skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>You can't have an absolute right to something that requires someone else to provide a service for you

Like a lawyer? Pretty sure I have a right to one of them when charged with a crime.

I understand to go with the clean logic of Ayn Rand's definitely of rights and everything, but that doesn't mean it fits all situations of the word right.

Positive rights have some traction and serve a useful purpose too, even though they do in fact require some taxation/other forms of forced payments to provide them.
Good for you.

For my final thesis in college my professor made me change my mind. My initial project idea was a music instrument, a polyphonic digital synthesizer (TTL-only, no processors). I had a single wavetable "voice" implemented in silicon already, as a proof of concept.

Instead, he convinced me to make a boring sawtooth variable current generator for his lasers. :( Grrr, I wish I didn't listen to him.
Hmm, a term was about 10 weeks so I guess this must have taken about 4 or 5 weeks. But I was working on it a ridiculous amount.

My friends called it "Ray" and would leave funny drawings on my desk depicting them partying while I played with Ray. Or if I had been partying with them, they'd all groan when we arrived home and I set to work. But it was definitely worth it.
I read it a few years ago and seems a good resource in the current context. It's detailed and with good sources. Takes UK as a case study, but can generalized reasonably well. A teaser:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c4/page_32....

Look for the bar graphs on the right side of the page (page two of the link above). They're at scale all through the book.
As of yet, no one cares. That might change but it hasn’t already.
I'm not sure it really will change anything. The assumption is that people with IE6 chose it and can change it which is often not the case (corporate users with a strict IE6 policy notably).

It's reasonable to expect that your users will stay, and the browser repartition will follow the same curves it did before.
>With enough time and dedication anything is possible.

Good, where's my flying car?
[Crowd Leader] Ville Miettinen: Play the game of life
Rereading your post, you are correct, I misinterpreted it. My apologies.

So you are saying the licence used for Bionic doesn't come into play if Google do a "clean room implementation" of the headers? If they do that, they can use any licence they like, since they are not using any copyrighted parts of the kernel.

This does leave me unsure on another point though. How does the GPL prevent the linking of a GPL library from a non-GPL binary? One can distribute the binary without including the library, so you aren't distributing it, and just using the headers from the library is apparently OK, as long as you do a clean implementation and don't use headers containing any inline functions. What legal mechanism does that leave for the GPL to prevent linking by non-gpl works? As I understand it the GPL is entirely based on copyright. If I never distribute the library in question, I never have to agree to the terms of the GPL since I never copy it (putting aside personal use of the library).
How could you look at an APL-family language and then be totally outraged that the implementation took quite a bit stylistically from the language itself?
Right. Kid goes from a hacking cough that kept him awake for three nights straight to fast asleep (and resumed coughing the next day & night, so "he just got better at the same time" isn't on the table either) and it was all placebo, for a kid who can't even talk yet. Sure.

That is the exact logic people use to say that vaccines cause autism.
I'd agree but reading this comment thread shows a lot of people don't get that it is a joke.
A couple points on this by one who is by no means a seismologist but who finds the topic fascinating and reads a great deal about it just out of curiosity:

(1) First, I tend to agree with russell that Hayward is one of the two most likely candidates for a devastating quake. This fault line seems the greatest threat to the SF Bay Area. That said, whether San Andreas, Hayward or otherwise, any quake on a Bay Area fault line around an M8 or larger will wreak havoc on the Bay, especially along the Marina Green and other places with similar landfill. And I agree such an event is inevitable within the next few years. Fortunately, the seismic retrofits to the Golden Gate and the current rush to rebuild the Doyle Drive Freeway should mean those structures will withstand most anything, as will the tallest skyscrapers around the Bay.

(2) That said, I think the LA basin stands the greatest risk of failure during a quake: from what I understand, LA functions like a bowl of Jell-o, geographically: bounded by the ocean to the west and mountains to the north and east, earthquake waves tend to reverberate within the "bowl" and generate far more damage than they would elsewhere due to the formation of standing waves.

(3) Either way, I think those of us living in earthquake-prone areas need to realize that it is all but a mathematical certainty that we will be struck by another devastating quake within our lifetimes. Accordingly, I think it is foolish to not take at least elementary precautions: I for one, even I could afford it, will simply never live in the Marina Green due to the risk of liquefaction. Similarly, I would far rather live in a tall skyscraper condo rather than a small home since (a) they are designed to withstand quakes far better than smaller structures and (b) it turns out they function like wind instruments (i.e., closed on one end, open on the other): when high frequency earthquake waves strike a tall building, they resonate at a much lower frequency than in a smaller building. These two factors alone -- along with stricter building codes -- explain why we've never(?) seen a modern skyscraper fail in an earthquake.
I thought it would be "he took his ball and went home," read his answer, and confirmed it.
I see the benefit of belonging to such a bank, but if other banks “bring it” might it become too costly for your bank to keep paying your fees for you?
That is a possibility for sure. Since pb is a younger audience my gut feel is that there are a lot of users who are simply clueless about what browser they are using and just don't know better. Whether they do anything about is another story.
On these lines, there's lots of sharp restrictions and heuristics you can use to get problems out of NP into something manageable. And a lot of the time a decent approximation is good enough.
There's a lot more to New York than the trendiest clubs and the wealthy in-crowd.

