skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can't see where I didn't respond to what you wrote.

If you mean I didn't break it down into quotes, an anal compulsive check list of points and responses then, yes, I didn't respond to what you wrote. I took what you wrote as a whole and composed a response as a whole. If you are looking for the list, I'm going to disappoint you again.

If you mean, specifically, that I didn't respond to what you wrote about Da Vinci's painting ability, well, you've said both that he was a good artist and that he was mediocre; and then repeated the performance again.

I really don't care whether you appreciate his art or not. The rest of the world seems to have reached a consensus on that.

A discussion of realism, naturalism, and abstraction, and their relative merits and practitioners, while fun, is way more involved than I'm willing to go into for a wildly careening off topic post. But go and actually look at a pre-Da Vinci icon. No, really do it. If you don't I've no more time for you. You tell me what the differences are, or their lack.

Da Vinci defines the term Renaissance Man. He had his nose into everything. He was prior to the likes of Galileo and Newton and a departure from Aristotle and Plato.

This really is covered in most undergraduate history and philosophy courses. If you want a discrete list of Da Vinci's major works and his claim to fame, well, Wikipedia is your friend.

I'm not going to do your homework for you, but here, let me get you started:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Leonardo_da_Vi...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_inventions_of_Leona...

By no means stop there. And the other "Renaissance Men" are also worthy of study. Da Vinci didn't operate in a vacuum.
Watch The Grey
Watch The Grey Online film making is by Masanobu Takayanagi under Liddell Entertainment, Scott Free Productions, and 1984 Private Defense Contractors studio. The movie is distributed by Open Road Films which is planned to be release on the 27th of January, 2012.
The industry is much different today than it was when Epic was small. Even established companies now struggle to keep their clients from migrating to Epic. Epic's ability to connect different hospitals and physician practices trumps most other functionality.
ADP (www.adp.com) is a company which provides pretty much all of the mentioned services. My employer uses them as the corporate portal for W2s, vacation/sick time and etc. The user experience is terrible and the site won't render right in anything but IE. But these guys thrive because there is no competition. This is obviously not your typical trendy and entertaining niche to be in. It doesn't appeal to most people, like a picture of video sharing service. It's hard to break into the market. Most startups these days are after quick money. They'll roll out, get a decent user-base and sell out the moment they can. Creating a startup in this niche would require a lot ass-busting work and PR to get paying clients.
"Inspired"? Sorry, but are you trolling? It's about as close to an exact copy as you can get.
Thank you sir may I have another?
that's the point... we are very efficient at getting restaurant reservations or booking flights or doing video chats with random people around the globe, but we can't apply technology to the most basic, fundamental problems that we are actually facing
Depended completely on the site. The first UNIX machine I worked on (ca 1985-1986) still was putting them in /usr for instance.

There were certainly sites that used /u for what is now commonly /home (or /export/home on Solaris, /Users on OS/X, ...) This was not something that predated "/usr" though: /usr was already added back in the early 1970s (the linked article was correct about that, although it got many other details wrong)

Basically /usr was originally only for home directories (as the name implies) Then it became the place for anything you didn't want to use the precious space on the root filesystem for (hence /usr/bin popped up, and later things like /usr/dict/words) Finally, it became so cluttered that people started locating home directories elsewhere and now the name "/usr" is completely unrelated to its actual purpose.
I copied this info from our bootstrapped startup annual report. This info covers development and first month revenues.

Money and hours spent:

10$ + 2 days - domain+naming

9$/m - hosting

0$ - 1 week - webdesign (~ 3000$ value)

0$ - 1 day - front-end development (~ 300$ value)

0$ - 1 week - development (~ 1500$ value)

0$ - 6 days - copy writing (~ 500$ value)

- Facebook official page created 05.05.2011

- Money and hours spent on advertising : ~ 200 $ + 1 month work (~ 4000$ value)

- Over 800 emails received and replied

- 12 paying costumers. (450x12=5400 euro)

- 3 refund (250x3=750 euro)

- Profit - 4650 euro

P.S. Actually I should spend 10000$ for the launch, but because I did everything myself, I didn't spend so much money. I spent too much time learning graphic design, marketing, seo and my expertise on my startup subject. And some coding skills. But because all of them were already familiar to me as a hobby, I dont't count the time spent on learning developing my startup.
It's a waste of tax money, but there are clearly a lot of rich people who would pay for private space tourism.

Going for #3, combined with LEO manned spaceflight on a commercial basis, and then maybe a Mars or Lunar mission privately financed, would be fine with me, even if the same money in government would be more productively spent on aid to the poor or lowering taxes. Let the government spend money on purely scientific missions (with robots or telescopes), and maybe on establishing regulatory frameworks and contracts for specific amounts of space freight to cover government missions.

