skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My position on SF is close to how Philip K Dick put it: in SF the main characters aren't people, they're ideas. SF that purports to be scientifically rigorous in some way, or in some way predicting the future, seems to me to be missing the point. Science fiction is about today; it is about the world right now. SF is interesting in so far as it makes you consider the current condition in a different way. In so far as it is scientifically accurate, then it is speculative prediction, not science fiction.
Thanks for the post!

My group has been collaborating for weeks on our application. I think we must be on our 5th draft by now. At a certain point, I do feel like it's unproductive to keep second guessing how our answers will be parsed - we're just doing our best to listen to the great advice out here on HN, lay out the facts about ourselves, and hopefully make a good impression. Hopefully YC will like what we have to say!

BTW - my group of 3 is quitting Google, Facebook, and Microsoft to pursue our idea, and we will definitely do it with or without YC. It'd just be super nice to get that level of support.
Video: Jason Fried of 37 Signals Q and A  Creative Mornings Chicago
Check out the breakfast lecture that I taped/edited of Jason Fried answering questions from an audience of fellow creative at the August Creative Mornings Chicago. Cool questions about productivity, time management, and shipping good product.
" Open is a means to an end. It’s a means to a better, leaner, more reciprocal, more win-win ecosystem. And EVERYONE understands those terms. "

What? Those buzz words? They're even more fuzzy than "open" when you're talking about politics.
China group’s eye on Yahoo fuels privacy fears
Yep, and they're still useful: I use a logarithmic computation for fading elements in and out with JavaScript, and by pre-computing the values for each step and storing them in an array, the fade still looks smooth even on older hardware.
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The Best Books On Leadership: Approach Your Day With Tenacity
There's got to be a tipping point where everyone has eventually seen a company they've followed get threatened by patent trolls with questionable patents like this and gets behind the movement to ban software, business model, and other the other patent forms that are causing more harm than good. I just hope that this happens before we see too much damage to companies like Kickstarter that are doing good work.
Dear Rich Bastard: story of a test message mailed to clients
> A super-simple thread-per-connection program with blocking i/o calls from C or Java will demolish the most sophisticated evented system you could ever design in a scripting language

Are you really sure about that? Perhaps 5 years ago, but have you tried recent versions of node (V8) or Python? I have, and even as an old-timey programmer, I'm impressed.
That assistant looks like Bill Nye :-) I wonder if anyone showed this video as prior art in the iPad patent discussion.

Perhaps one of the most salient things to learn from this is that people with a vision, and a will, work continually toward that vision even when progress seems non-existent. A solid idea of what you'd like something to look like, elucidated clearly, can help shape products for years until what you imagine can be made real. When I saw Alan Kay talk about the Dynabook at one of Xerox PARC's lecture series I felt that here was a guy who had basically committed to this vision, and was knocking down objections one by one.
I agree. Other users have different perspectives and problems. Isn't this what hacking is? Taking something someone else worked on, making it work for you, and sharing what you accomplished.
The world has easily ten times the population it had in Leonardo's time, and also is probably less than 100% effective at discovering such people.

So at a conservative estimate, I'd say there are hundreds.
I work for a .NET based startup doing fun and interesting things, so I know that C# and .NET can actually be fun to code in. However, most, if not all, of the .NET job listings I see on Twitter are boring soul-killing enterprise jobs. Or worse, Sharepoint!

Fortunately, there seems to be a renaissance going on at MS. They realise they no one likes working with their shit tools. Sure MS technology may "run the world", but all the cool/fun stuff is being done in the OSS stack. When was the last time you heard of a hot startup using .NET? MS wants in on the party and a lot of their new stuff has a deliberate non-enterprise angle with a focus on developer enjoyment.
"For a given company, the partners just need to identify that there is some slight promise that makes an interview worthwhile."

