skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To anyone who might not be familiar with the applications of timelike paths in computers: it's the quickest way to the singularity. Basically, you get a computer and wire its output (in the future) to its input (in the present or past). Depending on how time travel works, this either gives you an infinite amount of computational power (actually an infinite amount of time to perform operations in, but it looks rather similar to outside viewers) or a way to quickly find the conditions under which a program returns the input as output (which gives you instantaneous protein folding, factoring of large primes, and so on, if you design your programs properly. If you don't, it gives you a good way to find buffer overflows and other failure conditions). Of course, both of those would look pretty much exactly the same to outside viewers.
I am working on a large open source project right now via a connection I made on HN. By hanging out in their IRC channel and listening, I've been able to fix a couple of problems before they left the "complaining about it in IRC" stage and percolated up to the "file a bug report" stage. If you're the first to move on it you get to fix it.

My recommendation is find something in open source you use and see if they communicate in IRC or some other open medium. Probably not great universal advice but it has worked for me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year
You're failing from the moment you start. Your whole mission is to get to a point where you're not failing anymore.

If each day you're making progress towards the things that will make you're specific venture sustainable then you're on the right track. otherwise its time to adjust.
Don't want to encourage treason either :)

I just want to be able to discard really bad designers (and there are a lot of them) with a 30-second glance at their work. Similar to the supersimple coding test to weed out the developers who can't actually code.
This they call fighting?
> Is it only for people who can't get a £1000 line of credit?

Basically, yes, but what credit card do you have that doesn't charge you for a cash advance?
Unless you have a negative discount rate, a few (hypothetical) deaths in the distant future is less bad than a few deaths now.

People currently live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, 24 years later:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,412954,00.html

There was significant radiation exposure in Japan a while back. This is what it looks like today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HiroshimaNight.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nagasaki_C1414.jpg
Oddly enough, "Why did we fund you again?" is not an uncommon question at the first office hours. Often when we fund a startup, it's because of something they could do in the future. So at the first office hours when they describe what they're currently doing, that doesn't always include what we liked about the idea.
Kids usually get tons of stuff and will at one point or another own many real instruments. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with them also playing with tablets.
> The murder in that news story was not triggered by the anti-litter. It seems highly likely that he murderer was already out for blood

What makes you think that? From the story it seems clear that the confrontation took place due to the victim questioning the murderer's right to throw litter in to his sister's car.

Sadly, young men who would kill over such a minor thing as this are not uncommon in London.
It's not bad, but its design is somewhat dissonant compared to the more common saturated, glossy, and photorealistic icons on Mac OS X.
I would call an earthquake (which was larger than it was designed to withstand) followed by a tsunami (which knocked out the emergency generators) pretty catastrophic.
Depends on their surface reflectivity.

A few 10s of European people die at chernobyl = crisis, ban nuclear now. A few 10,000s of Indians die at Bhopal = so what.

Of course sometimes you have to be a little more discriminating.
A damn breaks in China killing poor yellow people = so what.
A reactor accident in Japan affecting rich yellow people = crisis.

Strangely 1800 people being killed on trains in a Tsunami doesn't seem to matter. Germany hasn't decided to cancel ICE services between Munich and Wien until the track can be made Tsunami proof.
counterpoint: Dropbox is a great product, clever tech, insightful marketing etc. Even the YC application was great. And I think there's a large market (even its present size is more than enough to sate my own avarice), but... it doesn't seem that it could become a truly huge company (like Xerox, Google), without launching a series of increasingly unrelated products. Though perhaps that's true of many huge companies (e.g. Apple, Sony, HP - even Microsoft has Office).
I remember when this came up on gamedev.net many years ago and Chris Lomont (who, at least at the time - don't know about now, was a regular on the gamedev.net forums) came up with his paper explaining why this works (and coming up with a better constant). Brings me back :-P

Of course, this site is so much easier to understand than Chris' paper.

The history of this function (posted on Beyond3D[1]) is facinating too.

[1] Part 1: http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/ and part 2: http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/15/
Unfortunately the magic number is still magic, even though I read the paper linked at the bottom. Can anyone summarize the reason that number works well?
> 50 000 dies from a oil-related incident you would get some serious backslash

30,000 deaths a year from coal pollution in the US alone... Where's the backlash?
More likely an indicator of whether the candidate's supporters have a sense of humor.
If Chernobyl had been a dam burst incident, people would be living in Pripyat right now.

