skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair, there's a voluntary anti-copyright infringement plan underway among the top US ISPs that probably won't get underway until after the election. I'm not sure that CISPA is really related to it, but it's at least plausible that this would impact it. The main problem is that nobody is quite sure exactly how the plan is supposed to work, exactly, so you're correct to point out that it's largely guesswork.

I'm honestly not sure if there are any privacy laws that would affect it, anyhow. I question whether video rental privacy could even apply to a pirated movie, but who knows? And the plan itself is unknown and subject to change.

So there might actually be something there, but I would never argue this one. This argument is weak at best and harmful at worst. Even though big copyright holders have shown scandalous negligence in their DMCA notices and there are good reasons to believe that wide-scale efforts are likely to harm many innocent people, they haven't actually enacted that plan yet and arguing it puts you into a copyright quagmire, so it's best to focus on the more immediate problems with this bill and slough all the weak arguments.
In JavaScript, && does not evaluate to a boolean. It evaluates to the thing on the left if that thing is false (in which case the right hand side is not evaluated at all), otherwise to the thing on the right. So in said JavaScript console,

"asdas" && "da"

evaluates to "da" and

"" && "da"

evaluates to "".

So in an assignment context |r = a && b| would need to be replaced by: if (a) { r = a } else { r = b }, which may or may not be more confusing than the original statement with &&. But in a statement context, where the result of && is not being assigned to anything at all, "a && b" is exactly the same as "if (a) b;" except harder to understand.
I'm looking forward to this. Thanks Alex!
Ask HN: How do you get a guest post published?
I was wondering if anyone on HN has written a guest post for a site like Mashable or TechCrunch and what did you need to do to get it published: contact the site directly, stalk a blogger(not a fan), etc.

Thanks!
>>This doesn't seem to have any new details on the service other than that its 5GB and launching on Mac/Windows/iOS/Android, which is all in line with expectations.

The author mentions they have a draft of the release from a launch partner. That feels a lot more substantial than just rumors, to me.

>> Given all the recent leaks, it really doesn't seem like Google's doing much more than cloning Dropbox.

In the sense that they are creating a cloud storage option?I suppose. I would almost guaranty it will have extreme android integration, which would give it an obvious advantage over any other cloud storage app on android.

>>Was I the only one expecting Google to knock this one out of the park, a la Gmail's introduction?

We haven't seen the announcement, so saying that feels a bit early, but realistically, I am not sure what they could do that would be terribly interesting. GMail was amazing becuaae every other web mail platform sucked. Dropbox is awesome though, so they will lack the contrast to make them look better this time around.
Visual quality is an "easy" problem. We know exactly how it ought to work (ray tracing has been photorealistic for some time now), it's just a matter of tweaking it to run fast enough on the hardware we have. And we're really close to pulling it off.

AI is, by contrast, a hard problem. We don't have a very good idea at all of how to exactly simulate a personality, but it's likely to be orders of magnitude more complex than the most elaborate physical simulation ever designed. The most intelligent NPC ever developed was really, really stupid. The appearance of realistic characters in games at all is an elaborate stage show. You can spend artist time making the show seem convincing in more circumstances, but evolving it past that at all is one of the hardest problems in computer science. We're nowhere near realism.

Now, with that said, in the demo they showed off some of their pathfinding and destructible environment improvements. There are plenty of gamers who care just as much (or more) about that stuff.
I do this, and occasionally I catch flak for it. I put in 8 hours, and that 8 hours happens to be fantastic -- regardless of how busy I look, what I work on, or who I work with. The problem is that casual observers don't see that. They only see the present.

Thankfully, my efforts were noticed despite my lack of unpaid overtime. I've been promoted twice in the past three years, added to special panels and events, and even been given assignments that just rock.

There is this stigma around working 40 hours a week, and only 40 hours, that I will never understand. If you don't need more 40 (or even less) to do your job, what does it matter? The employer is getting what they asked for, and often times more, and you're getting a paycheck. Its called ROWE: results oriented work environment. Just a shame it hasn't caught on in the US.
A bigger problem for me is the almost totally broken search.

