skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're right that outright theft of the car is unlikely. But the advantage that Zipcar has over this p2p system is Zipcar personnel can keep a log of everything related to a vehicle - the condition of all of its parts and a full inventory of its accessories. This also allows Zipcar to make final decisions about who has caused damage or theft. In a p2p system, there is no central authority to adjudicate these issues - which requires relying on the word of either the owner or the renter to decide who is responsible.
New Startup Seeking 2 Developers
A new tech startup is seeking two developers. We are looking to make these two developers as founders, receiving founder's shares, while joining two other founders (myself included).

To apply, you must be willing and able to attend an incubator for 3 months and be one hell of a developer. Our idea has garnered interest with the incubators and we have been in talks and email exchanges, so we know this is a good idea and a viable idea.

You will have to sign an NDA with a non-compete clause if we decide to work together.

Regarding the project, we're allowing the two developers to choose the best language and ways to make this idea come to fruition.

No specific project details regarding the idea will be disclosed until papers are signed.

If you're not serious, do not waste your time nor our time.

Please send all inquiries to mgtarheels5@hotmail.com
Not every upstream will take your patches. Not every upstream can take your patches.
I'd like to see an example of the site (example account, video, etc) before having to join. Just previewing the 1 page doesn't compel me.
I don't think that is implied in the article, so much as the fact(?) that fully understanding one requires a healthy understanding of the other.

Question mark b/c I don't know Scala, but as it is a JVM language my guess is that you would need to know a bit about Java and the JVM to really grok it.
8 simple steps to increase traffic to your blog
Let’s say that you have a blog where you publish articles just for fun or because you want in the future to make money by selling advertisements places. How can you generate traffic ? Follow these easy steps and your website will be an success !
My advice to people in that case is to pay some well respected person whatever it costs to help you hire (evaluate code samples at least).

http://www.stonehenge.com/consulting.html

"Human resources hiring support, including interviewing and evaluating candidates"

I would at least have someone like merlyn hire your first person.

P.S. I do think it's a good list of basic Perl knowledge. Id on't think it's smart for someone who doesn't know the language to hire people though.
Keeping your social networking secret
DRTFA, but does he realize the sheer amount of grammatical mistakes on that sign?
That's when you need to use Readability!

Seriously, I spend one second glancing at each page i'm about to read, and decide if i'll click the Readability bookmarklet. I find about 50% of the time I'll need to click, which is an unfortunate number showing how bad the typography is on many of the websites. Common mistakes include: contrast ratio too low (like this one); contrast ratio too high (white on black); fonts too small; text width too wide or too narrow; too much noise on the sidebar; blinking or moving ads in visible reading area; etc.
I'm not arguing against or in favor, I'm just interested in understanding, but the claim here seemed broader than tied to a specific business model like you're suggesting. Did you get that from the full interview? The long quotes in the article made it seem like she presented the claim as a simple fact, and so I wondered if the full interview was worth reading.
ugly hacks, assuming decent programmers, is usually a result of not knowing exactly what you are writing when you first start. This is common, and often it's not worth refactoring it as in the example I gave.

You ignored all the points in my last comment. Let me be more explicit. Bad code is only an albatross if you have to work with it again. What I'm arguing is that it's usually wiser to leave it as it is until the next time you have to work on it, then fix it. It's only an albatross if you don't fix it, and you only save time by fixing it if you actually have to touch the code again. So wait until you're certain that you're going to have to touch the code again, and fix it when you touch the code again, and not before that.
More likely is that there is no other way.

Modern car security usually involves a coded key. The key is coded to an immobiliser computer, which is then coded to the main engine computer. Sometimes the key works by RFID. Without the correct combination of key/immobiliser/engine computer the car will never start. You can't just replace the key - it has to be ordered via the dealer and programmed to match the car - same goes for all the other computers. You can't just take out an engine computer from car A and put it into car B and expect it to work. Each is encrypted to only talk to it's matching set of key/receiver/immobiliser computer/engine computer - subsitute one out and nothing will work. The actual ignition lock is immaterial - and a lot of newer cars have done away with it altogether and just have a slot for the key and a start button instead.

So for someone like Zipcar etc, it wouldn't be economically feasible to try and develop new hardware for the car that adapted/circumvented the proprietary immobiliser security systems in modern cars. Much cheaper and easier to leave the original key in a locked box.

As for parting out- you're probably correct. Without an original set of keys, you're not going to get the car going again, because the only way to get a key is to apply to the factory for one. And they keep a list of stolen vehicles in the same way cellphone companies know which handsets have been stolen.

