skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is on topic and you wouldn't have objected if he put "start-up transportation advice for newbies to NYC"in the heading or the first line.

This is a good tip for anyone who is working or having meetings in NYC. Getting around the city trying to meet clients or partners can be tricky and if you're in a hurry you don't have time to argue if the cab driver can get you there or not.
It's true. I've learned my lesson after living in Brooklyn and now Queens for the last few years. Just get in the cab, ensure your entire party is in the cab. Shut the doors. Say where you're going and sit tight. I've been fortunate to live by the bridges in both locations so I have an easy counter if they start to argue. Hold your ground!
First Round’s Charlie O’Donnell on What’s Right and Wrong with NY's Tech Scene
HN Discusses: Lets talk about replacing HTTP in the browser.
HTTP has been a solid workhorse for, what, 20 years? It can pretty much be considered ubiquitous -- any platform worth its salt has a robust HTTP client. HTTP is reasonably light weight and extensible and is generally well understood.

But is it still appropriate for "modern" uses? As web apps become more and more interactive, larger, and have different constraints on connectivity is there a better alternative to base our stack on?

We have a few interesting solutions to those problems that have been built on top of HTTP. Comet, for instance, overcomes the interactivity bit and web sockets could be cool if it ever get full support but those both seem like hack-y solutions -- solutions that required a lot of energy that likely could have been mitigated if we used a different protocol in the first place.

Lets just consider, for the purposes of this discussion, what the ideal technology would be. We don't necessarily need to talk about adoption or deployment or feasibility -- obviously its pretty damn infeasible to ACTUALLY replace HTTP thanks to its ubiquity -- but just ideally, what would you like to see?

Anyone know if any feasibility studies or scoping of a technology has been done on this topic?
That's not really true since most languages are some what similar with some what similar constructs. Anyone who can read C, can read a multitude of other languages pretty well and figure out, just from the source code itself, the meaning of any unknown constructs.
I don't know that I agree, I really am not sure what "GIVING COBOL" means.
What you say is true for mediocre to average developers.

Before I had my own company, every place I worked whenever I would talk to clients or go to conferences I would get on the spot job offers. Principals would ask "Would you ever consider leaving XYZ?" I would say I'm not looking at the moment. They would always then hand me their cards and say "If you're ever looking to move, give me a call first."

In addition, I would get calls at home to my unlisted number because of articles I had written or patents I held.

When it was time to move on I would have dozens of open offers already to chose from. Why the hell would I or any other great developer bother dredging through monster hoping to find the 0.001% of ads that are both legitimate and for a place than isn't some web shop with slave hours and low wages? Answer is I wouldn't. Any company that only relies on job ads and resumes is not a place that great developers work for.
Rocking Chair, Portable Realtime Feeds ala CouchDB
Even though the cab drivers are 'free agents', the economics of the business are pretty harsh (due to the city limiting the number of yellow cabs) :
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2009-08-05-t...

I believe (maybe incorrectly) that an individual driver pays (>$100) to take a taxi out on a shift. 12 hours later, when they return the cab, it's a pure win/lose situation. The drivers themselves don't feel like the city is subsidizing them at all.

Whereas the rules are put here by the city to create the public good of reliable, non-discriminatory transport everywhere, the drivers actively pay for the fact that the city is creating artificial shortage of cabs...
What's the distinction between uber app and gypsy cabs?
"You're right. Scheme implementations usually have unboxed fixnums and other types. However Scheme systems do not usually support user defined unboxed objects, like C#, C and ML do."

That's because Scheme has to support type safety for arbitrary code loaded at run-time. Exactly like JavaScript has to do when the web browser GETs a script. Exactly what any of the other proposed ILs would have to do as well.

"I agree, I did mean tail calls. Tail calls may not be so good for programming with, but they are good for compiling to, because you can easily encode your control structures like while, for, until, state machines and more exotic forms of looping to them. You can also compile (parts of) code in continuation passing style without blowing the stack, which is hard to do efficiently if you don't have tail calls.

The reverse is not true, you cannot easily express tail calls on top of the usual control structures like while. This is why Scala and Clojure still don't have support for tail calls."

A better argument can be made for gotos than tail calls in this case. JavaScript already has gotos in the form of labels and break.

Tail call faking doesn't always have to have a trampoline overhead cost. Take a look at Scheme2JS for how they do it (http://www-sop.inria.fr/indes/scheme2js/)

"I'm not arguing that Java is better than Javascript for programming in. It's just a better target for compilers."

JavaScript provides run-time types and extensive reflection and introspection facilities. This makes it relatively straightforward to write something like Parenscript. OTOH trying to compile even a static subset of Common Lisp to C or Java is pretty complicated.