(If things keep going well technologically, we could have a Mars Direct mission for about 2x the cost of a series of movies about a Mars mission... at that point, it actually becomes worthwhile for private financiers to do it for the media rights.)
you can make the smallest viable product even smaller when you pinch designs and externalise the costs of your asset hosting!
I'm confused why twitter even has to do anything here.

For example: http://chillingeffects.org/dmca512c/notice.cgi?NoticeID=1860...

Is it really illegal to link to infringing material?

Oh.. that's right. http://www.2600.com/news/112801-files/universal.html

Wow, that's so stupid. Why don't they just strip the hyperlink part and leave the URLs un-linked? It'd be a nice legal way to comply while disagreeing.
INoobs: 6 Words Any CMS Admin or Blogger Should Know
> why would you be "devastated"?

Because they feel like they contributed directly to the death of another human being.
We used to have a computer play a gong noise when we sold something. It was just an email client that got a copy of all the receipts and played a sound when mail came in. That got really annoying so we killed it.

Now we have a physical gong in the office that our sales reps get to bang on. We don't learn from our mistakes.
Probably, he meant that the happy smiling guy was replaced by another.

They could have gone with a headset hottie instead (http://www.headsethotties.com/).
Anonymous seems (to me) mainly to be attention-seekers. I'm not convinced that their DDOS attacks on various sites actually accomplish anything, other than to make the server admins' lives hell until the sites are back up. Further, there are legal avenues for the kinds of protest Anonymous claims to support.

This is just my two cents' worth, and more than likely isn't representative of the rest of HN.
thanks, but I think I stick to asana for now.
As someone who comes from a Windows (and further-back, OS/2) background, the directory structure of -nix systems is baffling. It's really interesting to read the background on why it came to be structured a certain way, but I feel that the current structure doesn't jive with how we use computers in a modern way. The structure seems to be optimized for single-file command-line based applications and are not well suited to today's much more complicated GUI applications.

Mac OS X, I think, has done a decent job of structuring the file system to be more user friendly despite the -nix background.

Modern use cases typically revolve around either installation and use of specific applications, often with dozens or hundreds of files needed, and data storage. In Windows/Mac, applications (for the most part) are installed into their own individual application folder and a GUI (as opposed to the PATH) is used to provide easy access to the application. This makes it easy to 1) know where to put a program you're installing, 2) know how to locate a program after install, and 3) keeps all the application components in a single place for easy move or removal.

In my somewhat limited experience with Linux, I find that the complicated nature of the file system makes package management systems necessary to simply keep track of where all the files are: executable in /usr/local/share/bin, configuration files in /etc, libraries in /usr/lib, and I'm not sure where non-binary resources of an application get stored.

I once installed my favorite browser (Opera) in Ubuntu. It didn't make a desktop or Applcation menu icon for some reason, so I figured I'd just go make a icon to point to it. It took quite a while to just figure out where the executable was at.

This could very well be one of the reasons that many people find Linux on the desktop difficult to use. They don't understand where anything goes.

I hope that one day one Linux distribution will at least step up and consider restructuring the file system to be more friendly and straight forward and to take advantage of the availability of long file names.
Cisco working on project "Futurama"
For what it's worth, I have a 10.1 Tab. I use it to play a couple games that work better on tablets than on phones, surf the internet in places a laptop is inconvenient, a couple neat art/drawing programs, read comic books and PDFs, watch a couple movies, and because of the stunning battery life listen to google music or streaming radio when I'm in the kitchen cooking.

There's probably half a dozen other uses for it, but those are the majority cases.

But it's not like there's a huge difference in my use cases from my friends who have iPads. I just happen to like how Android does it's thing better than how iOS does it's thing. I feel like I'm using a proper portable computer rather than an appliance. But I can see how plenty of other people prefer the appliance.

I also like the price point on apps, between Amazon for daily free apps and just the regular old Google Market for free apps, I've pretty much not had to pay for anything on my table (and I don't pirate apps for it either).
ASUS is a direct licensee from PrimeSense for their depth sensing technology for the ASUS Xtion/Xtion Pro. I wonder whether there's a difference between that hardware and the Kinect-branded system that's going into this laptop.

http://us.estore.asus.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=3...
"You've opted out, but you can opt in at any time." I am really surprised that the majority of readers of HN have not opted out from being tracked.
For some reason, I thought that Intel had abandoned the Itanium platform. I was surprised to see that HP was still marketing machines based on that processor line.
Nothing is perfectly safe, but if you could make space travel as safe as boating then I'd say heliodor was correct.
> The mystery is this: Who has been buying the general-purpose Android tablets, and for what uses?

The few (German) Android fans I know go download console emulators or are trying to use their tablets to stream movies from shady websites using Flash. This makes it completely acceptable to have a terrible tablet app selection and works fine without ever paying $$$ on the Android market.

