skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since we're on the issue of psychopaths... The armed forces are grandfathered in societally. Examined critically there's nothing sane about the institutions or those they recruit, in theory or practice.

Think of what they do. They actively recruit young and impressionable children, by promising them huge rewards (toys) in the immediate future and no consequences. They use us-vs-them jingoistic propaganda and compliance tricks such as forced sleep deprivation to break the very critical thinking and will to question unreasonable authority that makes us what we regard as truly human. Ultimately they turn a once peaceful person into an executioner - willing to instantly utilize lethal force on command.

As long as we feel the need to legitimize lethal force we need to take a multi-pronged approach to it to ensure good soldier-to-society feedback, educate everyone in the reality of war, and train everyone to function alone (while still serving societal needs). But not just at the convenient war machine level, these people would also by necessity of training intelligent people, have self-driven goals at all levels from picking up trash to spotting crime, entrapping corrupt officials, and when needed, wielding lethal weapons in defense of the innocent, at home or abroad.

A society where war is called for and legitimized by those who haven't fought and aren't currently willing to, is a sick one. After all, the draft is only the polite grandfathered-in name for slave armies.
Wouldn't seeing a bus drive on the shoulder or fly by you in the HOV lane be a kind of advertisement? I never see buses do that where I live.
It's fine with me.
Continuing Infection
What in my post lead you to believe I thought that governments don't engage in a variety of dubious surveillance (including surveillance which leaves open back doors to the victims machine)? They certainly do.

The thing is that exposing these acts and fighting all efforts to make such acts legal is still important for limiting how much the state can do.
The article did state that the 'secondary' versions of the kilogram were getting lighter with respect to the Grand K and it was up to 500 mG which is quite significant.

It would be interesting to know what is the source of that error (I didn't find the speculation of out gassing to be particularly compelling, but I didn't recall them mentioning how the companion standards were built).
http://insights.chitika.com/2011/failure-to-launch-google-gr... is the source article.

the 1200% number came from "Reportedly, Google+ saw a surge in traffic of over 1200% due to the additional publicity, but the increased user base was only temporary, as was projected in an earlier insights post." and the 60% drop came from "But, soon after, traffic fell by over 60% as it returned to its normal, underwhelming state."

but the graph right below that shows Google+ going back (in Chitika's "traffic index", whatever that is) to just about where it was before it was made public. as a result, I don't think those two numbers can be composed, and the "heh, guess 480% doesn't count for anything" smugness I've seen from a couple different places is based on everyone else's misconception of what the numbers mean.
> However, the proliferation of native 3rd party apps meant that users weren't using the browser to get to Facebook and that may have led Facebook to finally decide to release the app.

or it could just be that the Safari on the iPad doesn't let you upload photos to the largest photo sharing website out there (Facebook).

I suspect the reason it took 18 months is because Facebook was waiting to figure out where the iPad fits into the ecosystem.
Looks very promising. I see it currently uses Net::HTTP under the hood - do you plan to keep it that way, like Httparty and Faraday, or are you going to do away with Net::HTTP altogether? (The comment saying "this is temporary" next to requiring 'net/https' is encouraging... :))
What friends and random people on the web (even on HN) think about your idea is irrelevant.

You need to speak to prospective customers and get reliable answers to these questions:

1. Are you solving a problem they have?

2. What substitutes do they resort to right now?

3. How much are they willing to pay for this service?
Go doesn't define "lvalues," in the spec, but it does define "addressability." My comment would be more accurate if I had said "Go lets you take the address of any value in memory." (stack or heap)
I'd gladly pay multiples of that price for the ESPNs, if I could buy them a-la-carte.
http://m.facebook.com got a nice update today too. Adding that to the home screen will probably solve most of your complaints. With the caveat that you won't be able to upload pictures.
It seems to be a normal link now.
It's not impossible to grow a startup without investment, just harder.

Also, a company en route to such an outcome would probably find that they got offered funding on such good terms that they'd be stupid not to take it.
Douglas Crockford details a pile of problems with Javascript that have plagued it since the year zero. Dart needs to fix all these issues. Moreover Google really pitched it as a better language than Javascript.

So far the Dart implementors don't even implement their spec correctly and some of the completely broken things in Javascript have been retained. And some new ones have been added too.

I'm absolutely stupified that their spec claims integers are not limited to 32 or 64 bits but only limited by the size of memory on the machine. Not only is that not true (they've just used the completely broken Javascript double precision floats), but it isn't even sensible. You cannot make bignums anywhere near as efficient as machine words.

They've even thrown away some of the really brilliant things in Javascript. It's a total disaster. The spec is full of typos too. This is not a hackish attempt of some inexperienced computer science graduate student, it is a language developed by one of the richest corporations on earth.