Try searching for Fuze (Sansa Fuze, an MP3 player) and then selecting "in Electronics & Photo" and then sorting by price.

You end up with pages and pages of power adaptors; cords; cases; screen covers; etc. And the paging mechanism for Amazon only lets you scroll one page at a time.

There are very many examples of this.
While I appreciate the need to compare MVC JavaScript libraries -- lots of folks are looking for a shortcut for evaluating codebases -- I also worry that using a relatively shallow comparison of a "trivial" example app isn't the best way to make choices.

To that extent, I have to apologize for publishing the original Todo example app ;)

While TodoMVC is a fine resource, I think it's still important to look at what the different libraries and frameworks choose to do differently ... and most importantly, what sort of real apps have been built with each.
You seem to be ignoring the central role played by London financiers in the largest global destruction of "capital and jobs in the pursuit of notoriety, peer adulation and the odd $1bn exit" in the last 50 years. In other words, there's a perfectly adequate bankroll, but they happen to prefer poker over blackjack.
Great idea , looking forward to your podcast.
Are you allowed to make a porn game with this engine?

I ask in all seriousness... I'm thinking maybe the licence of this engine comes with certain terms?
I don't see any information on the CPU resources available or IPv6 support.
Idea HN: QR inside video for ad's
USE CASES:
1. SOCIAL:you are watching tv with friends ad is shown,u might want to know more about product/buy it.You just need to click with qr app.
2. CROWD: You are at times square(or a place like that!) ad is shown u want to buy it.You can buy it/know it instantly.
3. NO_CABLE:You are watching ad in a medium which does not have two way connection.
ADVANTAGE FOR AD COMPANIES:
1. They can catch/track you where they cannot in general track.
2. They have something measurable
3. They connect with you instantaneously.
IDEA:
Idea is to create a simple platform where ad companies will provide the link where they expect the user to land or create a page for their brand on the site and upload their video.QR would be generated based on the link and encoded in a video.All the traffic will go through our platform and would provide rich analytics.
NEED UR INPUTS:
1.Is this a viable idea?
2. Are there already companies that do it(i googled it couldn't find anything substantial)
3. what do u think? should i try working on this
criticisism is welcome :)
Evaluating 12 apostles of technology influencers
Agree so much from New Zealand, me and heaps of my friends were all massive fans of At the Drive In when they were around, being able to see them live on the other side of the world felt pretty cool.
Learn to read the source, Luke
No, but "tasteless horse radish" is a completely useless thing. Which is my point.
I'm sure Amazon would've accepted a return if asked.

I acknowledge that there may be some confusion around knock-off products, but the Amazon customer service has always been top rate in my experience.
I find modern VS very clunky, to the point that I avoid using it whenever I can.

In my opinion, the VS6 (for C/C++, released 1998) was excellent, and it's all been going downhill from there.
Hotspots.io team (YCW11) acquired by Twitter
"Sprawl became an addiction in the same way most addictions start: by providing a huge rush of perceived benefits early on. It became the biggest money-making machine ... and you didn't really even need to think very much in order to participate because of its reductive simplicity. Zoning ordinances, financing mechanisms, and appraisal standards all conspired to grease the skids for the developers of sprawl, with an unspoken side-effect: every other way of building became intolerably laborious by comparison."
A todo list encompasses many basic entry points a piece of software must accommodate:

1) interface
2) database
3) adding/removing from said store
4) sorting
5) class structures
...

I could go on. Essentially, the best way into any language is to know how something is supposed to work and compare it to how it appears to be working, making those more difficult leaps by actually practicing.
Like you, I couldn't even entertain this had I not an enormous load of audiobooks and a Kindle loaded with hundreds of titles. Most of which I've read. And listened to. At least twice.
> @izs - I think you overreach by grouping him as anti-semi-colon [sic].

