skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i think it may be wiser to get the startups themselves to subscribe to a swag subscription service (not consumers or fans). then each month the startups receive different types of products at their office. they could then order more of the ones they like. the subscription service introduces them to cool swag that they can give out (or sell?) to consumers & fans of their service. different approach, but i think it may make more sense.
Well, given that javascript was designed in somehow less time and with less resources than superior languages it has obviously some inconsistences and everybody agrees on that. On the other side if you know the language really well you can avoid the most of the problem it has. I like your point of 'keep it real' but you need to accept that the language is far from 100% correct.
Yeah, and the reason is, if you do that, your product costs more, and you will beaten by your competition that doesn't have any problems with using slave labour. We do everything we can to make astronauts safe, but don't do a thing to stop subsidizing our products with the lifes of third world workers. It is precisily in this kind of thing where the goverment should meddle in the economy, like it did when it abolished slavery.
What's consumer friendly about physical media is simplicity & independence. My 2-year-old can climb onto the bookshelf, dig out whatever disc he wants, open the Bluray player, insert disc, close it, and watch it - THAT is "consumer friendly". Sure there are things to complain about with discs, but those are way into the "first world problems" realm.

When you buy a disc, it's yours. No remote server can deny you access to it on a whim.

There was an old saw "don't underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon stuffed with magnetic tapes." Until we get consistent >25Mb/s streaming cheap, you're not going to see Bluray-quality video from Netflix et al ... but a 2-year-old can deliver it in seconds.
You're gonna need a really strong argument to convince me that, all else being equal, building things is more damaging to a nation than blowing things up.
I think the families of the tens of thousands of people killed in the Japanese Tsunami last year would disagree.
Sure you can, you can encode information as gestures/taunts. So for four taunts, you have a base-4 encoding. It's great!
Yes, hence “RESTful.” The API is definitely not a prime example of a REST API since it doesn’t return the URIs of resources. It does, however, generally follow the other constraints.
Similarly, my first exposure to programming was in a high school AP (advanced placement/college credit) class taught by a math teacher. The teacher would give us an assignment and then leave the room for the rest of the period. As a group we would come up with an answer in about 5 minutes and then spend the rest of the time playing games on the class computers. His teaching method wasn't exactly effective for me, and needless to say I didn't learn a whole lot. I ended up getting a 1 (on a scale of 1-5, 1 being terrible) on the exam. The way I ended up learning and becoming infatuated with programming was with my TI-82 calculator. By trial and error I would write programs for games, class notes (hi-tech cheat sheets) and animations. In college I began taking "real" programming classes, but found the teaching to be both dated and lacking real-world application. I kept learning through side projects though and now, 12 years later, I realize that in this vocation, there is never an end to learning and that people can learn in so many different ways.

I think the misconception some teachers have is that if a student is struggling, he or she is either incapable of learning the material or just not trying. The reality is that it could just be a reflection of how effective the teacher's methods are for that particular student.
I think Nintendo has three advantages in the mobile-space (Nintendo 3DS vs. iOS/Android). #1, Nintendo-branded games. They're the "Disney" of video games, and have a large loyal following.

#2, dedicated gaming controls. Certain games need D-pads, analog sticks, and tactile buttons. Hard-wired controllers allow for more accurate control, and are essential in some "twitch-based" video games. Touchscreen's are phenomenally good for some types of games like board games and Angry Birds, but terrible for others like platformers and FPS's.

#3 is price. $40/$30 for a new game is extremely expensive for iOS games, but not 3DS ones. This may attract bigger budget games to the 3DS since developers/publishers could potentially make more on the 3DS than on iOS/Android. This can be considered a disadvantage too, since consumers may be deciding between one $40 3DS game, or 40 $0.99 iOS games. 3DS games will have to offer more perceived-value to justify premium pricing.

