skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Think of it as a shortcut, not a substitute, for going out and meeting new people in the same way that going to a conference or bar is.

If your goal is to meet new people that might become friends or repeat acquaintances, you probably don't just start talking to random people on the street. You could, but most of them won't be interested, or you won't be able to find substantial common ground in the few minutes that you have to make a connection. Conversations will be short and awkward, as you fumble to find an topic that you and your target can both be interested in. At least, that's been my experience as a shy, fairly introverted guy - if you're a smooth, sociable person with a lot of experience interacting with people, you might have more success. If you do, more power to you. You probably don't need ambient location apps!

However, if you want to minimize both time spent and awkwardness, it's a good idea to put yourself in some kind of context where anyone you meet will have a shared experience or interest that you can use to break the ice. If you go to a sports bar during a football game, most people there will have some interest in the sport in question. If you go to a conference, most of the people there will be there because they're interested in the topic of the conference. If you go to a coffee shop, you're either there to drink coffee, or you're doing something while drinking coffee that could be the subject of a conversation. These are all stronger shared contexts than incidental contexts like "random person I saw on the street" or "guy I stood behind in the grocery store checkout line". I don't know about you, but when random people in the checkout line start talking to me about how long the line is, I get a little creeped out.

"Ambient location" apps are just a high-tech extension of that idea of shared context. You get an easy way to find people that a) have some kind of shared interest with you, determined by the app's algorithm and b) have explicitly decided to look for social contact by installing the app and setting up a profile. It's just a way to opt-in to social situations that might have otherwise gone unexplored because you never encountered the person in a context that gave you cause to talk to them.
The giant spotlight that Notch (Minecraft) brought to the project and to Tim via the Psychonauts 2 funding "offer" helped a lot too. Must admit, I'd never heard of Tim's name before despite being familiar with his games until Notch was going on about it.
I've played a lot of games of Catan against the computer on the Xbox 360, which gives stats, and I found that is almost all cases the player who had the most resources (produced - lost/stolen) won. To some extent this makes sense since a better economy will produce more resources, but it didn't seem to matter what the resources were or whether they were used directly or 4-crunched into something else.

What I took from that is if you're choosing settlement spots or robber targets you'll do pretty well just maximizing the number of resources you produce or block (which, for the robber, means multiplying the number of pips by the number of resource gained if the number rolls)
Anybody know how big the MIT population on HN is? SWAG (stupid wild ass guesses) welcome.
Makes sense - they have to be the worst telco in the US.
Well as I understand it, one could study on Khan Academy and use that to get a GED, right?

Then you would only have to be in school when you took whatever test was necessary to get that degree.

Although you could conceivably try directly for university and skip High School completely. Or even skip university, learn to code in your basement and be done with it.
It's enough of an issue that Nissan offers a cold weather trim package on the Leaf, which it "strongly recommends" for operation in below freezing climates.
Researching and documenting censorship
I treat my personal projects as practice,

My blog has at a time had a peak of around 100k visits a day, its a static site served by nginx on a linode512 that has various other personal project running on it, its never blinked.

I recently put a forum live(coded from scratch, but not all by myself) that is hovering around 5k visits a day, this has had growing pains (currently on a linode 1024), but when debugging the performance issues I learned a hell of a lot, and its been stable since (touch wood).

If I wasnt able to keep a blog / forum / various other side projects live without having continuous maintenance problems then I would be pretty worried seeing as that is my job.
On a tangent, is there anything as well designed and with as many features as Kickstarter but that can support projects from outside of the US?
While not as sexy as fighting SOPA, representatives still need to hear your support for bills like this. Otherwise, opposing bills like http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/01/here-we-go-again... will prevail.
Not trying to be a buzz-kill. It's a neat idea, sure...

1. It's too slow. I want to know about you, now. I'm a fast reader and want to get on with reading at my own pace, not the pace you've decided to have fancy transitions slide in.