This sounds very forgiving and makes me wonder how many out of those estimated 4000 get the interview.
Hands on with the Green Volunteers
Could you point some benchmark actually showing canvas performing at tiny fraction of Flash's speed? Considering that they both are ECMAScript-based and Firefox got even some code from Adobe for their JS engine, I'd imagine that the performance difference wouldn't be that great.

I found one (micro)benchmark[1], and in my quick unscientific tests, canvas-version performed quite well compared to Flash (70 FPS for canvas, and 40 FPS for Flash, Firefox 7 on Windows 7).

And I certainly believe that there is great chance of improvement, as the APIs an techniques are quite young yet. See Mozillas Azure project as an example: http://blog.mozilla.com/joe/2011/04/26/introducing-the-azure...

[1] http://themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2010/03/22/
A Potential Fix For the KSOD on Windows 7
The Collatz Conjecture nearly killed me. Literally.

For three months I was consumed with the conjecture. I slept, ate, and breathed it. I was sure I was on to a successful line of attack, using some sort of inverse tree approach mixed with a density argument. One day, while working on the conjecture as usual, I heard cars honking but couldn't see what the fuss was. I turned around and realized I had just ran a red light at a busy intersection going 40 MPH.

I haven't thought about the problem since.
I dunno if you are old enough to remember this, but there was a certain weirdness to using a cell phone when it first came out.
Interesting, I agree that passing around classes in Ruby is not a good idea, it's not easy to work with classes in ruby like dynamically finding them depending on name in a certain namespace. Such things can be handled "better" with a method missing chain or something.

Looking at the code: I'd be wary of chaining << to a custom class since it's a source of error if << does something clever/extra and does not return self.
I am not sure what you are implying and feel I am missing something but no, in France you cannot fire an employee without a professional fault from the employee's part. And "professional faults" are fairly well defined, and being part of a union is explicitly not one of them.
sounds like a hard-hitting group. Good luck!
>Apple continues to achieve a level of quality in their products that most of us aspire to as entrepreneurs, and the tech world is better for it. The impulse to belittle them in light of an impressive achievement baffles me.

Many have a problem with what Apple because it's trying to normalizing sharecropping in the software development world.
I have to give them a 30% cut if I want to sell software for their hardware. I have to pay them $99/year just to put applications I've written on my own hardware (effectively subscribing to use my own hardware). If I write an application they want to compete with they have the power to make my application unavailable on their device. If I write an application they somehow find distasteful or politically controversial they can make it disappear. Microsoft is following Apple's lead. Why would I want to support either of them instead of an alternative like Android?
I'm italian so excuse me for my terrible english.

in the next 24hours this proposal law will be approved or not in base of the choose of the parlament, that is very influenced(?) by Berlusconi, for this reason italian writers of wikipedia had written the advice, for make the italian people think about what is happening. I'm so scared.
I'd love to hear more about this academic dishonesty. I've been disconnected from academia for a long time.

For me, I specifically make a lot of my work public to avoid someone else claiming sole invention rights--as I have reasonable public proof of prior art. Though to this day this has never happened, and people have always given my projects more than appropriate credit without even having to ask.
It allows you to jump between banks, but not to overflow from one bank to another without explicit jump on the boundary.
Kinect will make sure your kids aren't playing the violent games
Cool article, it left out my favorite function though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothstep

This is the magic sauce you need. (more visual demo here: http://sol.gfxile.net/interpolation/index.html)
Ironically, this video was made at the request of one of the CEOs who was booted during Apple's dark period. (Gil Amelio? Edit: See child, it was John Sculley.)

Source: Insanely Great. I don't have a copy to look it up in.
In terms of ease of living and freedom from worry or want, relative social status trumps absolute wealth once you've passed a certain base level of well-being. Which I think the 1950's falls into.

I'm having trouble finding hard health data. The closest thing is that in 1972, life expectancy for the bottom half was 77.7 and for the upper half 78.9, while in 2001 79.6 years for the bottom half and 85.4(!) for the top half. Which amounts to about the same for the top half in 1972 and bottom half in 2001.