Currently I see #2, controls, as the biggest problem in the mobile-phone gaming space, which is why you're seeing 3rd-party solutions (iCade, 60beat GamePad, etc). Since 3rd-party solutions are not widely adopted and will result in high fragmentation, it'll probably require Apple or Google to design and release an "official" controller of some sort (ideally built into each device). If this never happens, there will still be a clear distinction between "portable gaming system" and "portable mobile phone/tablet".
How to get a massive amount of early adopters?
Well according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi

Practically, one needs only 39 digits of π to make a circle the size of the observable universe accurate to the size of a hydrogen atom

In my opinion trying to answer the question "to how many decimal places does nature carry out π before she decides that the computation can't be concluded" naturally leads us to what is known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
Apple likes to imply that you are doing good by buying an Apple product (versus, say, a Dell or Motorola product). As it turns out, this is not the case.

Also, when you're on top, there's no place to go but down.
I've only known Geoff for a short while now, but this will be a huge benefit to YC. Geoff has a great eye for product development and can really strip an idea down to its core elements.
The AngelList 2011 Yearbook
It's probably just a tribal thing. Libertarians know they'll do better as a group if there are places to run. Unmanned space travel doesn't help from this perspective.
Ycombinator must really be an wonderful place to be in, with all these smart people around.

I wish I knew how to get there from halfway around the world.
My problem with Joel here is that he's taking a good rule, not to rewrite software unnecessarily, and trying to make it universal.

Well it's not a universal rule to never scrap code. Sometimes the software is just so bad, so complicated, so wrong for the task that it must be scrapped. Large parts of Navigator, but also other things like OS 9 are examples. The original Mac OS was simply not cut out for an internet age -- like Windows 9x it couldn't be reworked to something current.

Even if Mozilla fails to keep their browser relevant, the investment is sure to pay off with a new widely respected system programming language. If you follow the reception of Rust virtually everybody seems impressed with the rationality and practicality of its design choices, explained and backed by solid engineering. Compared to the nearly universally panned golang (series of arbitrary decisions) or even Dart (decisions not backed by metrics), it's hard to imagine that Rust won't have a major impact on the industry -- that alone is worth scrapping the browser engine and rewriting from scratch.
Thoughtbot created https://www.apprentice.io/ which is starting to get some momentum.
This is great news, congrats Geoff!

Having had the pleasure of working with Geoff, I really appreciate his ability to quickly address the flaws in your product, strategy, presentations, etc.

He groks things almost instantly and gives really constructive criticism that might sting a bit at first but adds a lot of value. Most valuable advice isn't what you wanted/expected to hear, but you come away in a better position after hearing it. He's really good at giving it.

He'll be a great addition to the team.
I think this is more a problem with centralized services than with Twitter or any particular government.

I'm with Dave Winer on this one:

http://scripting.com/stories/2012/01/27/onTwittersNewFilteri...
I studied to become a computer science teacher. I have not finished my certification for various reasons but I have some limited field work under my belt along with numerous discussions and readings. And, of course, my anecdotal but legitimate experience in public schooling.

Let's get one thing straight: the problem is bad teachers. My mentor once said it kind of sucks that UTeach was only available to UT students and by extension those who statistically succeeded in traditional schooling because they are usually the least acquainted with the system's failures.

That "test" they show inside is bullshit, first of all. If they showed that to me as a completely green 11 year old without explaining the syntax or semantics of what was going on, I'd probably have to ask some clarifying questions. And, I think it goes without saying, if the professor is the type of teacher to go into a class with the expectation that half the class will fail, I'd probably have shaky confidence and would hesitate to ask questions since everyone is quickly cast into a mold of either "have" or "have not." I've taken math courses before by these people.

