skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I strongly disagree. USAMO problems range in difficulty quite a bit. I can solve some but certainly not all. Not so for IMO. And nowadays I generally solve all of the Putnam problems in the time allotted.

By the way, the early years of the IMO were very easy, by today's standards (only a few countries were involved at that point). They would probably be approachable to people comfortable with the AIME problems.
#1 is my big reason for writing code. I love the feeling of abstract world creation.
it would be very cool to have real time sharing -- or a few seconds behind -- so that it could be used during a phone call for collaborative brainstorming...
Yeah-- I gotta disagree here too. As a guy who weighed 300 lbs and smoked two packs a day two years ago, and a guy who weighs 220 and runs marathons now, I spend more time (and money) paying for my healthcare now than I ever did when I was living a far less healthy lifestyle.

I just broke my fibula and dislocated my ankle in an accident. Fortunately I have health insurance, fortunately I have sick days at work, and fortunately I have enough money where I can pay the $3000 out of pocket it's going to cost me, even with the insurance, for the surgery I can have to walk (and hopefully run) again.

But somebody without insurance, making it so that they could get back into stable condition could lead them into bankruptcy and making them a burden on society. Quite frankly, I'd rather be paying to the burden of keeping that person well and making sure they can stay in the workforce than I am paying for their unemployment and bankruptcy because they can't get well because they can't afford to.

Universal Healthcare just makes sense and it is embarrassing that we're the only western country without it.
Agreed. I like Arrington's writing, and I do think this was an important story, but if I ever put a non-quote in quotation marks, and plopped it in a headline, my editor would tear me a new orifice.
The most entertaining and useful biographies are of people whose most interesting features are flaws. You could read about JFK winning elections despite his crippling levels of charm, and the fact that his dad was one of the richest people in the world; or you can read about Mao, who (according to the last biography I read) was disgusting and dull, but still managed to rule a large country despite the threat of coups. For similar reasons, Shockley is probably more interesting than Noyce, Jobs more fun than Woz, etc. But that depends. After thinking about the question for a little while, I realized that I don't notice that much variation in biography quality. It's there, but I'm mostly using the book to visit a historical period in the company of some interesting characters, so the author/tourguide is not such a big deal.
Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers
I liked 'Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction' interesting read. It wasn't a cover to cover for me, more something I could pick up during lulls
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=How+do+you+convert+...
John Forbes Nash: "A Beautiful Mind" by Sylvia Nasir

Richard Feynman: "Genius" by James Gleick

"The Passion of Ayn Rand" by Barbara Brandon

"John Adams" and "Truman" by David McCullough

"Lincoln the Unknown" by Dale Carnegie
I have flashblock installed (Firefox 2), and when the site first loads up the flash box is offscreen on the right. I had to scroll to the right, press "play", and then the box went to the right location.
I think I would have to disagree. I think the quality of biographies can vary greatly. Some do not bring the person "to life." An author may only highlight and write about the events of the subject's life, without delving deeper into the personal qualities or characteristics that make someone so intriguing.

I want to be able to understand the subject as thoroughly as possible. Some authors are able to do this more effectively than others, in my opinion.
Does anyone here read Mashable?
I liked it:

3. I hope that when you update the algorithm you will include ovals/others shapes that can be drawn at a tilt. (or maybe tilted later on demand?)

Whenever I tried to draw tilted ovals they un-tilted and became really big.

PS This is one of the best Ask YC posts I've seen so far. Everybody likes helping in this kind of discussion--its also obvious that you value every bit of feedback.
In general I agree with the author; arrays should be a core type. They are simple to implement in the compiler, and a significant number of types can be created on top of arrays.

