skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"YC only takes the top 3% of startups."

This is exactly how legends are built in the media. YC takes 3% of startups that apply, not "3% of startups". This is the same as when they say it is harder to get into Techstars then to get into Harvard.

See this:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/nicoleperlroth/2011/08/24/the-mo...

Figures like that ultimately don't mean much anyway other than creating a appearance of scarcity. It is well know for example that colleges try to increase the application rate to game the acceptance %. Nobody has access to all the companies applying to YC in the 97%, (do they?).

Edit: To judge the quality (if possible) of the applicant pool.

Edit2: I don't mean to imply that YC tries to game applications. Only that numbers get thrown around without any vetting.
Dont you think thats because of the lack of blogging platforms, rather than the lack of hosts? I mean, most shared hosts support one click installs for Wordpress, but there is no alternative currently for a python clone of WP.

I guarantee you if there was a python CMS with any where near the adoption of Wordpress, python hosting would be alot easier to find.
How to emulate 'cp --update' behavior on Mac OS X?
Targeting Apple has proven to be the best vehicle for that.

Do you have any evidence at all for this? How do you know that targeting other companies too wouldn't be more effective?
Maybe also tweak the cyan link color to be a bit darker - it is difficult to read on both of my screens
Haskell simple online game. Server-sent events, deployed to Heroku, open source
In my opinion, the problem is that 32-bit Windows is intentionally broken by Microsoft.

Unlike other 32-bit x86 operating systems, the consumer version of Windows refuses to addresses more than the first 4GB of physical memory, and on most machines a quarter to half of that space is consumed by PCI address space.

Yes there are hacks around this. But the right way to deal with this is to just fold and accept what Microsoft is imposing: use a 64-bit version of Windows whenever possible and enjoy your memory.

Once on a 64-bit OS, you can either write a 64-bit program, or you can write a 32-bit program and use a compiler option to get the full 32-bit address space. (Microsoft's compilers assume by default that you are an idiot who uses signed values for addresses and your program will break if they give you more than 2GB of virtual address space)

The other lesson is don't use experimental languages you are uncertain of for actual product.
I love this idea and I think they have a defensible position. But to make it even MORE defensible create an extra mapping layer, new text book -> old (expired copyright textbook) and use that as the outline in addition to the new text book. Material from the old textbook could be used verbatim (the seed if u will) and then supporting to supplanting information could be fused into it.
Why a lot businesses won't give you a free cup of water
Apple Is Not Like Sony: (keep creativity in education)
SPDY only affects content transfer, whereas what I'm describing would affect both transfer and content generation.

Moreover, SPDY is a highly complex proposition, whereas what I'm describing is dead-simple. I have implemented something very similar using JS, cookies and local storage. Of course a built-in browser support would be much, much more desirable.
"Personally I treat it as a failure if we ever hit swap"

/agree. but still a useful feature.

The degraded performance a system will show when it starts hitting disk instead of memory is a great 'soft' failure.

I think it is good to have graduations. Going from 'OK' to 'Damn-this-is-slow' before 'Fail' is handy.
In my appeal-to-status-quo, Has no-one learned before?, big-textbook over inflates their importance.
This is a really cool idea! I could see people using this as a testing ground to learn the instruction set as well. Especially if you can make the "paste your code, share your link" part of it as easy as pasting into a single obvious text box (like with pastebin).

If you can make it easy to browse the snippets that would be great. It's probably important to get that working right away so that people can play with different programs and get a feel for the instruction set. (Plus people like to have their stuff seen by others.)

Can't wait to see where this is heading, as well as your JS implementation of DCPU.
any other web-based sites?
Great overview, much more extensive than any other I've seen and I like the interactivity.
Fighting ideas is difficult, first you have to understand it. Fighting the manifestation of an idea doesn't require that understanding. Or something.
OP here, that was my worry. But, I admit I didn't thoroughly look into whether bank-side encryption eliminates my risk from a public network.

