skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really? Given what Notch plans (2,000 DCPUs per machine - which is certainly doable), let's assume he's running a high-cpu instance (large) at Amazon for those 2,000 DCPUs. That's $500 per month for the machine. If he can't get that much money out of 2,000 players, he's doing it wrong.

Assuming you allow for eventual instead of atomic consistency, and allow for loss of CPU for several seconds if an instance goes kablooey, the load distribution is really not that hard. (And your spaceship really doesn't need five 9's. It's a game, so just blame it on "an ion storm". Or "a space monster" if that floats your boat ;)

Partitioning does not need to be too clever if you can constrain the number of ships per region - certainly something you can impose via game design.

Lag only matters if you interact twitch based. Notch's plans lend themselves to indirect agency via the simulated ship's computer instead, so if everybody perceives the world as it was a few seconds ago, not much is lost.

It's certainly a doable task. Notch's mind is in the right place to pull it off. No doubt, it'll be hard - but it'll be interesting to see what he comes up with.
Hmm, can't find the link to your blog anywhere on your website... Maybe you should add that also.
I guess what I missed in my post (deliberately) was tying this diet to weight loss. To lose weight, simply put, you take in fewer calories than you burn to stay alive. That's the gist of why my coworkers do it. If they get 1400 calories usefully extracted from their diet but they need 2000, they lose 600 calories every day, 600 calories which the body then makes up by burning fat. Even if they could extract 2500 just from cooking the food.

The human body is incredibly designed to not die if you don't eat anything. Basically, you have to not eat anything PLUS not have any useful fat left to burn PLUS not have any extra muscle to burn. Almost everyone in the Western world could go a month without eating and only suffer from lethargy and possibly a lack of non-fat-soluble vitamins. Eat nothing but take a multivitamin and you're theoretically good to go for months. There was the study published on one man who fasted for a full year and suffered no health detriment.

I tried to dodge that direct statement in my original post because I am not a health professional, I know nothing of the science behind the diet, and I'm not trying to make the argument that the diet would be a "good" way to lose weight.
Good point. If you wanna show you're capable of executing, just pick one of the well known pain points. Build something cool. Then use that as a proof of your abilities. Investors look for good teams. There's no better curriculum for your team than a track record of great projects.

Instead of telling us that you can build something, just build something. :)
Designing iOS Applications (Presentation)
Sure thing - yeah, it's scary. :/

Jos A Banks has a couple of sales going on right now, if that'll help? My dad tends to prefer Men's Warehouse (they have better service), but the suit prices alternate. MW will usually be cheaper if they're not in a mall, too.

If he had a good relationship with one of his professors, they might be able to help with the hunt. One of the interviews I had was because of that.

You might be able to get the ticket for free if you have some spare miles. It's still a pain, but marginally better. :/
Let's take it a step further, shall we. Say you get this type of request thrown at you, which is obviously a mis-estimate and you don't end up delivering it with expected pace. You weren't supposed to, by the way. It was a trap. Now, the PM or whoever says this "Well, Joe, what if we punt it to Bob over there and see if we can get you concentrated on another problem X". Does that precipitate your balls into shrinking or what?

Estimates are just that, estimates and not contracts. We should expect them to have a float time, otherwise rename them to contracts. I do X in Y amount of time if Z is true. Usually, there are unknown variables and I'm running out of letters to name them all.

Furthermore, I don't work on a deserted island. I have a phone, QA keeps on asking me questions, clients want clarifications and my version control is burning up from constant merging, and yes I have included all that in the time estimate.
It is a crying shame that this article fails to realize that decorator.decorator is itself a decorator, and that failing to use it as such undermines the premise that decorators are "a neat way to modify functions". With this realization:

@decorator.decorator
def heading1(func, *args, **kwargs):
return "<h1>" + func(*args, **kwargs) + "</h1>"

With this construction, you no longer need to have the two copies of the function: the degenerate wrapper can be removed and replaced with this decorator.

Even if the library didn't provide this, you can just look at this code and feel "no, wait, this is wrong: this should be implemented with a decorator" and write this:

def better_decorator(function):
def wrapped(function, *args, **kw):
return decorator.decorator(function, *args, **kw)
return decorator.decorator(wrapped, function)

This new decorator, @better_decorator, can now be used in place of @decorator.decorate in the above example, and again solves the problem of the degenerate wrapper by generalizing it into a single universal degenerate wrapper.
Dear lord, I'd love to know who this funder is.
Blamed by who? Commercial compiler support?
I'd blame the part i didn't make too :)

You can usually figure out if this is true by testing it out against Comeau's online C/C++ compiler. Or at least, you could. Comeau seems not to have updated in a while

If it crashes, it was probably EDG. If it doesn't, it wasn't

The ICC example posted does not crash Comeau, so i doubt it was an EDG issue.