On the other hand, I think the author got at his conclusion by looking at the current feature-set of existing languages. What if a new language were created that either negated the need for arrays all together; or implemented core types that allow for complete creation of an array type in a library?
Ten Books on Investing Recommended by Warren Buffett
Why Do We Accept Signatures by Fax?
I highly recommend Born Standing Up by Steve Martin if you're at all into comedy. One of the more enjoyable books I read recently. I'd say it was entirely unrelated to Hacker News, but pmarca did paraphrase it in his talk at SuS.
Database sharding unraveled - part II
...and then you 'defend' yourself by finishing up with statements like that? Wow.
Just read this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm
Most TCP/IP mail servers had to be shut down then and patched. At that time, the majority tasks of internet are Email, Usenet and FTP.
Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein is superb if you have the slightest interest in him.
Craig Venter's autobiography was intriguing. It would be especially good if you were already familiar with Biology and DNA. I ripped through it and reading it was quite enjoyable.
Your circle-detection code is a bit overzealous. I put it in arrow mode and tried to draw a bunch of arrows from one side of the canvas to the other, and if my lines were even a little bit curved, it turned them into ovals. It should really only turn it into an oval if the user has changed direction substantially during the drawing.
And our biggest employer and company is a non-profit! The hulking University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
You could put a picture of yourself in the about section to build a personal connection with the first users.

Edit: There's also a typo (harware)
These might not be biographies but they are good non fiction.

It's not about the bike, my journey back to life. - Lance Armstrong

Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman! - R. Feynman

Into thin air - J. Krakauer
Is there an apple bias in the media?
Thanks! I'm not sure I'd be able to update the algorithm to automatically detect tilt. That would probably have to be a tool you use after drawing (like the "group" button).

I'm curious, what types of drawing would you need tilt/skew in?
It was EXTREMELY painful just drawing simple stuff because the "free transform" resizer would pop up after every segment drawn. Make this optional.

Also, don't even make people sign up. Not right now. Later.
Great idea and great implementation.

A few suggestions:

- fast (or almost) autosaving/updating so that it can be easily used on a phone call for collaborative brainstorming w/o having to click save all the time.

- add meta keywords or other text on the page so that google indexes the text content (added via the text tool)

- Add bottom tabs like excel does for sheets to make a sequence of whiteboards possible -- of related stuff.

- full screen mode

- let users create libraries of shapes that do cool/useful things

- integration with that guy's technology that uses wiimote IR receiver to let the user draw with an infrared LED as a light pen. Projector projects the dabbleboard onto the wall, I draw with light pen.

- the ability to zoom way in/out and scroll (maybe i want my dabble board to be 30 feet wide..
As a foreigner you can own property in the US but you cannot work without INS (DHS, whatever) authorization. You should definitely talk to a lawyer. Check out the forum below because I'm pretty sure your question has been asked before, if not someone should be able to answer it.

http://immigrationportal.com/
Thanks. It does have this, the "few seconds behind" version :), though you have to click a button (Share -> Refresh) to refresh the drawing. Try using the "Share" functionality with a friend after signing up.
Spot the HTML syntax error/typo in the header image.
Boston is too cold. That's the strongest message the city sends, at least during the winter.
Thanks! As a EE myself, the ideal feature for circuit diagrams would be "auto right-angle route and connect" (hope that made sense). Visio/Omnigraffle have this. I wonder how many non-EEs (or non-techies) would need that.
Not just philosophical, very practical.

PG's "lies we tell kids" is just scratching the problem that Gandhi dedicated his whole life: can you live in a society and always tell the truth and only truth?
Check out Slicehost, it's mentioned on here a lot.
Yes, the problem is that I don't support curved lines yet. (Do let me know if you intended it to be a straight line and the algo still messed up.) Sounds like everyone wants curved lines, so back to the drawing board -ahem dabbleboard-. Will definitely find a way to add it.
Working for a VC or a seed fund probably only gives him technical part of the VC operation, such as how to read/interpret term sheets. The real talent/insight of picking bets, probably can not be learned. I think even YC has to revisit its portfolio from time to time to find clues. And in the case like black swan, the experiences based on unexamined faith may be a big problem.

Maybe he can work in YC as intern....
Startup? 15 years ago apps like this would be a nice weekend projects we'd do for fun or (mostly) to impress each other in high school: doing it under DOS using x86 assembly mixed up with some Pascal was comparable to JavaScript's capabilities of modern day.

