skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cheaper, Faster, Convenient Fitness
Our fitness community of user and expert-generated content is getting ready to launch in just 7 days. Our site being in dissaray aside, I couldn't wait to get everyone's take on our first user-generated training video:

www.pacefit.com

Our core belief(s): Fitness is not for the elite or the jock. "Fitness Experts" are a leftover from a broken fitness culture in the US.

Our goal(s): Fitness for the people, by the people. Make fitness cheaper, faster, and more convenient by offering a selection of thousands of training programs from users and experts from around the world.

We have a long way to go before our launch (7 days), but please tell us what you think of the format of the video.
I wouldn't say Objective-C is supposed to be "a better C", just different, and better. They're quite different (besides the obvious fact that Objective-C is indeed a superset of C). C is a statically typed procedural language while Objective-C is a very dynamic object oriented language with optional static typing.

It's really quite elegant if you think about it. It's a highly dynamic language that was designed more than 20 years ago and is still very relevant today as the platform of choice for developing nearly all Mac OS X and iPhone apps. As far as dynamic languages go it's very fast since it's compiled. It integrates seamlessly with C (and even C++).

Just because you don't know or care about Objective-C doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people who do. I regularly see articles about Objective-C on the front page of Hacker News, Reddit, etc.
I see what you mean, and I agree. In other words, we need a "wxQuery" library.
I learned something interesting in grad school. It is that the Nash Equilibrium for mutual assured destruction involves the occasional nuclear explosion simply because players must be credibly irrational for the threat of deterrence to be effective. I can't figure out if this is interesting or crazy. But the fact we're not all dead suggests to me that rationality is overrated in politics as in economics.
Pressflip (http://pressflip.com) is basically that.
You Leaked on my JavaScript
Thanks. I don't know why people are so scared of SQL.
I don't know if you've traded /es futures, but that's nearly impossible to do. There's a couple different markets that put in bid/ask, and normally you'll just see the closest spread, but there's usually underlying bids as well. That's why it's so liquid. I'm looking at premarket futures right now and the qty of contracts offered at the bid/ask ranges from 10-100. That means to take the bid out you'd have to have a margin of around 100k.

And since making money is presumably based on volume, if you did small trades, you'd end up doing a lot of them to make it worth your while.

Not true with futures. They are risky, but you can get some pretty nice returns, especially in the volatility that we're having right now. On a single contract you can expect to pull 1k-2k, and that's on one trade per day. In terms of R, you're looking at 10R-20R per trade if you're experienced enough (>2 years).
Liskov, Reuse, Inheritance, and Roles
I'd much rather have 10,000 independent bets each with a 0.5% edge than 10 independent bets each with a 20% edge.

Not with trading, you want to cut losses quick and let winners run. The model behind Long Term Capital Management, as well as a ton of quant firms that went under this past Q, was the take-a-bunch-of-trades-for-small-profit... and it works until you get a six sigma event (see 2008).
Looks like you're next.

Unless I get some lunch money.
It's an interesting question that I have no good answer for!

Related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus
Partly, I guess. One the one hand it makes sense to apply one's skills where they can help best, but in the case of the kid in the bush, perhaps some creativity would yield interesting results? Maybe one could build a cheap satellite link or something...
On Peace Processes
There is the “Add any gadget by URL” at the bottom of Labs settings page which goes some way towards this.

For example, Remember the Milk offer: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/gmail/gadget/
This is an amazing writeup. Incredibly honest.

It would be great if you could do an as honest writeup after some time(possible a couple of months). I would be interested in thoughts along two lines:

1. Maybe working Google will not be that great. They sure do have very smart ppl - but I guess you know by now that startups are a different beast. There was a reason you went into the startup world - maybe because you found more meaning in the complete responsibility a startup endows you, and probably that wont exist in Google - nor the adrenaline. Maybe you need to balance that 'meaning' in your job with having fun - your starup was all about meaning and probably too hard to be fun so a stint at Google looks exciting. Maybe you will crave meaning very soon, in which case Google might not be the best option.

2. "And I have no cofounder, so I'd be doing everything myself until I could afford employees, and then I'd have to build a company culture. That will be no 'fun'"
Maybe you can still find a cofounder(maybe in Google). I am not sure, but I think there should be a way to do startups while keeping the fun intact. One thing that I have seen is that big companies afford you a default(big) social circle which a lot of times is the source of the fun you have. (Also startups typicall dont have cute HR's ;)). But maybe you can still create a big enough social group by just hanging out with other startup folks and have as much fun.

Just some random thoughts. Feel free to (not) reply.
Or they attributed it to a higher power (fatalism/determinism).

