skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you want the best and brightest to be teachers then you have to recruit where the best and brightest are....and PAY what the best and brightest can get in the private industry. What's Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook paying? That's the competition.

South Korea, Singapore, and many other countries don't have this problem. Why? Because being a teacher there is a good job with good benefits. Benefits the private sector can barely touch. Instead we are left with the PE teacher teaching maths because all the good math teachers are working for Google.
s/mood ring/Comcast DVR/g; The UI when interactive viewing overlaps with scheduled recording has always seemed very bad to me...
Okay, granted. But my point was that has no relevance to the lhnn's point: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1950776
[Ask-HN] Is anyone using pythonfutures with python 2.6?
I wanted to build a high level API over multiprocessing, but it seems that Brian has already done all the work. Does anyone have any experience with this package?

I am planning on using the python 2.6 version.
Here is my latest Haskell implementation that Matt is referring to (git repo):

http://david.darais.com/git/research/der-parser-3/
you might want to give developers the ability to supply you with regex expressions perhaps and then do something like vary the post url/data based on any matches -- would enable matching of tech support ids or order ids, etc. but then again, developers can do the same thing in their code i guess, so you'd need a compelling reason as to why it should be done within your service.
There are several things missing from this matrix that I think are super important. One is communication ability, the other is learning.

I really don't care about most things on that list, as long as someone has the ability to grasp the concepts, the tools and experience to learn the things that are relevant, and few bad habits. Obviously someone down the left column is going to take longer to come on board, and it may be an indication of an inability or unwillingness/lack of motivation.
When PG offered us a chance to be in YC, we agreed to hop off the train in CT and grab the next one back to Boston to brainstorm with him about a new idea. From that ~1hr conversation came the idea for reddit. PG summed it up well: we were building a "front page of the web."
Rubik's Slide [2010 Toy Fair video] -- how would you fix its usability problem?
I find the tablature somewhat difficult to read. The color of the text doesn't contrast too well against the background. You might also try to find a typeface but I assume you need something monospaced for this app.

Otherwise this looks really awesome!
Thanks.

> And, at the risk of breaking rule #1, have you heard of usenet?

Of course :)
Who needs conscription when you've got 10% (and by some accounts 17%) unemployment. A pool of people desperate to take any job no matter how dangerous it is.
You need to press a button to see the goal state. It's very annoying.

Another demo video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dAUdUNf8-c
"isn't it a fundamental right to join whatever organisation you wish, not just the ones the government likes?"

I agree with you on this, but unions gain power from pro-union laws that enforce things like not allowing hiring non-union workers among other things, so it isn't as simple as you state. Without the legal backing, just joining an organization doesn't have much effect. This changes it from a freedom issue to legal policy issue.
Good point, I came here looking for the answer to this too. Hopefully kn0thing or pg can shed some light as to why this was such a horrible idea?
none. Those were "Freedom Fighters" or "Guerilla warfare" only "bad" people are terrorists, and by definition the american government cannot be "bad"
PG, when you read this did you remember them as the guys who met you after your talk in Cambridge?
Here's one of the most interesting "X in Y lines of Z" programs I've seen, a prototype interpreter for the basics of an APL-like language in one page of (rather funky, Arthur Whitney-style) C: http://nsl.com/papers/origins.htm

It segfaults due to nonportable assumptions about pointer sizes in the allocator, and is far from complete as APLs go, but I spent a couple hours picking it apart and came away quite impressed.

There's a similar raytracer (http://nsl.com/k/ray/rayq.k) in 17 lines of Q, but I haven't figured that one out yet.
So I have to wonder if this application would have gotten anywhere if pg hadn't personally met these guys previously?

ie. is this really a sample of a "winning" YC application?
Probably one step back. Without knowing precisely how the bidding system goes for Polish subway cars, I'm going to guess that there were multiple competing bids for building new subway cars. They were all about the same, except one of them said "Lookee, our cars will be recyclable!"

The critical reader might, at this point, say "Hey wait a minute, subway cars are made almost entirely of metal and metal is always recyclable, so you're really not saying much of importance there". However, it suits everyone just fine to pretend it's a significantly greener option, from the company to the politicians to the media outlets who publish their press releases, so here we are.
Many restaurants have implemented it on their own via iPhone app or web app. Chipotle is an example.
Could make a camera tri-pod (in this case, "mono-pod") that fits in your pocket.
Previous coverage of rust:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498528
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498233
Activists often call for corporate employees to be fired. Regardless, my point is that the highly inflammatory examples (interracial dating) cited by zerogravitas applied to all respectable professions historically, and no professions today.