The top half life expectancy would be lower in the 1950s than the 1970s, but at the same time today's welfare underclass is probably significantly worse off than the average person in the lower half. I expect those would end up being a wash, and life expectancies would be comparable, though probably with a slight edge for the underclass of today.

That's a trade that I think would be worth it, given all the exceptional benefits of relative wealth and status. Yeah, no iPhones, but drivers, maids, home-visiting doctors, nice single family homes in fun areas, economic security, and ability to eat out or go to shows whenever you want makes up for it for most people.
This Apple image shows that iPhone 3GS is now free
I've been working on a project in this same general area (crowdfunding) and this scares the everliving bejeezus out of me.

Perhaps the only real revolution we can do to improve the system of capitalism is to increase the ability of creative minds to gather funding and address the needs of the masses. If everyone is a capitalist--if everyone is able to easily seek funding to address public needs--then things can get better for everyone.

This is the sort of thing that prevents that. :(
Yes, it's a must-have, that's why it's been part of LibreOffice for quite a while: go to menu Edit > Changes > Record, or to review all the changes to the document use the "Accept or Reject" function. It's all there, isn't it? What is it with LibreOffice's change tracker that you don't like?
If you have a source about the French part I am really very interested. There is a similar law but it requires a judgment of a court of justice, it is a law about public slander and it usually only requires that the "attacked" party is given the ability to answer in the same medium.
IPad and iPhone User
Yet another "XXX" is dead post.
Hopefully the major distros will just rebrand it, thus removing that problem and allowing for tighter integration with the rest of the OS.
I wonder when we'll start seeing startups created specifically to help people apply to programs like YC. Similar to prep classes for the SAT, these could help you fill out your apps, fine-tune your answers to the essay questions, coach you on interviews, and even polish your videos. Maybe advanced courses could teach you how to launch and market your MVP before applying to YC.
That's a valid point.

However, everyone whose work does not directly or indirectly lead to an applicable (or otherwise useful) result has been wasting their time.

Although I guess that's true for anything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system
Forex and trading pakistan exchange money
about Indonesian Lagos, Nigeria, China shortens COESfx Adds, Singapore's, forex trading activity Scrutiny of US forex trading, Annual Forex Trading Expo in Las Vegas, money exchange rate
The Open Project Fund - an Individual Oriented Microfunding Initiative
It may be even worse than that... one study was using FORTRAN.
> I see people every day come into an elevator and press the door close button like it is the only way to get air. Nobody realizes that the button does nothing. Furthermore many do, but they do it any ways on the off chance that it saves them an extra millisecond here or there of waiting. It never gives any benefit. However "may as well do it just in case it works". Trivial to disprove but still

The close door button on the elevators in my work building work as follows:

1. After summoning the elevator, if I enter and press the door close button, the door immediately starts to close--even if I have not selected a destination. If I do not press the door close button, the door closes automatically after several seconds.

2. If I press the door open button to interrupt a door closing, as soon as the door finishes opening the door close button makes it close. If the door close is not pressed, the door closed on its own after approximately five seconds.

3. When the elevator arrives at a destination floor, if I press the door close as soon as the door finishes opening, it immediately starts closing. If I do not press the button, the door opens, waits several seconds, then closes.