In 2008 it's a "startup". Nicely done.
Shantaram - amazing.
Perfect Machine/PC for hackers
If by "free transform resizer" you're referring to the green move/scale/etc. circles, then that shouldn't happen. They're supposed to only come up when you click on an object, not right after drawing each shape.

If that's happening it must be a bug somewhere in my code. I'll try to replicate it. Thanks!
I didn't understand what this was about. Cory Doctorow and TechCrunch are bad, because TechCrunch doesn't like Rails and never wrote about Grameen Bank? plz advise.
Lincoln's War Cabinet by Hendrick Burton - learn to surround yourself with ideas you don't necessarily agree with and be influenced by the most unlikely minds
Why would this be any less viable than Zenter or Writely?
My hunch is that a lot of business users wouldn't know what to do with a PNG, but they would know how to open, print, and redistribute a PDF. (PNG support is built into Windows, but my guess is that most non-technical users don't know that.)
Announcing Twoorl: an open source ErlyWeb-based Twitter clone
You're forgetting JavaFX, Silverlight and Flex/AIR. It's going to be fun.
Creative Capital Raising ideas
What are some of the more creative ideas to rasing start-up capital besides hitting up friends and family, selling all your posessions, VC's and Banks
Might be cool, but as it is Flash, I won't be using it.

Could this be done reasonably with Javascript et al?
Does anyone know where those public records can be found?
Why even mention this junk on HN?
Thanks!

1. I'm worried about database load. I'll have to do some intelligent memcaching etc. (haven't thought this thru yet) to make that a possibility.

2. Yep I've thought of that, tho I'm a little worried it might creep people out. (It's not as awesome as Gmail to get away with it.) That's one possible way of monetization, the other being the freemium model. But right now I just want to get some users, get the features right.

3. Hmmm... the library pane on the left kinda does that. Would you want it to work in a different way?

4. Sure. But I don't want to resize the canvas for UI reasons (see another of my comments on window resizing).

5. You can already create a library of shapes (the left pane). Did you mean something different?

6. I absolutely want to do something like that. But I've dreamed up a very different -and I think better- implementation. To build and sell a real physical product like that I'll need quite a bit of funding. PG, you there? :)

7. Yeah I was hoping to avoid that (see 4. above). Coz I hate having to constantly zoom in/out and pan around just to draw. But it may be needed if the current canvas just isn't big enough :(.
I went out with some friends weeks ago. I found several girls were using blackberry and I asked them how do they like it and had they tried iPhone.

A girl told me she tried and she just couldn't use the multitouch on iPhone. I looked at her beautifully polished nails then I understood we really need hot female engineers in a consumer product team. Not for gender balance but just we can discover that current multi touch interface just won't go with fake nails.
>"Lincoln's War Cabinet by Hendrick Burton - learn to surround yourself with ideas you don't necessarily agree with and be influenced by the most unlikely minds"

"Team of Rivals" by Doris Kearns Goodwin explores the same topic, specifically how Lincoln made up his cabinet from talented rivals.

Apparently Obama referred to this book (reference http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/05/obama-propos...) which made me curious enough to buy it. It is a great read and a fascinating study in leadership.
It doesn't really add any meaningful security. The real security issues with your app are going to be in your code, not on the wire. But it's a strong psychological signal.

It's the same with the random IDs. Generate UUIDs with SHA1 or something, and make them show up in the URL bar. The signal is, "there's no simple integer counter here where if I incr it, I get some other customer's data".
"If spending $1 trillion extra on medicine would save a thousand lives"

"Medicine" is too vague of a term. You'll be spending your trillion dollars on Ducatis and BMWs of drug sales reps and medical equipment middlemen, plus thousand of other parasites that make several times more of what an average engineer can dream of, by milking the system we have in place.

I know a little bit about how the "sausage is made" and it makes me sick, what an irony...
AppEngine: Announcing Open Signups, Expected Pricing, and two new APIs
Javascript's ability to do graphics is very limited; you have to do hacky 1pixel divs, and you still won't get pretty anti-aliasing.