Maybe it does, but there are enough other unencrypted sites that I'd rather have the VPN.
Since they are doing the most to improve working conditions, perhaps they deserve more profit.
You mean why didn't they blow thousands of dollars per year on an inefficient mode of transportation irrelevant to their ordinary daily lives? Can't imagine.
Unfortunately, Norway's rail is actually pretty comparable to the U.S.'s, I think. For example, the main Oslo-Bergen line, connecting the country's two largest cities, takes about 7 hours to travel the 500 km (300 mi), which is about Amtrak-level speeds. As a result, the Norwegian domestic air-travel market is one of the largest in Europe (esp. relative to population).
Largely agree, but it's still a tradeoff. Having many fine-grained commits makes individual steps more intelligible but the overall path harder to make out.
Thank you![1]

[1]: Really!
If there's an opposite to syntactic sugar, this is it.

Good idea, horrible implementation. Other than the @namespace keyword, it needs to be thrown away and start over.
I couldn't agree more and I got mocked just this past Thursday for saying so.

The awkward treatment of organizations doesn't help either. I'm constantly having to context switch, and it's even worse because I have an organization with one project, so if I click the organization, I have an "Issues" button. If I click it, I'm seeing issues for that one single project, but there is no "New Issue" button because I'm at the org level instead of the project level. :/
How do the boards compose? Is communication between the edge cores of two internal boards of a grid different from communication between two cores on the same board?
Stylish (or whatever the equivalent is for your favorite browser) is always an option until a better design comes along. For example, if you don't use the details boxes that much, you can apply something like

div#repo_details { opacity:0.3 !important; }
ul.with-details-box { opacity:0.3 !important;}

to make those fade a bit and draw you eye toward the menu bars below them. You could event apply it your specific repo urls, so you could customize it depending on what you're working on.

Again, only a temporary hack, but better than nothing until a better universal design can be agreed upon and implemented.

Stylish: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/
Can you copyright the voicing and structure of a document? Even if the replacing source material was not constructed with that intent? At what point does have a structural similarity to a book turn into a copyright violation?

Copyright is for the work itself. The physical manifestation of those words in that order. It isn't a lock on the ideas expressed with those words. Reproducing another writers outline is not a violation of copyright.
Some fields (including, as I understand, IEEE and ACM) have codes of ethics that provide minimum standards on years retention of study data.

Such a response from a researcher should be extremely disconcerting.
I'd definitely agree that trade at gunpoint is on the same spectrum as war. I can see how you get from there to all protectionism being on that spectrum too.

Short of eliminating national borders, I don't see how this would go away.
The list of companies supporting this bill:

http://intelligence.house.gov/bill/cyber-intelligence-sharin...
Thanks! yes, this is just the minimal feature set (save code, share link). I'm trying to think of a good way to show an index of snippets (and/or if that means people would want private pastes as well). i'm hoping to implement features based on community/user feedback.
OP here. Very good question, I should have made this clearer in my post.

The internet is extremely useful. I've learned more from Hacker News alone over the past year than I could have learned from any book. I don't need to list the other benefits; everyone here knows the Internet's advantages.

But...there is a point of diminishing returns. 30-60 minutes of aimless wandering each day can be highly useful. It's the equivalent of keeping your office door open. Can be distracting, but you learn a lot. But I find that if you spend too long on the internet, the value starts to drop off.

But there is much value in reading a book cover to cover, or focussing on a project for hours at a time. I find these things easier to do if I don't have to resist the temptation of the internet in order to do them.

Disconnecting my home connecting was a conscious decision based on the fact that I was spending more time online than I would prefer, and not enough time doing other valuable things. But I do not mean to say that time online is not valuable - far from it.

p.s. TV was a bad example; I don't watch any now. I only included that to show how much time was freed up.
First thing I noticed. And unfortunately for the author, that's where I stopped reading, since the credibility is instantly lost.
If you are having problems like this I am working on getting a cli interface with Github. Look at things like issues and commits. https://github.com/myusuf3/octogit
On a side note, how hard would it be to write a WordPress extension that generates static HTML every time you write a new post or a new comment gets approved/submitted?
I'm starting to think we need a dcpu.ycombinator.com.
> Why are these trains still running?

