skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A functional crab computer would probably have to be built from delay insensitive logic[1]. The outputs of the gates would be of the form X and !X, where the signal (crab cluster) would appear at the appropriate output.

With regards to crab supply, I think the sufficient study of reversible computing, and in particular their charge conservation properties, would address that.

You'll still have to have a mechanism to spray bits of dead fish around to feed the thing.

--

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_insensitive_circuit

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
Why one in five U.S. adults don't use the Internet
Getting Things Done for Developers
Five OS X security threats that fizzled
That's... very weird and surprising. NYC grew by low single digits, while SF did a bit more. I incorrectly assumed this was shared across most major cities.

I'm not sure how that affects my prediction, one way or another.

Edited to add: a table with actual data. The 2000s have not been kind to most cities. By comparison, the USA as a whole grew 9.7% from 2000 to 2010.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2011-04-07-1Aciti...
I'm pretty familiar with the DC suburbs and between normal daytime traffic(not even considering morning or afternoon rush hour), traffic lights, and the time to get to a main road from you community(very slow speed limits) a half hour wouldn't surprise me at all and 45 minutes is very possible.
We're sorry, but Wufoo is not for your country or region.
"We're sorry, but Wufoo is not currently accepting new signups from your country or region."

This is what I see, when I try to signup for Wufoo (an online form builder) from Pakistan.

Startups are coming to exist in every country today, so why a company doesn't offer its service to specific country(ies).

They should know that in countries like mine, there is much more need to help first time entrepreneurs.

An approach like Wufoo's is very sad and lame, and it closes the connection for forever before it actually starts.
Stop telling us what to do.
Why Facebook Terrifies Google
The self driving car will be much more energy efficient, especially if they can communicate with each other to optimize traffic flow
Gas prices have gone up, but adjusted for inflation not outrageously so.

http://inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Oil/Gasolin...

Additionally gasoline isn't the only energy source. Once solar power reaches grid parity and electric cars are popular gas prices won't mean much.

You're right that energy is finite and if we stay on the current energy consumption growth curve, energy will continue to get more expensive.

However by that logic--extrapolating the decrease in time it takes me to run a mile each week--I'll be able to teleport in a few months.

Population growth slows when a country becomes developed and at some point we will reach an equilibrium.
Iraq Emerges From Isolation as Telecommunications Hub
I did, and it produced a huge .webp file, 6.7 times larger than the original PNG.
Entrepreneurs: It's not about the money
In the fall of 2004, Rose withdrew $1,000 — nearly one-tenth of his life savings — and paid a freelance coder $12 an hour to mock up a Web page. He got a deal on server space over the Web for $99 a month.

$99/month? Shouldn't that be $99/year?
I have sent the url of this entry to Wufoo team, using their feedback page. I hope someone shall respond.
Yeah...This one is conflicting to me.

I love pit mixes, but I've noticed myself voting for other breeds too. The internal conflict almost makes it more interesting.

I also find that when it's a rottie vs rottie, it can be difficult to judge, since they both will look so much alike.
URDU SEX STORIES: Ek Raat Ki Anokhi Baat
I think your problem with this advice is that you're looking at it at the micro-scale. They don't mean the, fairly hedonistic, "only ever do the activities that you love to do", but rather in a grander scheme. Work on the problems that motivate you, the issues that are near and dear to your heart. And yes, that will mean doing things you don't like. But it also means you'll be more likely to succeed in them because you actually care about the end result.
That version is incomplete -- there's a full PDF at the Computer History museum's Software Preservation Group page (http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/apl/book/APROGR...).
lol he said "professionalism". Feels like 1997.
You're right. I'll have to check that out. It wasn't intentional.
The need for an embedded array expression compiler for NumPy
Herb Sutter: (Not Your Father’s) C++
Not sure if I'm the only one out there like this, but I'm actually a technical guy who wants to be a non-technical cofounder. I'm a decent programmer but I find myself much more drawn to the business and product side of things and would be more than happy to have someone else who is a much stronger programmer than me handle the bulk of the technical work.
Eventually transcompiler languages will evolve to take advantage of different JS engine improvements.

I wonder what opportunities there are here that haven't been exploited yet and that don't require replacing JS with a new language. For example, could JS implementors define a more-easily-optimizable subset of JS? Then transpilers seeking performance could target just that subset.
s/ruby/programming/
I, too, would like to see other browser vendors follow and I don't see the same obstacles as with video codecs so there's hope yet. Microsoft's plans for IE auto-updating should also help (if they decide to support WebP) but admittedly it'd still be a long wait for web developers.