Pick your poison.
Ah yes, this is an example of 'Wareing's Law' (which I named after someone I went to college with) who when asked why any event happened in a film (usually because someone was incredulous about the way a film was progressing) he would reply: "Because it's in the script!"
will your philosophy change by anti-aging discoveries?

So you might ask: will you live the same life as if you would come back again after you die?

if yes,then you live well now...(so in short, this is my philosophy)
Facebook Private Photos Not Private
These are skills for nerds, not geeks.
Seth's Blog - Warning: The internet is almost full
the author is a bit of a drama queen, and that's unfortunate, but it's a good story overall.
the traditional peace process doesn't work if is was the feelings of the people that gave rise to a war mongering leader. When the leader offers peace the population will depose him and install a more warlike one.

On the other hand, if it was the leader who incited the population to violence, he should be deposed.
box.sk found to interact with nut jobs
Maybe this is a difference in expectations, but I don't expect a platform to be supported forever, nor do I expect support for a platform when not specified, by anyone. When I looked at the "sunshine enema", I saw a tool for a specific purpose and not much else, certainly not anything about what platform the tool supported which could wait until I read the install/download pages. What I read in the message was someone who was stuck doing something he didn't like, and he was asking for people to do precisely what he did with Capistrano: step up and scratch their own itches, something further helped by Capistrano being an open source project with a current release that still works fine with Windows. I didn't see someone who should have been beholden to anyone otherwise. I also don't see that as an OSS project doing wrong, I think it's reasonable given the situation and this certainly does not have to end here in this way.

For what it's worth, what would bother me is if this wasn't explicitly announced and the dev just didn't feel like working on the project anymore, or if it was a core feature of the tool that was going to be ignored in the future. Now that's something to complain about, and then go do something about if it mattered that much to me.

I've personally been in a similar hellhole of a situation (who hasn't?) doing some dev work for a nonprofit where less than 5% of the users both by number and usage completely wasted my time trying to convince me I should bring back support of older browsers and platforms for absolutely no legitimate reason other than a lack of willingness to upgrade on their part, even though the nonprofit had existing volume and discounted licenses that would effectively make the software free for them. Make a lazy <5% happy by doing LOTS of extra work possibly eschewing working on features for the other >95%, and still deliver what may be a subpar experience (think windows 98 when everyone else is running Vista) while billing them for it at the same time? No thank you.
As others have said, awesome site. Seems like you've done just about everything right.

I'm curious how you came up with your site's Terms of Service, which seem well done and comprehensive. Did a lawyer come up with that or did you come up with it yourselves?
It's really a rather odd philosophy when you think about it. Is consciousness a mistake?
You can't conquer entropy, you can only use up negentropy on interesting projects.
this thread came up as one of the top results. I guess Google _really_ likes YC News.

Just wait a few hours; whenever this submission falls off the front page, Google should drop it quicker than a greased pig down a mud slide.
IMO this is not nitpicky - it's a crucial implementation detail. In a quick scan of the main page I saw two similar tech-speaks:

- Use your own domain name (why not 'website address')

- ..with no code (what does 'no code' mean to a non tech person??)

This looks like a good product, but to really address the target audience it needs wording to them (or maybe you need different versions for different types of customer?). See if you can borrow someone's granny for the acid test.
I am here to debug an unstable, confusing, and feature-poor universe.
Wildthing Tattoo u. Piercing Studio - Emsland
I can't understand why some people (those who are in the position to make the decisions on what hardware you get) don't understand that more pixels make you more productive. Constantly flipping between windows/views to get at the information you need just slows you down.

That's one of the problems where I work. I don't understand what would make someone think that a single 1280x1024 monitor is good enough software development. My requests for a 30" or at least a 24" have not been met yet. I'm strongly considering buying my own monitor.

They also want to cheap out on hardware. It seems like they are only interested in buying $300-400 machines, which makes it less likely that my request for a Mac will be met.
Appcelerator Titanium puts more Web apps on your desktop
Even if a service existed that would manage your online identity, how would you prove at you are yourself everytime you sign in? I think thats the biggest problem right now. Another problem is the second someone gains access to your 'online identity' they now have access to everything else that was also linked using this identity.

So maybe its not a good idea to have a central identity manager. Maybe we just need to be researching how do we prove that you are indeed YOU when you visit a site again and not worry about figuring out if you are you AND the same person on x,y,z sites.
be here now
Not only can this guy write code, but his prose is fluent and insightful. A pleasure to read such a well written post.
Hidden Travels of the Atomic Bomb
Obama can't have a BlackBerry. Should your CEO?
Windows Vista SP2: Second time's the charm
There are probably lots of loopholes, but we don't know about them. It can't be a coincidence that the largest hedge funds have beaten the market spectacularly every year the last 20 years. (And if they put 10% some of those gains in a money market account, they are guaranteed to have made positive returns no matter what happens).

