skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My wife and I share a single car in Salt Lake City and have done so in other places, included Washington DC and semi-rural West Virginia. This setup is ideal, because we can coordinate our use of the car and combine that with biking/walking and public transportation. We also have a 2 year-old son who goes to pre-school every day and has to get dropped off an picked up by car. Sharing w/i a couple or family is a really good way to reduce car usage but retain the benefits of having a car. I'm definitely a proponent of reduced usage combined with biking/walking and public transportation.
How Kaggle wants to turn Rockstar Programmers into the next Roger Federer
Heard of the NetFlix Prize?

If you're thinking of dabbling into data science and analytics, and want to make some money along the way, then I highly recommend you listen to the latest Techzing interview of the guys from Kaggle.

In a 2 hour interview (no boring bits so it didn't feel long), Kaggle share their really interesting story on how they went from a website built and run from Anthony's bedroom to a company whose aim is to turn rockstar programmers into the next Roger Federer - girls, fame and fortune (minus the tennis).

Link: http://techzinglive.com/page/927/166-tz-interview-anhony-goldbloom-and-jeremy-howard-kaggle
Don't you think buyers and sellers alike should know up front what they're paying for?

I'd like to know how much is e.g. Apple paying Foxconn for each iPhone, doesn't mean I think they're wrong for not telling me.

(Purely hypothetical example, I don't buy stuff from Apple)
I gotta say that this change makes me feel a little funny. I use Android after switching from an iPhone, I like Android and I like the menu button. Further, I understand that there are relatively few ways to do what needs to be done to support application options. Further, further, I understand that Apple and Android have blatantly lifted bits from each other. But isn't this a near pixel-perfect copy of iOS's options buttons? I was kinda happy when iOS stole Android's notifications behavior because I could feel a little superior for using Android. Now they're stolen something else from iOS, I feel a little less superior.

And I realize these are big mean companies, but still I can root for one of them...
Me too. I was really hoping for an app that could take a scan of a handwritten diagram / mockup, and "recognize" the shapes, converting them into objects that could be manipulated (resized, removed, repositioned etc) through the app.
Tell you what...I'm a big Android fan. However, the removal of the menu button and the addition of the "..." action overflow button is the single biggest UX mistake I've seen on Android so far, for a very simple reason...the "..." is too small to easily press, and appears at different (mostly inconvenient) places on the screen. For example, a large part of the time it's on the far right hand side. As a guy who keeps his phone in his left hand most of the time, and who typically operates his phone with one hand, I have to reach across the entire phone with my thumb and hope to hit it. Not so with the menu button...it was easy to hit, and even if I had to reach across, it was easy to "feel" my way to it. I miss it quite a bit.
From you're massively oversimplified statement I can only conclude you don't understand REST. HTTP != REST. REST is how the architects of HTTP generally expected things to work, but due to tunneling, and other approaches to API design it, generally speaking, most systems that operate over HTTP don't actually work that way.

In fact I'd be willing to bet this comment form isn't all that RESTful.
I wish I can make it !! But my product isn't finished yet! #cry
Cars Don't Kill Cities (Silly Assumptions Do)
What? Its search is a regex, plain and simple.
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=45.528017,-122.598179...

We're protected from the busy road and the grocery store parking lot by elevation; we're 50 ft below either. We can hear the highway, but I only notice it when the din is missing when we visit friends in the country!
The counterpoint here would be that memorization happens more naturally when practicing, as frequently used knowledge is automatically memorized.

I remember school courses in history and chemistry where requirements of memorization was the largest component of the course credit. What I suspect is the real reason is that measuring student understanding and engagement is a hard problem, and memorization is easily measured proxy for the above. The problem is that it is easily gamed, learning decays into this gaming process and then, students promptly forget material after the exams.
In my experience, though, universities mostly do allow for notes in exams.
If someone pays their debts according to the pre-agreed schedule (e.g. meets the mortgage payment every month), there's absolutely no reason to make moral judgments on how they spend the rest of their cash.
Bug hunting is the slowest skill to develop, because it takes thousands of similar cases and the experience finding them to know where to look. The reason someone with 8 years experience can spot them almost instantly is because they have seen thousands of mutations of database, Toolkit, UI and self inflicted bugs, they learn over time to spot the fingerprints, that provide the trail to investigate. I think it is peculiar that we as an industry put juniors on bug hunting as some of the first assignments, when it has been noted by many that debugging is one of the most difficult and frustrating aspects of development. I think Brian Kernighan's quote is appropriate here:

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
You're right (I should have double-checked). I've been repeating bro-science. If you'll excuse me, I'll be jogging around the block for penance.
Today Apple, Google, 5 Others Battle “No Poach” Conspiracy Case
So much for the good news then, please don't shoot the messenger ;-)
Yes, it's normal. Low productivity for a newbie is pretty standard. Even if your programming chops are fantastic, you come into a new job knowing nothing about the domain they are programming in, which may be very complex and have a long history, and nothing about the tools, the code, the architecture, and so on, which may (and often does) suck. I am seeing this right now with a new hire where I work. She's competent, but just drowning in all the stuff she has to learn. I was here when our system was and designed and built, and I did a lot of the designing and building myself, so I have a deep understanding of how it works, an understanding that I think would be incredibly hard to come by second-hand. It can take years to become fluent in a big system.
What they need to do is identify all flagged tweets to everyone, either with a "this tweet was blocked by censors in your country" or with a "this tweet is blocked for users in Iran at the request of censors".
MinuteFrame: Frame a photo in less than one minute
They can't even block the most idiotic kind of spam[1], and now they will get this magic NLP working? Ha.

[1] @reply tweets from newly created accounts.
I wrote up my response to this article here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3516307

As a resident of Atlanta, I disagree with many of the assumptions this article makes.
Nice one Facebook. I don't know if you knew this or not, but news conferences are meant as a channel to share information, not ask journalists to say nothing. I think I'm going to share a link on facebook, but I don't want anyone who sees it to pass it on.
Figure out what kind of traits the workers you want (diligent, documenting) exhibit in a job interview and hire that type of people.
How Cadence Predicts Process
Personally I've always considered craigslist to be sketchy from a buyer or seller point of view. Since I live in Portland, I'll keep you in the back of my mind if I need to get rid of anything I don't have time to handle myself. I'd rather work with someone trustworthy then deal with the unknowns of craigslist.

(Welcome to self branding. :) )
I love your point that car storage decreases city density and therefore walkability. I was made aware in grade school that cars enabled low density settlement, but you have enlightened me to a case in which they FORCE it! Something you may investigate in further posts is that the path versatility of cars(and trucks) is also a waste of resource capacity on most long or oft repeated trips.
> We are going to change healthcare from the ground-up

This is so impossible!

You have a great product for 1-10 general doctor practices. You should focus on that and just that. If you feel like you have a lot of free time on your hands try knocking on 1-5 pain management doctors clinic. See how you do there. If you manage to customize their workflows and menus for pain management, move to 1-5 MDs obesity clinics, and so on. I suspect that after single pain management clinic you get burned out.

Have you ever looked at UMLS http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/ ? It has 2,612,024 mln medical concepts and counting. Many diseases are still poorly covered. Any time you talk with a specialist in a hospital he/she will need those terms in their documentation. Every disease has different workflow and different vocabulary. If a hospital thinks about adopting a new EMR, they will send ~100 their own IT people to EPIC/GE HQ to have them trained how to configure their system. Then, those ~100 IT people will work with ~1000 MD to have progress notes, flowsheets, and what have you configured to everyones liking. This is SO MUCH work and huge investment that has to have 0.0001% risk for the hospital and for the patients. Keep in mind that if patient dies and there are lacks in documentations someone will have to pay ... a lot.

I'm sure that some day you will have ~1k engineers and ~2k support team, each encumbered with basic medical knowledge and patient workflows. But then you will notice that healthcare can be changed only top-down not ground-up.
Add that to the fact it hasn't been posted outside of the US App Store and you got yourself a whole barrel of sadness.
Data exploration like this is very interesting, and a problem that's far from solved - so I'm excited about this.

A small UI nitpik: one thing that struck me from the video demo was that your drag targets were on the opposite side of the screen to their source. That seemed a little less discoverable and more involved to use than if they'd been closer.
That's well and good, but (1) most folks are not outliers and (2) thermodynamics is not subject to hormones.

As I said above: the "black box" is enormously complex but it is not observable, so it's not useful for an ordinary person. Caloric deficit works for everyone and it can be controlled easily.
Dude, don't worry - the 8 years experienced guys were in the exact same position 7.7 years ago!

I've just hired a new developer and he's forever apologising for 'taking so long'. I just try to reassure him that I know he's learning, and that's good - I want him to question what he's doing and does take the time to solve problems correctly.