(They are also missing a semicolon on line 2, which EDG doesn't crash on. If you fix this, it still doesn't crash EDG)
In fact, all of the programs they posted that contain structs have the same issue. The last member of every struct is missing a semicolon.
Thanks a ton for the followup.

Was devbootcamp free when you did it? I was having almost this same conversation via email with ezl, and while I don't doubt that there are tons of Ruby/Rails resources with mentors that are very good, I find it interesting that there is a large enough dearth of resources in the Python/Django arena to warrant a $10-$12,000 course for Ruby that would work.

While I fully understand that LPTHW isn't nearly the same experience, I guess I just never noticed how little tutorials there are for Python when there is obviously so much documentation.

Regardless, congratulations on your progress. Please keep us updated, as your post was quite informative.
If you want a registrar and DNS host, I've had great luck with http://dnsimple.com

Great customer support, and they're always adding new features. And having 3rd party DNS hosting separate from your server provider makes switching providers easier.
Tiny, “Self-Sculpting,” Sand-Like Robots
Well, I'd settle for a teleportation device or ability that could take me anywhere in the universe instantaneously, and far, far greater physical durability (maybe in a Culture-level gel suit).

They better get cranking, because 72 hours is just not a lot of time to develop either of these things.
To be fair, Readability is doing a good job of responding to feedback from Android users. There are still more than a few issues (e.g. better control of background processing), but they did quickly turn around support for Share Intents (first out and then in) so I'd say they're moving in the right direction.
What would it take for the average i5 or i7 to virtualize a 16bit processor? Could it run on a separate thread from the main game?

Could you run part of your MMO server work as a distributed-computing setup on client PCs? (but how would you get that working in real time?)

Maybe the players that are online at a particular time could be doing some of the extra processing - the game client could run 1 or 2 extra 16-bit virtualizers in the background, along with the virtualizer for the player's own 16-bit cpu and the game thread. So 4 threads running on 4 separate cores.
With $25M From Benchmark, Can Minerva Build An Online Ivy?
That would be pretty awesome. To have different sizes of ships that require different amounts of crew members.

To have a big ship, you'll need lots of friends to perform all the jobs, and you can take shifts in flying the ship (or set it to autopilot) or cleaning the space showers.
This is a very valuable post for people who are applying to YC. In particular, I think business people who haven't done as much implementation work are particularly susceptible to this specificity problem. I certainly was (and sometimes still am).

One concept helped me catch myself making this mistake... I read somewhere that a good explanation gives a peer the understanding required to reconstruct / implement the idea themselves.

However, some people have success describing ideas broadly in certain instances. For example, I have some friends who have had success selling "vision" to investors, even though after they pitched me I wasn't able to explain how their product worked at all.
Very cool. Definitely has the style down! That green is spot on.
A good way to stop being a "nobody" is to get your names on your online properties. Twitter handles on your blog posts would be a good thing.

It took way too much effort to track you guys down on angel.co, and even then I don't have twitter handles.

( ps: I'm also hanging out in Iowa, hacking on a startup. Hit me up @collintmiller, maybe we can cook up some ways to remind people this is the state that brought you the computer. )
The best source for information about startups is the web, not books. You can probably learn 90% of what you need to know from reading everything on these two links:

http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

http://venturehacks.com/archives

The details of deal terms are not very important until you're actually raising money. You'll have a lawyer at your side when you do that anyway. The hard part is building a product that users love. Focus 99.9% on that.
Federal court tosses Colorado's Amazon tax
Getting into YC isn't the goal here... having a successful company/product is. I would try to just build something that solves a pain point for you. If you want to prove yourself based on what you can build in 72 hours, then pick something and do it[1]. That will get you more consideration than something like this.

[1] But, I'm not a fan of "look what we built in 72 hours" types of projects, so you may want to just try to build your product.
I clicked on "we're hiring" and saw that:

Site Reliability Engineer:
As the first Site Reliability Engineer at Parse, you’ll be responsible for [..]

At some companies, reliability is an afterthought. At Parse, we’re building a developer platform, so robustness is one of our core values. [..]

Do people even understand what they write?
Notwithstanding a possible Colorado appeal, what has been Amazon's habit with similar rulings? Are they likely to reinstate Colorado affiliates?
Regardless whether you get a response from YC or not, I think that what you did is more creative than chasing down a bunch of YC alumni you don't know and getting reluctant recommendations that carry no weight. Good luck!
And one of the things that throws some software estimates out the window is when a developer/programmer gets in the zone. There have been times I've hammered out a problem that I had spent days on in a few hours when the inspiration/flow/etc. hit. Something I would have guessed would have taken me a few days more, I end up hammering out in 3 hours. And when you pull these kinds of tricks...