2. I don't have a ton of time to sit through this.

3. There is no detail. You show logos of some impressive places you've (presumably) worked... but... what did you do there? What did you learn? How will that experience make you a good fit at company x?
"Um, Grindr is for casual homosexual encounters"

... which can turn into incredibly helpful proper friendships, especially in new cities.
She submitted a resume as well.
There IS Skydrive shell integration:

-you can easily mount a Skydrive folder and Office will recognize the file originated from Skydrive and show relevant information (e.g. other editing the file)

-Office 2010 has a 'Save to Web' function
In my 15-20 years of work history, to my knowledge, I have never had an employer confirm my academic credentials. Credit score? Yes! Criminal history? Yep! Whether I am academically qualified for the position? Nope! In particular (in my younger days) I "inflated" some of my academic credentials and achievements. They were simply accepted at face value.
Congrats, Margot. Have a great time working with Jason & Crew!
So...as an indirect competitor...let me just say...well done. This is pretty awesome!

This is something I have thought about doing for a while, but to be honest, I never had the technical chops to do it at the time.

Sure, parts of this still needs polishing - got some quirky JS issues with the comparison of the two images side by side in Chrome on Windows.

But you guys have done and awesome, awesome job!

Edit: Btw, this is the quirky issue I encountered - http://i.imgur.com/MOY9c.png To replicate this, in Chrome on Windows 7, click on the 'X Y' side by side icon and then just try scrolling the images up and down, or side to side, and then moving the mouse. It moves the entire DOM element.

Congrats on the launch.
If the luck element bothers you, just use a deck of 36 cards, numbered from 2-12: 1x2, 2x3, 3x4, etc. (Either draw your own on a deck of cards or use two decks of playing cards). Shuffle, and deal from the top instead of a dice roll. When the deck is exhausted, reshuffle.
Great going. Congrats and all the best moving forward.

> In terms of revenue for 2011 we got paid from Google AdSense $125.

For the whole year 2011? Do you run Google Ads on all the pages? What were your total traffic numbers? Does that tell you anything?
> Grim Fandango was pretty much the final nail in the coffin (no pun intended) of the pure adventure genre, because it had terrible sales.

Not precisely since it was followed by Escape from Monkey Island, but yeah Grim basically shuttered LucasArts adventure games, which in turn shuttered the adventure games genre until its revival starting ~2007 (Zack & Wiki, Broken Sword, Sam&Max Save the World, Strong Bad, Tales of Monkey Island, Machinarium, ...)
It's primarily intended for folks who don't come from a Ruby background and prefer their OS-native installation methods to rubygems. If you're happy using the gem, carry on.
Yeah, until your time is so valuable that you'd rather pay your assistant and/or a copywriter to help you with it.

That's where I am with my company right now. Even with my copywriting background, my time is valuable enough that I need to hire someone to help us with website content. WordPress is easy. I can hire thousands of people to update my design or add content. Not so much with another solution that doesn't have a WYSIWYG, web-based interface for adding content.
Understanding Facebook Insights: People Talking About This & Engaged Users
Clarkson is professionally paid to be an elitist fool.

Most Europeans already believe 300 miles range and room for eight passengers is a luxury. Why? Their gasoline costs about twice as much per liter/gallon. Their automakers build mostly hatchbacks to match demand. It's rare to even see a large van on the roads. When you see an SUV/crossover in Europe, it's the sign of a wealthy person who lives to excess.

As I pointed out in my article, ten minute chargers are only five to ten years from commercial release. You can charge your Nissan Leaf from 0 to 80% in 25 minutes using today's Level 3 charger without waiting for any new technology. That'd be ~45 minutes for a Tesla Model S.