Conclusion: your theories on elevator operation are inconsistent with experiment.
The Story of Siri, from Birth at SRI to Acquisition by Apple
You brought up some great points there but couldn't those be generally classified as training? When I think of support I think of people who help the customer to analyze problems and fix them. If support people are spending time holding the customer's hand then I'd say it isn't fair to be tasked with support and training.
Why I believe Apple is losing
Operative word: 'fully'. Down-voted for replying without reading.
John Sculley. Yes, the one who fired Steve Jobs.
Twitter Now Has 1,600 Advertisers
Five govs’ tenure - Supreme Court invites Akinjide, Sagay, Adoke
It's conceptually simple, but there are two problems:

1) you have to detect near jumps that jump back inside one bank. (at least from instruction ending on 0xffff to instruction starting on 0x0000, on the other hand you can plausibly ignore this as it is very unlikely case)

2) more importantly, I understand that this coprocessor contraption does not interact in any way with lower 16 bits of address bus. You would need to actually snoop on address bus and detect the wraparound and as this thing is built from MSI logic, detecting transition 1 -> 0 on all bits of address bus - while conceptually trivial - would require significant amount of hardware. You can detect 1 -> 0 transition only on 15th bit of address, but then you really need to detect jumps in microcode and disable this logic in case of jump.
Haven't people been talking to phones in public since the StarTac? Siri's big selling point is that you talk to it in the same cadence as you would a human on the other end.
Did you pretend like you were talking to a real person? I could see the conversational style that Siri supports breaking down some of the awkwardness of this.

I would feel less awkward saying "Hey Siri, what's the weather going to be like tomorrow?" into my phone than "WEATHER. TOMORROW."
If you really want to find out about what makes Node.js tick, do yourself a favor and spend some quality time within C and the related I/O APIs, like select/poll, epoll, kqueue, AIO and all that stuff.

After that you'll have 3 revelations:

(1) everything sucks badly

(2) non-blocking I/O really is available in every platform and programming language

(3) you'll learn to appreciate older developers that have solved these problems years ago, without ranting on stupid blogs
This may be a good lead on prior art. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article itself doesn't qualify: Its earliest version dates back only to 2003; the original provisional patent application was filed in 2002.
tl;dr is in the one-to-last paragraph:

“A quitter never wins and a winner never quits.” In 1937, a self-help pundit named Napoleon Hill included that phrase in his very popular book Think and Grow Rich. Hill was inspired in part by the rags-to-riches industrialist Andrew Carnegie. These days the phrase is often attributed to Vince Lombardi, the legendarily tough football coach. What a lineage! And it does make a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Of course it takes tremendous amounts of time and effort and, for lack of a more scientific word, stick-to-itiveness, to make any real progress in the world. But time and effort and even stick-to-itiveness are not in infinite supply. Remember the opportunity cost: every hour, every ounce of effort you spend here cannot be spent there. So let me counter Napoleon Hill’s phrase with another one, certainly not as well known. It’s something that Stella Adler, the great acting coach, used to say: Your choice is your talent. So choosing the right path, the right project, the right job or passion or religion — that’s where the treasure lies; that’s where the value lies. So if you realize that you’ve made a wrong choice — even if already you’ve sunk way too much cost into it — well, I’ve got one word to say to you, my friend. Quit.
not much of a vc scene compared to SF/NY, weather sucks almost half the year, and chicago is generally underrated as a place to live for various reasons.

a lot of it is chicken and egg - the top talent doesn't see chicago as a place to go to achieve your startup dreams so they don't come here, and chicago won't be that place until people come here. groupon - meh. barely a tech company in my opinion, and (correct me if I'm wrong) smart, ambitious, top-notch coders aren't really banging down their door for a software engineering job.

that being said, lightbank now has plenty of money to spread around, and there is an incubator or two to get things going. can't do much about the weather though.
Drivers Shamed into Adopting Better Driving Habits through Crowdsourcing
Italian editors may have done this as a stunt to merely alarm italian readers of what a law may be comming, but the "italian language" wikipedia, even if probably mostly populated by italian citizens, is in no way connected to or obliged to abide by laws of italy, the state. There are probably millions of italian speakers who are not italian citizens, they are affected by this stunt even though they are in no way affected by this silly law.