Even if I had infinite time to write the code in JS, I'd have to replicate a lot of functionality of the Flash player, and you'd end up with maybe 5x the code you'd have to download compared to the Flash swf file. Doubt you'd prefer that experience.

I think most people hate Flash coz its: (i) obtrusive as ads on sites, and (ii) it takes too much goddamn CPU (or at least that's why I hate it on my Mac). But I've paid close attention to the CPU usage in Dabbleboard; let me know how it runs for you.
Researchers develop wall-climbing robots
You can always post anonymously :)
Is this the actual code of the software used in the tests?
Erlang. The Ron Paul of programming languages.
I didn't said it was. I just find it funny how history repeats itself: when I was a kid, doing something like this was a fun challenge, since most computers worked in text mode 80x25 characters, and after a while an application like that became trivial and boring to write (since about Windows 3.0 on PC).

But fast-forward 10 years and thanks to advances in technology - bam! It's hard again :)
There should be some way to work on the whiteboard with other people simultaneously. I need that.
The auto-biography of Benjamin Franklin! Incredibly relevant to entrepreneurship.

http://www.earlyamerica.com/lives/franklin/ or

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/148
I second the recommendation of Genius. It is incredibly rich and stands up well to rereading.
If you have any relatives, famous or not, that have kept a journal, or written family history - it offers a unique biographical reflection. You can read biographies about the greats, but you also can not be something you are not, and reading about relatives can offer needed perspective about your capacities.
10 Blogs Indian Entrepreneurs Must Regularly Visit
Monash: The outsider who won a war. - Roland Perry.
Linus's biography, Just For Fun, is not bad.

I have sentimental attachments to Man Out of Time, the Tesla biography.

No Man Knows My History is about Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon church. It is naturally controversial to the LDS, for its depiction of Smith as a polygamist con man who fell sideways into a religious racket and never quite fell out. I found it very readable, full of color. It might depend on your interest in the period and the subject matter.

Stephen King's On Writing is about half biography, half writing manual. I thought it was terrific. It's had several rereads already.
1: I am the creator of worlds.

I get the sentiment but his explanation sounds like he gets hot over business logic. Meh, who am I to judge if he does ;)
"For me at least, I think I would start associating usernames more with their set of comments. And I think that would greatly increase the sense of community gained from the site. I’m sure there are other (low-impact) things one could do as well, but I just haven’t thought of them."

if that si true its obv great but:
"Think of some of the more memorable opinions from the past. Would your opinion of those comments be different if you knew before reading them that the poster was a 15-year-old girl, a 23-year-old transgender, a 55-year-old male? For a very small few of us, the answer is no. For the large majority of us -- myself included -- the answer is yes. The less information I have about the person, the more I can stick to what is being said."

is a very good point made by rewind.

i personally dont feel a need for it, i like the simplicity of hacker news.
alan-j-perlis in his intro to sicp (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-3.html) pretty much sums up the reason for me.
Lol. You might as well ask for the loch ness monster in your QA department.
Richard Feynman: "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman".

Not a conventional biography, but Richard wasn't a conventional man either.
It's there, but you need to sign up for that. After signing up, click "Share".
This is cool.

Last summer I had an inkling of an idea that used basically the same strategy. My idea (never implemented) was to set the background images on visited anchors to a dynamic image url that could be used to track pageviews from other sites, to perhaps determine what links from your site your visitors found most interesting, even if they didn't click to them from your site.

There are plenty of terrible use cases for something like this, but also plenty of benign and probably useful cases as well. If you were a search engine, for example, you could determine if a user has been to sites that show up in the search results, even if they don't click on the links from your site.

The full write-up of my strategy is here: http://tinyurl.com/6fnjod
Sure it's no more than a weekend project (though it took me a LOTT longer than that). If a weekend project has the potential to add value to the lives of many users -which I'm hoping for-, I'd call it a startup.
I wonder why people work in the big compound beside Lake Samammish never found the problem. I live in NYC so we have more sex and the city women here. But I've been Seattle, even more men there but how come they've never discover this problem in their QA team?