If gasoline prices predictably rise and it only takes as much time to top up at the local mall as it takes to stop there for a latte and a sandwich, you'd be a fool to not own an electric vehicle.
Always cool to see articles trying to tease apart correlation from causation. That said, I am automatically suspicious of any publications mentioning power laws, since they make for attractive stories and can easily be fit to data which is not actually generated from a power law. See http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html for an excellent discussion.
Who, if Anyone, Owns the Web?
It is nonsense. I feel more strongly than you can apparently imagine about this issue, and I would never knowingly interview for a job that requires coding on a whiteboard or on paper. I made a single exception for Google, and I had to take tranquilizers not to throw up during the interview. I consider this kind of interview to be borderline abuse. It serves no useful purpose that can't be better achieved through different means other than to humiliate those whose brains don't function well under this kind of pressure.

Btw, as far as I'm aware, Google didn't traditionally allow coding on paper--they always required coding at a whiteboard. As I understand it, Google Boston softened this requirement because it's rather counter to MIT culture. In four years of undergrad schooling at MIT and quite a few additional classes as a special grad student, no one ever made me work on a whiteboard, or do any kind of work at all with someone staring over my shoulder.
Ah, interesting! Thanks for the link.
Ask HN: Do you know a good resource for large data scraping job?
My company, Easy Vino (easyvino.com), is gearing up for beta release and we need to populate our database with wine lists. The job consists of extracting information from wine lists (which we have and are usually PDF, HTML or Pictures) to put it into our database.

We have a simple back office that connects to a wine API to search for wine info and we need help inputing the data. I'd rather have the same person (or team) doing this as the learning curve is significant.

Does anyone know a cheap resource for this type of task? Any help or reference is appreciated.

Thanks a lot!
> 1. It's too slow. I want to know about you, now. I'm a fast reader and want to get on with reading at my own pace, not the pace you've decided to have fancy transitions slide in.

Fair point. Had this been poorly done, I would've hated that I couldn't flip through it quickly, but since it's well done I don't mind it so much.

> 2. I don't have a ton of time to sit through this.

This is essentially the same point was 1.

> 3. There is no detail. You show logos of some impressive places you've (presumably) worked... but... what did you do there? What did you learn? How will that experience make you a good fit at company x?

She also included her resume, presumably with that level of detail.
I recently read about a study that found strangers were generally far more friendly and willing to talk and initiate conversation when they had a known shared interest. In the case of the study, they found over 20x more initiated interactions from strangers when a woman walked with a dog than without.

Finding someone nearby that might share an interest who is also open to meeting people through this application seems like an easy way to broadcast those interests. For those who are trying to become less introverted or meet others, these apps seem like they could be useful tools.

Collis, G.M & McNicholas, J. 'Dogs as catalysts for social interactions: robustness of the effect' in British Journal of Psychology 91 (2000), pp. 61-70
I agree that if this was the only thing Margot sent, it would not be as compelling. But she also sent a resume and an exceptionally well-written cover letter with a lot of great ideas about how she'd engage the Ridejoy community (we ask for 5 ideas from all job applicants).

I think we would have at least phone screened her without this video slideshow, but it took us from "interested" to "wow, this girl looks super legit and really wants this job". If you're a job applicant, that might be worth a lot.
Very well polished.

I think it might be super useful to get frontend designers who are afraid of the command line to use LESS even more.
he asked me what I'd do on an architecture that didn't have a square root or a divide function

My answer: I'd change the hardware
This isn't an answer to your question, but I think it would be pretty easy to come up with a few rule changes to make Catan deterministic.

You could get rid of the dice rolls by saying that a tile with a certain number on it will produce a resource every X turns.

The robber could either be completely eliminated, or you could just have players take turns moving it at some interval.
How the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley
The first example there allows the JS engine to prove to itself that no one uses foo, so it optimizes the reference out of the closure to save memory. That's an optimization (and the fact that the debugger doesn't disable it is actually a bug); the language semantic is that all closed-over variables are available to the closure function body.
As a way to separate oneself from other candidates, this cannot be beat. Amazing job, Margot, and RJ for the great reply.