What if a nuclear disaster like that happened next to say, Philadelphia, and left the area uninhabitable for 10,000 years?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_III#Greatest_threats
Chomsky on Intellectual Property
I said that I would do this tomorrow in my last post, but couldn't resist the temptation to play with the code again :) here you go http://www.skillendar.com/hackernews/noajax.aspx this is the non-Ajax version.
a great part of the fear is that you can not see radioactivity harming you. Water I can see. Mining coal feels like it is within my control whether I engage in that activity or not.
Sorry - very little time. E.g. for an intranet with a customer who is paranoid about designs getting out, or someone who insists on the work being sole-licensed. I've met some right 'nanas in my time.

But I agree that any decent designer should have stuff they can show you, it's just that I can imagine ways for it not to be completely cut'n'dried.
Netflix's Streaming Costs Are Dropping Rapidly
Wikipedia[1] cites a claim that France (which generates on the order of 80% of it's power from Nuclear) has the cleanest air of any industrialised nation, due in large part to the lack of fossil fuel burning plants.

I for one think that's a reasonable trade to make for a few nuclear waste dump designated areas being radioactive until we can get some breeder reactors or similar to break them down more quickly.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power
I think it's mostly just a rooted fear of anything “nuclear”, but there's an argument to be made that the damage caused by dams is localized in a way that nuclear disasters can't be. In reality, of course, it's quite impractical to move everything away from dam failure zones.

Either way, historical data is very valuable and in that light modern nuclear plants are pretty safe but I think potential damage should play some role in the determination of course…obviously, the best thing would be to go full-tilt renewables (with pretty much only hyperlocal failures) but the question is can we get there without additional nuclear power even if everyone fully invests in it? If nuclear didn't linger such a long time after the plants are decommissioned, the risk/reward of building new nuclear to tide us over the next 20-30 years would be a no-brainer.

I think it's an important discussion that I'm not quite sure can be had rationally – but even that's better than not having it at all.
Google Chrome: not ready for html 5 canvas rotation
Is AirBnB eating VRBOs lunch? Reaching an untapped market?

Or is AirBnB a small (and staying small) player getting disproportionate lot of attention in the YC/HN world because they have friends here?

I'm not saying AirBnB is wrong or unsuccessful, just suggesting that sometimes "world-changing" really means "my friends and I personally like these guys better, so the other ones don't count".
I actually felt my heart pumping each time I read "## days until Demo Day". That's how starting a business should feel. Money's running out, time is running out, energy is running out. How are we going to make this work, today?
It's so rare to get a resume with something like a link to a github page. You're pretty much guaranteed a phone screen with me if I see this

Yes, yes, a billion times yes!!!!!

Even if it's some tiny little project that went nowhere, the fact that you actually have some code that is yours and that you can discuss intelligently puts you well ahead of 99% of the people I see.
hello mate, please try this one http://www.skillendar.com/hackernews/noajax.aspx
I agree with what you're saying, but I think the original post went much further. Even with respect to what you're saying I think the paradox is that if you discover that people don't like the product you rushed out the door, it might be because you rushed it out the door. And the lessons you learn from customers saying "it doesn't look that valuable" may or may not outweigh the effort it took to launch quickly. Sort of like the way A/B testing can help you make small corrections but probably won't actually create value where there is little to begin with.
How can I secure data I need to carry with me?
I'm sure it would make you a better programmer. Using tools that were abandoned by their company 10 years ago teaches one to be humble and to appreciate the little things in life.
JQuery is $
Pictures of 37signals' Porsche race car (DHH is the driver)
I'm not sure what you think this will prove, but if you're going to go this route it's going to make nuclear look even better. Much more confined mining operations, much smaller land use (something almost all "green" technologies are actually terrible with, IIRC nuclear is the most power-per-acre you can get with current tech), waste goes to uninhabited areas anyhow (and if we were less stupid about it there wouldn't hardly be any), and take a quick Google at "pictures of Chernobyl" [1] and note how it isn't a radioactive wasteland in the style of Fallout or anything.

Very little land has actually been rendered "unable to sustain life"; I'm not sure it measures in anything more than a handful of acres. Hollywood movies and video games are not a good way to learn how nuclear power works.

[1]: http://www.grcade.com/viewtopic.php?t=2217 - note the greenery all the way up to the plant itself
Wouldn't say they are exactly steaming along on this project. It's been OVER 2 YEARS!
> A corporation is only a group of individuals.