"Do you have any arguments to back up why ML would not be a better IL than JS?"

Your original statement was: "I challenge you to find a language that would have been a worse choice than Javascript." Given the state of ML implementations in 1995, I think it would have been a worse choice.

"It seems to me that you are arguing that these languages are not better than JS for programming in, but that is not what I claimed."

And you seriously think people would have first run out and built compilers from other languages to the "hypothetical better than JavaScript" language rather than use the latter directly? Because that's not what actually happened.
thanks for the link.

"Einstein's brain weighed only 1,230 grams, which is less than the average adult male brain (about 1,400 grams).
.... However, the density of neurons in Einstein's brain was greater. In other words, Einstein was able to pack more neurons in a given area of cortex."

Personally for me, that completely confirms my theories. Moore's Law for the brain :)
3D Printers, One-Dimensional Enemies
The world orange has which letter in the penultimate position?
A: FAILURE

Aircraft fly through the?
A: FAILURE

Q: A beetle has how many legs?
A: a

It does well when it recognizes the questions, but there's still plenty of room for writing new ones. It does show that it's an arms race, as someone else noted.
In many states, including New York, California, Colorado, and a few others, it is actually a crime for them to add a surcharge to a credit card transaction.

For example, in New York, levying a surcharge is a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $500, one year in prison, or both.
Wait... are you proposing that you get a kickback for your positive review? I'm not sure that will work so well...
If Apple announces a new product, the world looks on with curiosity and awe.

If Facebook announces a new product, the world looks on with scorn and distrust.
Ye know, after thinking about it, i honestly think that this is also doing good for other people, "rejecting therapy" if you will.

There are loads of people in this world that absolutely suck at saying no and really should do it more often, so going through this not only can help yourself but also the people you are interacting with.
> Do players really build all that, or does the ingame AI make those decisions?

The AI controls the dwarves, the players issue directions. The ASCII is a bit hard to read, but there are plenty of graphical tile packs. I like Phoebus right now, but Mayday & Ironhand's graphics are also nice. Look for something called the "Lazy Newbie Pack" and then at the tutorial threads if you ever want to get started.

Also, you can lock doors and such. It won't stop building destroyers or thieves (kobolds), but everyone else will just sort of walk up to it and wonder what to do. Dwarves can only destroy doors and other stuff when they go crazy, which tends to happen if they're unhappy enough.

> Jeez, the fortresses can become pretty massive.

Actually, that's pretty small, these days. This was also done on an old version that had maybe 40 levels to dig through. New ones are more like 200 unless you change settings. Oh, and there's a magma sea at the bottom. Magma is very Fun(TM) so more than a few players (including me) have constructed gigantic pump stacks with ~100 iron pumps powered by perpetual motion devices that pump magma up near the surface where it can be used for traps / forges / Fun(TM).

That game is a succession game (everyone plays for one year, taking over for the last person, so they may be surprised ... and appalled ... at how people before them have been running the fortress).

The comment about dwarf bread being a lethal throwing weapon is, sadly, true. But everything is (was?) a lethal throwing weapon: the throwing skill was completely broken. You could throw anything (and I mean anything) that you could actually hold at someone and have it be deadly once you had enough throwing skill.

Anyhow, the jokes get a lot funnier when you understand how the game is played. For example, there once was a weaponsmith who ran outside to grab a sock someone had dropped outside. He got ambushed by a kobold who had a copper knife. The kobold attacked him and cut his finger a tiny bit, then ran away. The weaponsmith hobbled back to the fortress, making a big deal about his minor injury. Then he decided to faint from the pain while on one of the weapon traps near the entrance. Normally, dwarves can walk over their own traps just fine. But if you faint? You get chopped to bits by the trap. At least he's not in pain now. I set up a coffin for him.

As for the comments about the elephants, they used to be deadly (as were carp... yes, the fish... it's now an in joke). So he trapped one of the elephants who had been killing folks in a cage trap, then traded it to the humans. Due to yet another bug, any animal that had killed dwarves could be "tamed" and yet it would continue to attack dwarves who believed it to be "tame" even as it was killing them and who wouldn't fight back. So, that elephant they gave them was dangerous...
$3.5 million is simply too large a number for your theory to be correct. A number that large to a single employee doesn't come out of thin air, it's based on something -- whether that be formal analysis or back of the envelope calculation.
The relevant part of the guidelines is a bit further down:

"Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead."
Also, buy a scale and weight daily at the same time as the pictures and record it into some form of spreadsheet. Quantitative data meets qualitative data!
Hey, I didn't know that one, thanks!

The equivalent French saying has a bit more more innuendo...

