skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These are largely trees for the forrest type problems.

The first problem is the same as the second. (eg. which data (errors ARE data) where)

Make all your services unreliable and it solves 90% of your issues as then unreliable services aren't special.

Performance issues in data generally stem from two places (underspec'd hardware) and latency. Which are usually solved best by buying better hardware (more drives not more CPU) and buying a network nightmare box and putting 400ms of latency in the network. People stop designing chatty APIs pretty quickly at 400ms of latency.
I can believe most any story of a teacher being preposterously unreasonable, though of course not all of them are true. I've had some bad experiences. But that's not what I wanted to talk about; I wanted to talk about this:

> On the other hand, I have no such qualms believing a version where a 16 year old who thinks he's God's gift to mankind (hey, I was one of those) puts something together that doesn't fit the requirements of the project, submits it despite being repeatedly being steered in a different direction, comes up with unrealistic readings and interpretations of the assignment or context of the class to get them to fit his world view, and then (even if he does get a passing mark in the end) complains to everybody who will listen about how he's being discriminated against and how much smarter than everybody else he is, and oh I'm so wasting my time here between all these morons.

You say that with loads of negative connotations, but when I was a grad student teaching programming, I loved it when students would do this sort of thing, because they learned so much more than they would have by sticking to the lesson plan. Of course, I actually rewarded them with good grades for going above and beyond what they had to do.

Sure, it was inconvenient for me to have students ignoring my carefully-made lesson plans. But screw my plans; classes are about the students, and I wanted each student to do as well as they could. In other words, I wanted to be the kind of teacher I had always wanted, and occasionally had. It worked out well.
That sounds interesting, and I hope you the best of luck with it! I definitely agree that the realm of academia in general could do with some disruption at large.

The point I was really trying to convey is that, sometimes, it's very lucrative to put stuff out with very little actual value or content. It's better to wait it out, and put something that would generate actual feedback since from this you can iterate and actually improve your product. Putting out content of the opposite nature will turn potential users away and will not really get you much of a benefit otherwise.

But after all, my opinion is worth what you pay for it.
A very small fraction of Ph.D graduates land professional research positions.
I hope people take any BOM costs that might come up with a huge grain of salt. The hardware component costs are only one part of the costs of getting a complex product such as this to market.

The way people repeat these iFixit teardown costs as net costs and imply that there is a huge margin is utterly misleading (as has happened with various iProducts in the past).

These tear downs are useful and nicely done though - a great resource.
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I write small, simple shell functions using a single busybox-like binary that do the same things as Perl modules. I store the shell functions in a local repository and load/unload them as needed. I make "programs" by combining different functions.
Unfortunately, the space program is a trivial amount compared to what's actually consuming the budget: defense and welfare.

Since the risk of this thread devolving into a federal budget debate expands exponentially with every post, I propose leaving the subject for another time and place.
Checkout https://github.com/hacketyhack/

hackety hack is an intro to programming (and ruby) app. A cpl projects on there - the hackety hack app itself and the website which recently was ported to rails3.

Since it was just ported there's a few bugs and more feature requests for the site. Check out https://github.com/hacketyhack/hackety-hack.com/issues?sort=...

You can always join the hackety irc channel if you have any questions - #hacketyhack
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Yes, it's true Invisalign are made on a large bank of SLA machines. It's actually such a large application, that every graph on "Parts Produced" for 3D printing has a adjustment for them.
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> What I think we're understanding now is that something that fails 1% of the time, might not fail for just 1% of queries, it might fail for 1% of the users and work perfectly for the rest, and that small set can be really unhappy as a result.

Excellent insight. Linux kernel developers have had a similar experience with the use of the likely() and unlikely() hints on conditionals; it took a while to realize that unlikely() has to mean unlikely for any user, not just "unlikely for most users, and likely for the rest". So, for example, it doesn't make sense to write "if (unlikely(feature_disabled))", because anyone with the feature disabled will meet that condition every time.

I've definitely had the experience that Google's automatic correction does the wrong thing for me more often than not; I almost always end up clicking the link to go to the search results I actually asked for.
I'm not sure that logic works. You're assuming that the Ads are matched to the query in the same way that results are matched to the query - that a more restrictive query necessarily translates into fewer ad matches.

There's another possibility which is that the ads are the query and the search query is in fact their match result. In that case, adding or removing quotes within the search query might not have any impact on the ads being shown.