People think you can do it again... and again... and again as if it was something you could just conjure out of thin air. There are many papers written on this topic. I've been playing around with a few ways to achieve this more frequently, and it has worked to some degree, but it's not something I could rely on in the heat of battle.
If you are so talented and innovative, do you really need YC? Just because one road closed down, doesn't mean you can't reach the destination.
also some neat tips here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4426504/python-library-to...

i hadn't seen some of the more modern ways to do screen scraping.
Step back from this conversation for a second and reread this, pretending it was from someone you don't know. Does this person who wrote this post sound like a winner who is going to make the next Dropbox? That's who YC wants in their next class. Be the winner who is going to make the next Dropbox.

There is nothing wrong with making affirmative efforts to sound like a winner. This is a skill which will take you far in life. I suggest working on it.

With specific reference to you being in Iowa: howdy! I live in a rice field in Central Japan. I work that into speeches frequently, often as part of a self-deprecating joke. I probably overuse self-deprecating jokes if I'm being totally honest with myself, but when I use them, the idea is not to convey "I'm not as competent as all you cool kids from the Valley who paid good money to hear me talk today", it is close to exactly the opposite of that.

You say you don't know any YCombinator alums. Is knowing YCombinator alums a priority to you? Winners routinely achieve their priorities by taking the basic, obvious steps for achieving them. There's a series of tubes between central Iowa and every YCombinator alum. There's also planes which regularly fly between Iowa and Silicon Valley. (I am totally serious.)

You may be inclined to state reasons why YC alums (or anybody else whose cooperation would be valuable) would not want to talk to you. How about you just don't state those reasons and instead wait to hear them from the horses' mouths instead? Better still, how about instead coming with reasons why they would of course want to talk to you, because you're building things that will solve identifiable problems for them?
Playa iPhone Case Helps Get You Laid
The Travelling Salesman problem, and why its important
No question, take the job.

I quit school after one year simply because I wasn't focused on school at that time. After 5 years of ski-bumming/ bartending, I went back to the University clearly ready to spend the time required without distractions.
Does the distinction matter to most software developers? From my perspective, the legal risk is almost identical. Something will most likely make its way through the patent office. At that point you can be sued and (unless you're independently wealthy and have plenty of free time or you have an employer who will take care of your legal defense) the quality of the patent doesn't matter.
This stood out to me: "I whispered audibly enough for a few nearby people to hear, 'Be specific! Be specific!'" because it also applies to writing. I'm a grad student in English lit and teach undergrads. Their writing is filled with generalities about the work and/or author; very few have the training or discipline to talk specifically about the work and to examine particular sentences. So I spend a lot of time doing that in class.

Actually, most people are like this with books or movies or other things in their lives; they'll be able to say if they liked a book, or could "relate" to it (whatever that means), but beyond that they won't have much concrete (another synonym for "specific). Which is okay, since they're not trying to be professional writers or critics. But if you are trying to a be professional x (writer, critic, startup), you'd better be willing to look at details, since details are everything.

The older I get, the more I believe details are everything. Well, maybe not quite everything, but certainly 95% of the thing.
I can attest to this. I was a total noob when I saw that video and didn't get it.

Spent several years in the murky php waters because I could just drop that code in the html I did know and go.

Now that I have more experience its more more clear the benefits of rails/django
Sorry, much is often lost in pure text form.
Just wanted to tell everyone about our idea that we submitted.

We want to remain transparent in our process.

We have noticed a lot of people becoming interested in the quantified self with the release of such devices as the Jawbone UP, Nike Fuel Band, and the FitBit. We think there can be a better network for all of the people that currently use those devices and also people who want to manually track their progress.

Starsling will be a social goal tracking site where you can see how your friends are doing on their goals, give them motivation, and challenge or join your friends in their goals. Create goals such as Meditate 7 times a week, or read 48 books in a year. Starsling will also allow you to track your goals with or without the aid of such monitoring devices like the Jawbone UP and display your data in a helpful way.

If you have any feedback or thoughts please let us know!

jeffreykam & gregsqueeb

http://starsling.com/
SQL Injection through HTTP Headers
> "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there are few."

As someone who likes to read quotes and examine the wisdom within (or at least I tell myself that), I see no wisdom here.

The only possible interpretation which I find makes sense, is that the priorities of the expert are much clearer then the beginners. The expert (through experience and intelligence) knows what matters, and what details are not critical. The beginner however, places great importance on things which are near-worthless.

If that is the more correct interpretation, then I find the wording clumsy. If this isn't then please enlighten me.
> But don't you think that YC is a business school, by any definition of the word?

No; it's not a school, and it's for entrepreneurs, not businessmen, which is the heart of the distinction I made previously.

> And wouldn't it be interesting to do a comparative ranking alongside traditional business schools?

No, because there's no basis of comparison. You can be a successful MBA without ever in your life working for a company with less than 10,000 people or having more than a token amount of equity compensation. Some MBAs prefer it that way.