Those are your words, not mine. The "other side", as I put it, isn't necessarily anti-semicolon. To be on the other side of this particular argument, they merely have to disagree with the assertion that a semicolon at the end of the statement is a must, and not a style choice. And izs did choose that style for npm.

> Thomas Fuchs - heard of him, he's done lots of stuff JavaScript and PHP wise. I'll give you that one. He gave us Scriptaculous, and some decent PHP resources (like PHPatterns, IIRC). He's active in Rails.

There's Zepto.js too, and he was a longtime core member on the Prototype JavaScript framework. He's influential.

> The main reason the quality of JavaScript has increased dramatically in the last 6 or 7 years has been because of a coalescing towards a JavaScript best practice. This has mainly been led by Douglas Crockford and JavaScript developers at Yahoo.

I strongly disagree. The driving force was the increase in importance of the JavaScript language. He was part of that trend. He helped speed it up, but it would have happened regardless.

> JS Lint is the starting point for this improved use of JavaScript.

JS Lint is a starting point. There are other valid starting points.

> And I guess that's the real problem here. Not using JSLint before using JSMin.

But @fat isn't using jsmin. And there are great alternatives, so this is a valid choice!

> What would "JavaScript the Railified Parts" look like side-by-side with Crockford's The Good Parts, and Flanagan's Definitive Guide?

It would look like this: http://pragprog.com/book/tbcoffee/coffeescript
You're right, it's also like kicking Nokia while it's down. It's really sad.
It is concise. There are fewer tokens and bytes needed to write A && B than if ( A ) { B }. And the intent thing is, as I've tried to explain, very much situation-specific. There are many programmers out there very comfortable with this idiom. That it doesn't happen to be popular in the web development community doesn't mean it sucks or isn't worth learning.

Don't pass judgement on syntax you literally just learned, basically. Don't assume the world you know is the only one worth knowing. Good hackers know their tools.
My ideal storage solution would be one where I'm not restricted to syncing my own local data. I want to be able to upload it to the cloud then delete it from my HD.

This is the mentality I'm used to from Gmail. Everything is archived online and I don't need a local copy. This would surely tie in with the thinking behind the Chromebook?
No, my money is on Microsoft buying RIM/Blackberry. Those guys are gone in 3 months.
After that acquisition Nokia will not be possible anymore because of anti-competition regulations.
You realize you're making exactly the same point that the blog post was trying to make...
May the odds be ever in your favor.
Now we just wait for someone announcing his own version of Tupac made with HTML5 & WebGL.
We worked on a startup product a few months which is currently shelved. It had a file system like interface and simplified moving files between dropbox, amazon S3, google docs and multiple accounts (any one with two dropbox accounts ?).

With all this google drive news, its pretty tempting to bring it back to life :)
A Dropbox clone with a better Android client would make me switch immediately.

The Android Dropbox client doesn't even let you download folders at once, only individual files.
I think this was the plan from the start and I said so from the moment Elop was hired.

note: the downvotes are so predictable on threads like this...
We've seen this before. It was called google video. Google ended up buying youtube because even they could no longer deny they'd lost the battle and they couldn't risk it going to a competitor.

Dropbox is in for a rough ride, as long as they can maintain focus and quality (beat them at customer support, that should be a walk in the park) they'll be the biggest YC exit ever once Google has run its course with the Google Drive.
FEZ - insanely amazing game
The average work week in US is 43 hours. To be precise, it is on average 8.6 hours per day worked.

Working 11-12 hours is definitely not common. Of the few people I know who do it, all do it voluntarily.
Turntable.fm + Twilio voice api = Live panel chats, 3 minutes per person to speak, vote up or boo off.
I'm not hugely privy to the storyline, but it is my understanding a loose group of forum-goers from reddit, 4chan, neogaf, and probably other communities banded together to vote EA into the #1 status of worst company in america for various legitimate reasons. EA then very shortly after (like within a week) introduced this idea that they received the designation in part because of backlash regarding homosexual content in one game (of a series that has been featuring such content since '07). Now no one cares about why EA was really voted into this honor, but rather all the issues related to this (seeming) misdirection. This article is a perfect example.

