skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I would stay away from using a web font in your body. It'll render slow on smart phones"

Why is that? I thought the system fonts would be TrueType or OpenType, and so use the same renderer as web fonts. Not that I know much about the technical details of fonts; is it possible to optimize a font for ease of rendering?
Firefox 3.6. (Yes, I know it's old, it's the default browser in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.)
No, ++ is already taken. So is . (dot operator). Maybe # would do, but they're thinking of using it for a bunch of other syntax in the future.

Anyhow, there's no way to change it without breaking backwards compatability :( And just adding a concatenation operator alone would not do because + would still behave in an annoying way unless it was changed to only do math.
Why shouldn't it happen anywhere? What makes airline tickets so different? I think you're confusing the fact that airlines have gotten their operations so screwed up that they have to resort to crazy, opaque pricing with some idea that it's necessary.

I mean, sure, fuel prices go up and down, so it's not like prices should remain static from even day-to-day, but doesn't it strike you as absolutely weird that two people on the same flight may have paid wildly different fares?
The Facebooks That Weren't
> after all, a 1 is a 1 even if it happens to be a string

Is it? In JS: "1" + 1 == "11"; 1 + 1 == 2
Because it is a headline, not a summary.
Ok, here's the issue. We don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing.

The problem: If it's a good thing... whatever. If it's a bad thing... Mass Death. Seriously, that's not an exaggeration. Any slight imbalance and we're talking catastrophe. Unless you don't think natural disasters matter much.

We're not saving the environment we're saving our goddamn selves. The environment isn't even a thing. But humans are, and we need a stable environment to get on with our lives.
"Build a holodeck", "Read/write cells for under $1000", "biological satellite that... deploys/builds itself", "build quantum gears"...

This seems more like 25 Startup Ideas for 2042.
So I build an application in rails on herokou. All applications require a blog for SEO purposes. Heroku doesnt allow you to reroute or do anything at all to the webserver so your stuck using rails as your blog.

The best case scenario is to have a static blog so it serves fast and holds up the dyno for the least. Plus varnish can handle the load as its static.

So essentially I want a jekyll blog which commits to my source code and lives in say in public/ .

Use case:
I write my blog post. Check it in and do a push to heroku. Voila its on my site.

I think all this is possible but you have to manually put in all the github hooks etc.

Everyone who uses heorku for hosting their crappy apps and even their good apps would use this...
Well, we have no way of knowing whether he actually wanted him killed or "just" savagely beaten, but it doesn't matter. Second degree murder is still murder.

Now, if you think this was some kind of routine police enforcement action that got out of hand and that the company boss had nothing to do with it, then I don't think you know how things work, especially in places like India. The police chief and top brass would most likely be part of the same social circles and would look out for each other's interests. In corrupt places, the power of the state is always readily available to the rich and powerful, whether it's quelling a labour dispute in India or a low-interest Fed borrowing window.

Now, when I first read the title I was struck that a company president would be killed by workers, but after reading the article, it suddenly makes a lot more sense, doesn't it?

Now that I think about it, it's also pretty sad that the killing of a labour activist doesn't surprise or shock me, but the killing of an executive does.
This is an interesting program.

However, I found the headline a little bit misleading--I thought "written instructions" meant natural language. On the website, the blurb actually continues "...written instructions called a grammar" which makes it clear this doesn't expect natural language.
Has Elsevier made any response to all of these calls for boycott? Are they even aware of it?

And are the other publishers looking at their business models so they can become less bad than they are now?
Thank you.

The Wikipedia blackout is over — and you have spoken.

More than 162 million people saw our message asking if you could imagine a world without free knowledge. You said no. You shut down Congress’s switchboards. You melted their servers. From all around the world your messages dominated social media and the news. Millions of people have spoken in defense of a free and open Internet.

For us, this is not about money. It’s about knowledge. As a community of authors, editors, photographers, and programmers, we invite everyone to share and build upon our work.

Our mission is to empower and engage people to document the sum of all human knowledge, and to make it available to all humanity, in perpetuity. We care passionately about the rights of authors, because we are authors.

SOPA and PIPA are not dead: they are waiting in the shadows. What happened in those 24 hours, though, is extraordinary. The internet has enabled creativity, knowledge, and innovation to shine, and as Wikipedia went dark, you've directed your energy to protecting it.

We’re turning the lights back on. Help us keep them shining brightly.
> 15. Airbnb for Activities

See http://www.gidsy.com
An HR Lesson From Steve Jobs: If You Want Change Agents, Hire Pirates
"This satellite would self deploy/build itself at least partially to reduce weight..."

...I'm pretty sure you're not going to save much mass by soaking in a year of sunlight...
Rebase works great when you need/want to preserve he revision history. It's probably the ideal process to put in place if you can mandate it.