Don't know which way it works, but it seems to me the latter would be better for showing ads without having any negative impact on search results.
Yea, totally. CT is still too expensive for nearly everything, and the data is unwieldy.
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What was it before? How did you test the change? What can anyone learn from this?
Ideas vs Execution
They won't be free. They're not just numbers.
I wrote an app to display traffic images for my local city - I followed all the correct avenues and got permission to use the images from local traffic authority. Part of our signed contract is that I'm not allowed to sell the application. I've had about 200,000 downloads and was number 1 on the Australian app store for a week.

There are people who don't seem to have followed any path to keep their applications and content legal (with the same app idea) and are selling theirs with the same content as mine, they seem to be on the app store with no repercussions. I guess I have that piece of mind that I won't get sued or asked to pull my app..

I've made about enough from my admob ads to pay off my developer subscription :)
Care to elaborate? I just found your comment interesting but I'd like to know what you're talking about.
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What about the equals sign?

=exactstring
Seems very inspiring. Thanks.
I dunno, this distribution seems reasonable to me: 17% A's, 50% B's, 20% C's, 10% D's, and 3% F's

Are you saying that the caliber of student in the EECS department of Berkeley is so high that even the bottom 13% of the class would have gotten C's or B's at another school?
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Non having a working space program will likely be an even more expensive proposition. Theres nothing wrong, in my opinion, with governments being involved in high speculative, but highly valuable infrastructure development.
If one actually has a true practical reason to be concerned that processes won't consume less than $1 worth of RAM, I have to wonder why anything involving a managed environment such as the JVM was ever up for consideration in the first place.

I'd figure when dealing with that kind of memory constraint the only real contenders would be things like C, FORTH, or maybe PICAXE BASIC.
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Finds the best answer to your query, direct.
Gets result faster than using standard search engines. Aims to reduce CO2 emission per search engine query.
I definitely agree with you that it's probably faster to teach a single individual with a mild interest in becoming more techie than, for example, change an industry standard for search engines. But I'm talking about entire populations of humans and machines.

Changing an entire population of computer software/hardware is a far easier and faster process than changing the entire population of humans. We're much more stubborn creatures than we'd like to believe, plus we also have a longer lifespan thus making any dramatic cultural changes (techie or otherwise) a more or less generational thing. On the other hand, just look at how fast something like cell phones or the internet is changing on what now seems like a monthly basis.

People will always do the same things they've always enjoyed doing: eat at restaurants, socialize with friends, play games, listen to music... but in what way technology is involved with those activities will only be affected by how fast the technology can change to become more human-friendly, not the other way around.
FYI, there is a whole branch of chemistry that exists outside the lab and dealing with the abstract concepts and mechanics.
I haven't read the book, but is the thesis of this discussion that the book is fatally flawed because Isaacson didn't challenge Bill Gates on the details of how NeXTStep evolved into OS X? This doesn't really seem like THE crucial moment in the entire life of Steve Jobs.
Money in the bank is lazy money that's not earning it's keep. In the US many checking accounts don't even earn interest, at all. Extra money at the end of the month should go into a savings account. Once that grows to a certain size, excess money should go into investments.

Money in a bank account is a costly asset.
So they actually are doing full implants like that too:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0955221910...

I know several labs doing it in Ti, Mg and even stem cells for organs. There are some amazing things coming.

http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidn...
Y Combinator is a stupid idea.
Fred Wilson: Skip School and Learn to Code
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Hi, I'm one of the creators of the landing page. We thought traditional beta signup pages were boring (ie. Launchrock style) so we added a "Ravn Hunt" game to our landing page. Our landing page was pretty traditional beforehand, but after the game, user conversion went up as people became more engaged, and kept playing for the invite code.

It also helps that we invite the top 10 users who achieve the highest score everyday so that people have a goal to reach to get the invite. And of course, the Facebook share button helps with spreading the word.

---edit---

Here's a pic of our old landing page http://i.imgur.com/ZhURi.png

It was pretty straight forward, full size image in the background with a simple Request Invitation button in the middle. Hope that helps.
You are thinking of iSuppli: They do the BOM cost estimates. iFixIt only does tear downs. Easy to confuse, I know.
I think this in an interesting problem you don't really have in a lot of tertiary education systems else wear (that said, I still think the ability to pick and chose a diverse set of classes is a great model, and better than most).

I studied in the UK, so you apply from high school to do, "Computer Science" or, "Physics" or, "English". And that's what you do. You have some choice in terms of the classes and courses you take, but (generally) they're all totally within that sphere. I think having some options to do other courses would be really valuable, but equally it means people don't typically chose to switch from an STEM based degree to something else, and people stick it out (or just drop out).
You seem to have fixated on the portability. Understandable, but I don't think that is the point. The point is to build a cheap but capable device that kids can hack on. The portability is a byproduct of that focus on cost: the fewer parts, the smaller the PCB, the cheaper it can be.