EA: 1
Consumerist+Voters: 0
Tinychat hits 20m registered users
I agree, Google has some of the smartest Software Engineers, a huge amount of capital, and really they could have spent as little or as much time on this as they wanted. I truly hope it doesn't end up another Google+ vs. Facebook type comparison. Lots of room for new players in this market, but there needs to be innovation.
The Trademarked Beard
In the end, it will come down to which patents are more useful for Microsoft to help slow Android and Linux down. The one with the nastiest stuff will win.
A brief update on NUMA and MySQL
Yes.

Honestly, I'm not at a show to watch somebody perform their music, I'm there to enjoy that music with a few hundred/thousand other people, and listen to it on a big stereo.

It's a socializing thing, not a consumption thing.
I think "free" should be in quotes.
Twitter Acquires Social Analytics Startup Hotspots.io
It is news to where I work. When I interviewed I was told 40 to 45 hours a week. I get here and was doing 40 hours and then told they need "more hours out of us" and "it would be different if there wasn't a backup of work" (which as far as I could tell there wasn't any, just one of the devs constantly changing stuff).

There are 3 devs (including me) and the other two keep putting in much more than 40 hours whereas I strive for just 40. When I first started I tried for more but then I realized that it didn't matter. There was no incentive for me. It actually made me hate the job more and more.
> Everything is archived online and I don't need a local copy.

Even with Gmail, I hope you have a second copy of your data somewhere. You never know when your account might just disappear.
Should I worry about my privacy if I use this "free" service? I don't really want them to serve me targeted ads based on the contents of my Google Drive. I don't know whether they plan to do anything like this, but still. Giving Google access to my files (in addition to my email, social network, voice mail, contact list, calendar, and reading preferences . .) makes me uneasy.
What do you do when a 11-12 hour workday is expected upon penalty of being marginalized and eventually let go?

You take advantage of the fact that it's all but impossible for humans to sustain their productivity while working those kinds of hours for any length of time.

With all due respect to whoever said it first, furious activity is no substitute for keeping yourself in working order. Or something like that.
I agree, I think DHH's statements were bizarre. They seemed to assume a sort of binary idea of "professional." You were either an anal retentive, by the book pedantic clock puncher or you were a fun loving rock star. The truth is there's a wide gamut and I think it's great for people to be "professional" without going to some sort of IBM-style extreme.
Android isn't just for phones. It is (and can be) more than just software for the smartphone form factor.
Although it's obviously limited to media files, iTunes Match has probably the most elegant solution to the problem. CrashPlan is also doing a great job for backups via constant syncing with the cloud.
A short video that shows how the Musion system works: http://vimeo.com/7047856
Remember Nokia did it to itself. They could fix MeeGo, they could have gone with Android and, instead, they bet their future on an OS that had shown very little hope of growth. They could also have left the smartphone market and focused on high-function S40 dumbphones and base a way up from there.
Neat! I just started playing around with the implementation of another Lisp-inspired language I've been thinking about for a while now (https://github.com/gliese1337/vernal-lang); I suspect this could turn out to be a really useful reference for implementing the compiler (not to mention inspiring me to steal features).
Crytek isn't going to do your job for you, they make the tools that others use to make high interactive gameworlds and characters. They also happen to make a game from their engine called Crysis but I wouldn't call the be-all-end-all of FPSs.
It assumes that you can a) get into the YC rounds
(which 95% of angels can not) and b) there are
other deals out there as good as the YC deals
(80% of angel deals I see are not as refined as YC
startups).

So true.

That's probably where YC derives most of its value.
I used it at jamba juice about 3 months ago. I was the first at that location, and the whole staff came out to try and figure out how to get it to work. It took about 1.25 man hours (15 minutes * (4 staff + me)) to use the free $10 for joining!
You make good points. As a busy parent, I certainly sympathesize with people that feel like they have too little time to monitor what they're kids are exposed to.