> I decided very early on that once the crowd reaches a certain size, the experience is remarkably less satisfying.

Completely agree. And there's a ton of great small venues even in Manhattan.
Twilio Is The Real SXSW Group Texting Winner
They're not trying to redo the distribution of fuel over the US. That's the issue with anything like a turbine running on gas suffers.
Starbucks: 20k gallons of coffee/day (and 500k in revenue)
"At age 28 Genghis Khan had nothing and was barely starting to get control over his own small tribe. He eventually ruled over the largest land empire in human history"

Still though, basically just a ned.
Marketing Reddit: Have an Awesome Product and Tie it to a Fantastic Brand
And he apologized, saying it was a mistake: https://github.com/devinross/CrashReporter/commit/83f6050181...
Anyone using about.me?
Just curious whether -- and how -- people are using this new(ish) service. I had heard about it once a while back, then forgot about it, then just rediscovered it again yesterday. If I understand it correctly, the premise seems pretty good actually. Thoughts?
Sure, that would be one of their options. I just wanted to make it clear that doing so would be an _option_ and not something like a court injunction. A lot of people seem to think that if you are found to be in violation of the GPL, that somehow you will be immediately forced to release your source code to the whole world.
Beyond Fukushima
The 'right' to an attorney should mean that the government cannot prevent you from attempting to obtain an attorney to represent you. (edit: added the italicized words)

Edit: Don't many public defenders think of their jobs as a form of partial charity?

Edit 2: Is it a violation of rights that these public defenders aren't the best lawyers available? I don't think so, and the onus is on people that accept positive rights to show that it is.

Edit 3: You know, I'm not exactly sure that this is Rand's answer at all (I couldn't find it in the cursory glances I took at a couple of books). But it does at least reflect what I think about the right to an attorney, and I think it holds up pretty well!
It's only a concept car, but Jaguar's C-X75 is twin gas-turbine charged and electrically powered.

http://blogs.insideline.com/straightline/2010/09/jaguar-c-x7...
There's several problems with the statement made by Jerf. First, there's no control group. Second, there's breakdown of what actually helped the child feel better. Was it the active ingredient or something else? Lastly, w/o looking at a larger group its unclear how widely applicable it is.

Again, let me reiterate, if it works for you, that's great. There are people who appear to be largely immune to HIV. For them unprotected sex carries little risk of AIDS. But an isolated statement about a single person is only an isolated statement about a single person. That one person has great advice, but its not generalizable w/o more information.
Interesting, we have similar numbers. 1.03% on one site and 1.70% on another, totalling ~3m page views.
Electric Land Rover
I can fully understand where you're coming from and while it can be rough, this can be a time of unique creativity for you. What I do when I'm down is I start planning the next phase. I'd recommend getting as detailed in your mind as possible. See the project coming together and not only will this be a great use of time you'd otherwise spend in bed, seeing this vision can snap you out of your funk. Works for me. I wish you the best. Take care. :)
"It's virtually impossible to sell to school districts"

This is exactly the problem I've been wrestling with. The best idea so far has been to appeal to private&charter schools first, and then attempt the big system. Public education is very much like a large company (risk-adverse, and process-oriented).
Probably because the exhaust would burn anyone that walked by your tail pipe. Otherwise, they'd make effective range extending generators.
House votes to stop NPR funding
In the realm of software, which is diffuclt to defend, I like how much of a barrier to entry these companies create just by virtue of collecting data no one else does. Even google can't really compete here right away, because in each vertical space data has its own dimensions and requires different methods. I imagine this is one of the areas of software still really attractive to big VC money. (Not that it ever wasn't, it's just a lot easier to build now)
Same here. We just launched noteleaf.com (YC W2011) about two weeks ago, and migrated over to dotcloud this past weekend. Due to my naiveness with some key infrastructure, our processing times was over 3 hours when we launched the first time. With their premium support, Dotcloud's team helped me work through and reduce the processing time to ~20 minutes, and the start times for each worker was reduced form 44 secs to milliseconds, in preparation for our second launch today.

It's because of Dotcloud that I'm not currently in the pits of despair and can concentrate on my application and my users...and commenting on HN.

I can't recommend them enough.
You're selling yourself short though--at the lowest it's actually free, just like, you know, every other freemium model on the web.
To be fair, anyone who makes it through YC and gets pg's recommendation should be pretty competent.
Japan a robot power everywhere except at nuclear plant
How long have you had twitter disease? We're working towards a cure as fast as we can.
...black swan events such as holidays...