Keyboards and mice are pretty cheap these days. Monitors, not as much, but this can work with TVs, which are surprisingly common, even in the developing world.
Thanks much :)

(Obviously) I don't think asking why now is the right time for your idea is premature. I think it's orthogonal to the product building piece. I think a lot of YC companies could avoid a lot of pain if they asked this question early on, because it would lead them to talk to others who have worked in the space. Often they will quickly discover that the fundamental dynamics of an industry haven't changed yet and no matter how much time they spend building it's not worth their time yet. At the very least they should be able to point to why the other, previous attempts weren't quite right and why the time is now for this idea to take hold. But all too often companies just start building without understanding why the previous attempts have failed.
"Featured Stops
Starbucks (Coffee Shop)
In-N-Out Burger (Burgers)
Chevron (Gas Station / Garage)
McDonald's (Fast Food)
Jack in the Box (Fast Food)
Los Pinos Mexican Restaurant (Mexican)
Six Flags Magic Mountain (Theme Park)
Westfield Valencia Town Center (Mall)
Chick-fil-A (Fast Food)
Porto's Bakery & Cafe (Bakery)
Universal Studios Hollywood (Theme Park)
IKEA (Furniture / Home)"

First page of results. LA to SF. Next page includes "IN THE MIDDLE OF F#%~*?¥! NOWHERE!!! (Farm)"
Wanted: Low cost, small CT scanner.
There's a lot of non-standard uses for these (in my case, 3D rendering). Seems like a good opportunity for a startup.
You missed /Users/<user>/Applications/ .
Microsoft probably spends $7.5m on toilet paper too. They're a large company. Is this really that big of a deal?
I use Google as a spellcheck quite a bit, because it's generally better at working out what my tortured attempt at spelling really means than dictionary sites / apps.

I wonder how many of the 10% are intentional.
> Take patio11's advice: don't spend your awesome points on tasks that are ultimately unimportant. Or as some dudes from way back said, "don't give your pearls to swine lest they trample it and then turn on you."

Isn't that exactly what he did? Instead of wasting time on a crap project that wouldn't teach him anything, he decided to learn something new and interesting. Combine that with the ability to shrug off the occasional poor grade from a clueless teacher, and you've got a powerful combination for winning school.
Each one of these decisions involved numerous other people; these stories are still out there ready to be told. I would ask Siracusa why he, as a tech journalist, has not run down more of these stories himself.
So people start speaking in code.
I think it's forgotten in this discussion that the HN community is probably very different from the larger internet population when it comes to search queries. We all tend to do a lot more "exact/verbatim type searches" such as looking up some library package, whereas your regular user has a lot more "soft" queries where they're looking for a concept / business / song lyric rather than an exact phrase, and having proactive spelling correction is a huge help.

Correcting spelling automatically also probably helps guide those users towards higher quality search results rather than squatters who have purposely targeted misspellings of popular search terms to suck in naive searchers.

It's not realistic to expect a search engine targeted at all users to tailor the UX to this group; the best you can expect is some secondary options or commands that allow the extra control we want.
Moultano, don't be so naive. There's someone above your pay-grade that watches these things, like this change hurt the earnings or increased them. Then winks and nods kick in.

Not to mention that innocent things like favoring brands can do wonders for Google's bottom line. So you can change the results all you want, as long as you favor brands. Henry Ford and car color
So you come in with a preconceived notion of what the book should be about, and then complain that it isn't that. Don't judge a book by it's cover! Most people do buy a biography to learn "about [their] strained relations with their children" etc. The business side of his life has already been covered endlessly by so many people- a book about that would uncover nothing new.
Thanks for doing that. More implementations means there's a wider spectrum of places for developers to learn these tools and maybe even improve on them.
I would add that "building something that only tech savvy people want or would use" is not enough either to make a world changing idea.
They could have achieved higher density, but it would have been more expensive. The density is in service of low costs, so that wouldn't have made much sense.
I think you need to replace "pick a problem" with "pick a good problem". The distinction between those two phrases is a big part of the start up game, IMO.
You could just have the game ask to enter your email address if you want to save your scores.
Note the demo. page includes a link to the actual demo, where one can login & play with the software. I was wielding it a few days ago and it's fantastic :)
The article certainly identifies an important issue, but seems simplistic in it's assessment of the root causes. As a a bio major, who wavered between pre-med and business aspirations, my main gripe with science education was the theoretical framework it was taught in. It's mostly complete rote memorization of thousands of inane details, without any practical context to understand the relevance or application (no, labs do not fulfill this purpose).

