?
wth, this comment will always bother me.

sad...

so contact people in real life!
Write a hand written letter to someone.

If you don't know anybody that will sincerely appreciate a hand-written letter from you, make some new friends and get a new mother, father, sister, uncle, aunt, and dog.
No. There is no such thing as unbiased.

I don't just mean something like "to a first approximation there is no such thing as unbiased"; I mean that there is indeed no such thing. It is an English word with no existing actual referent, like the phrase "uniform distribution over the real number line". No such thing.

One of the fun things about learning about machine learning is that you get a great and powerful definition of bias, and as a consequence it can clearly explain that what unbiased translates to is "brings no information about the possible set of experiences to the table", but the consequence of that is that it takes an infinite amount of information to come to any conclusions whatsoever, even probabilistic ones. No matter how finitely many bits you apply to your original N-dimensional infinite state space, you still have an infinite state space remaining.

And in my experience, the ML definition of "bias" isn't just a cute mathematical construct, it actually has a direct (and somewhat profound) relationship to the word as used in English, so while I used math terminology in the previous paragraph this is not a case where theory and practice diverge. They are actually quite convergent here, and there really is no such thing as "unbiased".
Ask HN: Review our web app: Eyes And Feet - Social media for Local Businesses
Eyes And Feet is a web based application that will help local businesses get more customers from social media.

For starters, we're primarily looking at the following categories of local business: Restaurants & Cafes, Bars & Clubs, Salons & Spas

We're going into private beta very soon. For now, to show you the app, we've put up a video at http://bit.ly/eaftour

Please take a look and let us know what you think - about the product & the opportunity.

To understand the 'opportunity' better, and know more about the problem we're trying to solve, see http://bit.ly/eafopp

One last thing...if you'd like to be part of the Private Beta, please sign up at http://www.eyesandfeet.com and use the invitation code: ASKHN
We'll send you an invite as soon as we can.

Thanks for helping.

Lux
Founder & CEO
lux AT eyesandfeet THISISADOT com
What I would like to know is why didn't they simply license it to them?
Here's how to replicate it on my iPad at least

In landscape mode, put your thumb on the screen and hold it there. Then move it slightly to the left and stop. The page continued shifting despite the fact that I'm not dragging anymore and eventually it just shunts itself off the screen entirely.
Heart health is brain health. Simple as that.
I know no one like to read a text book, but good option would be picking up the Gang of Four design patterns book. http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Obje... I recently read most of it (preparing for a final exam yay!) and the really nice thing about this book is the examples. Each pattern has a description, a list of pros and cons, a discussion of a piece of real software that used (or often pioneered) this pattern and then finally an example of C++ that uses it.

Honestly, the discussion of pros/cons and then the use in industry sections make this book a very good read. It won't be quite as entertaining as lippert's blog, but then again it is a Textbook
Isn't this a simple function of population density? Can we just say that and be done with this stupid argument?

If the US had the population density of Japan or parts of Europe, yes we could all bike and have super fast broadband. That's not the case.
"The whole "visitor" pattern becomes a 1-line (map...) call."

That doesn't make sense. It's 'visitor pattern' -> defmethod.
Mike Rowe's TED talk from 2008 hits on some of the same points, as well as how much he thinks we under-value hard work. Agree with him or not, it's definitely worth taking a look at.

http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...
How to banish business cards from your life -- the digital options
The problem for me is not hardware, got a couple of older machines here that could easily run my current project (nginx + node + mongo), but the problem is symmetrical bandwidth is fabulously expensive.
I'm not seeing a huge difference between that and the state of vehicle laws in my home state (Michigan).

Here, if you strike another car, you're at fault. Regardless of what another vehicle does, you're expected to maintain safe stopping distance and an 'exit' if your lane needs to be vacated in an emergency.

I have a friend who actually did get a ticket for hitting a car that ran a red light. Granted, the car running the light got a ticket for breaking the law, but 'fault' for the collision was assigned to my friend.
Xkcd: Still No Sleep
Write (Code) Vigorously
First off, I'm an Android fan and don't own an iPhone.

But most of my co-workers do. When the new ones come out, yes, I have to hear about the new features, most of which are already on my phone or other smart phones.

But other than those 2 weeks every year, I generally don't hear about the phones at all.

On the other hand, I hear a lot more people expounding the virtues of their Android phones. Especially on the web. I love my phone, but I don't feel the need to tell everyone about it. (Except when I first buy it... Just like all other toys.)
Hmm, apparently the UK were 4 years ahead of the US in terms of SMS adoption (source: http://www.intomobile.com/2007/07/23/americans-are-4-years-b...) so maybe you're right. Certainly felt to me like SMS was well established in the UK in the 2000s.
Especially if the candidate's name is Brian Reid. He must not be planning on ever working again.
Is that "fair"?, or is that what those who worked all their lives want everyone to believe in order to justify themselves having worked all their lives?

Just a thought, not an opinion.
I was thinking about writing about how relevant I found the concept of writing vigorously (as summarized in the Elements of Style quote at the bottom of this article). I googled first to see if anyone had mande the point, and sure enough... Article's not new, but I figured maybe old enough that folks might enjoy the submission.
Oh, for Pete's sake: relax! People thought it's interesting and it is interesting (I had no idea you could go that deep). Hey, maybe if your elevator pitch doesn't work you can try to impress a VC with this tidbit, I bet this would get more attention than a lot of pitches.
Good point. Would have just said 2 order of magnitudes instead (20 users, scaling to 2000).
Do these announcements belong here? I mean, those interested in learning about new releases of Debian, Ubuntu or some other software can just subscribe to dedicated mailing lists.
I have four kids and would consider this product.

Of course, I have similar software monitoring my bike commute for my wife's edification. I'm the one who set it up; I don't feel particularly oppressed.

I would hope that my kids would view this as an easy way to keep the parents up to date without having to actually call/SMS.
A relevant thread from Wilmott Forums: http://www.wilmott.com/messageview.cfm?catid=16&threadid...

In particular, this quote from Dominic Connor is telling:

"...[snip]... As Zmei says [SLang] a GS only language, which even within GS is not exactly universally loved. I hear tales of tragically poor performance, and the inability to cope with modern programming. Think of it as a equivalent to C# 1.0, ie old fashioned.

I don't know how much it is seen as protecting IP, but it is not clear how GS can give it up within the next decade even if they tried. There is just so much of it there.

There are spots of Java, VBA, and C++ in GS, who often value C++ experience in new hires, even if they don't use it.

The GS IT bonus pool is better than most people's IT bonus pool, but it's several tiers down.
Mobility is no worse at GS than many other firms, but that is not saying much of course.
Slang does in this context work to your advantage. Many IT department technologies have no value in quant and/or front office roles, but since Slang is prevalent in all aspects of GS, this barrier is much smaller.
But of course the politics in all banks is far more of a problem than the technology."

Dominic is a very well known Quant head hunter. Well informed and generally well liked within the community. I'd wager that they don't want to use Slang in the spinoff simply because they have a change to do a reset and don't want the baggage.
Well, then you have an issue not directly with this story but the way HN is designed. Start a submission of your own, citing this example, about this issue and get the discussion rolling, if you feel passionately about this.
Already commented about Debian here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1581231
And investing in common stock when the founder controls the company and the exit is not a fair deal.

Don't tell that to any employees of your portfolio companies.
This is just the same image scaled down with virtually no input added.

Source: http://www.visualeconomics.com/food-consumption-in-america_2...
disable password logins

I can't emphasize this one enough. Unless you need to login from a lot of different machines, there really isn't any excuse not to do this. It also has the bonus of making logins really easy since you don't have to type a password.