> There was a time I wished I had gone to HBS or Stanford GSB. While those remain fine institutions, wouldn't any young nerd today prefer YC?

Any "young nerd", as far as I understand the term, would prefer a succession of stable job titles with "engineer" on the end from their first job out of college to retirement to an MBA. Now it turns out most of these engineers can be more valuable as founders, which supports the mission of YC. If it wasn't for the bubble and the social proof surrounding YC it would have never attracted the business-school types and you'd never have this confused association in your head.
I don't blame the lawyers and I assumed that most other people blamed the lawyers. I blame the law.
What about the twitter feed on the right?
Yeah I see it as a "Well you got a bunch of gyros last pit stop. Pity they don't all link up to your guidance stuff" so you write a program to grab data from your gyros and headings from your heading input. You could still fly just fine using the default stuff but if you want say...constant attitude adjustment or the ability to have your ship not pick up unwanted spin you're going to have to deal with that yourself or trade with somebody who has already dealt with it.

Looks fun, I want to make a program that does orbit translations and stuff for you with minimum delta-v.
I think Facebook should just pull their access to the FB API. Y! already stated how helpful it was for their news and then they sued FB. If they don't like it then don't use it.
Ah I think I misread that. ;) Still, I think even a thousand year gap in tech would make ships obsolete. I mean, look at how far our tech has progressed over the past century...
Doubling NASA's budget will save the US economy
As a general rule of thumb, I don't sign up for anything like this unless I can see screenshots or a video first. I know there are some on your blog, but they really need to be linked from the front page.
I had no idea. I will check this out.

Thank you!
I just started using Name.com and it seems great so far.
I think there are two issues with XML/JSON/etc vs. roll-your-own format/grammar.
The first issue is the difficulty of creating it, which you describe as "trivial". I think it's an "easy once you know how", but not easy beforehand, not easy for everyone, and not every aspect of it is easy even then. Another way of looking at this is that designing and writing and testing and debugging and rewriting and documenting a grammar is always going to be more work than using pre-existing code. For example, although you've put in enough work to be able to use ARON in several projects, it's not ready for others. IMHO it's a non-trivial undertaking.
(BTW: does ANTLR 2.x automatically take care of left-recursive grammars?) My experience with parsing is that there be gotchas; this is one reason I'm very impressed with the principles behind XML Schema. (It's a shame it's so soul-destroyingly horrific to actually use. Also XML namespaces: righteous concept, diabolical realization.)

The second issue is familiarity/standardization vs. specific-use formats (a kind of DSL), purely in terms of ease-of-use and adoption. I think familiar formats really are easier to read - your eye and brain have internalized short-cuts for interpreting them, so you can quickly work on them. Similar to your finger-memory for your editor. An alternative must be significantly better to overcome this unfair advantage of the incumbent.

However, counter-example: for both these reasons (the first is a kind of mechanized version of the second), I thought it would be impossible to displace XML, much as ASCII seemed impossible to displace (there used to be competing character encodings; the present standard, unicode, can be seen as a superset of ASCII). Although JSON seemed wonderfully better (I first saw it in the ActionScript version of ECMAscript), I thought it couldn't overcome XML's incumbency. Yet, JSON is making inroads, and not just in web-clients, but in APIs. It's interesting that JSON lacks analogs to XML Schema, XSLT, XPath; although proposals have been made, they aren't adopted. I wonder if this is because people are now figuring out how to do without these extras? Or if, when they do need them, they just use the XML stack...

I think new formats/grammars have the best chance of adoption in niches, when they are so specialized to the task that their benefits far outweigh the advantages of the standardized incumbent - in that particular use-case. For example, most programming languages define their own grammars e.g. python, ruby, java, etc.

BTW: in your other comments with code, just indent each line
by two spaces for nicer formating. :-)
Yes, but how long until you can print a 3D printer?
That is great thinking - I never thought about this. Does this work for phones that are the newest as well? For instance - my original incredible from 2 years ago?
Hey thanks for posting this, I just signed up and noticed two things:

1) If you guys allow signup / login with google why isn't there a sigin with google button right on the homepage /signup section? would have prefered that to entering my username and password and most people have a google account anyway.

2) There needs to be a way to exit tutorial mode, maybe it's there already but if it is, it's not obvious enough.

Otherwise I'm loving the design and ease of use.
There really isn't any more detail; it was a brief conversation.
DiabloD3 probably meant American companies.

That correction doesn't make the comment less inane though. I'm pretty sure that getting into a pissing match with a sovereign Western nation would be a no-win situation for Google - lose and, well, you lost; win and you've got every other government (including the U.S.) painting a target on your back.
Love the design. Clean, interesting and informing. One thing I would suggest is add a screenshot of the product somewhere. I find that seeing the product helps really draw me in and want to sign up.