skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm interested in this. Random reinforcement definitely had an effect on me in the past. The hardest part is IMHO recognising the problem. I once read an article about how games were made addictive using random reinforcement. After that I could spot the behaviour in my own online activities and I cut back. I now check e-mail and news sites only three times a day on set hours instead of all day long (once in the morning, once at lunch and once at the end of the day).

But, I have never had to use technical solutions to help me with this. Once I understood the problem and could spot it, changing my behaviour and sticking with it wasn't hard for me. But it took a while before I really understood the problem.
Well, this (quote from Wikipedia)…
> Tesla was widely known for his great showmanship, presenting his innovations and demonstrations to the public as an artform, almost like a magician. This seems to conflict with his observed reclusiveness; Tesla was a complicated figure.

… seems pretty Jobsian to me. And you bet when Bill Gates is dead (hopefully far far away in the future) he will also be compared to Edison.

Because, maybe, these kind of comparison just doesn't make sense. Because great men and times are most of the times not alike. Because we are just stupid with our stupid simplifications.

Geeks and Nerds have certainly a hard on for Tesla, the misunderstood underdog, with all his complicated character of scientific genius and OCD/phobia/celibacy. But I wouldn't diminish the achievements of Edison. And Edison was (surprisiningly) never one of the super-rich of his time. There is a reason he needed J.P.Morgan. He only had shares in companies, but never controlled them, even if they did bear his name.
"same Turning Award winners to a basketball court and have them run through some plays. See if they start asking questions like, "OK, I go left here, but what if someone is setting a pick, should I switch?" or do they nod their head..."

My experience has been that people are centered around feeling special in a few areas. Something outside that area they don't have an issue with appearing to be stupid. In fact they seem to almost embrace that. I'm sure you've run into plenty of "smart" people (say your Doctor) that say "I'm really bad with computers."

So my theory would be that the further away from their area of expertise a person would be more likely to admit they know nothing and ask a question.

I would even say that the asking of questions follows a bell curve.

If you are an expert, no fear.

If you know nothing no fear.
I don't know if you will ever see this response because I took so long to write it but you do have a point. The casual investor cannot invest in venture funds. One problem with funds like this is that they could end up going to zero if they miss everything or could invest in businesses which are not sound to help their friends.

In an effort to prevent this type of mistreatment of investors it is harder for them to raise money from individuals. In my opinion, the returns to VC firms on the average (not just the home runs) are not worth the potential losses.

But, the reverse argument could certainly be made and it will be an issue that I'm sure is discussed long in to the future.

*One area that most people are not aware exists is the area of fund manager vetting and analysis. This is mostly done by institutional investors and is something the average retail investor would have a lot of difficulty with.
Buddy of mine was getting a job where he needed to be heavily, heavily interviewed by CSIS.

Lots of polygraphs forms, etc. Detailed political interviews. Anyways, they get to this really thick form and the female CSIS interviewer says "please provide me a rough explanation of your history with illegal drugs," buddy says "Never. Not once." "Never?" "Never." One check box checked on the form the rest left unfilled.

Oh and my buddy was being truthful, but if you have to lie do it like that. "Never. Not once."
I had my moment of zen when some secret service agents came to my house to question me about a 6-month-old Slashdot comment. They looked around for guns, and finding none, needed to administer a "metal health exam". As they started asking the questions, I realized "wait. these people are not doctors. they don't give a flying fuck about my mental health. they need me to say the correct answers so they can close their case." I answered the questions correctly and they closed their case.

The moral of the story: many questions are asked to see if you know the right answer, not because they actually want to know the answer to the question.
Show HN: Store stuff you should remember about your bf/gf
There is something a lot more clever about this than you realise. By offering you the convenience of sending it to you via email they are collecting your address. Great way to gather conversion information and market to people who have never downloaded their app.
Even given the reporters' privilege, the First Amendment has nothing to do with whether it's legal (or stupid) for Path to be uploading his address book to their servers. Path is not the government.

That means he's not only a sloppy journalist for not explaining his First Amendment point, but he's doubly sloppy for implying that he talked to any lawyers while writing this article. Because if he did, they'd have said "Go check out jaylevitt's excellent comment on HN explaining why that's irrelevant."
So far I've been one of those smart people (though I'm finally finding people that are smarter than I am, and it's a great feeling), and I have my parents to thank for it. As far as I can tell, one of the big things they did was answer my questions. Without fail. Even through the entire "why?" stage, I cannot consciously remember a single instance in which my parents didn't at least provide at least a hook that I could use to keep looking on my own.
Downtown Oakland was sadly ignored. The nice side of Lake Merritt, as well as downtown and Jack London Square are generally overlooked. Maybe that's a good thing for my rent. I pay $1900 for an 1100 ft^2 2br/2bath right next to jack london square, with a pool, a hot tub, and soon with a 100mbps synchronous connection that will cost $45/month. BART is 4 blocks away and door to door I'm downtown in 30 minutes. I'm looking at downtown office space now and it's incredibly cheap, plus the business taxes are a lot cheaper.

