skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How about a mobile app which would allow me to pre-order from food trucks? I work in downtown Chicago, and there are a bunch of trucks around everyday (but not within 200 feet of a "real" restaurant entrance, of course!). Imagine that the food trucks all posted their menus to foodtruck.com in the morning along with their schedule of locations/times. I could then see a menu of food available within an N minute walk of my building, pre-order and pay, and then go pick-up my bag of food. The food trucks would just have a net-connected tablet onboard which would alert them of purchases. They could mark menu items as unavailable when they run out. By taking the uncertainty out of deciding to leave one's desk and find a food truck, business could increase. Perhaps owners could also be given geospatial/temporal demand pattern information with which they could optimize their positioning.
But isn't that the same line of thinking this article is arguing against?
>the pre-programming part isn't a problem, it's mixing skus to make an order.

Sure, but is the pre-programming part a barrier to using a third party to do fulfillment?
You aren't unusual. A good server will beat automation hands down. It's the power of a bad server to fore a bad experience upon me which makes me love the tablet as an option.
Yes, if he doesn't believe what he says he is lying. If he doesn't care whether it's true or false, but feels what he's saying will further his goals, he's bullshitting.
This is very old thinking (like half a century old) and the folks most qualified to comment on what is music and what is isn't are those at the vanguard, the "noise music" folks, the electroacoustic artists.

For one thing, monophonic music can be very rich. The Indian classical traditions (Hindustani and Carnatic) are both primarily monophonic. The "monophonic is boring" comment would also insult Bach (ex: suite for solo cello, which is awesome)
I'm a native english speaker, and i always refer to it as "der Heimatsicherheitsdienst", has a more appropriate ring to it.
"Wrongness" seems fairly straightforward in this context: you're deriving utility from the work of others without the recompense that we as a society have deemed is their right to extract.

The major content producers and their organizations (the RIAA, etc.) are stupid, but I think it's rather hard to allege that they don't have the moral high ground.
Liberal bias isn't any more truthful than Fox news, yet I see it all the time on Canadian news. Although I don't agree with everything on Fox, this is just a way for Democratic leadership to silence the opposition.
I think that this is only half of what PG was trying to say. It's not just that hard work can be unpleasant - it's that hard work can be unpleasant and this blinds people to working on problems with large impact, simply because they will hard. He's describing a very particular failure mode of potential startup founders that he sees.

If this weren't a real problem - why are so few people trying to tackle actual problems that make millions of people miserable? Like health & sanitation in the third world. Or fixing the political process in the U.S. (and everywhere) so that people with less than a million dollars actually have a voice? Or matching up the millions of job seekers with the millions of jobs that go unfilled because there's nobody suitably skilled for them? Or finding a sustainable energy source so that we can maintain our lifestyle when the oil dries up?
That's the hypothesis of the economist Mancur Olson.
there is a better place for bug reports
The IRONY of SOPA
I am aware that there are very large companies that were originally funded by YC. There are some problems that do not begin with throwing some code on EC2 and iterating to success. Hardware design and production is the area that comes to mind. I realize that there are a few companies that were funded by YC that did some hardware design and production, but they are certainly not representative of the entire problem of hardware design and production.
We need to go on the offensive so that the compromise position ends up moving things our way.
why is this advertising spamlink upvoted in the news list? can't you use a search engine? any admins here?
Alan Turing's Princeton Dissertation
The owners understood quite well what made for an amazing experience, but they didn't feel they could ensure that each customer would receive that experience given the issues they had in hiring and retention. One thing that shocked me was that I didn't get pushback on the likely increase in credit card usage. While 1.6% is a horrible portion of net margins, it's a small price to pay for keeping greenbacks out of employees' hands. There's a shortage of competent people in America who are willing to serve food at [Chain X] for more than a few months while finishing up school, etc. Most who will opt into serving long-term will seek higher-end restaurants.
I'm working on this ATM, will be launching in a few weeks. starting in Perth, Australia but will try to launch in the US as soon as we have a little traction. Great to hear that there's demand for this service.
"How can we turn garbage into energy?" Burn it.

"Why do cats purr?" Evolved basic social actions, display of affection/assuagement.

"Is it better to boil or bake?" Boil water, bake cake (or get bake).

"Can robots change their mind?" Only if they were programmed with algorithms that enabled them to.

"Why do some things bounce?" Newtonian laws of conservation of momentum, angular momentum and energy.

"Why do spinning balls curve?" The spin of the ball forces air around it in the direction of spin, coupled with a forward motion this produces a difference in air pressures on either side of the ball causing it to 'curve' a path through the air.

I can't help but feel the kids time would be better spent aiming their question at wikipedia instead of another thinly disguised Google Co. marketing site! ;)
There is a simpler explanation: the perception of risk / reward for those problems is too low.