I think one very significant factor is making sure that they can come to you, as a parent, when they come across a new concept. Of course, as you said, I would prefer to introduce the concepts on my timeline, but I also need to be ready to deal with them whent he come up. More than that, I need to make sure my kids feel comfortable coming to me when they come up. Otherwise, it won't be a discussion I need to have "right now", it will be a discussion that happens with other friends that are probably just as confused and unprepared as mine are.
Is the creation of new software generally a major part of most programming jobs?
I believe this is at best an unfair comparison between school and a "real world" environment. Out in the working world it is assumed that you are going into the work with the necessary knowledge to complete a task, this is not the case in education. We specifically develop a sandbox environment for kids to develop skills at school. At the end of the day students do not have the fear of losing a job to motivate them. We must instead encourage kids to keep going, even after they make mistakes. I stand firmly against people who believe tests are unfair, because at the end of the day children show they can stand on their own before moving on, but in the time that they are learning new material the focus must be on building them up and encouraging perseverance.
I think pebble is the next big thing and might even get rid of its dependence on the mobile phone in future. Just imagine Siri helping you get through your day with out taking the phone out of the pocket!
Oh yes of course, there are no people who oppose gay rights. There is a complete equality, legally and socially among people of different sexualities. No sir-ee, completly impossible that there are people opposed to gay rights,
I just won with a score of 9, although I have no idea how I did it.

I'm curious how this works. I'm guessing that the underlying algorithm is predicting based on a number of different heuristics, measuring the success of each heuristic, and using the prediction from the most successful heuristic up to that point. This can be a successful strategy for a Rock Paper Scissors bot (see: http://stackoverflow.com/a/8827797/173292)

If it's implementing that sort of algorithm under the hood then it isn't necessarily measuring true randomness, as there would certainly be deterministic patterns that could beat it. Anyone have the time to type in the binary representation of the fibonacci sequence?
I know that's an easy feeling to slip into (if you're serious), but it doesn't make any sense to feel that way. You know everything about your startup, all of its nuances and exactly how you'll change the world. PG and team know what you happened to write in response to a few questions on a very short application, and a 1 minute video. On top of that, they have to sift through thousands of these apps. There's no doubt that these guys are very good at what they do, but even if you're the next Bill Gates (or Steve Jobs if you prefer), there's a very good chance you'll get overlooked. Incidentally both Gates and Jobs started their companies sans YCombinator.

That said, best of luck!
... talking about “what’s wrong with the London startup
scene” to drive traffic to their site. Consider this post
two-fingers up to those people.

Two-fingers up?
Scaling Rails
Or: "Contains no represetation of people from the following minitories: [ ] Asian [X] Homosexuals [ ] Black [ ] Jews, maybe give skewed one-sided view of society"
I suspect you find Haskell difficult to read not because of its syntax--which is actually rather readable and surprisingly simple--but because it basically shares almost nothing with other languages you know (e.g. Python).
Please facelift my app (for child sponsorship)
Hi Everyone. My cousin and I are bootstrapping this startup for sponsor kids. Neither of us are rockstar designers but would love a great design. We currently have about 18 ministries signed up and we are sponsoring thousands of kids. Thanks!
On the other hand, if you want participation from the Algol-descendant community, who frequently scorn the Lisp community's formatting, that may be exactly the right decision to make to get them familiar with Lisp-like syntax and worry about teaching them the more standard Lisp-community formatting conventions later.
Calling this effort "really dangerous" is a tad hysterical. The current Pebble page is OK, not great. This redesign is an improvement. While it would be nice to hear more about the thought process, etc, t's not always necessary to detail out what can be inferred from observation.
Pebble E-Paper Watch Gets Waterproofed.
I hope your being sarcastic! YC is only one opportunity among many.
Patriot Hackers: Stand Your Ground - Not Mine
However, folks like me that are not already using Dropbox, but do already use a whole host of Google services... well, I'm probably going to have 5GB free next week.