I am so sick of that song.
You don't have to believe in the fall of civilisation to realise that the US Govt is currently borrowing $1 trillion per year to fund the non negotiable American lifesyle.
Things that cannot go on forever won't, and this is one of them. Take $1 trillion out of the US economy (ie: consume only what you produce) and this will be a non linear event.

I'd recommend you read some FOFOA
http://fofoa.blogspot.com.au/2010/07/debtors-and-savers.html
(and all the rest.) If nothing else it will help you see the money system in a different light.
Can you elaborate? Your app got rejected?
It would be possible, though probably not easy, if the proper people had the proper access.
This looks great, I hope it goes well!

If I may make a suggestion for next time though: please consider finding a place with better wheelchair access.
It's very disheartening to see the de facto bias towards able-bods reenforced. Of course, I'm certain this wasn't by intent, but it's something I'd love to see improved.
Picking A Startup Market
Oh cool, just last week got the same intent to do this, after someone mentioned layervault.com in the comments.

Version controlling for design is great but if you want to differentiate from layervault or pixelnovel.com then you should try and see if designers would collaborate in an opensource fashion, ala github. (I am really curious about this, as that's the real reason people use github AFAICT)
So I would go and add some social aspect for it, make it a bit more like dribbble, behance, flickr (portfolios, inspiration) as these are the sites that designers use.
Also adding stockphoto/illustration selling and job board features would probably make for the best designer platform ever. (not mentioning the business options...)

And after this feature suggesting madness, I would like to point out that if you want to keep this simple and stupid, then still please get a designer and work on the ux.

Keep up the good work!
When you're as concerned with frontend performance as Google is, computer science knowledge can really come in handy. For example, they wrote their own compiler for Javascript to check for errors and shrink down the code to an absolute minimum, by e.g., shortening variable names and pruning functions that are never called. This means they had to write a their own parser, run various graph-based algorithms to follow references, iterate and transform the abstract syntax tree, etc.

http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/
I now see what I was competing with. Great choice!
Just yesterday, I was browsing the exercise generation framework - Khan exercises on github yesterday and had a question. Can the framework be used independent of KA (ie for other exercises and youtube videos) ?

Thanks for the great job you guys are doing of bringing quality education to everyone.
> If I need alternate versions of files I just save them with version numbers.

As a designer/programmer, I completely agree.

As a programmer, the idea of saving multiple copies of a file with different versions numbers just sounds awful.

But when designing in photoshop, theres rarely a need for a full version control system since I usually only have 5-6 PSDs of each iteration per design (or logos/sites/etc) and at that scale its easily manageable.

If version control was built into photoshop, it would be nice but the important thing is its not a need I have and I wouldn't necessarily seek this type of product out.
Ever since I've gained the ability to downvote, I've used it exclusively for people who write M$. Ignorance should never be tolerated.
I'm not sure why your post is down-voted. It's just an opinion and I don't believe well articulated opinions should be down-voted.

I don't think Sony, Apple Samsung are the "premium/luxury" brands (Apple maybe was considered one when it first came out but it certainly wasn't in the same class of exclusivity as a Bugatti is in the car world). I see all of those electronics manufacturers as the GMs or Toyota's of the hardware industry. They make a wide variety of electronics at different price points for different buyers. There's nothing exclusive or elitist about owning a Samsung or an Apple product.

I'd like to see Tesla as the disruptive force among the well-entrenched car brands like GM or Toyota, but I'd rather it not become the super-rare and expensive alternative to them. I realize we pay some premium based on what brand we choose but I was just expressing what I hope the Tesla brand would come to represent (and also what I had heard its mission was initially).
Github is driving us crazy - but i love them
> 2. I don't have a ton of time to sit through this.