One thing to keep in mind is that it might lead to a number of merge conflicts that may be difficult or tedious to resolve depending of how the branches have diverged. Merging may avoid these.
I'm actually kinda hoping this one doesn't happen. Well, sort of. If we actually had a holodeck, wouldn't that mean the end of all progress for humanity? I mean, who would ever want to leave the damn thing?
You would need to take on some mass from space. The satellite would have a post launch snack.
I wholeheartedly agree. It's not the failures that make an entrepreneur, it's the lessons that you learn along the way and the fact that you put yourself out there and keep on trying.

Thank you for your article ansd post.
Sansa Fuze's latest firmware update included support for something called "SlotRadio" - a bafflingly awful drmd music format.
Interesting list with some good ideas. At the moment, I have time and talents but (surprisingly) no interesting ideas to work on. I was really hoping to see something on there involving machine learning or NLP. Anybody have any needs or ideas in that realm?
You don't have the right to be noticed since it would imply an obligation on others to notice you.

And honestly if you purposely block traffic, I won't fault a driver for forcing him past, even if it means that he runs you down.
Why are lawsuits needed if it's criminal?
They said the same thing about the TV
Coloured Balls High Quality Wallpaper HD
If that's the plan, I don't think you've reduced complexity by plotting a zero-gravity rendezvous with a cheeseburger
Why are everyone in here so surprised at Google being in on this? Are tech people really that blinded by their fanboyism?
Night Ligh High Quality Wallpaper HD
Oh, I seem to have missed the Forbes headline on the killing of the union boss...
I am tempted to say these boycotts are (as of yet) having no effect at all.

Having bought the idea up a couple of times, I believe the majority of academics (even in computing subjects) don't know they "should" be boycotting, and most have no intention of joining in when it is discussed with them.

I wonder if most of the noise you hear is from people attached to the 'free' journals, who obviously have an interest in getting people away from Elsevier.
Internships are essential for obvious reasons, and most of us are even willing to work for free if it means we get the opportunity to hone our skills

Internships are not essential. At all. They're generally anti-competitive and exploitative of the interns. Young people with no experience think they're essential, but they're just throwing their peers off the boat. You should never work for free. Period. You're devaluing yourself and your peers and giving employers carte blanche to skirt labor laws. Never work for free, even if it's just bringing ass-holes coffee.
Ahhh, sorry then. Don't be afraid to cold email people though. It's not the best, but it's better than nothing.

Good luck though!
Feed on existing space junk and simultaneously solve another issue
Matching the salary of the competitor is pretty easy when the competitor has an agreement with you not to offer a higher salary for your employees.
It does not invalidate my assertion at all.
dave, what do you think should be allan's response here.. because this is stupid enough to actually be true and an honest mistake. But this is something thats going to stick around especially with dhh making so much noise, which he have every right to. I mean a startup might dig themselves into a hole like this sometimes.. so is "fix it, apologize and move on" a solution or as it seems to be the case here , allan has apologized thrice ...
You could fire it at some of the older satellites?
> Since they’re so persnickety about licensing agreements,

I'm not convinced that they are. I'm sure that an audit of Hollywood software licensing would find many unlicensed copied (their word "stolen") bits of software.
Which also makes it possibly the world largest personal collection of code. I wonder how many millions of lines that man is in possession of.
If I understand correctly, everything after "await ..., defer" block will be executed only after the asynchronous operations from the await block are completed.

Does it mean that it's impossible to return any value from a function that contains await block?

module =
dataPath: "http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=blah&callback=?"

init: () ->
# Fetch data and do some stuff with it
await
$.getJSON @dataPath, defer @data

# Return yourself (this won't work)
return @
If you include the time it takes the download (or find) a QR Code app, it makes sense. Considering that neither iOS nor Android come stock with a reader.
I'm following (and created) http://www.trejdify.com/ which is similar to HN, but it's only economical resources. The current site is a beta, but my plan is to finish the new version soon. The new version will also include a "tools" section with different tools one can use to improve your economical decisions
Which is exactly why they are before the courts.
Zero-gravity, self-assembling, space-debris-katamari-satellite, then? I've got this.
I added some fun ones in there as well...though OpenPCR have made really good headway on the cheap desktop bio hardware front.
E-books will grow a lot, but I don't see paper books becoming the vinyls/cds of reading. I think paper books will still have clear benefits in 5-10 or even 20 years.

* You can take notes and make drawings in the margins.

* The notes will be saved in a format that reads that will be readable for a very longs time.

* A book lasts a lot of years. Put it in a shelf, it might very well be readable in 150 years.

* It's soothing, it's linear, it doesn't have a thousand purposes. The interwebs isn't a click away.