The food scene isn't as great as Berkeley, but rent is 30% cheaper, and there are far fewer yuppy moms walking around with kids in strollers, which makes me happy. There has been a pretty solid core of hackers moving here in the past two years, generally people like me in our early '30s who have been in SF for a decade+ and have finally stopped drinking
the "San Francisco is worth $4k for a 750 ft^2 apartment" koolaid.
"... Just out of interest, as I've never come across many examples, can anyone give me some rock solid examples of what scary stuff facebook / a 3rd party could do with my data? ..."

The biggest problem isn't just finding one piece of evidence a user has revealed, it's inference of collective data. Because access can be made at so many levels on Fb via the API you can infer information from the data alone. [0], [1] Data mining of server logs and inference poses the biggest potential threat.

[0] Carter Jernigan, Behram F.T. Mistree, "Facebook friendship exposes sexual orientation", MIT ~ http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ar...

[1] Paul Fenwick, "Dark Stalking on Facebook" ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=816372 & http://use.perl.org/~pjf/journal/39608
It seems like startups tend to move north once they get to the stage where they're not quite really startups anymore. Dropbox is a classic example. I don't know how easy it is to find space up there if you're not using a whole floor of an office building, though.
We did it a bit different, you can take a picture of the screen with your phone and open it on the AppStore!

Check it out, ripeapps.com
I'd love to chat, but you don't list a contact email and don't seem to be particularly Googleable. Shame!
I agree. I think I take the reverse approach -- I maintain a list of project ideas that I would actually use were I to build it -- and when I get the free time, I can see what new languages / libraries / techniques I can apply to implement one.
I agree with you, and you missed to mention the most private data Google owns, and that is our search queries.
I'd really like to hear more about why this was not a trivial challenge.
Khan Academy: Are There *Really* No Better Alternatives?
I've converted the lookup table to a few lines of logic. I think it's more readable, and I would definitely bet on it being faster, though since I haven't profiled I don't know how much difference it would make.

https://github.com/PeterScott/json-parser/commit/db9c326f747...
Thanks for pointing out the IMAP approach. I use IMAP on my phone but never really considered using it download all my mail.

I'll give offlineimap.org a look..

To answer your other question, I have 20k emails because Gmail doesn't delete by default, so I just archive as I go..

I'm a zero-inbox type so I use labels and searching a lot. Those 20k emails are surprisingly well organized..
Scott, my jaw is dropping -- I am super interested in this too! Let's follow up on this soon.
One of the remarkable things about this is that the campaign orchestrated by Something Awful users caused this happen in less than 4 hours. Even the CNN exposé took days.
This is completely relevant: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-01-19-playing-chicken-w... ("Playing chicken with cat.jpg" by Colin Percival from tarsnap)

> "The answer isn't for ... the company ... to prove that they can be trusted; the answer is to ensure that their customers don't need to trust them. ... The best way to avoid privacy breaches is not to formulate a detailed privacy policy; it's to reduce your capabilities so that you're unable to violate anyone's privacy."

Just think of what target companies like this will make for hackers. It's an accident waiting to happen.
Does this have any bearing on AI or machine learning. According to Marcus Hutter, the best AI is one that can compress the most (the hutter prize for compression). If compression is the same problem as data transmission, than this might an optimal AI algorithm as well.
I wonder if YC would take a porn startup?
Great work Jason!

I was amazed of the beauty of Wordie but then I loved Darth Vader (Figure 3-11. Do not underestimate the power of the randomized greedy algorithm).
The words reuse should definitely need to be allowed, but the result will be very beautiful when applied to smoothly changing contour (shape).

Is there a problem if I try to reimplement your code in C++ (especially openframeowks)?
I had misunderstood. I thought you were using the semaphore to allow only one request at a time so as to avoid/mitigate the memory leak, not pend all requests during a restart of OO.
Water bubbles orbiting a knitting needle on the ISS
> Edison was inferior to Tesla not only in terms of intellect, but also as a human being.

eyerolling
Just to play devils advocate:

Edison:
Nonviolence was key to Edison's moral views, and when asked to serve as a naval consultant for World War I, he specified he would work only on defensive weapons

Tesla:
Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon [the Death Ray] from the early 1900s until his death. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. He also offered this invention to European countries.

Edison:
Six children.

Tesla:
Tesla was a life-long bachelor. Like many of his era, he became a proponent of an imposed selective breeding version of eugenics.