The 'black swan' has definitely jumped the shark if it's now being used to describe events that arrive so reliably they can be printed on calendars, years in advance.
...and combustion engines in the future "could be" 3.5 times more efficient than they are now, as well.

How efficient are current wave disk engines? Any claim about a future, non-existent engine is just hot air. (In fact, the current wave disk engines probably generate way too much hot air already, or their current efficiency would be featured more prominently in the article.)
Wondering what this means for the constellation of links to old NYT pieces now embedded in blogs around the world.

Assuming that following one would count against the 20 free articles per month quota they've established, and that they're not planning an apocalyptic sweep of millions of inbound links.
SaveIE6.com was put together as an April Fool’s joke by the uptime monitoring service Pingdom. Due to the tremendous interest it has received we have decided to keep this site up and running. Thanks everyone for the great feedback and for enjoying the irony!

I guess they just didn't remove the conflicting text in their footer.
He is also the author of the K language.
This was also posted just a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322798
I don't think that the goal here is to degrade public education; one of the main attractions with this incubator is that it has connections to get your product into public schools.
Hey Moki guys, congrats on launch, sounds like a promising product! Once TC noise will settle a bit, please follow up with me(email in profile), i'd like to get in touch re your API
Conventional C style is there to improve its readability and maintainability. Applying APL style to C code is sort of like trying to use Russian grammar with English vocabulary, you might be able to puzzle out the meaning, but it is a stupid waste of time.
interesting. I thought the netflix tos didn't allow third parties to store a user's rating info. Maybe I read it wrong.
Hmmm...well, whatever it does when it loads generated enough CPU to kill my web browser. I saw only a black gradient background and a beachball. I'm not likely to go back.
To be fair, IE3 and, more specifically, Microsoft News and Mail, had one intriguing idea - that mail (and NNTP) messages were things to be managed like files and folders by a shell extension.

I would love to have Nautilus turn into a mail or calendar client when opening specific folders (somewhat extending magic into discovering what a folder is about)
I think free ad-supported content allows for more discovery, too. I.e. how do you know what you want to pay for before you read it?
Does each founder have to submit a separate YC Application?
I see that some fields require a joint response, while others ask for individual responses. Should the individual answers just be submitted on the same application (separated by a paragraph space, for example)?
Agreed, it's just that building stuff is cheaper and easier now, and more industries/SMB are going to digital book-keeping, so there is now more data to be gathered by more people.
Getting past the individual situation here it does raise some interesting questions about what ownership people have over information they submit for the good of others. If Quora restored all his answers against his will I don't think I'd object to that to be honest.

Put it in physical terms. If I volunteer to build homes in a third world country do I have the right to then tear those homes down if I become disenchanted with the organization I volunteered for? My answer to that question would be No and that's why I don't think he shouldn't have taken down the answers.

If the info was used just to benefit Quora that might be different but the fact that they benefit the whole of the community changes things IMHO
Great news! Sounds like a good model (essentially, YC's again) and a good team, and off to a lean/substantive approach.

I happen to have 2 different education startup projects, one of which might be a good fit for Imagine K12. However, the logistics and economics of moving out to SF for 3 months are making me hesitant to apply yet. I live in Colorado, no longer the college student age/stereotype, etc. But the team and mission is exciting. (YC is awesome too, of course, but the living-in-SV-area-for-months thing has been a big negative for me with their program as well.)

I plan on analyzing some cost of living numbers, see if I can make the dollar part at least make sense. Whether I could do it for $500/month, or $1000/month, $2000/month, and what each level would get me. And it's not just the direct cost of living, I'm also a guy with a career, paying client gigs, etc. so there's a financial opportunity cost. Yes, yes, bootstrap myself, obviously, and I already am, but I also see the value in getting mentors and introductions and the biz dev connections into the education market. Cash infusion is almost an afterthought, and giving away 6-10% is so small at the seed stage that it is nothing to worry about.
We (a mid-sized tech VC firm) recently did an associate search as well. We posted the job listing publicly (e.g., LinkedIn) and got almost 200 resumes. Of those, fewer than 5% were women. And we are a firm that has more women than most (up to and including Managing Director level). I was stunned that the ratio was so skewed.
If You Haven’t Sold Ten Product Sales Yet
Actually, many legal systems provide some way of getting free representation. The government is involved in many cases.

Similarly, many states will intervene to prevent their citizens from starving, even if they have to spend everyone else's tax money to do so.
Which really makes it that much more funny.
Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.
That's true, but he's also risking his reputation (and his paycheck) if he doesn't shop around for later stage investors for his companies. This kind of thing is his job, it's what Y Combinator exists to do. When one of his companies looks like it's going to be successful, he has to do this kind of stuff to actually get a return out of it.

