skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because most developers are optimists and because most clients don't think they'll need any changes...
A circle with a 690 meters radius is about half a square mile. The top 50 most densely populated cities according to Wikipedia all have over 20,000 people per half square mile, and that includes lots of European cities and even one in the United States:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popula...
This new organizational structure almost assures that they will continue to compete with themselves in the tablet OS space. Chrome OS vs Android will be an interesting battle.
Having done only the smallest amount of work trying to apply academic research, I have to say that the standard approach through a lot of AI is to develop good ideas about as far as needed to get a few papers done (though I don't know NLP in particular).

The work of putting this stuff together into a system which works consistently and at-scale is hard.

Basically, it is unfortunate that the standard academia is publishing papers (or pdf files) rather than publishing libraries. With this standard, the academics can't even readily use each others algorithms with this situation.

But when academics have this standard, it seems dumb to hear the complaint "uh no, you didn't do anything but apply our ideas..."
Like all things at which you have to work hard to gain ability, the original poster has but one course: the hardest one. To delve into those tiresome, brain-aching problems at which he once balked in school - the ones where he found that he had to put in a real effort.

And he will have to accept lots of failures before he can start to claim lots of successes. With nobody to mark his efforts down for not showing sufficient workings, however, admitting to failure can come a lot more easily when you only have your own self as teacher and student.
Are there general topics people would be interested in for hackathons that would be more interesting? I'd like to see more "hackathons for good" like http://cure.nyhacker.org or interesting topics like http://gamehackday.org
Charlie Sheen parece haber sumado una más a su lista de enamoradas
Actually you are right, I haven't read it carefully enough.
> When you're among the most influential on a platform, people watch and literally hold you to a higher standard.

Reddit's "celebrity users" have been grumbling publicly about exactly this recently. They feel like they can no longer disagree or behave like other users without being swarmed by people who recognize their username, and it's making them a lot disgruntled. Generally, it's a bad sign when your power users are unhappy, so I don't think that holding certain users to a higher standard than other users is a good idea.
For the record, I didn't submit this to start a flame war. I get the whole concept of "if you cross the border, you're subject to a full search" -- after all, that's the entire purpose of customs: to control stuff moving across the border.

The thing here is that government took the guy's computer, then sent it off to some lab 150 miles away for analysis. If I understood the article correctly, the judges said that was fine to do, even without probable cause.

Since a notebook computer is a tool for my trade, I'm left with the conclusion that not only can I be fully searched, but the government can also take my tools away from me for a long period of time while they examine them. There's no guarantee that the tools I left with will be allowed to re-enter.

Lesson? The U.S. government is effectively killing the personal PC, at least as a centralized place to keep my stuff. Move everything to the cloud, and make the notebook, phone, tablet, etc disposable.

Amazing. I must be missing something somewhere.
Below are two scenarios that seem to fit what you've said. There may be more, of course.

A) Others provide vision, direction, and everything else except doing the tech work. You provide excellent design and implementation to fulfill the vision of others. They should pay you more money.

B) You help define and drive the vision through your insights into tech. You have helped shape the company and the product rather than only built it. You should have an equity stake.
>e.g. pushing Mercedes ads to a person whose friends all drive Porsches

That's a small demographic, in my opinion.

The bigger pie are the people who are actively seeking out information about Mercedes via search.

But if I'm searching less because it sucks, then that's a big problem.

Google is a search company. I hope it doesn't lose sight of that.
yeah, true -- this is all about scale. They have tons of online content producing partners that will be interested in doing live stuff, and also on the scale side of things, the YouTube reach is immense compared to the DIY streamer sites like justin.tv etc
Which is why I believe that nothing competes with a Zombie Apocalypse as a social equalizer.
I am not an expert on speech recognition, but I am somewhat involved with machine translation. For MT, it's very architectural systems issues that limit us, first from trying different models and algorithms, but also in general.

How do you know ideas are "good" enough to be publishable unless you do plenty of experiments involving billion (or trillion) word corpora? I have a hard time imagining that research in other fields don't require validation.
You do. Just create a new throwaway account.
Or rather, the US seems to be on its way to becoming like that. Currently, because of state investment in public infrastructure - civil rights, highways, public schools and universities, regulations etc - over the past century, the middle class enjoyed relative leisure and comfort even as the very rich lived out much more comfortable lives. All that seems to be diminishing because of regulatory capture and the wealth feedback loop created over the last 20-30 years.
Thanks, the third CarWoo offer we got was human sounding and reasonable. Your support has been very prompt through all this.
Show HN: visualizing sports statistics
I think there's a reason most free software projects are still developed on mailing lists. It's not just inertia, lists avoid many of these problems and the problems they do have are well-understood by now and mostly easy to deal with.
I think this is an amazing idea. On the upside it could allow people to micro-target services.