Edison:
When Edison was a very old man and close to death, he said, in looking back, that the biggest mistake he had made was in not respecting Tesla or his work.

Tesla:
The day after Edison died the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla.
"After all, I don’t want this person to think I’m a moron."

Kudos for him recognizing that in himself. It is the single most problematic and annoying aspect of most middle and upper managers. Fear of looking dumb feeds on itself.
Remove Finder from the Application Switcher in Mac OSX
I believe it was meant to say rebills (in affiliate slang), the act of billing your credit card automatically for another service/product term. Frequently used in the Acai berry juice fad where they would send you another scheduled shipment automatically and bill you for it, and in online dating sites where they bill you every month continuosly if you don't explicitly cancel.

While unethical, it is not necessarily fraudulent since many times the rebill clause exists somewhere in the TOS/contract in very fine print or some obscure form.
It's not so meaningful to compare the relative intelligence of people within the upper echelons of intelligence--which is where you appear to be, along with those award-winners you mention. Which is not to disagree with any of your points. Rather, I'm just saying you don't need to worry about being less smart than all those eminent Harvard professors, because you're already in a league where such comparisons don't work.

What defines this league, and how can people in it be compared?

I think its boundaries have something to do with a general ability and desire to learn, and a breadth and depth of knowledge about important things in the world at large. (The knowledge criterion has to take into account age. You know less now than you will at 50, but that's obviously not a mark against you.)

Amongst such people, the only meaningful comparisons are far more specific than "more smart" and "less smart" can capture. You can meaningfully talk about, say, one's ability to solve an electrical engineering dilemma, or to pleasingly arrange the samples in a hip-hop song. But not relative smartness, not in this league.

This is one case where the truth is actually more comfortable than the myths we tell ourselves.
There were whole subreddits with questionable content? Damn, I'm surprised that they didn't take this move earlier.
There have been for years, it wasn't until recently r/jailbait was removed. For the longest time the policy was anything legal is allowed.
Yeah, I'll go with that - cheers.
That's interesting, last time this came around I started working though how to do it using a Sudoku style solver.

Step 1: If a solution exists it's going to have 4!(17!)^2 'mirror' images of the same solution. To avoid this problem we give each color a number and a specific ordering of the solution. Thus eliminating 4!(17!)^2 - 1 options.

Step 2: Based on the form that order takes we fill in the grid as much as possible. (Most of the top and side row).

Step 3: Start plugging in missing squares until you find contradictions. EX: If swapping a column gives a lower ordering it's not a valid solution.
Building Decoupled Large-Scale Applications Using JavaScript (And jQuery)
What's wrong with YAJL?
Problem: "I only marked the 'I'm serious' button to see if you were serious, I wasn't really serious."
Hot compatibility beyond databases
It's not just the Chinese that people are worried about. Travelers also wipe their cell phones and laptops to avoid giving up sensitive data to the customs inspectors at the U.S. borders.
Confessions of a Corporate Google Apps User
Here is the original thread that started it all, since the admins at reddit don't want to link to it: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=346....

And the reddit response: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/duplicates/pmbyc/somethin....
Why are you doing "#define numeric(b) ((b) >= '0' && (b) <= '9')" instead of say isdigit(3) ?
One theme across most of those stories is that the author and his team went out and built something before validating their ideas. Actually building a product is perhaps the HEAVIEST way to validate whether there's a market for the idea. Spend more time upfront validating the idea... make a fake version of the product, create some landing page that people can sign up for... anything to avoid going out and building before you know you're on to something.

It's okay to mess around with products in your spare time if it's just 'tinkering', but if you're trying to do the startup game for real, then lower investment upfront in ideas is critical to finding one that works.
I think the article is being romantic, when it sets Tesla up as a forgotten man. He might not be in the US popular imagination, but every electrical engineering student learns about Tesla when they learn about induction machines. Tesla also has an SI unit named after him.
>"The smarter you get the less amazing that will feel"

This is something that I'm continually trying to come to terms with. The intelligence distribution is tighter on the high end than most people realize. By that I mean, the smartest people aren't really amazingly smart. This reply, from Clay Christensen (Business School Prof at Harvard, Rhodes Scholar...must be bright!) when asked how it felt to be the top of his field, in this case material sciences, has always stuck with me:

"You know, there's real disappointment. When I was younger, I looked up at the top of the mountain and thought, Wow, those guys are really smart! When you're near the top of the mountain looking down, you think, Boy, if nobody is smarter than I am, the world is really hurting!"