Reward = how fun the work is + potential payoff (money, recognition, etc.)

I don't think anyone is blind to those problems. Bill Gates is trying to fix sanitation in poor countries. I believe that's awesome. Would I do it? No, the risk/reward ratio doesn't work for me.
No business starts with all the money it will ever need. Some YC companies are profitable in the first year and never need more. Some raise hundreds of millions for capital intensive businesses like Dropbox. The size of seed funding is not a limit on the size of problems companies can tackle.
Importance of Context: Why Django is better than Rails is pointless
Obat Herbal Untuk Kanker Kelenjar Getah Bening
Obat Herbal Untuk Kanker Kelenjar Getah Bening XAMthone Plus terbuat dari keseluruhan buah manggis yang di olah secara modern dan telah teruji secara klinis sembuhkan kanker kelenjar getah bening secara efektif tanpa efek samping, serta sudah teregistrasi di BPOM dan MUI.
Hacker says to release full Norton Antivirus code on Tuesday
Startups aren't only for hackers, though you might easily be deceived into thinking so if you live in the Valley or spend a lot of time on HN. Ingvar Kamprad started Ikea, Richard Branson started Virgin and Warren Buffett started Berkshire Hathaway - all very successful entrepreneurs that wouldn't be able to code an if-then loop if their life depended on it..

It's about niches in the market, not about who fills them. For any given hard problem in a marketniche there's probably someone out there who is passionate about it. Hacker, MBA, farmer, or something entirely different.
> why you trust a private corporation to manufacture jet engines and brakes, and not checking for bombs is pretty irrational.

Naa, Irrational is when you trust airline companies that don't give their pilots 8 full hours of sleep and bribe officials into giving them passing safety inspections simply because you've been conditioned from a young age to assume that the free market would never do anything to jeopardize human lives in the name of profit. Now that is irrational.

I don't like the TSA either, I'm not trying to protect their wasteful security theatre, I'm just saying, leaving it up to airlines to somehow collaborate together to work on increasing safety isn't going to happen on its own.
"One of the many things we do at Y Combinator is teach hackers about the inevitability of schleps."

Or, as somebody wisely put it, "All good planning eventually degenerates into work."
I think you're interpreting "don't see them" in a way different from how PG meant it. Of course we "see them", as in "are aware of them". There're pretty common threads on HN and Reddit where people lament "Oh, wouldn't be awesome if <big hairy audacious goal> were solved!"

I think he meant "see them" as "see them as something that could realistically be solved by my startup". And that's not really divorceable from being willing to take them on. After all, if you recognize that something is a problem and recognize that you can solve it - why wouldn't you? What's holding you back?
upvoting advertising spam? get a free cert with openssl and a shell!
Programming books and sites
Unless the WH response stated that explicitly, it's probably phrased specifically to sound like a reasonable position to everyone who reads it, regardless of their position.

So no, it's not clear.
I found the median commits and committers to be interesting - there must be a lot of people doing a few number of commits, which is what I would expect more in e.g. forum posts than source code. I would like to have seen the mean too. As to the title, I don't think that the numbers really say anything about the impact of language choice.
Are you speaking as a developer? Personally, I agree with the OP that android's tools for dealing with this are really pretty decent and flexible. It's definitely something that I bear in mind when designing an app, but the range of screen sizes has never really made development more difficult.
> they will freeze your account etc

They do that to save money. PayPal has very low losses due to fraud. Maybe if Stripe gets large enough to attract attention, or starts doing business across international boundaries, or in Eastern Europe, they'll start doing the same thing.
You're only technically correct because of how averages work. Novice computer users make up a major part of Apple's demographic, and often times their products are more suitable. More specifically, there are a number of features in Mac OSX which simplify the file system for novice users, including "All My Files", "Date Last Opened"/"Date Added" sorting capabilities, and browsable folders straight from the dock.
By blacking out, do they mean actually removing all content for that one day, or just something symbolic like applying a dark theme on their site?
By that you mean Amazon could be the universal cloud storage being that Dropbox is essentially a client for s3
Lots of people are trying to tackle these "actual problems". There's just no money in it, so it doesn't get funded.

Or if there is money in it, people criticize things. Oprah has practically become a saint, for opening a school that graduates ~100 students a year. Foxconn provides hundreds of thousands of migrant workers with the money they need to send their kids to school, and they are practically the devil incarnate. It's complicated.
So your answer to my question is 'no'.

Android 2.1 came out on January 12, 2010 (2 years). Android 2.2 came out on May 20, 2010 (20 months).
Did you configure the server to send the intermediate certificates for your GoDaddy wildcard certificate? I've experienced similar problems in the past, but sending the intermediate certificate fixed it.
I think there's a strong correlation between hard problems and intelligent people being passionate about them.