The flipside of all this - if you're purchasing a used car and only one key is available start asking questions why. If you go to the dealer to purchase a replacement key you might find out that the car has been blacklisted and no more keys are available. Cars that have been carjacked or stolen by stealing the owners bag with keys in it generally don't have the spare keys available.
So a better title: "AoCP goes 1.0 later this week"?
Honestly, I really quite like 4HWW - it changed my point of view on a lot of things. I felt really ripped off by 4HB and still think there is a dangerous 'signal to noise' ratio in there.

With just over a week to have calmed down though - I can admit that there are some good bits in there.
Most of this decline will be related to better in-vehicle security systems rather than a more obedient public.

The interesting stats are the thefts of older vehicles - which are way higher than new vehicles because of the crude anti-theft measures in 80's and 90's cars.
"you could get to the point where people purchase a car specifically for the intent of hiring it out for profit, in the same way that people do with yachts, holiday apartments and other high-value durables."

But, if it's profitable for me to buy a car for the purpose of renting it out, why shouldn't the startup cut me out and directly purchase cars to profitably rent out? And get economies of scale while they're at it? Maybe it's a way to bootstrap, but it seems like an unstable strategy, and that those purchasing cars to rent out are likely to find themselves on the receiving end of, ah, an uneconomical transaction.
Thanks for the feedback. I have adjusted the colors to make it more readable, please let me know you still have trouble reading it.
Crowdsourced Rankings of Law Schools and Law Reviews
Wow, best interface I've ever seen for a learning site. It's a great idea to be able to view the teacher in addition to their screen. Very impressive.

A few things bothered me though:

- I just listened to part of a lecture that began with, "...my purpose for this course is for you to do well on homework and exams." Wait a second, I thought the purpose of a teacher was to assist in the learning process of a student? Statements like that inculcated into us are seriously damaging to us as human beings.

- Some of the professors speak very slowly and aren't especially engaging/inspiring.

- The site caters to our very broken system with a focus on AP courses and what not. I could see the financial benefits of such a method but that's about it.
Yay mystery meat!

This perfectly illustrates something I said earlier about the difference between an OS with well defined UI standards, and one where the developers just do whatever the hell they want.

I boldly asserted that in such an environment, the developers will implement the one method of control that makes sense to them, and ignore all the other options, which means the user has to try everything they can think of until they hit on the right combo, which can take a while, leading to frustration.

===

Developer Driven Development. Interesting concept... "dumb ideas are not worked on" wonderful. Nirvana?

What I think is that development works best when the developers understand the problem. No methodology is a substitute for an actual understanding of what you're trying to achieve and why you're trying to achieve it.

Of course, developers understand the issues that effect developers. So of course they will be happiest (most effective?) fixing the problems they are themselves the client for. Also, this removes a layer or two of communication, since you don't need to have the customer talk to the developer, or have a Business Analyst interrogate the customer and then translate it into programmer-ese.

If you understand the problem, you can tell which are the dumb ideas (sometimes you figure this out retroactively). If you don't understand the problem, you're simply not qualified to judge which are the dumb ideas.
My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer
You a right. Experimentation is good.

However, I would posit that, for most people to be willing to experiment and to be ready to enjoy the process, there has to be a pretty strong limit to the downside.

Being put into a position where "hey, anything can happen to you" is probably only appealing to the very small, very entrepreneurial segment of the population.

Moreover, sharing all of your intimate details with the world is much more like the situation where you have a lot to lose and mostly likely only a small amount to gain - except if you're a celebrity.
You, robot: Kinect hacks make you into a machine
Plimus extended support for subscription billing
Ask HN: Beginner Pyramid Tutorials
I'm relatively new to learning python and programming in general though I have been learning python for a bit(2 months or so). I was looking around and there doesn't seem to be any newbie friendly materials out there for learning Pyramid. So if anyone has a link to any tutorials or such, I would really appreciate it (preferably free).
Well let me first start of by saying I respect you and what you have done so far.

--but your response itself is symptomatic of what you have demonstrated on my post and the sentiment I have initially outlined.

1) You said: I didn't intend the post to come off as arrogant, nor the replies to be defensive. I guess it's very hard to know what impression you give to people.

Reply: This is the same notion you expressed about how people/press have perceived you. Has it ever occurred to you that the way you are interpreted is because thats how you portray yourself. The impression you give people are at least 50% your responsibility and waving the flag of ignorance doesnt absolve you from that responsibility.

Hey dont get me wrong. I love guys like you, because your confidence/arrogance makes me sleep at night, cuz hiring guys like you is what its all about!

3) I agree with you on this. And I think its ok and great that you vented. But you must at least concede that there was an undercurrent of emotion(such as guilt) that motivated the post -and it eventually permeated thru the carefully chosen words. but yeah... sucks!