I know this is only anecdotal, but Android is clearly better for these activities. I can only watch some DVDs I ripped myself on my iPad because I got the VLC app during its short airtime on the App Store. :(
Also, your body converts starch into glucose, so starch can spike your blood sugar the same way. Fiber makes your body absorb glucose more gradually, which is why it's important to eat starch and sugar as part of whole foods, rather than in refined form.
> Oh man... if only we had all statically-compiled Linux systems these days.

Would you mind buying me a memory upgrade when this happens? I'll need one.
Just the capability to share memory with other apps is what requires the sacrifice in efficiency. It means that apps can't control what and when parts of themselves are paged out to disk. If they could, they might only page out infrequently used data, as opposed to data that needs to be available quickly for responsiveness.
I have a hard time believing that they're subsidizing it by a full $100. The ASUS Xtion Pro Live sells for $200, presumably at a profit, and the only feature difference I can see between that and the Kinect is that the Kinect has two more microphones and built-in AEC. On the other hand, maybe two mics and audio processing really does add $50 to the cost.
You are right. My argument would be that the fundamental problems may not be solvable. Though I think in smaller countries the problems can be mitigated effectively. Example I believe in Singapore you can pay your taxes online.
Hey - I'm one of the founders of Curebit, and yes - it was a boneheaded move..

We had a different homepage, were a/b testing different pages, came across the 37signals post and were like 'wow we should see how that converts!' We are big fans of rails and what 37signals is doing and did not really think through the implications of what we were doing. We just kind of thought about it as a fun test to run.

Clearly it was stupid. It was not meant to offend anyone and we are adding credit where due. (We'll take it down if DHH insists!)

Our new designer will take a crack at more than our homepage... we need all our UI "designed".. not redesigned, but designed - because we're primarily backend guys. Yes, this landing page variation was heavily inspired (read: blatantly ripped off) from Highrise -- because these are the peeps we aspire to, and they've done a lot of testing to figure out what works: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-tes...

We're running a "ghetto test" - this homepage variant does not even share a common CSS file with the rest of the code base. It's been live less than a week.

The idea was to just see how the conversion characteristics were before investing a lot of time into making a "real design" out of the lessons (prominent testimonial, light copy focused on value props). Hence the hot linking, inline styles, etc. It is personally my fault for not including a credit to Highrise for the design.. that credit is well deserved and will be added shortly - a big oversight on my part.. we launch some stuff fast (other things deliberately), and this was one of those fast things.

Lesson to us: add credits, and be more explicit what we're testing... ask permission instead of asking for forgiveness. In the meantime, please forgive us? :)
I don't know what kind of work you are doing but $25 is low even if it was a full-time gig, for doing just small tasks its absurdly low, I think you're right to drop them, that they would even expect you to be available for tasks less than 1 hour and then to nickel and dime you on that is ridiculous, you only get that kind of privilege when you're employing someone full time.
A slightly less annoying suggestion: rig up a box to make a noise every time a build passes the tests on your CI server. I suggest a golf clap, or the sound of a slot machine paying out.
You want the government snooping around in your medical history?
One of the odd things about many businesses that involve providing expert services is that clients partly evaluate quality by assuming that high-price providers must have better quality. That may or may not be true, but if you are dedicated to developing your craft, you can learn how to provide high-quality services. Then you should make sure to bill for those high-quality services, to get proper return from your investment in developing your skills.

My wife is a solo-practice businesswoman (a piano teacher). From the beginning, I have advised her always to set her rates as high as those she hears about from other teachers in town. I know enough about her musicianship and her thoroughness as a teacher to know that she is worth as much as any piano teacher in town, and every minute that she contracts for at a lower price is a minute she could have contracted for at a higher price. Over the years, she has had quite a few long-term clients, and she has become quite busy. She is very grateful, of course, to clients she had when she was still building up her portfolio of clients. But whenever she adjusts her rates or her terms, she eventually sends out notifications of the new rates and terms to ALL clients, and the clients she wants to keep stick with her lessons. She has been sufficiently busy for a few years now that if a client balks at terms or conditions, she thanks them for their previous business and moves on. There is no need to keep a bothersome client in a world full of clients who are looking for the work to be done well and are willing to pay for that. Just make clear what terms properly reward you for your skill, and keep your life from being too bothersome, and serve the clients who meet those terms.
"Dr Socman has tagged you with measles vaccination. Please confirm." - Problem solved?
You will never succeed if your plan is to get government "on board" with the process. What needs to happen is to get government OUT of the process.
What did the email say? Something like: Thank you for faxing us. Your fax is important to us. We are experiencing heavier than normal fax volume, and your fax will be answered in the order it was received.
I don't think credit is really going to cut it in this situation.. and permission is unlikely to have been given had you actually asked.
"Likewise, the mandatory installation of Excel becomes super easy with the deal from Microsoft."