You probably won't find many intelligent people that are particularly interested in standing in queues, driving a cab or waiting tables. That's because these aren't hard things to do. On the other hand you'll find surprisingly many intelligent people that are passionate about how ants build nests, how quasars work and how to solve a rubiks cube because these are hard problems.
I could solve problems that are extremely unrewarding to me. Some problems are very unsexy to most people. In order to tackle those problems you must be motivated by either extreme altruism, or a belief that your odds of success are high. The latter is probably unrealistic and irrational for most problems worth solving.
Oh come on. They're a hosting company. How was their service? Didn't you know what you were getting for the money? Would you have waited for hosting until a special offer came along?
I would pick a different example. The 21st Amendment rescinded much of the power 18th Amendment gave, but then retained: "The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited."

So, perfect example of the ratchet effect: go forward, but then not all the way back. Okay, okay, ratchets don't allow any backward movement, but close enough.
The size of the problem is not at issue; the type of problem is. Many problems have a natural path from small to large scale. Some do not.
I think Rupert Murdoch has been called much worse.
The most they'd ever do is a stylesheet change or an overlay on top of the text. Actually removing their content, for even a day, would irreparably screw up their search traffic in the future. Any site that big is being constantly revisited by Googlebot.
Isn't that what a web application is? Or I suppose taken to even more of an extreme what OnLive is?
I just put a blackout banner on my Android Market Apps.
--------------------------------------
SOPA is bad legislation. These apps are going dark on Wed Jan 18 to protest SOPA. Write your legislator.
I agree right now, but I've learned to suppress my initial reactions on these things. I thought Facebook had basically exhausted their niche in early 2007 and there was nowhere to go for them, and that's turned out to be pretty false. Only time can tell whether a startup ends up becoming another Facebook or another Digg.

It's not really where you are now that matters, but where you end up going. And Drew's a really smart guy and maniacally focused on his company. It's quite possible he sees things about their market that we don't.
Very hopeful. pg wrote similarly in "How to make wealth" (choose hard problems; choose hard options) http://awurl.com/HLZs3Bxu7

my version: life is suffering, so you might as well suffer meaningfully. Making something tedious into something simple can itself be extraordinarily tedious. But what a great thing to have done!

A problem is an opportunity.
I actually thought this was kind of boring and wasn't going to upvote, until I read that the images were from Mechanical Turk and your instructions.
Conceivably, we could serve the normal site to search engine spiders and black it for everyone else. However, we have a complex load balancing setup that may make this impossible.

An all-black theme would do the trick, but redirecting using Temporary Redirect shouldn't screw up search if we do it right.
Poll: Do you use app hosting or run your own server?
When building a web app we all really just want to focus on writing code and making it work. But some of us are total control freaks and choose to torture ourselves with server admin issues on top of that. What's the reasoning behind your setup?
VPS/dedicated all the way including hosting my own email
VPS/dedicated with third party email hosting
Heroku, Google App Engine, PHPFog, other SaaS
VPS/dedicated plus AWS
A mix of all of the above
I run my own sever (at home, office, wherever but it's totally yours alone)
The physical mute switch was one of my favorite features when I switched from a Blackberry to an iPhone. It seems to work exactly how I want it to.

The only time when I want something different to happen is when I lost my phone and I want to call it from another phone. Luckily the "Find My Phone" service is now free and solves this.

It might be nice to expose the alarm while muted feature somewhere in the preferences but it seems like a relatively small problem.
Dangers of Fracking
Well, the Protobuf PyPI package (which is two versions out of date) has not been able to be installed by Pip for over 3 years now. And yes, this is a known bug.
The current Indian government is run by a bunch of amateurs (if not outright criminals). They keep concocting fake issues to keep people from the real issues. Their days are numbered.
This trend will go on, other 3rd world countries will do the same.

The term "3rd world" is a bit outdated (it's from the Cold War to describe neutral and non-aligned countries) and is derogatory. It would be more accurate to say India is a developing country.
The security wouldn't be "faux" if the department were efficient and effective.
The solution is simple, just turn your damn phone off completely if you're at a concert.
How many 2011 box office hits can you legally stream?
Or, if you prefer a more manual approach (ie. my fellow paranoid developers) simply use `list` and `listchars`:

set list
set listchars=trail:•

In other people's code, use `set nolist` to prevent hyperventilation.

In general, explore `help list`.
Market Cycles
More precisely, older Android devices.
"it becomes harder and harder to contribute to a Perl codebase, the bigger it gets."

I've never written any perl, but is this really true? I fail to see how its really any worse than ruby/python.
Does anyone have her address? (Is she really going to serve 22 months in a county jail? WTF. I thought jails were for <1y offenses and pretrial detention, with prisons for longer sentences.)