On the down-side it will allow people to micro-target without peoples permission.

Like anything this is a tool, that can either be used for good or evil. With great power comes great responsibility.

I think the service can become more accurate overtime as it establishes more known locations. Each known location could be used to determine the n+1.
Awesome post. I took away a lot from your experience. Thanks for sharing. Keep us updated on your next project.
That's my experience too, here in Turkey. I wonder if it's the same for US or Europe, though.
Thanks for the kind words. I completely agree with you on the notion that the Chicago tech community isn't as unified as it needs to be. And the ironic part is I think many other people feel the same way. So we're all doing our parts to try and tighten it up around town.

That being said, in my eyes, things have come a long way in the past 2 years. Excited to see what the next 2 years bring.
This goes for everything in life. Humans suck at planning.

EDIT: http://book.personalmba.com/planning-fallacy/

“Hofstadter’s Law: it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” — Douglas Hofstadter, cognitive scientist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
I grew up on message boards. In fact, my first experiences with a computer were with message boards.

If there's one thing that I dislike about nested comments, it's that they make the community seem less cohesive. When everyone is commenting in a linear fashion on (roughly) the same topics, it makes for a tighter community. Nested comments, while better organized, just seem like a bunch of people having separate conversations.

Message boards are like a group assembly. One person talks at a time, and everyone listens. Nested comments are like a crowd of people having individual conversations about the guy that just talked.
As a foreigner who went to high school in Finland for a year, I'd say their English skills weren't that good. They probably do well in standardized tests because their education is geared towards tests and perfect grammar, not actual communication skills.

My friends in high school would attempt to construct perfect sentences in their head before speaking a word, which made them poor conversationalists.
artificially re-encoded [DR]NA sequences with redundant branching;

OR:

uuencode and compress with one of the newer high-end compressors like lrzip.
Instead of replacing estimation, I would say that you should embrace the problem in estimates - uncertainty.

Convey the uncertainty you have about a task to those you work with, and then you can start to factor in the risks of uncertain tasks.

I build project management software for a living at LiquidPlanner. Everything we do be it development, design, or marketing is based on ranged estimates. We don't always get the estimate right, but that's the beauty of a range, I it takes into account the fact that you will miss it some of the time.

The other thing that can replace an estimate is... lots of estimates. If you're planning something, update your estimates as you gain more knowledge about the problem.
Just Watch This Interview. Trust Me. It’s Good. – with Dan Shapiro
This argument is not about trusting or not trusting code. It's about piping web output blindly into a shell, which is an insecure technique, no matter how much you trust the author or web site.
We've stop/started continus integration a few times with a few different CI servers with mixed success. What did you guys end up using?

Right now, we have tests, but I'd still say we rely pretty heavily on hoptoad to let us know if we really broke something badly. ;)
> Is it something that can only be understood by playing it?

Pretty much exactly that.
Google may get OK to buy ITA on Friday.
Smart move, Google!
Iterators: Signs of Weakness in Object-Oriented Languages (1992)
This is why most packages are distributed with checksums, so you can be sure that what you're running is what the author intended.
Ok, it was a snarky reply, but the point was, we don't exactly need robots so much as labor to do anything...
was it downvoted because it was a one liner, or simply crass?
A westerner's perspective.

Recent trip from bangalore airport to hotel. Started with a clean, hot dry airport exit escorted to your air-conditioned car by hotel driver. Then briefly open fields. Then 30 minutes of red dirt road, with freeway in view barely in construction. With slums all along the street, with metal shacks aptly named 'hotels', with heaps of trash openly laid out and eaten by cows, with homeless kids/adults in bare feet walking along side of roads, with groups of women on their knees dusting the road with brooms. Then briefly comes tons of cars and people walking in between traffic. Tons of cars and people. Some semblance of city began to form. 2 story buildings. Then you're at your 5 star hotel in a 'nice' neighborhood. Across from slums and heaps of garbage and dirt roads and massive traffic and beggars everywhere. This is with no raining, which is usually 8 months out of the year.

Recent trip from Mumbai to airport hotel. Armed guards at outside the airport entrance. Taxi drivers mobbing you, trying to grab your bags. Your driver drives on local road as he speaks in his broken english how low this fare is, and you seemed to be stuck in traffic for an eternity what should've taken only 20 minutes. Highway barely constructed, with no workers in sight. Loud motor cars everywhere, no semblance of order. Tons of beggars/slums fills the side of the road. Nearby, restaurants, all with heaps of garbage sitting outside the establishments, attracting only the locals. Some fancy houses appear, but the are lost in the sea of ravage. A woman with a malnourished kid comes to your taxi and knocks on your window and begs. A woman with a bloody stump knocks on your taxi window, but your knowlegable friend says that's fake blood, although the missing hand is real. Then after a while, you arrive in a 5 star hotel, in the most posh neighborhood/city in India, not 10 seconds away from slums/garbage/cows/dirt. And this is with no rain.