In the same era he is discussing (most likely < 1967 [1]), no one would tolerate interracial dating from a newspaper columnist, homosexuality from a money manager or non-whiteness from the CEO of the #3 Bank in the US. In the present era, Paul Krugman, Peter Thiel and Vikram Pandit all have jobs. Can we attribute that to teachers unions as well?

As for firing the occasional good teacher, it's true that schools currently have no incentive to do a good job teaching students. This is a much bigger problem than firing unpopular teachers. Guess which organizations are the biggest proponents of keeping things that way?

[1] Pre 1967, interracial marriage was illegal in some states (Virginia, at least). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia
re: (See: for example, the sneering aside the author makes about typographic leading)

That sneering aside illustrates precisely one of my pet peeves. Namely, that the current tools for web typography embody a tremendous leap backwards in ease of use, compared to print design tools.

In the print world, it's quite easy to create variations in leading. Contrary to the author's assertion, leading matters a great deal.

The current requirements that one write code to achieve sophisticated typography remind me of the terminal-based typesetting machines that were common up until the early 1990s. You entered your text on a green-screen monitor, added codes for size, italics, bold, and so forth, and it came out of a Linotronic machine on photographic paper. After being developed, the paper was pasted into the layout.

Hopefully the state of the art in web typography will one day advance beyond technology that was obsolete in the print world some twenty years ago.
Not hugely different, really, from Apple.

Apple strongly cautions against installing any software that hacks the iOS. It is also important to note that unauthorized modification of the iOS is a violation of the iPhone end-user license agreement and because of this, Apple may deny service for an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch that has installed any unauthorized software.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3743
This was my response as well. The problem doesn't make much sense. Personally I would have made the "mood detector" start button show a progress bar on the UI so that it is obvious that it is doing something, and how long it will take to start the "mood detector". This internal "queue" and "counter" stuff is ridiculous. Just let users press the button, show them a progress indicator and don't let them press the button until the state is changed to fully on/off.

When it comes to third party apps and other things turning the mood detector on and off without the users permission or notification that makes no sense and sounds like a bad idea in the first place. But if it is essential I would make it pop up a confirmation request on the UI so that the user can not only choose whether or not to allow the on/off behavior, but so they will also be aware that the device is going to be turning on or off. Once again while the device is turning on or off show the progress bar.
I'm not the person to refute Warren Buffet, but I will point out that the Dow Jones had abysmal performance from 1970-1979. One decade isn't enough to judge the economy for the next century.

Do I think DJIA will hit 2 million in 100 years? No. But I don't think it's unreasonable to expect hundreds of thousands.
What a terrible smear on everyone actually in the military for reasons other than the money. 4 people in my extended family are in the military and 1 was turned down becuase he has a titanium screw from a sports injury. All of them make less money than they would have if they didn't join the military, but all joined anyway.

On the other hand, I've never actually met anyone who was in the military for money except for those in the ROTC - i.e. those capable of getting a college education that would put them in the segment of the population with lower unemployment than average.
davidw, i wrote 3 blogs on using different languages and web frameworks to send sms. for me, it's a learning experience. more importantly, it's demonstrate how different languages/web frameworks can interact with Tropo, which in the grand scheme of things (telco 2.0), is interesting. a lot of great work Tropo and some other companies (including telcos like Orange, Telefonica) is to enable web developer to access their network and adding sms and call functions easily to their web sites. In a way, it makes the telco cloud more open.
1 bike -> 1 post. There isn't enough posts for all the bikes.
> “We anticipated that people would attempt to unlock the phones and explore the underlying operating system. We encourage people to use their Windows Phone as supplied by the manufacturer to ensure the best possible user experience. Attempting to unlock a device could void the warranty, disable phone functionality, interrupt access to Windows Phone 7 services or render the phone permanently unusable.”

In what way is that embracing? They can't legally prohibit it so voiding the warranty is the most they can do.
Technical challenges integrating with existing restaraunt ordering systems; probable need for active field salespeople. They acknowledge possibly even needing hardware...

It might stand a chance of being a more profitable business than Reddit, but it's a tough and expensive route to market without experience or a large chain desperate to try the system. Probably pg had good reason to be more risk-averse about the types of business he invested in back in 2005.
The title is a little bit exaggerated... But the robot is very interesting.
I didn't downvote you, and I've spent enough time on reddit to stop questioning downvotes because they are too stochastic to spend braincell-seconds trying to interpret. But when I read your comment I immediately questioned why you would call canvas best suited for rendering vector graphics. If anything, VML/SVG via something like Raphael.js is best suited for that, because you can use graphics data exportable from a vector graphics editor like Illustrator, and manipulate the data in your page in a structured way--Raphael somewhat mitigates the painfulness of DOM operations.