* You can leave them at a friends place or at the subway after reading. E-book readers today does not promote sharing and I can only suspect future readers will be even worse. Although we can hack them and make copies, most people wont bother. DRM is here to stay.

* It doesn't need batteries. I know e-paper uses little power and things will evolve. But e-books still require energy.

* You can drop them to the floor without breaking them.
Go through this collection of finished ideas: http://www.ideaoverload.com/Find-ideas/#Finished
For airlines travelling to China: Demand is different depending on whether it is close to Chinese New Year or not. Chinese people travel far from their homes to work and every Chinese New Year they return home to celebrate. There are going to be so much more demand then than most other months. As the demand changes but supply remains relatively constant, the price must change to accommodate.
>and the police have to disperse them violently then the police are just doing their job.

If the police have to disperse them "violently", then they suck as police and should be fired.
Good brain dump.

This though: Bitcoin - "Let the IRS/FEDs be involved and stick to the law." You need to file under Things that will never happen. The U.S. will not permit a rogue currency.
That, er, seems obvious, and I would have thought has prior art...
Have I lost track of the plot here somehow? Aren't we talking about regulation to ensure big budget flicks can compete? This may be me failing at irony or something.
Recently forbes has started to stink big time.

Their articles are mostly lousy. Bad headlines. Hardly any editing done on the story.

What happened? It used to be such a respectable magazine.
The disruption to the currency risk also applies to china, india, russia etc. By having information control upfront this could actually be a smart way for the US to dominate global currency.
Yes.

There's a finite distance you can run this train of thought, but i'll continue: At what point does your system stop being Ubuntu, and start being identical to someone's WindowMaker distro, customised to use ubuntu repos? (Lots of desktop debian users add ubuntu repos for the occasional package.)
Commenting a bit late, but: the model is indeed simple, but that's on purpose. It's actually the simplest possible model that fulfill the customer needs.

This system does indeed currently handle hierarchies, slowly-changing dimensions, and provides far more than lists of data, including some rather complicated KPIs.

In short: it fits the customer needs. Not to nitpick, but I've seen many people going with more complicated solutions (including SSIS and the rest of the MS suite) only to find out it was a major pita; that's why I'm advocating simplicity :)

Just curious: which kind of technical solutions have you been using and are happy with?
Web Second, Mobile First
je vais faire circuler! bonne idée
OpenPCR is totally different from "read/write cells" much less "read/write cells for under $1000". A truly useful "BioCAD" isn't an engineering problem yet: there's a very substantial amount of basic research required. Synthetic gene circuits evolve rapidly, for one: let's say you designed and "CAD-tested" your circuit, how will you keep it from mutating within a few days? Unsolved research problem.

> Build a database for biology.

Better than Entrez/NCBI? They have a ton of data. Yes, not particularly user-friendly in the way the web community might be used to, but it has all of the data and biologists know how to read it. What would you add? (Yes, there's a lot to add -- but it's not a matter of a prettier UI, and NCBI does have an API already that people find usable).

> Reading DNA in vitro

What does this mean? Sequencing DNA without extracting it from a cell? Why? Sequencing is largely a solved problem now. Costs are dropping faster than Moore's law, and there's literally a thousand vendors who will do it. Even synthesis is advancing so fast that people are beginning to talk about not doing subcloning anymore and just synthesizing the entire construct! (Note that just because we can synthesize kbp oligos now doesn't mean that they're biologically useful in much other than bacteria and yeast, though... pesky things like epigenetic modifications and nucleosomes/genomic DNA packing... among others.) Also, the extension of "writ[ing] DNA sequences into plasmids using the capacitance of the cell wall via [a] nano tube" seems a bit far from current technology.

That said, I think these are important problems and I'd love love love to see more people working on them versus more web and iphone apps! This was not the list I expected to see, which is awesome. But the biology-related ideas don't come across as being communicated with much sophistication.
It can also be on the same _machine_, when you look at distributed data stores. One of the pains of "scanning" vertically is that you have to go through all of the machines in your cluster, where each takes a shard of your data.

Cassandra's implementation provides many insights into this question.
Not only data locality from the entity's POV, but also from the machine's POV.

Cassandra also stores the data on disk in a forward-only data structure (to avoid disk seeks), which is periodically compacted (deletes, updates) and employs bloom filters to ease up on cache/disk hits and misses.

I guess one more advantage of a practical column store like Cassandra is that you are being forced to shape your data to your queries (no relational calculus/algebra as in RDBMS) which requires much more thought.
You already realized why reading DNA in virto [sic] immediately is kind of pointless, because you still can't immediately make it.

Current DNA logic gates can already do sequence recognition as sensors in vivo but also provide flexible signals.

Also, there are already standardized part registries out there, like BioBricks.