The wikipedia article on corporate personhood might make some illuminating reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood_debate

Unless you already know about it, and are minimizing it for rhetorical reasons. When natural persons break criminal law and go to jail, they are deprived of the product of their labor for a period of time. When a corporation breaks the law, whether you want to attribute that to "evil employees" or to an internal incentive structure which encourages profits above legality, some analogue of jailtime makes sense.
Cheerios / O's are also a much more popular cereal product than whatever Captain McCains are.
well done mate :)
It works fine in the current Beta version of Chrome. In fact, it performs far better then it did in Firefox.
I imagine it has something to do with the quantity of power a nuclear power plant can generate compared to a gas based power station (given equivelent time/amounts of fuel)?? But I don't really know.

Having said that, though I don't remember the name/type ofdhand and am too lazy to look it up, there are new types of power plant in development/trials that 1) physically cannot meltdown, 2) produce much less (and less hazardous) waste and 3) use a plentiful form of nuclear fuel. If/when those nuclear power plants become production ready, then the choice between nuclear and fossil fuels is an easy one. For now, though, I agree with you and don't know the answer.
Major news outlet learns about cheaper way to share files from their intern who uses it at school like everyone else: News at 11
How to Mine 23andMe Data with Python: Part 2
>Hundreds of people will die year after year mining coal with nary a whimper of complaint

Doesn't anyone die mining Uranium ores?

With Chernobyl the fallout was measured across the whole of Europe whilst with some poor workers getting "miners lung" the effect is localised to those who were getting paid danger money to work in mines anyway.

Acid rain used to be big news ...

I don't believe your assertion incidentally.
Introducing WebM in Internet Explorer 9
Great post guys and thanks very much for the mention.
It will also discourage internet use.
I think in our lizard brains we prefer to have an imaginary measure of control over how we go. So we'd rather have a 20-foot wall of water bearing down on us at 80mph than to be exposed to invisible radiation. We imagine that we have a chance with the tsunami, but culturally we "know" that we're screwed with the fallout. This is cultural detritus from the duck-and-cover times, when we were told that even if we survived the initial blast of a nuclear weapon, the radiation would inevitably kill us (which isn't necessarily true).

I read a book years ago called WarDay, about a hypothetical limited nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the US in the mid-80s. In the beginning of the book, after the attack, the authors describe how they took refuge in a school building and constructed a makeshift geiger counter, which told them how safe it was to go outside to scavenge for food and water and help other survivors. The credit that with saving their lives. In other words, they approached the fallout exposure problem from a scientific standpoint, rather than an emotional one. People can't seem to approach the irradiation problem in other than emotional terms, so the end result is sheer panic. If more people were aware of how to measure and limit exposure, that would give them the control they need to function successfully. Sadly, very few do.
possibly. that said, 100m in revenue 4 years after launch with a fairly unbounded market (every consumer), looks like quite the promising start.
I can play linky too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object#Near-Earth_as...

There have been many more asteroids passing really close to earth in recent history than "almost nuclear wars". My point still stands -- nonzero chance is a terrible reason to do anything.
I don't think I agree with your logic here. It seems like you're saying that traveling to far away places is more dangerous than close places, regardless of how you get there. I don't see how that makes flying more dangerous.
What most people don't realize is that there is uranium and thorium in coal itself. If you're worried about 'nuclear fallout' from power, worry about coal and not nuclear. By the way clean coal doesn't fix this because if they could filter it out, they'd be able to get more energy from the uranium than the coal itself.
That covers all types of intelligence a man could posses.. Could anyone list anything else that is not a subset of the eight??
I'm one of the two developers that got the site built at first (as a contractor gig). I can vouch for adennis being really awesome to work with and being a good hustler.
Dude. This is nothing. Barclays charged me £22 for going £10 into my "reserve" overdraft for just 24 hours. Which is some completely absurd annual rate, 10^184 % if my quick calc is correct (220% daily rate compounded for 365 days).
Build Your Own Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer
There are actually systems where this is a non-trivial gain. I've heard some of the Extream software (since acquired by HP) guys tell stories about having to inter-operate with ancient mainframes their customers refused to replace. In order to get throughput on some of the logic up to an acceptable level, they had to do just this. Amdahl's Law, a-gogo!
In the article under discussion, this is not what the authors are talking about: they're literally proposing a model under which every time you traverse the extra spatial dimension, you end up at an earlier point in time. So the reach of that communication would be, in theory, unlimited.
Looks Like FoodSpotting Rocked Austin
Thanks for the correction, re-reading it that seems likely. Less useful, then. Not useless (you can "cluster" Erlang with multiple instances on one system), but less useful.
I think this article is perfectly valid. What everyone here is forgetting is that we are a pretty focused demographic of technical people. If you ask the average CNN user what Dropbox is you'll probably get a blank stare. The fact that an article like this is BEING written is just another sign of Dropbox's success... it may be crossing the tipping point to main-stream media and adoption outside of the tech community. I bet if you looked you would have found something similar about Twitter at some point where social media savvy people were going "WTF? I've used it forever"
Ben Horowitz on Titles and Promotions in Startups
Just sent you an email Vladimir.
Way too "culture" heavy. The only thing important on the list is BUILD, which is 2nd to last and does not include example projects to start building their momentum. If you only have 12 months to become a web developer, I hope all that time is spent building as many different projects as possible and not reading Hacker News.