We (Opera) started supporting WebP not long after its release and it's proved to be an effective improvement on JPEG. IIRC, there's a roughly 30%-40% reduction in image filesizes when used as part of our server-side compression feature (Turbo) which converts all JPEGs into WebP (among other stuff).

Of course, support in all modern browsers and being able to use WebP exclusively in public sites are not closely connected, unfortunately, but for sites with high image usage, detection for support and server-side image replacement could be worthwhile.
Israeli firms and startups don't have special trouble raising capital.

Buffet made his first investment outside the US by buying Iscar which is based in the far north of Israel where rockets from Hezbollah are aimed. Sequia Capital makes a ton of investments in Israel. The nation's economy is stable and rapidly growing. Politically controversial decisions are made precisely to preserve that stability.

edit: Israel isn't home to many global consumer brands. Even Dead Sea Works is mostly B2B.
This seems to be normal in most other countries as well. For example in Japan, UK etc Internet penetration grows to about 75-80% and then stops.
I'm noticing this play out on the ground in Seattle. There's a big box Target opening up right downtown. It used to be that if you wanted anything from Target, WalMart, BestBuy, etc., you had to go on an adventure to the suburbs. I've noticed other retailers are making moves to smaller stores located in city centers (like BestBuy recently announced http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/04/best-buy-releas...).

Also, Amazon is surprisingly still located downtown(ish). Most companies its size prefer to locate somewhere suburban on a sprawling corporate campus. It could be a competitive advantage; I know a number of young people who would stay away from Microsoft because of the dreaded commute to Redmond.
I thought the section on TV shows was nonsense as well. He cherry picked a few examples that fit his model.

Off the top of my head some modern comedies that don't fit are Modern Family, Parks and Recreation, and Desperate Housewives.

There were plenty of classic shows set in the city as well. Mary Tyler Moore, The Jeffersons, The Bob Newhart Show, Three's Company, Taxi, Welcome Back Kotter.
You can also use a service like http://torbit.com to create copies of all your images and serve up the right version to each browser that visits.
I have just installed it to my blog (example: http://ahmetalpbalkan.com/blog/getting-things-done-for-devel...) however submit button never disappears. I would expect it to show 1 points. Can you show me a page that vote count actually works?
Saving the Next 10,000
See below... thanks
I wouldn't imagine those issues would affect software companies as much as companies that need physical infrastructure.
A suitable alternative is BeeJive. I used it religiously about a year ago. Surely it's much better by now.
EXACTLY. This notion that gen y is some sort of elightend urban dweller is ridiculous. Gen y is the most immature gen ever in American history. They treat college like a party, an excuse to extend childish behavior, and just throw the bill on some low interest student loans. No wonder they all rent, their credit is terrible. And then they don't get that 80k job handed to them, so they still work at Starbucks at 26yrs old with a BA in pyschology or poli sci, which they took because the classes were easy.

I agree, its all about having kids and growing up. Once your children become your priority, your school district becomes important, and every major urban center in the USA has a school system somewhere between bad and god-awful. Watch the movies Waiting For Superman and The Cartel if you want to see what a mess that situation is. I don't see it getting resolved in the next 5-10 years, which is when gen y will start having kids.
"So what else is behind this tendency for Israeli entrepreneurs to sell quick and small?"

A couple million dollars probably.
Whilst fat doesn't come off great he has youth and inexperience on his side.

Someone like Crockford with his 'years of experience' opening the debate by saying this kid's code is 'insanely stupid' is the real disappointment for me here.

Not to mention the memes and pictures being posted further down in the thread. I hope it's a matter of time before github comes up with a way to flag these.
We're calling Instagram an innovation? A disruption even. I don't think so.

The iPhone was disruptive. Dropbox is disruptive. Instagram is a popular photo service but not much more than that.
This article is a wake up call, thank you.
But an MVP doesn't need to be a flashy, polished product; nor does it need to scale or perform well or automate everything for the user or do any of the things we would expect out of an alpha- or beta-quality product. It just needs to solve a problem that people have and work.

You don't need to be a seasoned hacker to throw together some desktop/mobile frontends in a free trial of Dreamweaver, put that on EC2, design a barely functional data model in phpMyAdmin, and glue the whole thing together with hacked up PHP. Hell, you could even get most of the way there without touching code at all before hiring a freelancer to take you the last mile (if you can't make a Dreamweaver mockup and a relational data model – even if they both suck – then you have no business being in charge of any product, much less an entire company).

After you've earned some traction from people who are willing to use your product, in spite of its inefficiencies, because it succeeds at solving a legitimate problem for them – that's when you'll have a shot at convincing me to quit my day job in exchange for 30% of the company.