Apparently her interim address is

Hana Beshara
c/o Alexandria Detention Center
2001 Mill Road
Alexandria, Virginia 22314

And she'll be moved to a real prison later, but mail should be forwarded.
Louis C.K.: The Man Who Loves to Hate Himself
There's some great gigs on Fiverr, but from the post it seems like you only had some mediocre results.
Your best option would be a 302 redirect to a SOPA-specific page. Google won't follow that and it shouldn't screw your search engine rankings. At least, that's how I understand it.
The problem I have with the iPhone behaviour is twofold:

1) The most common uses for mute are situations where you absolutely don't want any sound (theatres, weddings, etc). The iPhone behaviour makes it much more difficult to guarantee this than the obvious behaviour.

2) It complicates something that has an obvious default behaviour. It's no longer a mute switch, it's a "mute non-explicitly-requested sounds switch".

I could see the iPhone behaviour being useful -- it's more flexible after all. I just don't think it's worth compromising the common case.
I'm not exactly sure how it did this, but my old Nokia 5800 used to sound alarms, even when the phone was turned off.

The device would power on somehow, alarm would go off, you would silence it, and the device would be off again.
I don't think you have any right to the domain, regardless of trademark. I think it is arrogant to try to take it.
last i saw symantec is saying this is old code:

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/247376/symante...

and not currently running products: '"Symantec can confirm that a segment of its source code used in two of our older enterprise products has been accessed, one of which has been discontinued. The code involved is four and five years old," said Cris Paden, the company's senior manager for corporate communications.'
There are plenty of people working on sustainable energy. You just don't see more because it is largely still in the R&D phase- the problem is not executing the solution & monetizing, it is finding the solution. Renewables cannot yet pay for their own R&D, so they are inherently limited in research scale right now.
Your latter statement is unequivocally false, for what it's worth. On both counts.
Just a few other huge schleppy targets:

Better elementary/middle/high school
Better voting (digital democracy)
Better government procurement system
Better prisons or prison alternatives
IBM Ad for SAGE, A Massive Cold War Air Defense System (1960)
If you create software, and you oppose SOPA, and you're on Twitter, please let @rupertmurdoch know. He writes, "So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery" I'd prefer he not speak for me. Or anyone but himself.
A good solution to the iPhone's mute issue would be a gasp Blackberry-like gasp 'nightstand mode'.

Though it would not have saved the day in this instance, it would be a good implementation. So many times I do not want all my apps alerting me with push messages and emails and texts; I just really want phone calls or alarms to come through.
Better Electronic Health Record systems
No.

Absence or presence of trailing whitespaces is sometime significant, such as in big ereg in re.VERBOSE mode in Python.

Therefore, it must be visible, and if it is visible it must be removed when it has no use.
Inside the Obama Campaign’s Massive and Astonishing Data-Mining Project
The point of science is never the answers, it's the process you use to arrive at the answers.

Yes, you can search Wikipedia for answers to any of the answers to the questions you list. That's not the point. If you do that, you'll be completely lost when you need an answer for a question than nobody, anywhere, has ever investigated before.

I wish this point was drilled into kid's head in elementary school. It's not what you know, it's what you do when you find something you don't know.

(Aside from that, all of the questions you list have much deeper answers than the ones you give. "Can robots change their mind? Only if they were programmed with algorithms that enabled them to" is false in the era of machine learning, or tautological if you count machine learning as "an algorithm that enabled them to." "Why do some things bounce? Newtonian laws of conservation of momentum, angular momentum, and energy" ignores the vast field of material science, and questions like why does rubber bounce while clay does not, and why does silicone not bounce very much yet if you add boric acid to it (making Silly Putty [tm]), it bounces a lot?)
I resell services. I found a couple of good providers after months of testing (and failing) and advertise on many sites like Craigslist. It pays the bills, but it's something I don't want to do forever.
I'll start. I've been running 2 VPSes. One for an app that's special to me (as in I hope to make some money on it) and a second one I use to host multiple sites and apps on. I chose to host my own email on the special one even though it's a huge pain because I feel like I need absolute control over everything. I'm pretty obsessively controlling over that server. I've even totally wiped it about 3 times because I want to be sure everything is exactly perfect from the start. On the other one I have no problem outsourcing the email as I don't plan to use it much if at all. I tried AWS for a pet project but found it to be too complicated for simple, experimental projects. I don't really get into Heroku or GAE as I have trust issues. I feel like if I can't control it then it's not reliable... Even if it is Google running it.
No. Everything is synced (apps, settings) and there is still native-run code.
"I've never written any perl" that says it all. Try it, you will understand. B/w what makes you think ruby/python is worse?
If you are interested in erlang ChicagoBoss is a rails like framework for erlang. http://www.chicagoboss.org/
Making Noise (Ken Perlin, GDC 1999)
Paul Graham's Viaweb was written in Lisp.
http://www.paulgraham.com/vwfaq.html

Reddit was too before switching to Python.
http://blog.reddit.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html