"A good rooster is never fat"
Not "native variables", but any concurrency package built on CSP does this. For languages where it is more built in, consider Erlang or Occam.
The SPDY protocol is a potential replacement:
http://www.chromium.org/spdy/
No, since most open source projects don't require you to sign over your copyright when you contribute. For these projects, you need the agreement of everybody that contributed to the project to change the license, since they own a part of the project. In the case of Node.js, Ryan required all contributors to sign over their copyrights, so he was free to do whatever he wanted with the code. That includes relicensing or selling it.
Obama administration to appoint Web privacy czar
While it may technically be true that a cab has to take you anywhere within city limits, it seems to me that it is only polite to ask first before you ask to go someplace out of the way.

On the occasions where I wanted to use a cab to go from Manhattan to Brooklyn or an airport, I always ask first. Most of the time, they say ok, and it's all good. Once in a while (maybe 1/4 of the time) the driver refused. I'm fine with that, you can usually catch another cab within a few minutes -- one who will be happy to serve you.

These guys work long hours and I do not view it is as my right to force them to provide me with service. The law is probably a good one. That said, I believe a certain level of consideration on the part of customer would also be nice.
Travis has some amazing experiences to share from his time hustling as an entrepreneurs. It's great to learn from folks like Travis. This video is a great way to do it. Thank you Tech Cocktail!
20 years ago - the making of ARM
Adams' theory on this may be completely wrong. But I completely agree with his observations. On a an empty stomach I'll be alert and loaded with energy. After a carb laden lunch it'll be nap time.
Yeah, that is kind of what sparked this thought in my mind...there are a couple of things that are good here. Multiple files per request is a pretty cool idea and server-initiated requests could solve a lot of problems.

One thing that immediately comes to mind as a bummer about SPDY, though: Lack of native full-duplex duplex communication.
You raise a very good point, and it does sometimes feel like sheep being invited to a wolf party. ;) However, I think it prepares us well for the realities of startup life. Sure we have that male-dominated thing to get over, but if we're prepared to do it, we stand out even more than any male will. Don't you think?
But then I guess some women will say you need to do that much better a job as a woman to get the same recognition as a man - but I don't know if that's actually true in startups simply because there are so few women willing to fully commit and go the distance.
Or further down:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
Neural network DSL using Clojure
I understand you just copied the same snippet for your example. I'm just pointing out that Python does support that kind of if natively, so that people won't think that it doesn't.
Yeah. Using the Facebook graph to price health insurance. Has your girlfriend slept with someone who slept with someone who slept with someone who has AIDS? That will be $100,000 per month kthx.
Basically, your body runs on glucose. Everything else is a stop gap for you to get more glucose.

But don't forget that the body can make quite a lot of the glucose using a process called gluconeogenesis. And substances like amino acids, glycerol or products of fatty acid oxidation are used as precursors.

So, in essence - yes, it runs on glucose, but glucose does not necessarily come from dietary carbohydrates.
ITunes 10.1 brings AirPlay, warning about Ping use
From what I've read, it'll take more than a nightly fast to trigger Ketosis:

If the diet is changed from a highly glycemic diet to a diet that does not provide sufficient carbohydrate to replenish glycogen stores, the body goes through a set of stages to enter ketosis. During the initial stages of this process, the adult brain does not burn ketones; however, the brain makes immediate use of this important substrate for lipid synthesis in the brain. After about 48 hours of this process, the brain starts burning ketones in order to more directly utilize the energy from the fat stores that are being depended upon, and to reserve the glucose only for its absolute needs, thus avoiding the depletion of the body's protein store in the muscles.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis#Diet
Given the recent wave of reinventing/breaking captchas, I saw the captcha at the end, and thought: "what if this free app is just a very clever way to get a bunch of intelligent people to answer captcha's for a bot?"

Then I realized if somebody went through all this trouble to design a new app like this, they deserve to have me answer captcha's for a bot somewhere.

Q: What nonsense word do the letters G-B-R-D spell?
A: gbrd

Q: Which three letter word starts with the letters TH and ends with the letter E?
A: th

Pretty neat.
Use a time machine to prove/disprove P == NP

Hold up. P==NP is only proved if you have a time machine.[1] It's still unknown in story if you can do it with a conventional, causal, turing machine.

Also note that Harry is either ahead of the times (he doesn't mention the Moravec paper in-story) or very, very au courant, being perhaps the only eleven year old in the world to be reading preprints of theoretical computer science papers while also attending wizarding school.

1: http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.artic...
This did not work for me "0 contacts imported"
Facebook poaches Foursquare engineer
I don't have to start working until May, and I saved enough money interning last summer that I can work on the project full-time until then.