MVPs can be rewritten from scratch after it's been demonstrated that the product is worth creating in the first place.
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Baltimore suburb, but same experience. Probably more like 20-30 minutes, though.
I don't think it's so much a matter of professionalism as much as lazy thinking. For instance, the notion of "best practices" is utterly professional, but when overapplied or misapplied it results in some of the same symptoms.
If you think the value of HN stems from it not being popular with the masses, you're fully capable of making HN 1 unit better by leaving. Oh, wait, this doesn't apply to you, does it?
Does anyone have a lead on a framework or service that can handle the storage, display and metadata management for assets of this type online? On a low (non-institutional) budget?

My family has a large number (thousands to tens of thousands) of photographs, sketchbooks and other historical documents that we're in the course of digitising - partly so that they are not lost to posterity but also so that we can share with other branches of the family.

At the moment we have thousands of scans in a massive Dropbox account but it's becoming unmanageable very quickly, and only allows minimal metadata storage. (The quality of the scans is something that we have concerns about but for the moment it's good enough).

Apologies for the slightly unrelated post but I've been mulling this for a while and may see if I can hack something together if nothing is out there already.
IOS & Android analytics
This looks like a good place to fulfill a promise I made to report back if my hopes were dashed about Dart (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2989686). They were dashed pretty quickly. I've seen nothing compelling enough to prefer Dart to a fixed-as-much-as-is-practical JS. Especially if such a JS becomes more suitable as a compilation target (better numerics and so on).
>Additionally the rise of the self driving car is going to completely torpedo 90% of the advantages of living in a city.

The rise of what? We've seen some experimental designs, but I don't see the "rise" coming any time soon. Plus, the price of oil is more important factor --as for them "coordinating with other vehicles to increase efficiency" (as someone writes in a comment below), well, that seems marginal, especially since we are discussing driving OUTSIDE of the city.
I'm surprised no one has made a little command line tool that follows the rules and automatically inserts semicolons according to the ASI spec.

That might even be useful.
Coding for the rest of us: why you should learn and how to get started
I live in Manhattan and for me and my friends not only do we not like wasting time in cars but we like stores/restaurants, etc. open 24 hours. We have 5 Apple stores in Manhattan including one store open 24/7/365.
So...have a city that is alive late into the night is also important to the lifestyle...
Show HN: libaudiodecoder - The Cross-Platform Audio Decoder API
I've actually used this technique before. You can also use an SVG clip path to do something similar in Firefox. When I used this technique I shipped the mask as a separate file as I wasn't familiar enough with the file format to realize I could attach it. The 63KB limit when attaching the mask to the image might be too close.

If you make an app that can take a PNG and convert it to JPEG with alpha channel can you let me know? I would be VERY interested in this.
Er...... I don't think you understand what Firebase is... Obviously they're still running servers; the entire service is basically hosted MongoDB with a clever Scala API and a JS library that further abstracts Socket.IO.
I second. As well-intentioned as this is, I am firmly against HN becoming the mainstream social platform that it will become if it is to be grouped in the same share boat as Facebook, Twitter, etc. It is perfectly fine for a blog post to link to its corresponding HN discussion, but I feel that the share button approach commodifies the experience.
Sounds of PI
I posted this last time it was mentioned, here's Wallace delivering the actual speech. The above article cuts out some sections making it less cohesive. Listen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5THXa_H_N8 (part 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSAzbSQqals (part 2)
Rooted Kindle Fire screenshot tour
Couldn't agree more. Email should be something like: "I want to know it, but I don't need to know it right now. Otherwise I should have called you." Let's try to get that back.
Thanks for the donwvoting, at least Brendan Eich and Douglas Cockford agree with me...

http://brendaneich.com/2012/04/the-infernal-semicolon/
RegEx, you are perfectly correct. One thing I quickly learned here is to shut up and listen, limit my comments.

But I hope you understand; its soo darn hard sometimes to keep your mouth shut :|
When citizens have transparent access to what their government is really up to, those inside the government may be held accountable, which is not something they will take kindly to.

I agree with this and want to expand on it a little. This is the way power works. If having a government, having a state, is to work at all, then those with power must be saddled with accountability. However, the track record seems to say that in the vast majority of cases, those who have power, immediately act to murder any ability to hold them accountable. Which is exactly why accountability must be enforced, as harshly as possible.

When normal humans are granted power without accountability, evil results. Insist on accountability.
I am in southern California, and perhaps the suburbs here are more concentrated than suburbs elsewhere. I have three pharmacies, three grocery stores, and a Walmart all within 10 minutes. It does require taking a car, though.
Yes, ECMA-262 completely specifies (modulo bugs) sentences that are accepted or rejected, and for those accepted, their meanings.