90% of the programming problems I personally come up against, I've seen before and so I know the answer near instantly; but thats just through years of experience. Take the time to enjoy what you do and you'll begin to appreciate that you're getting the time to learn as you work, and don't hesitate to ask the experienced guys for a hand; they'll love the fact that they're the gurus.
> Any custom set of filters/searches can be saved and turned into a daily e-mail alert, too.

I did not know about that. Thanks.
I was under the impression that for YC the the idea was less important than the team.

How did the teams change between rejection and acceptance?

Was a different idea enough to consider them in a different light or is the interview process just sufficiently noisy that they were false negatives earlier?
As a busy person who finds your ideas interesting but has no time for riddles, I would really appreciate it if you could at least drop some hints here.
No, but when it comes down to "Censor stuff when asked" or "Don't bother setting up shop at all", any rational person would take option #1.

So let's see, you're Google, and you want to set up your search engine in China.

"Not so fast" says the local big cheeses. "You have to censor search results in compliance with laws X Y and Z. If you do not, your employees will be jailed and you will be shut down."

As a Chinese citizen, which is the best result?

Let's do a very simple payoff matrix.

Outcome A: Google avoids China altogether

Outcome B: Google opens in China and complies with the law

Outcome C: Google opens in China and does not comply with the law

Google Chinese Citizen
A 0 0
B 1 1
C -1 0

Only option B leaves all parties better than they started out.
> We've extended all objects including numbers to respond to the bar function.We can provide more specific implementations at anytime, i.e. by using extend-type on string, array, Vector, even your custom types

Mimicking that in javascript:

Object.defineProperty Object.prototype, 'bar',
value: -> 'whatever'

'foo'.bar()
(1).bar()
[1,2,3].bar()

More specific implementations can be defined on the other prototypes. This is totally safe (except for oldIE).

Making objects behave as functions (actually the opposite) is also possible:

MagicHash = (props) ->
f = (key) -> f[key]
f[k] = v for k,v of props
return f

address = new MagicHash
street: '1010 Foo Ave.'
apt: '1111'
city: 'Bit City'
zip: '000000000'

address.apt
#> '1111'
['street', 'zip'].map address
#> [ '1010 Foo Ave.', '000000000' ]

or

map = (fn, arr) -> arr.map fn

map address, ['street', 'zip']
#> [ '1010 Foo Ave.', '000000000' ]

And no, I have no idea how this could be useful...
I thought SEOmoz and Ginzametrics were almost direct competitors.

Does anyone know why you would use Ginzametrics over simply signing up for SEOmoz directly and using that to track SEO progress?
Ask HN: Real-time availability calendars in online booking engines
Many online booking engines struggle with one problem: real-time availability. Even well-established services like OpenTable are not immune to it. Ever been in a situation where OpenTable says there are no 7:30 pm reservations available, but when you call the restaurant, they say they can accommodate you?

Businesses find it hard to rely solely on hosted availability calendars (esp. when it is provided by a growing startup). Today, they work around the problem by providing a fraction of their supply to online services while saving the remaining to make bookings in-house.

Any suggestions on how to make inroads and provide a reliable availability calendar that serves the needs of businesses as well as provides real-time availability information to online booking engines?
Yes, thank you, when and how much?
Presumably the email would cover some of this. Records don't need to be something out of CSI, you just have to have them.
Isaac doesn't really refute any of the original article's points. He (clearly and persuasively) asserts that Atlanta's development pattern reflects the preferences of Atlantans.

The original author of "Cars Kill Cities" seems to hope that all cities can be more like NYC. A laudable goal, but an unlikely one. Many cities, like Atlanta, are low-density and high-parking because their residents like it that way.
I'd call this interpretation indisputable unless I saw jashkenas himself disputing it. In many ways, CoffeeScript is just JavaScript, minus a whole ton of redundant key-tapping.
Yes and there is also BillHighway which has signed almost ALL Sororities at the national level, OmegaFi, LegFi (Based in Lexington), and I'm sure there are a couple other that are less popular.