Many so-called "gifted" math students (and we're all students) are great with applied math but are just as stumped by theory as everyone else (anecdotal). Testosterone and typical youthful arrogance turns classrooms into settings hostile to people aren't extremely competitive and who are somewhat unsure of themselves. Combine this with a teacher who was once one of the cocky ones and a few snide remarks about how some students "just don't get it" and what you have is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If your students fail to learn, it means you did not teach them adequately. Learning is the product of the work of learners: you have to give them the proper resources to work with. Humans are exceptionally capable. Children are extremely inquisitive and interested in so many mundane things; they can be taught math. This is beaten out of them as they get older and they're told there is a cap to what they can accomplish.

Bah. Humbug.

A good set of resources for anyone looking to teach programming and/or computer science is CS Unplugged (http://csunplugged.org/). No computers. Much of it relies on human interaction. It's fun, it's versatile, and most importantly it distills the important parts of computer science while shedding the stuff that gets in the way: confusing, advanced user interfaces; arcane terminology and confusing history; and the stigma that a computer brings to those who've never worked with them before.
For a creativity boost, think outside the box...literally
hmmmmmmm

1) github
2) pivotal tracker
3) campfire
4) olark
5) cheddargetter (technically)
What never seems to get mentioned is energy cost. Sure, you can keep throwing hardware at the problem, but eventually that will lead to a substantial power bill.
If you go to space you might not come back. That's why explorers rock and everyone else watches TV.

http://www.wondermark.com/comics/326.gif
For those with custom hardware setups like this, how much time do you estimate you've spent designing, building, and maintaining custom servers?

I can see how it would be less effort than sharding, but it seems like throwing hardware at the problem is not a completely "free lunch" when you get to the scale of having to custom design a server supercomputer and source specially made SSDs and terabytes of RAM.
You may be right. I have only recently made the switch to wm, mostly because of the problems with gnome 3. Originally gnome was the only de that I liked, absolutely hated KDE for no real reason other than something about it bothered me. Then gnome 3 just ruined it.

Then I discovered wms. I'm probably more attracted to openbox because the stacking is closer to the sort of window management that you would get in any de.

However, I so very rarely have a bunch of windows open at once that I need to see all at once. And I can also easily open, close, move, resize, switch screens, etc. with the keyboard. I'll give it a try before I say that it's not for me though. Who knows, maybe I'll use one for when I'm working on projects.

Which tiling one do you use? awesome?
It's worth exactly what the guy is willing to risk to go out there.
Google's response to the mocality data ripoff.
How to Create Your Own Promo Video for Under $100
Sony, Microsoft, and Valve have gaming networks. Apple has a new one. Google and Amazon don't really have one yet, but they do sell games.
Sorry for typo. "Signal antenna" = single antenna.
For money / no money isn't such a great distinction either. After all, the Minute Maid corporation and a kid's 25 cent lemonade stand are both "for money".

However, there's a bright and shining line between corporate entities, and actual humans. Assuming that even low-level commerce is not something that we want policed, it seems like setting up a new line at the point where a business is worth incorporating.

Put simply, you have to be incorporated before copyright penalties apply. Critically, you don't have to be incorporated to go after an infringing corporation.

This doesn't really solve the business model problems of legacy rights holders, but it does provide a clear basis for moving forward, not just with new models, but with law that doesn't harm people's daily lives.
Perhaps a semicolon, next time? :)
Facebook reportedly plans IPO filing for Wednesday
Http://www.xn--yozgatsatlkdaire-jqc.com
The important thing is to not scuffle around a carpeted room with your wool socks on and then pick up the memory.
Recorded Webinar: Artifacts to Enable Data Governance
How much can you say about "how to copy?" The title is a QED.
Pat Sajak.News
Was Nike not particularly egregious in their use of sweatshop labor compared to other shoe manufacturers? Honest question, I don't know. I certainly got the impression at the time that Nike was way worse; if everybody else was doing the same, then I'd say it was also unfair to single Nike out.
I don't think that is their target market right now. There is a land rush on for people that do not have an EMR and do not want to join with a larger facility that already has an EMR.
Facebook to File for IPO Next Week
Ruby / RVM hasn't broken homebrew for me (thank god!)
You should've tried this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Yaourt
Numenta is hiring Python hackers and interns
So.... I dont understand. Is he about to publish something?
The Future Has Arrived — It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed Yet
I'd submit we're already there. I've read at least three articles linked on HN alone in which the author comes to praise eBooks but feels they must desperately sing bizarrely tepid paens to paper books lest they lose their hipster creds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Estimates_of_the_...

