skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Take the origin as the end of life. The angular position of the ant is maintained as the angular position of the ant-life. The distance to the origin is a measure of the ant's remaining life. As the ant walks around the origin in a cycle, the ant's remaining life decreases. When the ant-life reaches the origin, the ant dies wherever it was in the cycle.
I think you're conflating the two definitions of anarchy, though you make good points if you s/anarchy/chaos/g;.

I, too, wish there was better data on this.
I guess the TShirt guy is too.
Our security is important, but nothing is more important than our freedom. Thus, the powers of law enforcement must exist in the spaces between our freedoms, and not encroach, forcing us to alter our behavior for their convenience.

Surely it would be more convenient to law enforcement if they had DNA samples and fingerprints from the entire population, but that's not going to happen.

In some ways, demanding the "right" to eavesdrop is even more pernicious, because it's interfering with our freedom to speak and associate with those we choose -- one of our most cherished freedoms.

And like at least one other commenter mentioned, the government has a clear track record of abusing such powers. I'll add another to that list, their abuse of the Echelon system.

One of Echelon's primary roles has been to gather industrial espionage from European companies for US ones, say some intelligence experts. The French were said to have lost a $6bn contract for Airbus with the Saudi government to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, thanks to Echelon intercepts of faxes and telephone calls.

...The [British Parliament] report warned businesses and ordinary individuals that they are being spied on and that users should encrypt their e-mails. It said: "That a global system for intercepting communications exists ... is no longer in doubt. They do tap into private, civilian and corporate communications."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/secrecy-spy-s...
Divorce by numbers..
horses-for-courses i suppose - i find that i quite like everything gathered into the Instapaper 'magazine' just because it tends to gather up that week's articles. Perhaps i just need the discipline of the old content being archived!(you can re-download it though)

edit: its also perhaps relevant that i don't tend to have much really long content. The DFW/Infinite Jest article from the New Yorker that was posted earlier is about the average for me (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1730153)
Someone mentioned unshort.me, but I created one a few months back for an internal project.

http://www.delinkify.com/

It has an API too, which is ridiculously simple:

curl "http://www.delinkify.com/api/unravel/?links=http://on.wsj.com/aGFmsK,http://cl.ly/2ZY4"
["http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052748703694204575518222145769804.html?mod=e2tw", "http:\/\/seldo.com\/weblog\/2010\/09\/27\/php_needs_to_die_what_will_replace_it"]
My theory is this:

- too weird - Plan 9 is very difficult to get used to as a user experience. Novel, fascinating, powerful, yes! But also minimal, impenetrable, and very very different from the UI you're used to as a Unix hacker.

- nonexistent marketing

- too hard to get into initially; I wish they had gone to a public source repository model earlier, although in all fairness the project predates a lot of this.

But, it was still an enormous success:

- UTF8 came from Plan 9

- Linux's clone syscall

- /proc

- numerous other minor things

The main thing I wish I saw more that was in Plan 9 was structured regular expressions. I'd love an awk based around them, or an ssam that didn't basically run sam on the file. The second thing I wish I saw more was Plan 9's per-process filesystem namespaces. Chroot and jail are crude hacks compared.
Unifycle - a syntactic unification API for Clojure
I've been using my Kindle 3 for hours every day since it arrived. I actually prefer it to a printed book now. Definitely my favorite gadget of the last several years. The only significant downside is the selection in the Kindle store, which is still pretty uneven.
It's interesting, I registered Quora last week and it was optional to use your Facebook or Twitter account to register. It was a bit tricky because it looked like you need it, but you could make progress without it.

But I rechecked a minute ago, and it really required it. It seems that they changed the policy this week.
What Happens At Y Combinator
I have a similar love/hate relationship with PHP. I write PHP because I want my code to be used by as many people as possible. As long as another language gets even a tenth of the deployments PHP has, I will gladly start writing software in that language.