If the implications of bio/chem theory were taught in a more practical, problem-solving approach, (a la computer science), I feel people would develop a better passion for science (as they did in High School with science fairs as the article describes), and stick with it longer.
I strongly agree. Though if I had to guess (I DO NOT WORK FOR NETFLIX), I would imagine that they're trying to stay on the good side of their content providers, since they're the ones keeping Netflix in business.

I can see where there coming from, but cannot take the same stance as them.
Why do you need to build a "world-changing" company in the first place?
In my experience it's more that more prestigious schools have a very talented student body, who are not at all used to failure. If something gets hard for the first time in their life, more of them are likely to say 'well that's not my thing' and switch, rather than say 'I guess I'm not a genius I'll have to work hard'. Calc III is Calc III -- you can look up the video lectures at MIT and see for yourself. The books, topics, pace, are mostly pretty standard at most universities, with some exceptions.

Also bigger, more prestigious universities seem to care less about their students and more about their research: see: TAs who are incapable of teaching, can't speak English, etc. When you're taking a difficult subject and lecture is a waste of time because your teacher can't communicate it's no surprise people drop out. They didn't sign up to self-study by themselves for a semester and take a final.
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Agreed. I think thinking about "Why now?" is essential to picking a good problem
I am afraid that it is you who evidently does not understand my point. I am not suggesting that some imbecile may transcribe in a manner to blindingly obvious that they may run into trouble. What I am suggesting is that access to the code for anyone with an IQ over 50 is a HUGE help in building your own version and that this assistance is not inhibited by copyright.

I am extremely familiar with clean room reverse engineering. You are absolutely mistaken if you believe that 'That's what you have to do to copy software without infringing its copyright.' Reverse engineering actually has a rather different history. Given a device, say a chip, take the inputs and outputs of said device which defines the machine's behavior. Now design and build a machine which reproduces such a mapping. This practice was frequently associated with 'clean room' protocols. The key point is that the team had absolutely NO access to the source code. And because such a clean room team would never hire anyone who had previously had such access they could be confidently said to have reverse engineered the behavior from the APIs alone. This is a VERY different situation.
Saw this presented at the most recent NYC Lean Startup Machine. Grant is one creative son of a gun. I'm very excited to see this app evolve (and get onto Android).
Yup, it was interesting reading some of the discussions about the design of the device. PCB cost was a major consideration. They aren't exposing some of the I/O pins on the SoC because it would require a more expensive PCB to do so.
I just want to thank you for getting it and not spouting off the regular crap that is regurgitated by certain people who have made it to the level you have (TA or higher).

Recent CS grad (May of this year actually)

Its more than people being lazy. Though of course there is some of that but you hit the major and more important points.

I wish the whole of academia were as enlightened as you are
That doesn't make any sense. It is the same as writing the software from scratch. The only difference is that the behavior of the original software which is being copied is effectively the spec.
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From Mexico myself as well.

The whole ordeal is by far more complicated than in the US, except for visas.

Starting is already hard enough by itself, so adding on top a thick layer of hoops to jump and bypass in Mexico isn't the best of things. The market is different, the talent pool is vastly different than sillicon valley.

There's a big focus in custom enterprise applications and consulting among CS workers and grads, very little product focus. There's a mindset gap where the majority of people believe starting, and doing something without getting squashed by El Goog or government is impossible. Convincing people that things "can be done" is an uphill battle.

Incubators are more of the generalist type.I applied and spent some time on my university incubator ("Tec") and found that the focus was in manufacturing, trading, and finance business. There was very little knowledge of tech startups. Accounting/Hr/taxes are pretty draconian as well.
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That the avenues converge is your assumption. The avenues may not be geodesics. They may be parallel small circles. Manhattan is of course a region on the surface of a sphere, but the avenues could behave either way.

Throwing together that promised trigonometry, with some approximations (using round numbers, ignoring the oblateness of the sphere, ignoring the skew of Manhattan's grid from due north-south):

40° = approx latitude of Manhattan's south end
40.27° = approx latitude of Manhattan's other end 30 km north
40000 km * cos(40°) = circumference of the 40° parallel
40000 km * cos(40.27°) = circumference of the 40.27° parallel
0.996 = ratio of the distance between avenues at the north end compared to the south
300 m = assumed approximate distance between avenues at the south end
298.8 m = expected distance between avenues at the north end

If the avenues are geodesics, they should be 1.2m closer to each other at the north end of Manhattan than the south end. Unfortunately a difference that small is probably essentially noise and below statistical significance to actually measure; the width of a sidewalk or a bicycle lane.
Board design is expensive for small units - but assembly costs for complex boards don't drop very much with large numbers.

Especially if Apple have every super high-end pick and place robot booked for the next n years!