My personal this-is-what-i-think theory is that there are lots of patterns in the pricing of equities and other market components, but if they ever become publicly known, they cease to exist. The best hedge funds (or best traders, take your pick) manage to find patterns that no one else does. This does not protect them from a spectacular implosion if their models for some reason become invalid.

There is a cult of believing in the perfect randomness of market pricing. Saying that market developments are random is practically the same as believing in the efficient market hypothesis. The market cannot be perfectly efficient, because there are always interactions that no one will be able to predict. Most of these interactions are no doubt chaotic (unpredictable), but there is no way that traders instantly discover every pattern that is predictable.
101 uses for an iPhone
No such thing as mobile security?
What Sequoia Capital Was Thinking
The struggle for a free wi-fi America reaches a turning point
2 book publishers announce mobile phone plans
Mumbai Terrorists Relied on New Technology for Attacks
Fun little writeup, but I think he forgot a few:

- use two $50K programmers instead of one $100K programmer

- have managers who have never programmed

- begin programming before systems analysis has adequately defined the "big fat what"

- change requirements daily

- don't ask your users what they want

- don't ask your users for feedback on what you've done

- don't test

- write something really cool that no one wants

- use Microsoft products
What's the merit to publishing a successful algorithm?

In this particular case: a Nobel prize.
LaunchBox08 Startup JamLegend.com Has Launched
Java Discovers and Makes Garage Sales a Cultural Happening
If you want one that sneaks up on you, try fen-phen. No noticeable side effects and then you die of a heart attack.

As for modafinil, a quick look doesn't turn up any long-term safety studies (pub med is either down or even slower than usual today, which amounts to the same thing, so I might be missing something), except for one 9-week study. You could smoke for 9 weeks without being affected much.

It's not like it's a rare thing for drugs to turn out to be harmful. We'll just have to wait and see.

EDIT: given the lack of long-term safety studies, but also the lack of problems with short-term studies, I personally would use modafinil for finals week or a long car trip or something like that but not day-in day-out for years.
The Humble Developer
One huge factor he omits is the additional overhead of all the surveillance installed by the telcos at the request of the federal government.
I imagine we all have this issue from time to time.

Is it because the experience here is so good, or...

Is something in your work "missing" so much that your passion pulls you here instead.

hn is great, but if it "attracts" you more than your project, then it's time to take a good hard look at your project.
But if I were to do another startup, I'd be stuck with it for the next 4-10 years,
it'd have to be profitable within about 2 to avoid running out of money,

<SNIP>

I might be able to pull it off and get rich,
but it'd eat up all of my twenties, probably all my friends,
and possibly all my sanity. Not worth it.

This is one of the things that i ponder upon as well.

A lot of people would say (and correctly so) it becomes more difficult later on to start your own venture, but at this point (I'm 27) i just can't convince myself to work like crazy for the next 2-3 years and possibly spend the prime of my life in front of the screen.

I guess it's just a question what you want from life at that point in time. (Great work/money/time for other interests/good social life). Obviously all of it together would be nice :-), but till then got to be selective.
The degradation of quality posts/comments is inevitable as news.yc or any social news site grows. The only thing saving new.yc is the limited appeal of the subject matter.

This is like moving from a small town to a big city. Someone can be rude to another person in a big city because more than likely they will never meet a again. In a small town everyone knows everyone else and word spreads rapidly. You don't want to act like an ass in a small town because everyone will hear about it.

In large online communities, karma is supposed to act as an incentive to be nice and contribute thoughtfully, but it is not as effective as true reputation among people that you know personally. What the world as a whole thinks of you is less powerful than what your friends think of you.

A good experiment would be to enforce the small town effect on an online community. Partition a news site into groups of 100-1000 members. Comments and submissions would only be visible inside each members subgroup until upvoted past a certain threshold. With luck members would get to know one another inside a group and desire each others respect enough to contribute to the discussion meaningfully. Debates would last for days or weeks instead of an afternoon as is the case on current news sites. Trolls damage would be confined to one group at time as well.
Sigh. What the article claims is that the structure of bee dances are like the structure of the maths used in quantum physics. So what? bee brains could have neural nets that produce similar output as the quantum physics models.

Correlation is not causation - that's an elementary mistake.

And I'm still not sure what a "quantum field" is. The probability of an electron being present? We all interact with those when we press up against you know, matter.
finally, a to-do list with sub-tasks...
History will judge this to be our day's version of VBA.
Now, can somebody please forward this to the German Federal Minister for Family Affairs?

http://www.mywire.com/a/AFP/Germany-takes-aim-online-child/8...
Speculation, yes, but it's still science. She has a theory, and hopefully she'll come up with a way to test it. This is how progress happens.