I would say canvas is best suited for rendering/processing sprite or pixel-based graphics that does not need mouse interaction, if I had to pigeonhole it. Sure, I've used it via Flot to draw charts, and for purposes that were decidedly vector-ish, but I would never expect to be able to manipulate that stuff without complicated collision data and redraw logic. The API for drawing with the canvas pen is moderately featured but drawing imperatively and trying to act on <canvas>-mouse interaction just isn't scalable or maintainable.
Latitudes not Attitudes: How Geography explains History and the West's dominance
Strippers can climb that pole and take that bike.
> Try to hold these two thoughts together in your head

That's skirting the edge of an ad-hominem attack, maybe even crossing the line. For someone of your stature that is a pretty bad example to set.

> whoever was charged with protecting this information was negligent, and whoever actually leaked it is responsible for their own actions.

Neither of those are Assange.

So, the new world we live in: if information is leaked it will instantly reach an audience of millions. Plan accordingly.
I'll have to check out Mark's paper, but just by your description, I bet they're related.

For finite-state and pushdown automata, derivatives and continuations are two sides of the same coin.
If I'm reading it right, the black line is the best fitness in a given generation, and the green line is the average fitness.
This could probably get real old, real fast for the people around you. If I kept asking all my friends to fold my laundry I'd get some pretty annoyed looks. This game needs some moderation!
The only difference between this and Apple or other companies is that they even mentioned it. It's not something companies want to "educate" consumers about. It's something that exists and is outside what the company wants, but hey, you can still do it so long as the laws keep siding with the consumer.

But at the same time there are indeed soft-ware/hardware mods that the companies can't warranty or trouble shoot. So washing their hands in those situations isn't that insane.
ProFounder offers two products: Private Investing and Public Investing. With Private Investing, entrepreneurs can raise capital from friends, family, and other community members who they already have a relationship with and these people can get unlimited financial upside based on a % of revenue. This is a security. Given that it's a security, we help entrepreneurs easily comply with all necessary federal and state regulations that apply. Compliance is not too challenging because all of the entrepreneurs are raising less than $1M from people they have a relationship with, so the security has exempt status. And you're right - there is no public solicitation.

With Public Investing, anyone in the general public can invest. This is not a security as investors do not have financial upside -- through revenue share agreements, they are repaid their principal and if they are repaid before the investment term is up, their share of the revenues for the rest of the term goes to a non-profit. Given that this is not a security, entrepreneurs can market it as widely as they'd like.

I hope that helps clear up some of the confusion. Glad to hear that you're also a securities law buff!

Dana
ProFounder Co-Founder
At first I didn't notice that you could search for songs. It didn't work for me in Chrome or Opera (didn't bother trying other browsers after that); no music was playing at all. Nice idea though.
Well, Reddit didn't exist yet (on account of Reddit being a YC startup) and HN didn't exist because Reddit hadn't gotten to a state that HN needed to be created. So the evolution seems natural, assuming they wanted to know whether you made any intelligent comments on tech news sites.
This acquisition makes a ton of sense: Google gains a kick-ass AdWords sales team

But for two and a half billion dollars?
This was like five years ago, before mobile internet was available to most consumers. Also, writing mobile apps before the App Store was a real pain, and involved dealing directly with carriers, I believe.

It was a good idea, just ahead of its time.
I don't know who that is. I don't know who D-Wade is either. Though I think LeBron might be a basketball player.
The weird thing is that wikileaks were said to be breaking encryption on the Apache video. And that was supposed to be also from Manning
His crime was to allow the students to have a debate on the merits of two US policies - the use of torture and the use of depleted uranium.

The key point was that this wasn't his idea. He solicited topics for debate from the students in the class, those two were chosen as the topics.

This got misconstrued by some parents who were offended as he pushed us to consider these questions becuase he was liberal, and thus was bringing his political beliefs into the classroom.

I ended up being the lead on the team that defended torture and depleted uranium (and we won), and somehow the more difficult debate actually ended up being the one I had at the school board meeting defending him.
Watch Barcelona vs Real Madrid Live stream
I'm a pretty heavy user of Rapportive (I built http://crm.raplet.info to make it into what I needed). But I worry that the silicon valley mindset (where everyone is on LinkedIn, Twitter) is holding the product back to some extent. When I deal with large sluggish institutions (schools, government), Rapportive struggles to find any relevant information on the people I'm talking with.
XEROUND | Divide and Conquer: How Virtual Partitioning Enables Elasticity
In their latest blog post, Xeround explains the benefits of their “shared nothing” architecture, which allows them to spread partitioned data across numerous servers.
Your argument is incoherent. It will be modded up because it supports Wikileaks, but understand between the two of us that it is a stupid argument, and I think less of you for making it. People who leave their front doors unlocked are not themselves responsible for burglary. Burglars are responsible for buglary.