4) Maybe an apology enmasse would be good for therapy -maybe cathartic

5) But, you did assign blame. At least thats how it read. And I can only assume that is what you intended, since you have demonstrated your effectiveness with words.

you did give up. you were three month in to it. you basically decided to do something else than NewsTilt. And I think that is by definition giving up. Theres no other perspective to it. there is no other way to interpret it. You start to do something, and three months in to -you stop; thats giving up.

I think you've fallen into a fallacy I see a lot on HN: that making the startup work is more important than anything else.

-- now, thats just condescending and disrespectful though, im sure you are very wise in your grey old age. -but; Family, friends, life and love are ALL important. And yes, Startups too. Actually, theres a bit of irony that you comment on the fallacy of "startup work is more important than anything else".. because/// on your post.. you get chastised and you defend yourself for saying: "...but startups need that kind of work ethic from very early employees–exactly the reason that intrinsic motivation is so important. If your first employee doesn’t love what you do, doesn’t wake up each morning dying to work on HIS product, you have likely chosen poorly, and that’s exactly what we did." *

Anyway...
4 NYC Entrepreneurs To Watch Out For
looks interesting, thanks for the tip
For Sale: 4BR/2+1BA Single Family House in Glenrock, NJ, $700,000
The same issues are faced with rental of any high-value item, whether it be a house, boat or car. The answer is both scale (many items) and in-built pricing that expects, say, 1 in 100 people to steal/break something. You've got to price in the expectation of replacing certain items.

For the individual owner without fleet economics to back them up, however, one individual event (ie, theft, major damage) can be enough to put them out of the pool.
I can't see them disappearing completely, possibly they will become more streamlined where the author can get a better deal only taking on board services they need.
"Inconsistent Hiring Quality"

I think that one of the prime sources of this mistake is the assumption that adding another person will necessarily increase output.

The hiring criteria that is being applied at my current day-job employer seems to be "Will X be able to get anything done?" which doesn't even come close to guaranteeing that the hire is a good investment, even if the company is established and can afford to wait a while for a new hire to mature. At a startup, the situation is obviously even more critical.

Time and time again I've seen weak new hires suck up not only the time, but the morale, of highly productive existing employees. Good hires come much closer to training themselves, and having a great new person around makes other folks happier.
The video is up on GoogleTechTalks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BS3UVSLX-I
Cool. What's your motivation for running this site?
It's not. Their positioning is inaccurate, and the magnet helps guide to the final position.
Android has a gesture recognition API in 2.2, implemented by one of the creators of the $1 recognition algorithm (the one implemented in the article).

The creators of 'one-dollar' released the next generation of the algorithm, the $N multistroke algorithm, and here's an implementation of it in javascript: http://depts.washington.edu/aimgroup/proj/dollar/ndollar.htm...
If this doesn't work out at least some Atom servers would be nice as well.

It would be great for datacenters that need to save cost on energy and are IO bound, like those saving email/messaging with an already underused cpu anyway. I wonder what the maximum memory would be for these new servers.
Is trust the new love drug?
I am not sure what you mean that OOP is intuitively harder to understand than functional programming. In fact, OOP was explicitly conceived as a more intuitive alternative to traditional languages, and most modern languages implement its core concepts in some way. Java is classic OOP, and is a good way to learn these concepts, so you may want to begin there.

Of course, I agree with everyone that you shouldn't be worrying about these things. You can learn many of these things through experience, and the bonus is you can get stuff done at the same time.
Stuxnet cyberworm heads off US strike on Iran
PG, if we make a product worth more than 1B, we can be included in the current winter session as an exception?
Is the Android gesture recognition API you speak of purely back-end and not available in webkit?
because people like to make MONIEs and dont care about you
Ok, I'm trying very hard not to be that industry guy that scoffs at the new entrant to the space with a new business model, but I have serious concerns as to the viability of this model.

My background: I've run a car rental company for nearly 7 years now, so I know a thing or two about the logistics. Granted, my business deals with luxury/exotic cars, so some of the issues we face are quite different, but nonethless the core issues remain.

Here are my concerns:

* Rental cars get treated like crap, whether it's a Buick or a Bentley. "Mystery damage" appears in a high percentage of rentals. The customer will, 9 times out of 10, say "Oh, that was there when I picked the car up." We solve that problem by having a trained staff member take photographs of the car before and after and have the customer sign a very detailed check-in and check-out report with every inch of the car covered. In the event of a dispute, we are documented up the wazoo. If these transactions are happening person-to-person, how is that documentation being done? It takes at least a few weeks of solid training to get our employees accustomed to having "the eye" for damage to our cars. I doubt P2P renters are going to train themselves. This, then, opens up every rental experience to a massive potential for liability and dispute, and in the cases where the documentation isn't up to spec, both parties will be left with a very bad taste in their mouths (and potential lawsuits).