I modded the story up not because of the content releated to the headline, but because it appears the bee dances are 2D projections of the flag manifolds she studies. She may be wrong about the mechanism she proposed for why this happens, but when you find things that fit together so neatly in the natural world, that's a clear sign: this warrants investigation.
It would be nice if chatterous could have some sort of custom twitter account for each chat room like you do with the Jabber bots. Maybe some poking at Twitter devs would be required :).
A greasemonkey script could probably do this, it was done for reddit: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/31002
Is there any decision that can't be restated as an arbitrarily complicated series of if/then statements? If you're patient, you can do addition using just if-thens (IF N1 = 1 and N2 = 5 THEN answer = 6), etc.
The Great Ruby Shootout (December 2008)
Salesforce announces Force.com for Google App Engine
True. I would like to add that an eye can detect a single photon, but there's really no way to use that meaningfully to make use of quantum mechanics at a bee-level.
Programming with your feet
> you could drop the code...

> with no code and no hassle.

See the issue now?
Yaaooouch! Seafood soup is NOT on the menu!
Your 404 page did make me chuckle..

http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/

"yeah no"
Its great to be in movement;
dont know for people in other ages, but in our time, things seems to be acceleratin and that makes it a great time to live.
Koza's a pretty big name in that space:

http://www.genetic-programming.org/
Happy Birthday: The mouse is 40 today
I don't expect highly successful people to be gods, or even heroes. I'm nowhere close to being either. I merely expect them to be as talented as I am, or at least on the same order of magnitude. Zuckerberg fails.

Frankly, the blowout nature of his success results mainly from luck and positioning, as has been well-chronicled. If Zuckerberg had started Facebook at a state university, it would be just another obscure social networking site that was eventually clobbered by a superior competitor, instead of running over its then-superior competitors, as Facebook did in its early days.

Facebook is now a reasonably strong product, but that has everything to do with the momentum it has developed (Harvard is high ground for prestige marketing, and it's easy to gain speed when each cardinal direction is downhill) and the quality of engineers it can get now, and absolutely nothing to do with Zuckerberg and his "vision".
I usually provide some sort of incentive if you're in that 5%. Coupon campaigns and the like.
> At least until politicians get tired of promoting idiotic politically expedient barely half-thought out ideas.

What color is the sky in your universe?
45 Vintage ‘Space Age’ Illustrations
I think he means that there is no theoretical basis for a long-term system that claims to beat the indexes. Index funds don't, by definition.
Good GA, but for genetic programming, you need to come up with a program representation and then evolve something in that space that spits out a solution. V. simple in lisp, given the code/data are the same thing. You could try the same thing with python's string eval, but it'll be trickier to define the lexemes and what qualifies as a feasible program.

Here's Koza's material from his Stanford class:
http://www.genetic-programming.com/coursemainpage.html
Minimize dependencies.
Crossing over at one point is not as effective as an even crossover, since it is actually equivalent to an even crossover with one static and one dynamic point. Thus, building blocks in the middle are more likely to be disrupted than building blocks on the ends.

That being said, his approach is also a viable GA operator. It is called a uniform crossover. But really, to qualify as a GA, his solution only needs some kind of variation, mutation, and selection.
Nationalization
Church service held for Auto Industry [Slideshow]
Google gobbling up $7 bn of taxpayers’ money every year: study
> In this case the difference between being able to assume with near certainty that someone you need to do business has at least potential access, versus a 9 in 10 chance that the person whose attention you need for your business to survive is online.

You're assuming that lack of internet access is randomly distributed, that 90% internet access means that Donald Trump is 90% likely to have internet access. It isn't. 10% internet access is more than enough for some biz. 90% is more than enough for most biz.

To put it another way/use your own example, the fact that less than 100% of people go to medical school doesn't imply that there aren't enough doctors.

Note that "access" isn't enough - they have to be willing to use it AND willing to let you get to them via the internet. I have access yet often refuse to tell biz how to reach me.
I agree. I think it is the natural place to have a to-do list. I also don't really like the Remember the Milk add-on. I usually don't think of to-dos as thing that are associated with a particular day. They are just a laundry list of things that need to get done. It would be nice to see the to-dos in the context of what my schedule looks like for the day (i.e. My Google calendar).
You leave me humbled, sir. You are thinking on a much greater scale than I was. I was at first skeptical whether these types of things are going to come in to mainstream debate in the next 6 months to 2 years, but the more I think about it, the more I'm starting to believe it.