One thing that must surely die, is PHP 4. Please stop making your PHP projects backwards compatible from PHP 4.2 and up. PHP 5 is a lot more palatable and 5.3 even more so.

We have to kill PHP version 4. With fire.

It would be a service to all PHP users, as well as the PHP developers who still have to maintain the 4.2 branch. And it would move PHP 6 one step closer to reality, from the pipe dream it seems like today.
any language with cgi.
This is the best comment here. Haters gonna hate. Players gonna play.
Instead of listing email addresses, I would include a form right on the page. Wufoo.com can easily do this if you're unfamiliar.

The webpage looks kinda scammy. From the 4 super stock photos to the 3 column layout, to buying something I've never heard of, I'm just turned off by it.

Can you go into more detail in to how this works? If I only hire men, but purchase diversity offsets, does this protect me from being sued by a woman because I appear to favor men?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun

New-style, specifically.
Sam Walton was awesome. I don't care if he did it as a coldly calculated matter of image, he's still awesome.
from http://theory.csail.mit.edu/toc-seminars/ (can't find the actual paper...)

Electrical Flows, Laplacian Systems, and Faster Approximation of Maximum Flow in Undirected Graphs

The maximum flow problem and its dual, the minimum s-t cut problem, are two of the most fundamental and extensively studied problems in Operations Research and Optimization. They have many direct applications and are also often used as subroutines in other algorithms.

In this talk, I'll describe a fundamentally new technique for approximating the maximum flow in capacitated, undirected graphs. I'll then use this technique to develop the asymptotically fastest-known algorithm for solving this problem. For graphs with n vertices and m edges, the algorithm computes epsilon-approximate maximum flows in time \tilde{O}(m^{4/3})poly(1/epsilon) and computes epsilon-approximate minimum s-t cuts in time \tilde{O}(m+n^{4/3})poly(1/epsilon).

We compute these flows by treating our graph as a network of resistors and solving a sequence of electrical flow problems with varying resistances on the edges. Each of these may be reduced to the solution of a system of linear equations in a Laplacian matrix, which can be solved in nearly-linear time.

This is joint work with Paul Christiano, Aleksander Madry, Daniel Spielman, and Shanghua Teng.
I wrote a custom letter echoing my own personal opinions pro-freedom and those of the FSF recommended text.
The only thing I wish for nowadays is for the public to gain a better understanding of OpenID so we can start using it on every site. It's the best thing to ever come out.
I'm familiar with the common use, and even there I demur. He was a mature man who was using and adventure model segway to travel off-road. Death by misadventure may be statistically unlikely, but it is not unexpected. Furthermore, in his life he was able to accomplish a great deal, and while he may have gone on to accomplish even more, I trust that we can look at his life without a massive sense of what-might-have-been.

Compare and contrast to the "tragic" death of Jimmy Blanton, Duke Ellington's bassist for just two years. Blanton is credited (or blamed if you prefer) with inventing the Bass Solo, but at age 23 he died of tuberculosis. Thus, the world was deprived of the bulk of his career and looking at his short life one wonders what Jazz might have been like had he played for five decades like Ray Brown, a man he inspired.

The tragedy of Blanton's death was that it was significantly premature. Naturally the bereaved think that Mr. Heselden's death was also premature, but we must draw a line somewhere, otherwise every death is tragic and the word means nothing at all.

So Blaton's death was tragic in comparison because of how premature it was and how much of his productive genius was lost. That being said, the cause of Jimmy Blanton's death was not extraordinary given the health issues affecting many from his social class at the time.

This is different than Scott LaFaro, another pioneering Jazz Bassist who died "tragically," however Scott's death was in an automobile accident, an unexpected incident. Scott's career was cut short and it was cut short in an unexpected fashion, another mark of a "tragedy" in the sense you promote. Mr. Heselden's death was anything but unexpected. If a man sets out to seek adventure in wild places, he and everyone around him must accept the risk that he will not survive.