Also I don't think it's smart to immediately steer them toward MVC framework such as Django or Rails. If you give them web.py or Sinatra off the bat you'll expose them to the fundamentals much quicker and significantly accelerate their learning process. Especially in regards to databases.

Then I would throw asynchronous web development at them. Have them write a simple app on top of an event loop with something like Node.JS or one of the python options (gevent,fapws3,tornado,etc.)

Having said the above, there are more books for Django and Rails if thats their preferred learning format. If there is a time crunch, I would recommend "Django 1.0 Website Development" by Ayman Hourieh. It walks through building a complete social bookmarking app and includes chapters on jQuery and AJAX, instead of focusing exclusively on Django. Which will give them a bit of breadth.
Lectures on Human Capital by Gary Becker
>cloud computing -- that catchall phrase corporations use to describe services delivered via the Internet

With this line they are streets ahead of most pure tech sites in terms of accuracy.
>> "...And there's little to stop...Amazon (AMZN), with its own Amazon Web Services, from making a greater push into Dropbox's territory...."

Dropbox actually runs on AWS by using Amazon's S3 for storage. This is what allowed them to get up and running quickly and cheaply without needing a lot of venture funding.

I would not be surprised with Dropbox's continued growth, if they in the future were to set up and manage their own data centers to avoid being dependent on Amazon or anyone else's platform. This would be advantageous if Amazon were to decide to compete directly with a similar product.
Told my parents about Dropbox (for about the 10th time) 4 weeks ago, they're finally using. Told my in-laws about it on Monday. I don't think that they meant you (or the other millions of people already using it)

Edit: typo
While I'm sure Dropbox has their work cut out, you know they are onto something when you run into their flyers outside college dorms cross country in Chapel Hill, NC.
Really? Damn. Maybe I need to rethink my position.
They Don't Teach You This In School - Background & Outline
I certainly enjoy writing, but my wife and kids are somewhat persistent about a stable income. So it's more a question of whether some neutral third parties think I'm good enough at this that I could someday earn a living at it, or if I should be doing more games instead - such as this one:
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/479926
It's a great sound bite that I think is completely wrong.

It's been my experience that purposeful founders do not fail. Patience is always reqired for success and politeness costs you nothing. If a founding team has a sense of purpose, a realistic idea of the amount of work it takes to succeed (patient), and is able to encourage others to assist them (polite) I normally see these as markers for success.

I think the behaviors he is actually highlighting are perfectionism (not patience), an unwillingess to test your vision by getting out of the BatCave and talking to prospects, and being afraid to take prudent risks.
and $$$$....
Not everyone has access to a credit card and some don't like the responsibility/risk associated with them, also some people may have reached their limit if they do have one.
There is nothing age specific about YC. There have been YC founders over 40.
I think that folks that complain about being "too old" for YC usually mean that they have lots of commitments that aren't compatible with the requirements of the program.

I hope you're right. In fact, I'm counting on it; being a 37 year old founder who's looking to apply (possibly) for the next Winter cycle. Luckily I'm still single and have no mortgage, just a car payment and rent, so I have a fair amount of freedom to make radical changes in my life if I want. :-)
This point is in fact extremely important in understanding the behavior of real systems. The analogy I've used to explain it to students is that a memory map (mmap) or brk operation is like getting building permits from the city. You haven't created new buildings, but you've received permission to do so.
Credit card “convenience checks” charge a 2–5% fee on top of the regular cash advance interest rates. Annualized, that’s still under 200%.