A 3rd world country, with massive population and corruption and squatter's rights and caste system and religious fervor and terrible weather/land. Same economic progress in 1980s with China, but vastly diverged since.

I don't see a way out for India.
Presented at USENIX NSDI.

Abstract: http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi11/tech/techAbstracts.html#...

Paper: http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi11/tech/full_papers/Wang_Yo...
Interesting. I wonder what kind of energy is needed to keep 12000km long tunnel situated 4+km below sea level at partial vacuum...

Without even getting into problems that will occur at tectonic plate boundaries...
Represent "Smarter Than" or "Less Smarter Than" as boolean operator?
Just having a discussion about some things at work with a buddy and somehow got on the topic of something is "smarter than" something else and I was wishing that there was a short hand for representing that statement (e.g less than is < ).<p>I was first thinking something like this:
&> for "smarter than"
&< for "less smarter than"<p>But on a second look it kind of reminds me of an ice cream cone and a party hat.<p>Thoughts?
Mandate for Mediocrity? 31 U.S.C. 1342 & The Government Shutdown
Political or apolitical, if you're a government employee trying to do go the extra mile, or do right by your customer (the taxpayers) during the potential shutdown, you are likely violating the law:

http://www.opm.gov/furlough/

There is even talk of some government web sites being off-line during this shutdown.

Does this seem outrageous to you, too? Too bad we just can't 'route around' this.
Larry Page reorgs Google, ties bonuses to social success
DOJ Approves Google’s $700M ITA Deal, With Conditions
How important are patents for innovation?
Anna Hazare: India's pioneering social activist
Think if someone live streamed a suicide or some other horrible thing. On Justin.tv, Ustream that would be horrible enough, but on YouTube it would be a whole other level. I'm surprised it hasn't happened on one of those sites yet actually.
Depends on what you'll be doing.

If you're automating a money making process that is scalable, the sky's the limit.

If you're developing from scratch or greatly enhancing a core product, then... A lot.

If you're doing reporting or back-office cost center type of coding, then whatever the market values your skills as a commodity.
Just curious, why would you tell them your current salary? In salary negotiations, wouldn't that give the employer a substantial advantage in bargaining?

I've been asked this before in post-interview negotiation, so evidently this is somewhat common practice. I always respond with, "I'll tell you that if you give me a salary breakdown of your engineering positions by experience level." They always back off at that point.
It's a good reason to start looking around, even if only to get an offer you can use to get a raise.

It's not about being greedy, most companies will pay you the minimum amount you'll work for, or close to it. If your salary is that far below the mean, there's probably still a good chunk of money on the table (if your company isn't broke or doesn't just have a policy of underpaying).
Really? I did not notice any ambiguity. Can you give an example?
I've seen Google Goggles on a lot of Android phones by default. I'm still not sure how I feel about everything important to someone being installed by default on everyone's phone.
This is the first version of the site :). We're planning to redevelop to add more datasets, more sports, and different visualizations.

If anyone has any suggestions, that would be greatly appreciated.
Medium Hairstyles 2011
Medium hairstyles 2011 trends. Hairstyles 2011 medium ideas It is a matter of 2011 Medium hairstyles many people ask, the problem is hairstyles come and go.
I was looking for something in the shell script that was nefarious rather than the obvious "explicitly downloading and running things is a bad idea".

A good example of the fake downloads can be found with people running ads for VLC that link to their malware/adware invested versions (presumably, I've never actually bothered to investigate them).
Do you live in Helsinki?

You should maybe change the people you hang out with. I befriended "Finnish rednecks" for a year but that helped me go from 0 to fluent (YKI 5) in 2 years.
It often is now the case in the US. A couple years of go YouTube's streaming was pretty much flawless. I don't think they've managed to keep up with demand.
We did a Chicago HN meetup around Christmas which was pretty well attended (filled about 1/4 of the Publican). I'd be game to do something like it again.
A past (small) discussion of this -- mostly just a link to information on the Dropbox forums:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2043191
I agree that it is common sense but a little more than that:
1) Write good, engaging content with a strong point of view
2) respond promptly
3) Share your spotlight & traffic with your readers by reblogging the best comments and giving specific readers credit for the idea for your blog posts
4) As your readership grows, you cant respond to all comments so identify leaders to help you and ask for a couple of guest posts from them to make them feel a sense of ownership.
5) Prioritize responding to people who are commenting for the first time to welcome them to the community.
Yes you are right, India and the U.S. have a lot in common. The big difference here in the U.S. is the larger middle class compared to India. The other two big factors are corruption which is much more widespread and the caste system which won't go away anytime soon.