Information security people in the US government were apparently negligent with information they were charged with protecting. But those people weren't information owners or stakeholders.
The iPhone is NOT superfluous, easily copied, revolutionary or a premium product
My controls lab in college (University of Washington, Aeronautics & Astronautics) had an inverted pendulum. I designed a controller to balance it and maintain position along the track for a controls class. We took a picture of Gumby standing on top of it for our report. It used rotary optical encoders to measure the angle, and a motor driven belt to move the base along the track. Somebody in our department developed a controller to flip the inverted pendulum up and balance it. Another stabilized a jointed pendulum in various configurations (both arms up, one up & one down, one down & one up). All are non-trivial problems. Combining them is commendable.
> Ed Borasky recently commented here at ReadWriteHack: "We flat out don't need any more programming languages! What we need is efficient implementations of the ones we have now and IDEs / version control systems that enforce software engineering discipline."

There was no need for assembly -- writing straight machine code worked. There was no need for C -- writing straight assembly worked. Etc, etc.

There has never been a need for a new programming language, but new programming languages can make life easier, can save you time, can make new optimizations possible, etc. So he's right in that we flat out don't need any more programming languages, but that doesn't mean creating new programming languages is a bad idea, or something we shouldn't do.
This reminds me of a (probably apocryphal) story about Picasso and a carpenter.

He had called in a carpenter to build a bookshelf. After sketching out the design, he handed the sketch to the carpenter and asked how much it would cost to build. The carpenter asked him to "just sign the sketch."

However, from the article, it doesn't seem that Picasso was all that free with his originals. Too bad for Monsieur Le Guennec.

Side note: Should you have the chance to see it, the film "The Mystery of Picasso" (http://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Picasso-Pablo/dp/B00007ELEI) is very enlightening. I didn't much care for Picasso's celebrated works, although I knew that he was at least a competent artist in the traditional sense as well as the modern. This film shows how he develops several paintings, from the initial concept to the final work, and you can see how he starts from a traditional framework, then pushes it out of all recognition. I still don't /like/ most of his paintings, but I can much better appreciate how he got there.
And I submit that that is actually an effect of what iwr suggested, not a root cause. Why modify your expectations when there isn't much you can do about it? Higher expectations are only useful when they can manifest as action, but there's an incredibly high bar for pulling your kid out of a school and sending them to another, or going to home schooling, or anything else. Expectations are fading because we are internalizing the idea that they don't matter; no matter what you put in, you get the same output.

I think we can fiddle around with the details but until we actually open up some sort of market and competition the problem will simply never be fixed. Centralized management doesn't work; schools aren't an exception.

Doesn't mean that I want everyone to have to pay for schools. Vouchers are at least a decent idea, even if they still distort the market and raise prices. But without some ability for parents to use the tools of the market to beat low performing schools, possibly unto them going out of business and letting other schools start, we're not going to see improvement. All incentives right now are aligned towards looking like they are improving, not actually improving, and that is the only possible result you're going to get from mandates from above.
I think you make an excellent point - those were the same red flags that caused me to add the edit when I re-read my post earlier.

FWIW I am open to being proved wrong, and I think you've nailed the main issue that arises between 'businessmen' and 'technical' founders ... lack of awareness of the other side. It's clear which camp I'm in!
If climbing up the pole is as easy as you make it sound, this device is totally pointless.
"[in OO programming] I also have what you would call the categorization problem: which object do I put my code in?"

It seems to me like object-oriented style forces hierarchies onto the problem. It's fine to use hierarchies when it is a part of the problem, but when it's not, it causes all kinds of problems.

Erlang doesn't seem to impose hierarchies at all.
Well that's easy. It's because the writer of the table has a blog, and therefore people who have blogs are obviously superior to those who don't.

I'm gonna assume that this "programmer competency matrix" is a "How similar are you to me?" matrix. Skill sets which the table author lacks are missing entirely, and for other skill sets the precise skill level which the author happens to have is the highest possible level.
You should check out http://raphaeljs.com/ , which basically unifies the SVG API in a cross-browser way. In IE, it translates everything to VML on the fly. You need to transcode your SVG to Raphael's JSON-based format, but it's not hard to do.
This would be a major departure from Apple if they don't actively fight the jailbreakers/unlockers. Apple has spent a lot of time and money fighting people trying to modify their own devices; Microsoft would be wise to not follow their lead.
Has Apple done that?