Huh? mandatory installation of Excel?
Most newer advanced networking is unavailable in ifconfig. ifconfig and route are now just there for backwards compatibility. The ip tool lets you do all of what ifconfig and route can do, and more.
Hey Geoff -- that's awesome!

Our company dwells in a weird business that sometimes defies logic. But Geoff had two golden pieces of advice for us after listening to our story for only two minutes in an office hours session. He's a stalwart sounding board. Big addition.
Nice write up, Kul. A no brainer to go through YC again. Talk soon!
Over the short term, that's a great success. But over the long term (e.g., 50 years), it's only a 5.4% return. The S&P or DJIA, for example, had 7% returns over the same timeframe.

(Of course the two are not directly comparable, I'm just pointing out that "14x returns over unspecified timeframe" is a faulty argument.)
Fruit was available for about 2 weeks a year, so they ate some but not year round.
Some entrepreneurs are willing, but most funders are even less willing. A pitch that you've found some important, but uncommercialized, recent scientific or technical advances that you see a market niche for can be well-received. A pitch that you're going to make some significant scientific or technical advances as part of your startup's R&D effort is usually seen as way too much risk: a VC does not want "major scientific advance" to be in your critical path. The result is that the significant R&D has to happen elsewhere (often academia) to produce the stock of not-yet-commercialized results that startups can build on, rather than being produced by the startups themselves, since they can't have significant/risky R&D in their critical paths. Even Google, for example, only got funded after significant R&D work had been done by the founders in grad school.

Seems less true in biotech, where VCs are willing to fund substantial R&D budgets, perhaps because the [breakthrough -> patent -> license] ecosystem is better established there; the tech startups using the breakthrough/patent/license pipeline seem to verge on patent trolls more than real R&D outfits.
If you poke at their JavaScript, you'll notice that they intercept every keypress and handle it explicitly (i.e. having a list of alphanumerics that are 'ok' to pass through on text boxes) rather than letting the browser handle the keys that don't need to be special cased. It really seems like someone decided to convert some 'green screen' apps to the web (or else someone with only 'green screen' experience decided to do web programming).
Bootstrapping a Business: San Francisco Business Registration
Using Redis Scripting to Implement Disjoint Set Operations
`except` is a bad idea because it's a black-list, but what's wrong with using `slice` as a white-list?

(Anyway, I just grepped our code and there is only ONE usage of slice in a controller anyway, the rest are explicit, non-mass assignments)
Oh, you end up needing Excel if you're doing a startup. Cap tables, etc.
I learned Linux pretty well before I learned Windows (I was an early adopter) and I felt equally baffled by Windows at a time. I felt nothing made sense. :)
Guarded Continuations
I see where you're coming from. In the past 10 years, I've learned to appreciate things that, while not solving fundamentally a specific security problem, act as a circuit breaker to keep people from mindlessly making the exact same mistake over and over again.

AR::Base#update_attributes is a bad interface, from a security perspective. But it's vital to the programmer experience of Rails development. There's no good fix for the problem; AR models don't even list their attributes, let alone express a coherent strategy for defending them. I'll take the little wins I can get.
oddly, I would hardly classify the administrivia you listed as "big problems"... Those are first world middle class problems.

Why the downvotes?

TRULY Big problems:

Every year 15 million children die of hunger.
... 1 in 5 children in Africa die of malaria
... 1 million people die of malaria

I would hardly classify "having to fill out the same form every time I go to the Doctor's office" as a "BIG" problem.
> Many of us aren't exposed to meaningful problems outside of coding, using the internet, etc.

Are you certain? Unless you live at home 24/7, you're interacting with the world every day. If you're like me, you regularly run into situations that are "sub-optimal" in terms of how much hassle you have to deal with to get things done.

I think the key is to stop thinking that meaning problems only exist in the realm of computers. In fact, most of the meaningful problems in our world are outside of the realm of software precisely because no-one has looked at the problem and thought "hey, software could make this easier".

An example we're all painfully aware of: medical records. There's a TON of paper involved, little co-ordination between doctors, the list goes on. People are working on the problem, but the revolution hasn't arrived yet.

A different way of putting it comes from Paul Graham: "don't think that you're trying to start a startup, instead think that you're trying to solve a problem".
I certainly haven't been exhaustive, but after reading Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat I pulled a couple dozen studies to read. Most were because I found his claims implausible, a few because they were just interesting. A couple times I thought he was full of shit (eg. claiming there's no link between increased saturated fat in diet and precursors to atherosclerosis) and tried to find studies to disprove his claims.

I didn't find him to be misrepresenting studies, and I didn't find research that disproved the claims I found implausible. I was underwhelemed by the rigor of a few of the studies he cited, but he was either citing them as historical curiosities or alongside other, more rigorous notes.

I regularly pull sources for the science I read and Taubes fared far better than usual.