If I am to die while Scuba diving, could we really call that a tragedy? What caprice of fate can we blame for a man who is killed when he deliberately immerses himself in an environment hostile to air-breathing life?

This watered-down use of the word "tragic" no longer carries much meaning, if any. I get that it's the style (especially in America) to say that since English is a "living language," it is defined by whatever meaning the vox populi care to give it. But while I respect your point that there's more than one way to use the word, I feel that even this lesser meaning does not apply to a mature, accomplished businessman who died while knowingly engaging in a risky activity.
Now accepting applications for Twilio Fund
The irony here is that at the time of the Kingsbury Commitment, phone networks were spreading across the country like wildfire.

That's not good enough, though. The phone system was something that needed to be everywhere, including areas where poverty and/or population density could never have justified a business case.

Were those 3,000 phone companies all building compatible equipment? I don't know, but I'm guessing not. This would have been a problem when it came time to tie them into a single long distance network.

Perhaps some compromise could have been reached in which they would all agree to deploy compatible equipment... but is there really an economic advantage in having 3,000 regional monopolies all doing exactly the same thing, as opposed to one mega-monopoly? Either way the individual customer is going to have to deal with a monopoly.
Re: MVC re-writing. I settled on Zend Framework and havn't looked back. http://framework.zend.com/ (link added)
Look at the names that come up in this search:

http://searchyc.com/rate+my+startup
I looked around, but the only links I could find appear to be selected textbook chapters that describe old ways of doing it. Even Dr. Dobbs just reprinted the MIT press release. So far, the only useful link I can find is to the scheduled talk and someone already posted that.

If anyone can find anything more than this link, it would be interesting to me, too: http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?s...

EDIT: Incidentally that page does tell us a bit more about the solution than the press release everyone is reprinting. Specifically, it says: "We compute these flows by treating our graph as a network of resistors and solving a sequence of electrical flow problems with varying
resistances on the edges. Each of these may be reduced to the solution of a system of linear equations in a Laplacian matrix, which can be solved in nearly-linear time."
Facebooks Events Are Broken And Need Fixing
Marginal result - taking an hour out of an 8-hour day is 12.5% drop right there. Hard to make that up in the remaining time, with a small percentage increase in productivity.
Be did a couple of things that prevented BeOS from going anywhere.

One was basing the machine on PPC processors initially, because it limited their audience. I thought it was a cool idea, but wasn't willing to buy outdated hardware to get the OS. Mac users at the time could have simply acquired the OS and installed it, but the number of mac users willing to do that wouldn't ever be large.

One was not supporting IDE when they ported to x86. When they finally went after a large market, they made sure that hardly anyone in that market COULD use it. I had to do a lot of finagling with my computer in order to install BeOS on it.

AFAIK Apple actually DID try to buy Be before going after NeXT once they realized that Rhapsody simply wasn't going to happen. I've heard a number of stories regarding this, and I don't know which to believe; I was informed that the Be CEO rejected Apple's offer. If someone has better knowledge of that part of history than I and can confirm or correct me, that would be appreciated :)
I just finished reading past "Forward Ruby on Rails". I started writing down couter-points, and realized my list was longer than your article - so I deleted it to tell you this:

You seriously need to edit this post, or just take it down.
I want one... but I'm absolutely not touching the stuff until the SDK is spread more freely. I cannot fathom why it's locked down so tight, except that they may have an incompletely-implemented API. Finish it! You'll get loads of side-channels of revenue. How can that not be worth it?
Adult video-sharing list leaked from law firm
How much larger can Y Combinator get? 36 start ups is already a huge number.
It's not an identical question, but people have been debating versions of this question since the first local-root exploit in a multiuser Unix system. Is it safe to run multiuser Unix systems in general? The answers seem to range from "no" to "maybe", but plenty of people still manage to run reasonably open multi-user systems (e.g. http://sdf.lonestar.org/, not to mention many universities' Unix servers) without great amounts of carnage. One major mitigating factor is attempting to make sure all users with accounts are tied to real identities, so you can deter misuse via the threat of real-world consequences. That and patching quickly, and not installing unnecessary suid things that can increase the attack surface (a few of the privilege-escalation bugs in recent memory have been via the X server).
Nothing is stopping me from setting my password to something different for every site I don't want to set a good password for, I'd just very very much rather just enter a URL and have everything work. OpenID is the most useful thing online in ages.
Robot Teaches Itself to Fire a Bow and Arrow
To be a bit more specific as to what our needs are, we have a database server and a front end / business logic server (times 2, 1 instance for production and 1 for development). I might have bungled up in saying Managed hosting but what I meant was dedicated hardware with full access or probably a cloud setup.
"I call this my Greatest Zukes album... all great artists that asphyxiated on their own vomit! You can't get this in stores, man!"
Without the author of the post being Sarah or Michelle, and given the problems I have with it... it's hard for me to tell what really happened.
Lists use (not infrequently) logic like the following;

If one element
do this one element thing
else
do this more than one element thing
Flying Robot Swarm Takes Off | Wired Science | Wired.com
Strikingly similar to my journey! :)
5.3 has namespaces? Awesome :)
Uh no. PHP in 1995 was very much in C. Go look at the (now famous) Usenet announcement.
Am I the only one who sometimes wishes I could write PHP-style pages in Ruby? Sometimes a whole framework is overkill. I wish I could make Ruby pages as simply as I can take an HTML file and sprinkle in some PHP.
The method sounds very interesting, but the title seems to overstate the work a bit. This is an approximation algorithm, meaning that it's an improvement on an _approximate_variant_of_ a fundamental problem, right?
The point of the above post was to say "this is nice syntax, and it isn't ten times slower, so it's good on that front too", not to say "use that because it's 6% faster". I'm never going to write this in a tight loop anyway, and even if I did, I'd benchmark the entire piece of code, not just this line.
We used HESCOs (Concertainer) in Fargo for flood control a couple of years ago. Not the perfect solution, but there's no way we would have been able to get up that much flood barrier in so little time without them.

It's one of those inventions that's so simple you wonder why it didn't already exist.
The items you mentioned mitigate but do not "solve" the problem. We often have users forget what email address they used when they first signed up (work, personal, their kids email because they aren't a "computer person", etc). Probably not so coincidentally, these same users are the ones that struggle the most with basic computer tasks like opening a URL from an email, etc.
Let's tease this out...

The need for a court-order isn't part of the FBI's position in this argument but is a historical/constitutional mandate that has existed for some time. And law enforcement has shown a willingness to ignore this limitation in practice (see the AT&T case).

Their position, what you called "balanced", is simply that they need the technological ability to tap all phones everywhere. There's nothing balanced (or sane or ..etc) about this demand. Society and technological feasibility may balance their demand for them but that's different from what you originally said.

And, yes, I read the article...
Can't Nasuni bundle files together? Given that for a 1 KB file the majority of the time to fetch it will be latency, if small files were bundled into 10 KB chunks (for example) then the transaction cost would go down by an order of magnitude without affecting UX, surely? It seems unlikely that someone would hit a large number of separate 10 KB chunks for 1 KB each time without a significant number of cache hits.
Brazil’s finance minister: World in “international currency war”
http://longurl.org/
I've noticed that it's in vogue to bash PHP, but frankly, with the current state of the language, along with its frameworks and libraries, there's no better time to work with PHP.

I've noticed that, too, I think a lot of people who bash PHP may have used it at one point, switched to something like Rails or Django, and assumed that PHP stood still, which just wasn't the case. In fact, while I may not use rails, I'm very glad it came about, because it was a very necessary kick-in-the-ass to other language communities to address common and necessary development concerns.