Regarding the fact that Dart has Null pointers, someone on Reddit commented "what were they smoking".

Someone commented on HN that Google does not hire programming language theory experts. I wish I could vote that up a hundred times.
On the 915G WDDM fiasco and the "hardware scheduler"...
Of course, that warning is from the Facebook app. The above comment is correct that there is no fine-grained security in iOS for user data (except location info). If Apple approves an app and you install it, you are trusting it will much of the data on your phone.
That's from February. Nothing to do with recent events.
Thanks for the feedback. I agree with you, and we thought HN might be one of the best places to get some feedback, since this is where a lot of tech entrepreneurs hang out. I'm hoping the audience here can spread it to anyone they feel the idea may be relevant to.
It doesn't all revolve around home ownership. There are a number of people who make decisions on where to live based on their lifestyle interests. Reed Hastings happens to live in Santa Cruz and was quoted in a chat about making a conscious choice about living in Santa Cruz County and having that separation "line" dividing work and the personal. Many people who live in Santa Cruz and do the commute feel the same (ignoring the fact that there is little to no tech industry here anymore).

Big houses and big yards? I've got a bungalow that is smaller than any house I lived in growing up (probably by a factor of two).

Urban sprawl may have a huge cost in infrastructure, but the lack of planning to put in commute alternatives (like trains) are just as damning. In Germany, there are friends that live 30-40min outside of Munich and happily take the train daily. They don't necessarily want to live in the city. Which goes to your argument of "Low-density urban sprawl largely also makes public transport uneconomic" -- in general, sure, but again infrastructure planning can offset this.

This country, unfortunately, doesn't believe in planning for infrastructure. Trains? Unprofitable boondoggles! (or so some think)
Ask HN: Anyone attending ACM UIST 2011 next week?
Wondering if any HN readers will be attending and want to meet up.

http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2011/program/index.html
> "Please make sure your friends are comfortable with any use you make of their information."

All 425 of my friends? And how, pray tell, did you expect people do go about doing this?

Simply putting up a simple click-through disclaimer is poor moral defense.

That message is incredibly disingenuous, and I do not believe whoever launched it believed for one fraction of a second that users will actually go out and seek their friends' permissions to activate the feature. Facebook expected people to just tap merrily through, and well, people did.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is far from perfect, but once a claim is denied and a lawsuit is filed, the burden is on the government to prove which parts (if any) of the document are protected from disclosure. They rejected the initial FOIA request on the grounds that the document is properly classified and would jeopardize national security, but now they will have to prove that to a judge.

In other words, if the lawsuit proceeds all the way to the bitter end, it's up to the judge what parts are blacked out, not the DoJ.

RCFP has a nice overview of the process, if you're interested in the details: http://www.rcfp.org/fogg/index.php?i=intro
Mobile apps must die
Show HN: Bootstrapped for 11 weeks - landing page (want feedback)
Grooovy is a bootstrapped app in its 11th week. We came from a non-technical background and about to launch Grooovy as our first iPhone App. Would like to get all the support and feedback we can get.

What would you change about the landing page?
Thanks HN!

link: www.grooovy.me
Thanks for clarifying.
I should probably have assumed things were OK, rather than thinking negatively.
There's no guesswork involved. The carriage return implies a semicolon. The rule is very simple and obvious in use (to me, the code you posted looks wrong - and it is).

http://golang.org/doc/go_spec.html#Semicolons
Exactly. Citizens have to be able to inform themselves. Democracy wouldn’t make any sense otherwise.
Is this a huge leap? or similar to previous batches. I know the applications are rising each batch but i'm interested in if this is considerably higher than previous years.
Well, we could, say, look at the FSF's definition of free software: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

It's arguable that the ability to install/uninstall a program isn't direction mentioned among these freedoms, but the ability, say, to run the software deletion program for any purpose would fall under that cateogory, and Android fails in this regard.

The Android platform as a whole is most certainly NOT FSF Free Software. There's some free software at the core. I consider my Android phone to be a proprietary product, and one I trust little with my privacy, confidentiality, and/or data integrity.

Unfortunately, it's best-of-breed and "most free" of generally available smartphone software presently, though Meego (or whatever it's being called today) and the Nokia 900 series might be a superior option (I've got my eye on both).
That's an interesting point and I'm sure that your conclusion is true in many if not most cases. Honestly I haven't thought of that.

However, I would posit that, likely because of the way things are taught and because people use it as shorthand, there is a portion of the population that doesn't understand the link from "because (as a result of) Moore's Law" -> "based on the assumptions described in Moore's Law"

I guess the issue would be how much of the population falls into that second group.
>> "Aren't most people just failed social actors who are rather poor at picking the signs in which to display their emotional communication?"
> which was the part that really rubbed me the wrong way.

But, aren't they?