Various policy setters have to make these difficult decisions.
www.dev.github.com
I bet pretty much everyone would have a correct mental model of assignment if the problem was stated like that.

Try this experiment with five people at a public place, say exactly what you said, and give them exactly one try at the correct answer. I'll give $10 to charity for each one that getes it right. If all five of them get it wrong, you owe me an upvote.

(Fair warning, the terms of this bet are ridiculously unfair to you.)
Facebook Readies IPO Filing for Next Week
Every year there are between 600 and 700 recorded deaths from recreational boating alone (not counting industrial or military accidents) [1]. No matter how safe we make it, there will always be accidents, and those accidents will kill people.

[1] http://www.uscgboating.org/statistics/accident_statistics.as...
Why Your Startup Shouldn’t Build A Mobile App Yet
And with apple, they might even be serious about that "patently" part.
Still it's undeniable that progress has been made. It's incremental and there are trade-offs, in the future we could have protective domes spanning entire cities that would withstand that amount of pressure for eg.
And just how many Spirit probes could one send to Mars for the cost of sending a single human?

Based on a bit of Googling, the answer seems to be on the order of "ten", as a minimum. Numbers of $20 billion or so were being thrown around for a manned mission, and the currently-in-transit Mars Science Lab is up past $1.5 billion after a 30% cost overrun:

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story.jsp?id=news/Bal...

Given that the $20 billion is a pie-in-the-sky planning number and has yet to experience overruns of its own...

Meanwhile, what's the rush? Mars is not going anywhere.

And meanwhile too, is your human really going to cover 40km in a week after a ten month trip in free fall? Not at the present state of the art:

http://www.space.com/8978-trip-mars-turn-astronauts-weakling...

Or are we shipping an SUV to Mars along with the human and all of her groceries? The Spirit-probe-to-human ratio continues to grow.
> the author of the Lua

Actually of LuaJIT. (I was confused, because Lua takes great pains to stick to highly portable C code.)
Memcached is designed to be fast. Anything that makes it slower that doesn't need to be there isn't there. For example: authentication (anyone who can access the port can fetch data), indexing (you need to know the key), deallocating memory (you configure memcached with an upper bound; it keeps allocating memory as needed until it gets there), etc.

Virtual memory (I assume you actually mean 'does memcached not page data out to disk') would make it much slower. Since memcached is just that - a memory cache - if you're out of memory it just expires the least-recently-used data. In your application, you fetch the key, and if that fails you fetch it from the primary data store (or wherever else you can find it).
I generally do 24-72 hour burn-in tests on my computers every time I put them together and I only take them apart when they need upgrading or something breaks.

Maybe I'm just incredibly lucky. Then again, I've watched Dell and IBM service techs take apart laptops we had on-site support for without ESD protection, so maybe everyone else is simply paranoid.
That's exactly what I was trying to install. I just couldn't get it to work. No doubt some simple step I had overlooked, but not being able to install the installer was extremely frustrating.
I didn't down vote you, but try Firefox with a new profile. Odds are that your speed problems are due to an extension or years of cruft or maybe just perception -- on most benchmarks, the difference between Chrome and Firefox is completely negligible.
"Gone are the days (if they ever existed) where you could be a relatively inexperienced kid with a crappy demo and expect to get funded by by either group."

That's not true in the case of YC. We make a point of funding inexperienced founders if they seem smart and energetic. E.g. Dani Gross of Greplin was 18 years old and we didn't like his idea, but he seemed like he'd make a good founder.