They all suck, majorly, we use LegFi and simple things like "I want to get an email when anything is charged to me" is not available and they don't store my CC info so I have to re-enter it each time, SMS support is non-existant even thought I wrote a standalone implementation of how it could work and offered to add it to their system FOR FREE... I never heard back. I was hoping that at least I could make the product suck less for my chapter but that wasn't even an option. I would love to start my own Greek dues collection company but can't take the time to build it out only to have to fight for scraps (As in I would have to sell it to each chapter). Note that the golden goose is that you get paid Yearly/Semesterly so it's the gift that keeps on giving. (We are talking $40-$60 PER member PER year/semester). Hit me up if you are interested.
I always wondered how much one can make by buying AC units on Craigslist in December and selling them off in June, in a place like NYC where weather gets very hot/cold :)
Crowd and offshore accelerated startups. Your experience?
GetViable has been working within the York Butter Factory co-working environment with 20 other high-potential, seed-stage companies to understand how best to leverage our crowd-source and offshore experience to build and accelerate the growth of very early stage ideas. At this stage our model is highly effective in keeping our clients focussed on getting their product out the door with the least friction and at an affordable price point.
This model particularly helps:
the business founder, without the benefit of a tech co-founder, to test their ideas,
attracting tech co-founders once the product is live ,
attracting funding by demonstrating a viable, working idea.

Have you had experience using crowd sourcing or offshoring to build more faster? We'd love to hear from you - good or bad ;-)

Full article here - http://wp.me/p20yIF-6D
I have recently signed up to AgelList and I find myself on it most evenings now, seeing what new companies and products are about. From a entrepreneurs point of view it's great to see what kind of products are being actively mentored and invested in too.
The problem isn't debt but debts that aren't paid back. Debt itself serves a useful purpose. As long as he's able to service his debts under the terms agreed upon, the rest of his money is his to use as he pleases. I don't think we know enough about his finances, like the cost of the trip, to be able to say that the trip was clearly unaffordable.
I _like_ having physical buttons. I can reach for them and they're right where my muscle memory expects it to be. I'm about to upgrade to the Nexus and I expect to miss the physical back button a lot.
Megaupload case weirder with gun charges, flight risks, and an inflatable tank
Motorola Mobility Closes Out Q4 2011 With An $80 Million Net Loss
What exploit was it specifically?
Keeping the trunk stable Wealthfront with Pre-commit Tests
Notable typefaces of 2011
Great, I'll definitely follow up on this.
This could use a better title; the noteworthy thing here is not that Pac-Man is NP-Hard, but that this guy has covered the computational complexity of a whole bunch of games at once.
You can't decouple urban density from traffic of any kind, be it pedestrians, bicycles, cars, buses or even flying cars, they go hand in hand. There is no magic trick to solve it no matter how much money you throw at the problem.

Show me the city in the world with the worst traffic and I'll show you the city with the highest buildings.

Only accepting that fact we can start planning better cities. Also worth considering, giving telecommute a high priority, since most of the office work done in these big cities can be easily done from home.

Suburban sprawl becomes a problem only when those millions of people have to drive downtown to work clogging the driveways, but traffic is not an issue in suburban areas per se, lower urban density wins again.
Not speaking for this individual in particular but in general its unlikely that businesses like this are going to report all of their earnings, are they? You can audit a cash business but with no receipts whole transactions never happened or have a paper trail.

I'm not condoning tax avoidance but remember most of the people on HN either earn six figures a year, will do in a few years and/or building startups that might be worth $millions.

This guy is making $15-30/hr, doing part-manual labor and has 4 kids and a wife to feed.

I guess it's a moral judgement but I feel less concerned if he was to not run all of his cash payments through his books compared to bankers and millionaires who put large amounts of money offshore to avoid tax.
Precisely. My math courses never tested my memorization outright.

But if after pouring 40-50 hours a week into a class for a couple months didn't result in memorization of the important stuff as a byproduct, you probably weren't going to do well anyway.

I'd like to be optimistic and say that that this is how memorization began to be tested in schools. Instructors noticed that the best students seemed to have things memorizes, so they started testing this as it's an easy thing to test.

For some reason, the analogy of a doctor treating symptoms rather than the cause of the illness comes to mind.
If you want to travel outside of Waikiki (which doesn't really count as Hawaii IMHO) and a few popular tourist destinations I think you're going to want to rent a car. Of course I'm not saying that the majority of tourists should rent a car. Additionally the bus has restrictions on how much luggage you can carry, typically you can only bring a mid-size suitcase each (it has to fit on or under your seat).
This is incredibly funny, but does anyone know why the interpreter makes such bizarre decisions? Why wouldn't it be preferable to just throw up errors?
FYI: There's a Y Combinator plug in there.
iOS's option buttons? No, not at all. They're a near-pixel perfect copy of Windows Phone's option bars:

http://mobileworld.appamundi.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__k...
Welcome to the world of JavaScript. This response is NaN.