Not actor in the sense of a script/a lie, but in the sense of trying, ultimately imperfectly, to convey how we feel to the world around us?

How often do you think you nail the perfect smile, the perfect handshake, the perfect snuggle, to demonstrate happiness, but not too much, familiarity and strength without being overbearing, and tenderness without clinging?

Combine that with the imperfect feedback you get from others and we have really have no idea about the finer details of anyone but yourself.

Not just that you can't detect lies but that we have no way of telling if our perceptions of red are the same, let alone a hug or a complex thought.
We always get about half the applications on the last day. It's not necessarily a sign of procrastination. A lot of these people have been working on their applications; they just haven't submitted them yet.
I would pay $1000/yr for this service if you could do one key thing: figure out, based on the receipts, which ones are tax deductible (e.g. food) and which could be tax deductible if I did something extra (e.g. NY ST 121.3, sales tax exemption for computer hardware). None of the existing solutions take the tax issue to the next step.
PiCloud: Introducing Scraping-Optimized Cores
I've been thinking for a while that the next phase of my career might be as a "gamification expert". I enjoy Foursquare, Gowalla, etc. and have a reasonable amount of interest in game theory, game design and mechanics, and psychology. But whenever I even type "gamification" I cringe. Can it really be a good thing for so many companies? Does it matter as long as they'll spend money on it?

I love this quote from Chris Dixon: "The next big thing will start out looking like a toy". That's certainly the prevailing attitude about "gamification".
http://cdixon.org/2011/09/28/some-lessons-learned/
Nokia opens positions on new Linux-based OS Maltemi
Three Ways to Make Your Website Talk
I should have done a blog post to explain what's up but I've become so obsessed with one part of Mixergy that I let this (and other things) slide.

pg knows about this. It was done by a YC company. My site wasn't scraped. This is more than the interview.

Also, entrepreneurs like pg are heroes. Till I'm old and unable to move, you should expect to see me experimenting with ways to get their stories out. If I knew how to draw comic books, you'd see my interviews in the comics section of amazon too.
A Professor’s Response to a Stutterer: Don’t Speak
Vanity metrics much? A huge part of the reason why Google+ will fail is Google's encouraging spread of vanity metrics instead of just admitting that Google+ has a serious, serious challenge and is still on course to die(it's already pretty irrelevant in the made-up social networking wars).

Heck I'd venture to say that myspace.com has more engagement than Google+. And that is after Google shoving G+ onto its users.
I never looked at the rate before, but I'd guess it's about the same rate we'd have had a few hours before the deadline last cycle.
And this right here is why we still need big, expensive news organizations. Sure, they don't need to be printed on dead trees, but I can't think of any online publications with the resources to bring what will surely prove to be an expensive. lengthy, and possibly fruitless lawsuit.
try the 4.0 version, should be much better now.
The [original job offer](http://nokia.taleo.net/careersection/10120/jobdetail.ftl?lan...) is not available anymore, unfortunately.
FREE advertising - YouTube
It's good to see Nokia out of Microsoft umbrella.
Good point, however I think that there's a distinction in that gravitational force is a Natural Law, whereas Moore's Law is based on human actions. I.e. If every person on the plant stopped going to work in the morning gravity would still happen, but the number of transistors on a chip would stop increasing very suddenly.
Tried to close my Google+ account and the choices it presents were confusing at best ( this will delete your Google+ and also/maybe your Gmail? )

So instead chose a fake last name and got banned. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED :)
Home, if nothing else I have a distraction free setup with 3 large monitors.
Not really a plus from the applicant side. It's crazy impressive, but how many can they take?
Depending on the respective values of hardware, OS, and vendor support, you may very well find that this is the case.

I could regale you with stories of how a large server vendor, name rhymes with "Hell", refuses to support a class of its iSCSI storage devices on its own hardware if you're not running, say, a specific Linux distribution, rhymes with "R-HEL", and will give you rather nasty time if you try to, say, get support based on a near-identical community enterprise operating system based on the same sources.

The reasons probably boil down to marketing affiliations between "Hell Computers" and "Dead Rat", but (especially in light of prevarication on the part of Hell's salesforce regarding support) it doesn't make for a particularly rewarding support story.

The further truth is that Hell hath relatively little competence in OS-level support, and will simply hand you off to R-HEL's own techs if you go past a level1/2 script. But Hell won't actually come out and tell you this.

Point being: warranty / support is effectively voided based on OS choice. Despite vendor supporting the same OS on other products / in other contexts. And in fact using that OS for several of their own support services/products/offerings.
So just because they are ditching the Qwikster branding and keeping both DVDs and streaming under one umbrella website, do we know that they are not still spinning off the DVD business as an affiliated but largely separate business operation? Seems to me they could achieve most of their perceived advantages of splitting up, while keeping netflix.com as a common storefront portal.
Small business owners are your most likely customers. I'd suggest also asking for feedback on small business forums like:

http://www.smallbusinessforums.org/
Hey, Himani.