We'd never want to get to the point where people had to be established (in any sense) to get funded by YC, because if we did we'd cut off some of the startups with the highest beta.
BTW, this description is mostly up to date for current FF versions:
http://www.howtogeek.com/58035/how-to-make-firefox-4-look-li...
Paragraph 71 of the ruling explicitly states that the claim of unfair trade competition was not considered: "Whether or not consumers confuse the products of the parties (or their licensees) is not the issue."
As a followup tangent, I would say that the strength of a teacher can be measured by how attentive they are to the work their students are doing. For example: a student might come up with a hideously convoluted but verifiably correct algorithm to perform multiplication. An arrogant teacher expecting the normal answers might throw it out. A patient and attentive one might very well try out the algorithm and see if it's actually kind of close.

The test they mention only detects one kind of mental model for programming. What if some kid is unsure about the side-effects of `=`? Do we fail that kid for having an intuitive understanding of something most of us are introduced to as undergrads?
Sounds like a good idea, but I remember someone telling me that there is some legal principle around transferring ownership of property and the distinction between private companies and public corporations; that it's bad when the same rights don't attach. This was around the time that Joel Bakan's book came out.

Definitely an idea worth looking into, though.
Although the 4 straight lines next to each other are also difficult to read. Having a differently shaped letter in there would help readability (people may think it's spelled "ilico").

Also, "illico" seems to be quite an overloaded term if you search for it on google.
Can you show it to us?
Is there anywhere to read more about Geoff's Rocketmail experience?

In Founders at Work, Sabeer Bhatia (who co-founded Hotmail) paints a pretty awkward picture of Four11. According to the interview, Rocketmail started out as a directory service (I guess, hence "Four11"). They were Hotmail's partner, providing them with a searchable directory of other users. But then through the partnership Four11 found out how many users Hotmail was getting and decided to compete directly by making Rocketmail. Things were apparently especially awkward because both Hotmail and Four11 were funded by DFJ!

Anyway, it would be really interesting to hear the other version of events. (Hotmail and Rocketmail were competitors after all.) Obviously, being in webmail rather than directory services was the right call, but how did Four11 decide to switch and what were the interpersonal and business dynamics really like?
Report: Facebook Filing For IPO On Wednesday
> It can be a prefix ‘this number is positive’ operator where it operates on a single number.

`+` in this context is the "Unary + Operator" which coerces a value to a number via the internal `toNumber` method of the operand.

It doesn't make the number positive:

node> +-1 // -1
I would argue that hiding things from children the way we do only works because we aren't always successful at it. If we were able to hide things from children with 100% reliability, we'd end up with young adults incapable of functioning in society.
I think any way of counting will have the same basic axioms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms)

Also See What are numbers, and what is their meaning?: Dedekind
http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~snburris/htdocs/scav/dedek/ded...
I'm curious what you mean by "community package installer"? If you're referring to Yaourt, that is an unofficial, third-party wrapper script that is unsupported by the Arch Linux developers and isn't required by any means. It does add some convenience for building packages from the AUR (Arch User Repository), but it's much safer to actually examine those PKGBUILDs to make sure they're sane. You also shouldn't need it for regular community repository packages, as those can be installed via pacman just fine.

If you do want something from the AUR, are customizing one of the official packages, or are trying your hand at packaging something else, editing PKGBUILD files and using makepkg manually is pretty straight forward once you've done it once or twice.

The community is very helpful and responsive...on the forums, mailing list, and on IRC. Feel free to stop by if you ever want to give it another shot and get stuck.
As I recall, people have attempted to replicate the results this blog post is based on and the result was debatable. Which is to say, not that they were completely unreplicable, but that under further investigation debate has intensified. It isn't clear that this methodology actually works, but it also was not conclusively destroyed. It's probably not a good scientific base to draw a lot of conclusions on right now.