But that doesn't alter ASI's error-correction nature, which is not an "implementation detail" -- it's in the spec and all too observable.

You're right, it has the character of a warning system, like Dart's unsound "types". But if it had been noisy (consoles in the early days were costly), too many developers would have ignored the warnings, and users would have paid for the overhead.

Your concluding sentence is spot on, I agree people should use semicolons in JS. Relying on a Ruby-like coding style in the large is way too risky.
Ask HN: Support network using IRC backend
Hello guys,

I've decided to open a chat support so people can get personal support with my product (a modest web host that I'm building clients on - a way to get instant help would be good for my existing userbase and new users)

I've decided that rather than fork out for some expensive software, or use an unreliable back end I am going to try and use the tried and reliable IRC protocol, I was thinking of setting a little server up on localhost.

I was wondering if you thought this is a good idea, and also where I can get some supporting front end software or some pointers on building a decent web client. What I need is for the web client to join the IRC server in the background and then open a PM window with any online staff.
I would say the advice should be: don't offer equity too soon. I've met some random "business guys" at conferences who offer me an equity stake in their startup within moments of meeting me. That smacks of desperation and turns me off. It's like dating, the legit business guys who've interested me have got to know me first before discussing startup ideas.

In particular, offering equity as part of a freelance arrangement is just dumb all round. It's a lose-lose situation.

A freelancer wants cash, not lottery tickets in your non-existent startup. And giving away a chunk of your company to someone who's only going to be around for a few months hurts you too. I know there's one UK startup that was founded that way (built by a web agency that got a chunk of equity) and it caused no end of problems. Either get a co-founder who's in for the long haul and reward them with equity, or get a freelancer and reward them with cash.
I'm not quite sure that it's just the line between using and mentioning the syntax. Template Haskell uses a syntax element called Oxford brackets ([| and |]) to grab the AST for a piece of Haskell. This is very easy but Haskell still doesn't have the same compile-time macro programming as Lisp.

I think the reason that Lisp metaprogramming works so well is just that Lisp basically has no syntax and the simplest reasonable grammar. Lisp syntax is just the AST with nested brackets. This means that modifying the Lisp syntax structure is equivalent to modifying the AST.

Fundamentally, you can make accessing the AST as easy as possible, but at the end of the day you're still accessing the AST so you can change the AST. The more complicated the AST, the more complicated the change will need to be.
I use a seedbox. The provider is in Canada and the server is Luxemburg. I connect to that with sFTP.

And for normal Internet traffic I have a VPS in New Jersey (Linode) that runs Squid that I route everything through.

While I am in no way totally private I am not the lowest hanging fruit.
> The couple on the left is taking an on-the-spot course in wine connoisseurship.

"Look darling, it says I'm right, the wine that comes in bottles is better than that stuff you get in a box!"
>but I don't see the "rise" coming any time soon.

Nevada already implemented regulations to allow companies to test drive self driving cars on its roads, and all it will take for the rest of the nation to follow is for Google get California on board.

The technology is already here. It's all about regulation and politics now, and there is so much money to made that it's just a question of when not if.

If I can't buy a self-driving car in 10 years, I'm going to build my own.
For those interested in why we created this, there's some extra background about our motivation here:
http://music.columbia.edu/pipermail/portaudio/2012-April/013...

Specifically, there's issues with FFMPEG, libmad, and GStreamer, and there was no good alternative that did what we wanted. So we wrote one!
All engagement metrics are pretty loose. Scroll depth percentage doesn't tell the whole story but to the degree that scroll tracking is useful, I think percentage provides a simple, document-independent metric.

Btw, tracking scroll points for specific DOM elements is one of the plugin options, so for instance you could track the end of the .comments div as you mentioned.
Clear and concise video. You really did a great job here Chris. My only critique is that I am now aware of what I am missing for my Java projects.
Your article failed to address the main issue: security. Off by default is broken.
The book "Generations: the History of America's Future" accurately predicts a lot of the content of this article, and was written in 1991.
I believe HTML5 boilerplate implements the smelly pattern.

https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/index....
I really don't understand how a particular usage of semicolons and logical operators is indicative of ego-stroking, showboating, and "hipster", as if the word hipster even means anything at all. If fat _said_ something to make you use those words then that would make sense, but as it is I'm very confused.
Why you need more sleep
That's an opinion of some random "CS senior" that somehow made its way on TC. It's basically HN version of "Top 10" lists on digg - a pseudo-informative speculation on a popular subject. Speculation. It might be a good conversation starter, but it's hardly insightful on its own.
I can't find it now, but this HN button thing has come up several times before and pg commented on it saying something similar.