What startup do you work for and how many resumes do you get? If someone made the effort to submit this to mine, I would "sit through" it.
I want some of that stuff. I don't visit Facebook on its own, so I need the reminders. I don't crawl concert sites on my own, so I like being notified of that stuff. But none of that ever requires my immediate attention.
Thanks, I hadn't seen this before.
I'm biased: some floors of this building I'm in have an MIT building number for mail delivery.

I'll SWAG roughly 5,000 people read HN and are within walking or T distance of MIT.
Apple does not want beta products in the app store, which makes sense. But I've not seen an outright ban on testing. Testing allows us to make the app better! In any case, we've not been rejected.
Sigh. PC game. I'm not sure how long it's been since I've even seen a PC. I suppose I could kick in some money and hope it works under Virtualbox.
Clarkson goes way out of the way to stage cases where electric cars fail. Then he gets caught red-handed. The guy has no responsibility to the truth. His program is pure entertainment, not a scientific case study, and should be enjoyed as such.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/aug...
Knowing how to program means knowing how to program a computer. Not a whiteboard, not a piece of paper, and certainly not with someone standing behind or over your shoulder. This is not a test of whether you can program; it's a test of whether you can tolerate extremely stressful and potentially humiliating situations without vomiting.
Without a way to install WOA (MS says they won't provide images for it), that won't help.
We got it you like gold. Warren Buffet doesn't. I'll take his advice over yours.
On my Internship at Khan Academy - David Hu
Where is this service drawing its crime data for? Specifically, for NYC:
http://www.trulia.com/local/#crimes/new-york-ny
Show HN: Chat Anonymously All Over the World.
Chat With other people all over the world. Anonymously. Geography + blabla = Geobla.com

http://geobla.com/
We created touchbasecal.com there, for the most part. It hit #5 in Paid Productivity in the App Store and still brings in healthy cash flow (though it was never meant to be more than a "learn iOS and App Store marketing project).
> This is an ongoing falsehood.

I realize that now, and apologize for spreading a misconception. We don't hear much about non-engineers through the biased HN-filter; hiring Silverstein gets you headlines. Part of my point, however, stands.

> but there are thousands of students who say it's
> making their lives measurably better.

I'd prefer KA to emphasize content -- quality content made by solid educators in their respective field -- over delivery method. That the latter enjoys priority right now (as Khan's comments make clear) may be a necessity, but an unfortunate one. But I'm pretty sure that you'll get there.
There's a Hackintosh community so I'm sure there will be a Hackdows community, but MS isn't going to ship a version of Windows that requires "community" drivers to work. As far as MS is concerned it's WHQL or nothing.
Eight features Windows 8 'borrowed' from Linux (and improved?)
Here's a quote from Klaus Teuber, the designer of Catan, that speaks to his philosophy of luck in games:

"When I play a game, I play intuitively. I don't like games where you have to think too much, where luck plays no part and the better player always wins. Chance makes things more exciting. If I know exactly what is going to happen tomorrow, things get boring. It's the same in a game. I prefer it that way."
I'm not saying it's a perfect indicator, I'm saying it's a cheap and easy indicator. Certainly there are outliers in every direction, but a running back who runs a 5.0 forty just isn't going to be very good (unless he's like 400 pounds).

So is it more likely that Google is filled with idiots that can't see the err of their ways, or that, across tens of thousands of individual hires, this is the most cost effective and produces the best results (minimizing false positives) on average.

College-admissions style interviewing just doesn't make sense for a company like Google.

FWIW, there are a couple edge cases (like javascript/frontend engineers) which my company (Facebook) has completely separate hiring tracks for. It works for us, but I'm sure Google has its own reasons for not doing that.
Does startup density predict startup success?
We take a data driven look at whether startup hubs actually lead to startup success. Click the link to find out the answer.
I think the video is an insight into the quality of Apple vs. Microsoft products. Apple would never let out a low quality product video like the one linked in this article. They didn't even have a decent microphone for the video and I was distracted by background static. Apple's culture embraces every aspect of a product's launch, with a product video being clean and simple just like their end products.