I guess the biggest concern is replacing the cofounder; he's an incredible programmer. That being said, most of the current "featuers" are implemented -- the thing is pretty much completely built. It'll be tough to continue adding stuff, but right now we can take 10x the customers we have.

Thanks for the prods, these are tough decisions.
Learn you a physiology: http://www.fi.edu/learn/brain/carbs.html

I searched this page for "gluconeogenesis" but did not find it. So basically they completely ignore the fact that the body can produce glucose from amino acids, products of fatty acid oxidation etc?

Edit: Also, the brain only needs a certain amount of glucose - somewhere in the 30-60g per day area. And if the blood sugar is low, the brain will have priority uptaking glucose from blood. So yes, it needs glucose, but one does not need to consume half of his calories or more from carbs - a mere 100g per day or even less would probably be enough.
The real connection speeds for Internet users across the world (charts)
Based on all these "rational actor" responses, I take it none of you purchase insurance?
The "what if" is weighing heavily on me already. In 5 or 10 years I'm going to be kicking myself.
Loved this talk
Has anyone got a convenient phrase for this style of blogging? I love having these kinds of BS sessions with my friends, propounding crack-pot theories and generally playing fast and loose with the facts, but it often bugs me when I see it in a blog post. There's absolutely no reason it should bug me, blogging is whatever the blogger wants it to be, but I think if I had a name for it I could quickly go "Oh, this is just a [blank] post" and not feel the need to take it seriously. Sort of like the way Godwin's law helps you filter the worst comment threads into /dev/null. I bet it would be all kinds of fun to have dinner with Scott Adams, I just don't want to mentally peer review his after-dinner conversation.
Story of my life. I suppose doing this sort of thing just sort of desensitizes you to that? I'd be curious to see if your viewpoint is different 3 months from now or so.
Why is this behavior (bullying) tolerated in school?

My theory is denial. Parents of bullies don't want to admit that their kids are doing wrong, and the parents of victims don't want to face the fact that they need to get involved.

That was my situation, at least -- even with known bullies... when I finally fought back, I got dragged to the principal's office... and I let him have it. Another rarity is that my parents actually backed me on that one.
Why can't you use the API to get all of your friends' email addresses? I thought you could use an access token to query a friend for 'email'.
I'm surprised the author didn't talk about using inbound marketing techniques such as articles, infographics, whitepapers, ebooks etc

I've also got mixed feelings about "retargeting". On one hand, it's great because it keeps your brand omnipresent. On the other hand, it can really bug the hell out of existing customers. For example, I'm an existing Grasshopper subscriber but their insect ad keeps following me everywhere. I wish I could squish it!
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+key...
ISoftStone, Microsoft team up brings HealthVault to China
Wow - my respect for Steve Jobs just went up an order of magnitude.
$161,600 for that Apple I
You make a good point about the magnitude of numbers they chose to use. I'm not wealthy by any means but I can afford to lose $1500. I would definitely choose to put up this amount if the odds were really 13%. This is assuming that the 'game' (i.e. startup idea) is in my area of specialty, and I felt it was not just a dice throw.

I would never gamble this amount, and I would not put up $15,000 or $150,000 unless I were part of the team. I wonder how my own magnitude levels will change as my personal income increases. I remember as a student saving a few dollars for the weekend for a beer, and now I'll grab a taxi for those few dollars every day without even thinking about it.
Right now there's no API or anything -- I wrote this just to see if I could. I'm not sure if I'll be putting up an API, because I figure by the time I'd do that I can just release the source for it. But if you really wanted I probably could provide an API it in a couple of days.
I'm not sure, but perhaps a combination of the following: They would rather you message them through facebook, and they fear fake-profiles friending people at random and collecting emails to be used for spam, were a query possible to collect them.
"I want direct benefits....free parking, a free night, coffee for free or dessert, discounts and so forth"

If you provide illiquid perks for participating in a review process, I don't see much wrong with that. If they were handing out cash, then yes, that is a grey area.
I was able to do this but I could only get 184 out of 221 contacts. Not sure what happened to the others. Could it be that they don't have an email address associated with their account?
I suspect the calculation was (expected value of FB package) * 1.5
I've been wondering for a long time, and this might be a good opportunity to ask: How do you pronounce "Buchheit"?
Is it too soon to sign up for our custom YC email addresses?
Not quite relevant, but I do not have a practice of skipping breakfast. I am trying however, once in a week or two, to fast for 24-36 hours. This is called "intermittent fasting" and has been shown to produce positive effects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting has some links to studies.
Six steps to effective Facebook advertising at $0.01 CPC