Despite all that I believe India has moved in the right direction in the last 20 years. I couldn't imagine how it would have been if not for the reforms of the nineties, which I personally believe has benefited all. Yes the rich have gotten richer but the opportunities that didn't exist before do now for the middle class and the poor. People don't have to depend on the government to provide jobs.
I read that. I was bothered by the fact that pg himself didn't comment on it. I was able to conclude there's one, maybe two, black co-founders that have ever made it into Y Combinator.

I'm currently taking a human resources recruiting class for an MBA program. Although there's no discrimination laws on private investments, it still bothers me that a private investment firm asks people to submit a video with their application for funding. It seems discriminatory and the effects of YC's selection process clearly indicate "disparate impact".
It's definitely the case for Germany. It seems to depend on the particular video, though. I had some videos not loading at all at 360p, while others loaded perfectly fine at 720p.
I'd like to hear more your experiences about breaking into the enterprise world and selling your knowledge management software.
I would agree with that. I saw my roommate playing it and thought it was completely idiotic. I bought the game a few weeks after he did. I was definitely addicted for while.

Can't....stop....digging!
That sounds about right.

I will make a small suggestion to the OP: if you think the interview went well, try to shoot for something at the higher end or slightly above.

Even if you don't get it, you'll probably still get a good counter-offer, and if you come from an area with a lower cost of living, you may not realize how much you might end up needing that extra $20k a year.
Microsoft whips up Bing app just for Apple's iPad | ZDNet
Ask HN: How should I dress when I pitch to angels and VCs? 
How should I dress when I pitch company my to angels and VCs?

Is there a difference based on where I'm pitching? (NorCal vs SoCal vs NY vs Boston etc.)
I'm in the US on a fiber connection and I constantly wait for buffering. It's only gotten worse over the past year.
I assume English is not his first language, as he also just made a job posting (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2422799) which has the same errors such as "din't".
HTTP is used for a lot more than just web pages - as I mentioned above, it's a de facto standard for a great many internet applications that are not web-based. The benefits - well, Gabor Cselle summarizes these quite well (http://blog.gaborcselle.com/2010/02/how-to-replace-imap.html) - so many problems have already been solved with HTTP due to the massive interest in the web over the past 20 years.

But I take issue with the idea that replacing IMAP with HTTP would in any way upset the email infrastructure. Changing the client protocol does precisely nothing to the infrastructure, unless you choose also to replace SMTP completely. I could write my own server for my own email account, with HTTP for the client, and as long as it used SMTP to send and receive in the network, no-one would see any difference.
Indeed, I have no idea why bloggers are so insistent on using gray-on-white quotations.
I'm in England with ~15mbps down, 1mbps up, never noticed any slow down with Youtube. I can't recall ever not being able to stream without buffering, always been good for me.
That's because disks are expensive in the UK, not because tape is cheap.

You can get 2TB of disk storage for <$100 in the US when you are buying retail (if you buy three hundreds like this guy needs, you'll probably be able to get it down to $30 or $40 per TB).

No tape device required, comparable speed, disks are random access; A backblaze-style setup in todays costs sets you back ~$60/TB for online, random access, storage redundancy and other nice things - 500TB can be build for $30K or so, with a few hundred dollars/month for electricity (and a few hundreds more for colocation if you don't have the office space).

How cheap can you get a functioning system with reasonable (a few minutes) retrieval time when you have 400 1.5TB tapes? (you need redundancy here too, you know).

Since sometime in '98, tapes make no economical sense whatsoever for any kind of storage, and hardly any sense at all, as far as I can tell.
>11. Make Apache an end-user product.
WAMP/MAMP and similar are one step in this direction.

Take a look at Opera Unite (http://unite.opera.com/overview/). I'm really surprised nobody has taken this idea and run with it.

On second thought, I guess that is what the CouchDB guys are/were doing, but I don't think the whole picture has come into focus for anyone yet. It will quite something once it does.
I'd say hire the one that gives you the best justification for their estimate. It's important for people to understand what is and is not involved in an estimate as well as why they think something is hard.

Once you communicate that, you can uncover a lot of potential problems and misunderstandings. For instance just the other day my co-worker was asked to estimate a task that seemed to our boss to be pretty small. He estimated it as being 2-8 days, it wasn't until they actually started talking about _why_, that they both agreed on the requirements. The resulting task will probably take 1-3 hours.

So sure, as a developer learns more they may estimate tasks as being longer, but communicating your assumptions is more important than throwing out huge estimates to cover your ass ;)
Selectors and Declarations in CSS
Do you truly believe civil rights are worse today than in the past? More people attend university than ever before. The poor manage to survive quite nicely, and most of them don't work at all. Could you please explain how you believe things are diminishing in more detail?

Something I've noticed - when someone says "just like the US" about a nation like India, they've almost certainly never left the US. At most, they've been to the EU, and often think Mexico is the depths of poverty).