It's all perspective.
Link to the catalysis:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=346...
This post explains the problem enough to give an intuitive understanding of why it's difficult: http://bit-player.org/2009/the-17x17-challenge
1500-2000 visits per day. http://www.puremango.co.uk. I rank highly for some good terms like "hacking facebook" and "how to hack", but my long tail is also very long.
Sorry but what in the world kind of /. comment could justify a search and interrogation?
That's why I've never understood how people willingly sharing personal information is considered a privacy issue at all. If I show my friend a postcard sent to me by another friend, no one's privacy has been violated.

Really? Because most people would consider that it HAS been violated.

Opting to share something with some person X is not the same as opting to have it shared by X to anyone else, except if you explicitly or implicitly permit him to.

If your gf sends you an intimate mail, I don't think she will not feel her privacy was violated if you show it to your pals.
[Review] The Tiny Bang Story HD – Amazing Puzzle Adventure Game
On the other hand: What took ’em so long? Jailbait was shut down, what now? A few months ago?

The admins must have been aware that the exact same crap was happening in copycat subreddits all over Reddit soon after Jailbait was shut down. Why was another campaign necessary in the first place?

I don’t think the Reddit admins can take the moral high ground here. They will only do the right thing when you threaten them with bad PR.

(I’m guessing they reacted so fast this time because they know that those kinds of things can escalate quickly and national press attention is not nice to have.)
and Gauss is to mathematics.
> anything legal is allowed

And quite a lot that was, at the very best, ambiguous.
Where c is `json_c', "return c > 127 ? 0xFF : hex_table [c];" always returns false due to the range of types.
Questions about work visa and founders unable to relocate to SF for YC
My co-founders and I are interested in applying to YC. However, one of them is unsure of his ability to be in the Bay Area during the semester. He is willing to work remotely in his spare time during the YC process but would be unable to make the full-time 3 month commitment with us.

Another one of his concerns is that he is in the US on a temporary work permit while he is in the process of applying for H1B. He is afraid leaving his current job would jeopardize his H1B application.

So my questions are:

1. Is it counted against us if one of the founders is not able to relocate during the YC process? Are we better to apply with him listed as a founder not able to relocate or not include him at all in the application?
2. Has anyone else dealt with work visa issues during YC or any startup? Seems like this would be a common issue as many founders are not residents of the US.
What happens when the input length is longer than 2^31? You used an "int" for the length (also, why ever use a signed value for length?) --- even on LP64, that counter wraps at ~32 bits.

(Same question applies to how you handle the max_memory computation).
Great exerpt:

"To make people understand the importance of doing things perfectly in the early years of his restaurants, Harvey would run to the front of the train, hop off and walk to the restaurant before the passengers arrived.

If he found the slightest thing wrong, he would basically take the tablecloth, yank it, and throw the entire table on the floor so that the people would have to pick everything up, clean everything up, and reset the table before people came into the restaurant"
Unlike most jobs, being a police officer requires a lot of lying, from "We have proof you did it, so confess now" to "I stopped and searched him because I saw something suspicious". Other jobs, like being a researcher on classified projects have different requirements, and admitting to a bit of drug use there won't get you in trouble.
Antipirates attacked for pirating NFL game
The case was pretty thick, maybe not 1/4in but about 2-3mm. A lot of the weight came from the power supplies though, it had 3 48V monstrosities that put out a total of 1900W IIRC. Plus there were disk carriages, a squirrel cage cooling fan, and about what seemed like 100 boards that connected to a common "backplane" for IO and power. It added up to be pretty heavy.
facebook is for sheep
You Will Not Be The Next Silicon Valley, Please Stop Trying
Perhaps...however, our influence in that arena has to be the most powerful.
I stopped using Gmail recently, but the primary reason wasn't that Google algorithm reads my email.

I just finally realized, that by storing all my emails to some company server is potentially dangerous to my privacy. I just don't know, who can potentially access my data, now or in the future.

I switched to another solution, which is to periodically download my emails through pop3s to my local truecrypt-ed drive. It is a slightly more work, but not that much work. I just feel better not to have my private data with Google.
Facebook Makes Us All Sad Because Everyone Is Happy But Us
I largely thought the same thing when reading the description of the app. Learning to communicate openly and honestly is probably a much better approach to this sort of problem than some highschoolesque crush app.

If you're wondering whether Dick or Jane 'like' you, just ask them. If they are going to be awkward about it then they probably weren't the right person anyway.

However all that said, I bet the app will be a smash.
There is no ill goodwill in his assessment. There is no way around it. Path is just like anything other company. They are in business to make money. No different than Google. No different than Facebook. No different than Apple. How they go about making money and the moral choices they make vary greatly. Whether they genuinely thought what they did was wrong or not doesn't make it right. They perfectly well knew what they were doing. Just like management at Sanlu knew what they were doing when they added melamine to the baby milk formula. The decisions were made with the bottom line in mind.