Y Combinator Universe still has the most comprehensive unofficial collection of information for Y Combinator Applicants/Interviewees:

http://ycuniverse.com/interviewees.php

My best advice: Remember that Y Combinator is a means and not an end. The goal is NOT "to get into Y Combinator". The goal is to make something people want. And there are plenty of resources for start-ups beyond kissing PG's butt for money and introductions.
Facebook has a nice strategy for their iPhone app. It mainly displays web views, so they can have the flexibility of a web site without having to go through an Apple review every time they update their features. And as a side-effect other mobile browsers benefit from the same work.

Edit: And now after playing with the new iPhone version, they replaced even more of the app with web views. At this point, it's essentially the same as m.facebook.com but with custom handlers for the Status / Photo / Check In buttons that allow for location awareness and photo uploading.
Photoshop 'remove motion blur' tool sneak preview
Bedroom Door Locks 
Here are a few options for bedroom door locks.
How would one write code that depends on order of evalution, instead of using parentheses? Where can you use parentheses that lets you write code that doesn't depend on order of evaluation? I think you missed something here because nothing about the example at hand has anything to do with the use of parentheses.
Let me brag first: I could be that girl in the interview. Yay me. But am I the only one to think these are obsolete skills? Isn't there more to software than knowing C++ at this level? Would I want to spend 10 years on learning it as well as I know it now, today in 2011?
I believe someone had a blog post recently where they estimated this years total batch at around 4000 based on previous years numbers and rate of increase. So ~1600 on the last day seems like it could be in the ballpark of what was expected.
How to Leave Your Business to Travel the World Without it Sinking Like Titanic
Perphaps I'm just turned off by the highly exaggerated and artificial tone mapping of most HDR. Generally I think using conventional techniques would have featured the architecture much better. HDR looks best when it expands the range of conventional techniques while still mimicking their perception. In this sense Ansel Adams was a master of HDR.

This sort of HDR reminds me of early stereo recordings that would ping pong sounds between the channels using panning.
Lars Bak on Dart
I don't see how "faster horse" theory applies to this experiment. The whole point of the faster horse theory is to look beyond your customer's assumptions to give them what they really want. Netflix wasn't looking to give their customers what they wanted, they were looking to inconvenience customers based upon internal logistics.

In many ways they were violating the faster horse theory: asking us if we wanted better streaming service or better dvd service. They were focused on technical details (do you want a horse or car) rather than the bigger picture (better travel - I don't care if it's by car or horse or teleportation).
Gah! Point.
I happen to think the Gilmore decision was wrong, but the issue in the case wasn't about secret laws, it was that you don't have a Constitutional right to fly on a commercial aircraft.
Linus Torvalds on Jobs and RMS
Your last two points resonate.

Whatever book I'm currently reading gets carried around with me quite a bit. It's thrown (and left) in the car, on my desk at work. It is not exceptionally well taken care of. It's just a cheap paperback, in most cases; losing it won't matter much. There's a kind of cognitive tax to carrying around something you don't want to lose or have to be careful with.

Besides, I can only read one book at a time, so the ability to access any book other than the one I'm currently reading doesn't offer much value.
+1 for comic books about entrepreneurship. Only found your ebook when I randomly searched for your name in Amazon.
I would only go as far as to say that Krugman is a dissenter from the prevailing line of economic thought in the United States and Europe. He's useful precisely because the prevailing thought crippled our economy and has little success in repairing it.

I can't really speak to his relationship with powerful people.
sure not but I've got the idea of tractup last thursday and wanted to make it as quickly as possible (basically before the end of the YC application submittion) and I'd just a ready flash framework, then...
I'm glad you said that, I was having problems with that bit of the arithmetic myself. My time is precious to me, but only earns me money when someone wants to pay me for it.
Exactly.... This is the key pain point we are trying to solve! Glad to see you think it would be useful :)
I don't think your reason makes any sense. If it was true, where do you think they ended up with it?

Facebook was deliberately dragging its heals for some reason, maybe partly due to not wanting to help Apple's platform anymore than they have to.
Wow - 28,000 registered users!!! Definitely going to ask around in these forums.
Interesting article. I was under the impression that the kilogram was defined as the mass of one liter of water, but that appears to just be an approximation now.
Is that one new application per minute, or does it include updates to previous applications? Very impressive either way.
Examples in Number Theory by Terence Tao [2005][PostScript]
My suggestion, from personal experience, is to beware.

When one owns a snake, there is a temptation to think he's "my" snake--he would never bite me. But he's a snake--he just may not have felt like it so far.