In my view, this is italian citizens effectively seizing italian language wikipedia to push their particular political interests, which apply only to italy. I also think that the foundation should not allow particular "countries" to effectively seize language editions of the wikipedia and enforce their particular laws on all readers and contributors who happen to speak that language.
It's been like that since at least December 2010: http://www.geekshavefeelings.com/posts/whois-apple-com

BetaBeat has more information: http://www.betabeat.com/2011/10/04/just-a-cheap-trick-facebo...
Assuming we buy the processor horsepower argument, the only other problem I could foresee is that Siri pretty much depends on data connectivity, which means it's only really viable on 3G iPads. Your use case is very limited (although a really cool idea, and you've got me thinking I need to do this.), but if you can come up with a clever way to educate users about it not working w/o data, then I agree that it should also be available on iPad 2.
I used to find that some years ago, but not so much any more. Microsoft used to have a reputation for making a lot of quite shoddy software (VB/VBA/etc.), but most developers, even the most hardened OSS neckbeard-wearing types will admit nowadays that .NET isn't a bad framework and C# isn't a bad language.
Show HN: MailSlayer - An App Platform for Gmail that makes email awesome again
Keynote Disappoints, iPhone 4S Does Not | Ted Landau's User Friendly View
Paying for Beta Testers: A Case Study
I own a Blackberry 9700 which was a nice phone when it came out but have been underwhelmed by the 9780 and in some ways even the 9900 (no autofocus camera, no UMA). That's why it's the first thing I thought of.

I think I would prefer an iPhone if it were on T-mobile or if not that, at least the option to buy an unlocked iPhone at a reasonable price that worked at reasonable speed on T-mobile. Not so with today's announcements. An iPhone 3G can be purchased unlocked for $375, or an iPhone 4 for $549 but both are very slow on T-mobile at EDGE data speeds.

An exciting announcement for me personally would not have been a new enclosure, but rather the ability to run on T-mobile at fast speeds, all at a reasonable price. Wishful thinking, I guess.
MailSlayer is a Chrome extension that plugs in to your Gmail account to add apps that are inline with your Gmail workflow.

It started off as a Customer Service Application called Ticketive, but after we got a lot of user feedback from our Beta, we realized that people were using it way differently than we first expected.

MailSlayer is 100% modular, so you can choose the apps you would like to use and are not forced to use any apps you don't want.

The goal of MailSlayer is to make email better by adding useful apps into your current Gmail workflow so that you don't have to go to another website or service to manage these tasks.

MailSlayer provides a platform for developers who want to add functionality to Gmail, taking care of user authentication, data storage, DOM manipulation, and state tracking (with observable events when the user opens a folder or an email, starts writing a reply, and more).
Google’s Management Doesn’t Use Google+
That's what I expected, too. It could be possible in the future with CSS shaders or filters.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/html5/articles/css-shaders.html
Not that a law like this should exist, but why does it scare you?
I actually might consider getting a job at Mcdonalds if I was working on a startup (if I could make enough money to survive).

I could zone out and not waste any of my creative energy during the day and work on my own stuff when I got home.
It doesn't have to be some elaborate audit functionality. Every reasonable internal application has to have access control and at least some basic logging in place. Based just on that you can already infer a lot.
Back in 2003 I was a developer on a team at Microsoft that was responsible for building a new storage backend for all the MSN Messenger and Hotmail contact lists. This store had to hold data for close to 300 million user accounts, which we sharded out to a few hundred SQL server databases. Our sharding system consisted of a database with a single table with a row for each user that mapped their 128 bit guid user ID to the ID of their assigned shard. New user creation involved generating a new guid and inserting into this table. Each read operation involved a select from this table.

The database ran on a machine with enough RAM to let SQL Server do its thing and cache almost the whole table in memory. At the time I left the team in 2005, it was executing over 25,000 requests per second, with an average latency of under 3ms. Pretty sure that on modern hardware it would handle much, much more.
Are we just buying you stuff?
I haven't seen scrumwise before, will have a look.

As I mentioned elsewhere, StoryWall is clearly a very light-weight take on the problem.