Which, again, isn't to denigrate him at all. He's obviously very good at what he does and deserves a lot of respect for it.
"And there's a ton of great small venues even in Manhattan."

I'm sure that's true. I only knows what I sees on TV. I've never actually been to New York, but I'm hoping to visit in late summer (visiting New York in a 33' motorhome, however, is expected to be a challenge, so I might have to save the New York trip until after I downsize into a truck+travel trailer, so I can park the trailer outside the city and drive in).

LA, on the other hand, I've visited numerous times. The music scene there is downright bizarre in its crass commercialism, though great bands still come out of LA every once in a while.
Quality education must accessible to everybody. It might, but it doesn't have to be free. What we currently have in many parts of the world is free education of poor quality. That needs to be fixed.
Great work with Noteleaf! It saved me the other day when I had totally forgotten about a meeting I had. Keep up the good work!
My wife and I used AirBnB to stay in paris on our honeymoon, we had an entire apartment (a studio) in a nice part of town for a fraction of the cost of hotel. It was great experience that we couldn't have had without AirBnB.
Maybe you're unfamiliar with how sensationalism in reporting generally works, but the fact that the page contains that text is really immaterial. Sticking a disclaimer at the end of an otherwise alarming article is somewhat like Glenn Beck's "I'm just asking questions here" — it doesn't actually change overall effect of the piece that much. Since I believe this very paper has reported on the hysteria already surrounding the situation, it would be appropriate to lead with the fact that it's unlikely to have any adverse effects.
Everytime that I have a thought like that I'm reminded of a poem by Anis Mojgani that really moves me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQAC3WXOOWE.

I just love the ending, "Already am. Always was, and I still have time to be."
Congrats to the Moki.tv crew. Great job!

I'd been using other services like Instantwatcher (http://instantwatcher.com/) to discover new titles but was waiting impatiently for an intelligent service that combined the many [new] services available. I rated 100 movies and got great recommendations. Thanks.
All other important factors aside, everything comes back to scalability. This helps further drill that point.
It is true that Rovio isn't forced by anyone to create a GPL version or to release their code. I should have pointed this out.

However, their options are pretty limited, considering they want to make money off of the software. They could simply stop distributing it from the platform. But they want to make money, which means that they(presumably) want to get as many sales of the game as possible on as many platforms as possible.

However, if the main system interface is GPL(and not LGPL), the GPL does not allow anything to link against it that is not GPL code. So, given that, they are effectively forced to do it if they want to get any further sales and ad revenue on the Android platform, because they would not be able to distribute the game in it's current version.
Prevent what exactly?
Touché. I was definitely being technically unclear. My usage there was meant to indicate that the effect of the holidays on ridership was wildly higher than we had expected. Now that we've had a few holidays, we can begin to build that crazy surge into our models.

So yes, certainly the holidays themselves are predictable, but their effect on rides was not.

But now is. :)
LinkedIn Launches LinkedIn Today - Tips Marketers Need to Know
Entreporn, The Fallacy That Wastes Your Life
Will this affect the Google Chrome app?
Well, the whole shilling-for-the-Pentagon-in-the-run-up-to-the-Gulf-War stink is still floating around. Also, the editorial policy of allowing the word "torture" to describe waterboarding except in instances when the US is doing the tortur...ahem, waterboarding is more than odious.

Pointing out the inferiority of less consequential papers doesn't absolve them. The point is that these guys consider themselves THE paper of record. You can't pride your self on a higher standard, then get defensive and angry when people actually hold you to it.
The HTML5 nsfw element (April Fool's 2010)
Dating site with only one man, and a 10k matching reward
Sony Got the Permission to Access Geohot's Paypal Account
It's not just that -- if the tail of the distribution doesn't seem to fit, you can just call it a "power-law with a cutoff", "exponential tail", "multiple scaling regimes", "piecewise linear" or some other cruft. Physicists, particularly, are egregious abusers of this. Like Agent Mulder, they want to believe.
Dude, that's absurdly optimistic. I wouldn't bet a dollar over $127 trillion.
Thanks for sharing PG, this is fascinating! We as entrepreneurs are generally busy trying to sell you and we rarely get to see your approach when "pitching" one of your companies. Your point by point break down of a market and how a company can grow into it is very insightful. I am taking note of your use of character validation (cereal story), peer validation (YC poll), market/community focus validation (out talking to users) and master vision for my own future investment communications. So short, subtle, and to the point, love it!
I'm on the fence for whether I like shiny logos that everyone is doing these days more or the same or less than non-shiny logos. The new logo makes it stand out, but I'm not sure in a great way among all the other gloss. I'll wait and see.
Am I the only one who sees something wrong with a guy hectoring any set of people who chose not to apply for a job he's offering?

Myself, I'm wondering how many men applied.