And lastly, a YC for biotech wouldn't work because of the time frame, but even more so because of regulations. Anyone can build a device or drug, but it's all proof of concept until you put it in a lab or clinical study.

Oops, also that there are a bunch of academic bioCAD programs. Tinkercell is one that does extensive simulations.

Boom. Roasted.
In this case, the union leader and others were trespassing and attempting to prevent others from peacefully selling labor at prices lower than his. The police responded violently to prevent this. What's the problem?

It's sad that the factory owner needed to be part of the same social circle as the police to have the rule of law enforced, but that doesn't change the fact that the police were merely enforcing the rule of law.

If a gang leader was trespassing inside a bank vault, and the police beat him with a lathi, would you similarly object?
You're quite right in that this is a design choice rather than a defect. I do, however, have a preference for strongly typed languages (and there are very different flavors thereof, from Python to C++ to SML). I think weak typing is great for getting prototypes out the door in a hurry (or even just for getting up to speed in a language in a hurry), but dynamic typing really helps in the later stages of an application.
Perhaps web economics? The struggle to make money off quality content vs pageview CPM model?
Academics revolt by committee from experience. It takes a while.
Saw this blatant copy earlier today when the news first broke. You'd think that if they really wanted to copy something they'd do a little bit better of hiding it, but the copy is just bad.

Shame on Curebit.
The problem there isn't with coercion, it's with + being both addition and concatenation, as I mentioned at the end of my comment.

If you use any other operator (any reasonable operator), it works: "1" - 1 === 0, "1" - "1" === 0 and 1 - 1 === 0.
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also http://guidehop.com
I have read here comments along the lines of "Anyone doing that would be evil, but here it's Google. So it's OK. Google would never do any harm" (it was a post about privacy)

The "Google is evil" trend may be an overreaction to those comments, but it embodies a sane criticism in my opinion. It gives a counterpart to the awkward "Google is my big brother"
It's, er, interesting to see Wonga listed as something to emulate. The only context I've heard of them in before is people wishing fiery death upon them for exploiting the desperate.
They are surprisingly hard to grow like that believe it or not. That's approximately a 1 in 50 occurrence and the good ones command a high value. I tried for about 5 years to grow one like that unsuccessfully. Various conversations on the Internet resulted in giving up and returning to a more valuable carb-heavy crop (potatoes).
I don't know why, but I tried opening this site in 3 different mobile browsers and couldn't get it to scroll.
While they probably won't support a rogue currency, they may or may not support a rouge one.
Getting started with Django: Free Udemy course for Django beginners
They outsourced it to India?

%)
Why is Stripe for ACH payments necessary? Why isn't that Stripe?
cute...fixed it. What we really need is a spell checker that knows what I mean.
Yup.

I have a feeling he just has a bunch of ideas but doesn't know how they'd actually be implemented.

Though, I am using the new IDT geneblocks. I even got a discount on an order, so now ordering 500bp double stranded fragments is actually cheaper than assembling oligos. It's nuts.
>> Build the database of biology

We are running a biological data warehouse, with a clean API in 4 languages. The problem is that the source data are incredibly messy and you have a lot of "blank" values. People then do not know if data are missing or if there really are no data to begin with. Who does the curation?
PdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX, ConTeXt - which engine to choose for learning TeX today
Noob's guide to reading form data in Node.js
First, let's be clear on terminology: dynamic is the opposite of static; weak is the opposite of strong; the two are orthogonal. "Weak" and "strong" typing is about coercion; static and dynamic is about compile-time verification.

I personally think that if your language is dynamically typed, it should be weakly typed; if your language is statically typed, it should also be strongly typed. So I would (and do) prefer JavaScript/Haskell to Python.

I figure if you're going to be dynamically typed, you may as well be as flexible as possible; it also makes sense from a semantic point of view (my whole a 1 is a 1 is a "1" spiel). On the other hand, if you're enforcing types at compile time, having type coercion just seems weird. (Of course, you can have ad hoc polymorphism like Haskell's type classes that could do something similar, but that's different.)

I think the practical difference between "weak" and "strong" typing is much smaller than the difference between dynamic and static typing.

Finally, I do think the behavior of + is a defect, but not because of coercion. Rather, I don't like how it does two different things. If it only added numbers, it would work perfectly; the other arithmetic operators all work as expected. (Yes, I think the NaN behavior makes sense.)
If we get rid of MIME, won't we have gotten rid of HTTP?
Man, if anything this article proved to me that I should always be absolutely terrified of pressure testing half-baked ideas on HN. And if I have the balls to do so, at least make sure my blog works.
Some other big problems:

Prisons
Retirement for not-so-rich people
Government procurement
Shipping (in developing countries)
Customs (in developing countries)
Utilities prices in Northern countries
Digital democracy (removing corporate influence on elections)