* Insurance. They claim to offer insurance, and I'm sure they've managed to find a carrier to cover them, but insurance in the car rental world is dicey at best. Often carriers will provide coverage, but if you've got too many claims (and a business like this is ripe for claims -- see above) then you'll get dropped like a hot potato. And if you get dropped, there aren't many other options. And the few options that exist cost 2x - 10x the price. I've seen this again and again - it's very easy to start and run a car rental company for the first year. Then you have an accident and it comes time for renewal and the story -- and numbers -- change dramatically.

* In general, and this is my weakest argument, lots of people try to enter the car rental business because they think of cars as commodities that can be treated like any other piece of equipment. The problem is that cars are massive rolling accident and lawsuit machines. If you're renting a dress to someone (Rent The Runway) or your couch (AirBNB) or a watch or a tux or etc. etc. etc. that's one thing. But there isn't a chance that dress is going to cause a death. Or a massive accident. And if the dress gets ripped, it's a $100/$1000 problem, not a $20,000 or $50,000 problem (or in the event of an accident w/ injuries, a $20M problem).

Anyway, I want to embrace new and innovative models, but this smells of disaster to me.
If you are a publisher, and have all the trouble to get and edited book into publication, why would you give the option of unedited book like you mention? It would be just like creating your own competition.
Imagine I'm your average, workaday software developer.

If I've written some software to scratch a personal itch and I push it out to github because I reckon someone, somewhere might benefit at some arbitrary future point, or to show off to a future employer, or whatever, then I really do not care about making sure it compiles and works on a dozen distributions. Just getting it working to fix my problem, then publishing it, ticks all the boxes I'm interested in. After all, I've got fifteen other problems I need to solve this week, none of which involve spooling up VMs for distributions I never use.

If a packager then decides that their favourite distro would benefit from having my code packaged nicely, at what point does that become my responsibility? It Works For Me(tm), and beyond reviewing and applying patches other people might send me to improve it, I don't necessarily have any interest whatsoever in what happens outside my repository as long as it doesn't stop the code from solving my problem. It's possible that I might be both developer and packager for a distribution or two, but that's the exception, not the rule.

Personally, I think the right way is for a clear path from language-package to distro-package to be provided by my environment such that I don't have to think about it, and I think that the bulk of that responsibility should be shouldered by the distro - but it's insane to think that the language environment shouldn't help, because there is a mutual benefit there. I think we're nearly there with RVM and rubygems, but that's about as far from autotools as you can get.
Is this better than running the program in something like screen or tmux?
Yeah, it would be great for most of us (his interested readers) if he just supervised a few post-docs to grind it all out. He could easily get the funding, but it's not his style.

I'm re-reading Volume 2, section 3 on Trees. On p.320 he makes the off-hand remark General methods for doing this are discussed in Chapter 8. What a sense of humor!
Does YC usually only accept new (i.e. early stage startup) companies? We've been online for almost 8 years now, and we have a new product we're really excited about. We already have demo code for the new product, not to mention an existing product that we've been selling since we started. So for us, the mentoring and feedback from other founders and YC would be invaluable, much more so then any investment (we're already self funded).

Just curious if there is anyone that has gone through YC with an established company, and how that worked out for you.

Thanks!
On my Android phone, swiping would advance lots of pages - first two, then ten, then forty.
Doubtful. Specialized graphics processor combined with a weak CPU makes sense in a console where graphics generation and display is core task.

In a server context, GPUs don't make sense. They won't make your web server or a database or Ruby any faster. In fact, in a server a GPU could be stripped off completely to save cost and power without impacting the performance.

Programming a GPU or other specialized processors requires custom code. You can't just recompile your database written in C or Java to magically take advantage of them. And since people can't afford to rewrite the whole software stack to take advantage of such capabilities just to serve web pages, it's not going to happen.

As the article says, the main reasons those chips might get traction is low power (and possibly low cost) since the cost of power is very important at scale and ARM is better at power management than Intel.
I navigated to your smartlyedu site. Looks nice. What in particular is unique about your product though? There are a number of other sites that do the same things mentioned on your landing page ("create lessons, assignments & more").
Eric, I'm interested in the eLearning space. Would you mind contacting me (or mind if I contact you) concerning what you guys are envisioning and what your motivation is for getting into the space?
Exactly. She's trapped by her own old way of thinking about selling books.

I'm not saying it would be easy for her to grok the new mindset. Or that a new better perfect business model exists. I think we're still in a transition period where we are learning what the new model is.