-- edit --

To be fair to MS, the fake nails don't go with multi touch happens only in iphone's form factor, because the key is very small, but on common touchpad and keyboards, fake nails doesn't hamper finger tip to touch the keyboard.
Learn Google Analytics with Videos
Very true. There is a a lot of potential for abuse of this kind of thing.

I heard about this technique a while back in a presentation about javascript malware:
http://www.spydynamics.com/spilabs/education/presentations/J...

.. there's a whole section on stealing browser history and how to figure out a user's search history.
mocking up UIs collaboratively

sounds cool, especially if it's live
Seems like there a couple of interacting problems but no one size fits all. It does seem like WalMart would be useful for high frequency low severity (adjusting for risk of some high severity situations lurking in the intake). Trauma needs a trauma center, chronic progressive conditions benefit from Kaiser's approach (and have proven amenable to pharmaceuticals in many cases). It's not clear where to put cancer, if we can't screen and catch it early we don't seem to have a good answer. Stroke and heart attack may benefit from early intervention that's one time plus physical therapy follow up. There may be some more categories.

Trauma (e.g. automobile accident, gunshot, explosion) => trauma center

High Frequency Low Risk (for most: cough, cold, flu) => WalMart

Chronic (heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, gout, glaucoma, cystic fibrosis) => pharmaceuticals / Kaiser pro-active healthcare

Low Frequency High Risk (cancer, heart attack, stroke, appendicitis) => medical center / surgery

Getting fewer people to smoke would have a huge impact.

You also need to distinguish between an intervention that gives a 1 year old another 60-80 years of life and a 72 yr old another six months, they may cost the same but the first has a much stronger impact on society. I am not saying deprive anyone of medical care, but understand there may be an enormous cost for medical care in the last year of life. Good health is dying more slowly: good medical care doesn't save your life, it lets you die of something else a little (or a lot) later.
Excellent. My apologies for not knowing about some existing features...
i like zuckerbergs attitude, i dont use facebook myself but appreciate the fact that he really wants to create something rather than just making money.
I'm the same way -- I don't browse TechCrunch myself, but I appreciate links to relevant and interesting TC articles.
Beyond Blogs
Ask YC: MacBook Black vs. MacBook Air
I have been wasting way too much time trying to decide whether I should get the Slick MacBook Air vs. a MacBook black.

I'm going to Europe in a few days and I need a portable laptop to code on the road.

I love how light (3 pounds), compact, slick and beautiful the Air is but I'm concerned about it's limitations: only 2 GB of RAM, slower processor, only one USB port, not DVD/CD-ROM, not Ethernet port.

On the other hand I could get a not so pretty, not so light (5 pounds), not so slick but more complete and powerful MacBook black. It comes with a faster processor, RAM can eventually be upgraded to 4GB, it has more USB ports, DVD/CD-ROM, battery life is supposed to be better.

What do you recommend I get?
I am not familiar with their consumer-grade machines but my Latitude D620 is tougher than a ThinkPad. It fell out of my bag while I was biking and hit the pavement, and the battery case split open and keyboard pried off. After fitting them back into place it's as good as new (scratched, but not dented). Everything works fine on it and I get 5.5 hours of battery life.
Berkeley: You should be more eccentric.

Atlanta, so far as I can tell, doesn't have much of a message at all.

Having visited Cambridge over spring break, I'm definitely enamored with the intellectual climate there, and will be moving to a nearby city in a few days (with the intention of moving to Cambridge proper when I can afford it). Getting to live in Cambridge is important enough to me that I'm hesitant to even consider applying to YC's winter round. San Francisco, to me, is essentially a laid back, less dense, more confusing, poorer, sleepier, cobbled-together, more hipster version of New York.
Man I wish this had been developed on django.
1700 LOC can't be that hard to port :)
MacBook Air is a truly excellent computer. It's powerful enough for all but the most intense compiling. I don't know anyone who has one and doesn't love it.
I'd go with a Macbook black.
Placebo is not what you think