The thing about new technologies, is that they rarely replace the old technologies, usually they just provide new ideas to make the old technologies better.
Part of naming strategy involves not sounding like everyone else. So you might not want to intentionally sound like other startups that have emerged lately.

That being said, I've seen a handful of .io TLD names in the last few months. Other than that, I'm not sure of any recent "trends".
It seems like the reason websites are starting to do this is that facebook authentication gives the developer more information than just an email/credentials. The developer can access all of the basic data in the user's profile and also grab their friend list. This means that later down the line they can automatically connect friends together inside the developer's own service without having to ask their users for that data, which as you know means 90% won't bother. It's essentially a value add to the developer (and much more debatably to the user) over other authentication options. I can see the interest in requiring or at least encouraging users to use this feature.
A clean notepad in HTML & CSS
Yeah, I guess a lot of people have similar stories, certainly a few of my friends who code said they were similar :P
I won't implement OpenID for any site where I have a say. It needs to die so that something good can step into its place.

If you have a site that requires OpenID, I won't use it for the same reason I won't use your site that requires Facebook. If you're going to implement it, make sure you also implement a standard user/pass registration or you'll lose a lot potential users (as in most of them).
Peter Thiel: Facebook Won’t IPO Until 2012 At The Earliest
I use structures like this in PHP5 all the time:

$object->doThis()->doThat()->doTheOther();

But maybe he is referring to method chaining using PHP's built-in functions. There isn't a way that I'm aware of to do the following (short of wrapping the built-in functions with your own classes):

$string->preg_replace("/[^A-Za-z]+/","_")->trim()->upper();
This was an attempt to describe everything we do, so if there's anything I didn't cover, please let me know.

(Sorry it's so long. I was surprised myself how long it turned out, but we do a lot.)
I have facebook, and I don't want to link my various accounts to it. I don't trust facebook to know what pages I log into. I already adblock all of their "like" plugins and so on.
> I really want method chaining, dammit

What? We've been doing code like:

filter('user')
->first_name->like('bob')
->age->equals('22')
->order_by->created->desc
->find();

Since 5.2.x
The main method of Facebook authentication these days is OAuth (which I assume is what you mean by OpenAuth.)
Is this a well-understood model of a developing brain, or is this more "cutting edge?" I ask because it seems to contradict, at least to a certain degree, the concept of "attention deficit." How can a child be attention deficit when this "deficit" seems like a normal phase of development?
Even better, you can use your domain to delegate privileges to a third party service. Eg, I have my personal domain leetcode.net delegate OpenID authentication to myOpenID.com, but if for some reason I don't like that, or decide to host my own provider, it's as simple as changing my domain's delegation info, and I can continue to use the same OpenID url everywhere.
If other people are able to produce with a graph of real time data with Wi-Fi, while yours is only capable of recording one data point, then it may not make the product indispensible enough for people to use, or pay for it. You are basically competing against all fitness companies out there who already have a large ecosystem of partnerships.

let's take this one question: Nike is a standard app that comes with the iPod/iPhone. what is it about your app that makes people want to use it, as a complete replacement or as an additional value to this app?

i think to approach this one problem, I would probably draw the focus of my app into an "analysis" piece, and steer away from solely being a "data recording" piece. By being an analysis piece of software, you could look into fitness devices out there, pull data from different types of fitness devices: from exercise equipments, to fitness accessories. this could potentially be a huge win if you could pull it off. it doesn't mean that you can't provide image recognition as an additional feature, it just means that's not where the core value of the app is.

Second question, there are already these fitness social networking communities who are already doing some of this already, how do you plan to compete with them? For example, from their front page, dailymile says that it works with garmin, nike...haven't read about what this means, but my guess is that they already have these devices plugged into their social community. what kind of values can you provide here? if your app allows people to record and analyze data no matter what social community they belong to, then it might be pretty valuable.

of course i haven't done much research so i am just pulling things out of my head without giving these things a whole lot of thought. if you start thinking about making a product that is "indispensible" then it will attract a lot of fans