A political reason is that the keep-Amtrak-alive coalition is basically a mixture of urban transit advocates and representatives from rural areas who want to keep their town's train stop. A system that only served the major cities wouldn't have broad enough support, especially if it were only the major coastal cities (e.g. if you cut the Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, etc. services).
Perhaps I'm unusual but I think it would be more useful if it emailed early evening* before the beautiful day. By the time the beautiful day has come I'll be able to see it out the window.

Either way I do love the idea. Nice one!

* I'll expand on that to say that I'd ideally want it early enough that I'd be awake and could call a friend to plan something without worrying about waking them up. But for building excitement I think it would be best to send it after it got dark (the timing of which you could determine from the date and location). I think that would be the way to maximize utility and experience.
Great job. Can you add support for foreign cities with special characters? I tried "São Paulo, Brazil" and the encoding on the "success message" was wrong.
Anonymous Hackers Deface 500 Chinese Government Websites
"As we are constantly reminded here, Apple takes 80% of the phone industry profits and thus deserve proportionate blame for working conditions."

Blame needs to be proportional to amount produced, not amount profited. If I have one phone manufactured and I charge $11 million for it (and actually find a buyer), but you produce a million $10 phones, your impact on the workers is far greater.

"On the other hand, many other companies like Amazon and Microsoft sell the hardware for a loss, hoping to make it up on software and media purchases."

So if tomorrow Apple decided to sell their phones at half price, thereby eliminating all profits, then suddenly no one will be able to say anything to Apple about their manufacturing and worker treatment?

"Meanwhile, the other companies are not doing very well, and labor cost increases for them might put them out of business entirely and then the workers won't even have a job. ... This is why Apple is criticized more since it has most leeway of all the companies mentioned in the article to increase wages."

So it all amounts to how much you charge the end user. If a company charges more for their product they must ensure the workers of the companies they contract with are paid/treated fairly, but if a company chooses to sell devices at little to not profit, they can treat the workers however they want.

It sounds to me more like if a company makes a device and provides it to you cheaply, you'll look the other way on how they handle manufacturing.
Just to build on this a bit, the Channel Tunnel's current location was chosen because this way nearly its entire length runs through continuous chalk, which is incredibly easy (especially compared to granite, or wet silt) to tunnel through. It's soft enough to cut through without too much problem, but it's still rigid and dry enough that you don't have to worry too much about collapses.
Armin Eşarp ve Tesettür Giyim 2012
When I wrote my book on Windows Azure for O'Reilly, they originally assigned me some bird which I hated. I wanted them to pick a pug or some dog (because Azure was originally code named 'Red Dog'). To my surprise, they hunted down a dog that was actually called a 'red dog' and we used that instead.
"But to solve it is non-trivial"

No, it's trivial. Device-dependent DRM-signed packages. Either the common part is duplicated in each device's version, or app store downloads can consist of two packages.
I had a somewhat 'similar' idea last year. Pick a place in the world and every morning (or once a week) receive a picture of the sunrise there. The time of day can be altered and the location within the city can be altered. Would be cool for people who miss home or who wonder what it'd be like to wake up elsewhere.

On a side note, not sure if this exists but what about a desktop picture app that changes your desktop daily based on your settings/preferences?
It chews a ton of battery if you do, though, since it gives you time-to-destination, which means GPS.
Fortunately Chuck's already done the nasty parts and you can (presumably) leverage his upload code if you use GreenArrays' tools, but there's always the possibility that your code will require some very specific sequence of node initialization and you'll have to wade in and do it manually. I agree that this tech will probably never be mainstream. If I had an unlimited supply of free time I would be very tempted to develop some third-party devtools for GA chips- I enjoy programming in Forth and I could get used to the F18 instruction set, but using a custom keyboard layout and ditching my text editors and source control systems in favor of a block editor is pretty hard to swallow.
The data does support the case. It may be incorrect, or incomplete. But why would they be hiding fatality stats? Why would they get away with that when they are subject to the crazy levels of scrutiny that we see today?

Safety management is based on identifying and reducing hazards, which reduces accidents, near misses, lost time injuries, serious injuries and ultimately fatalities. With a large enough number of workers, as we have in this case, fatality number is a very good proxy for the other stats.
This is a very fascinating read. The exercise I mentioned probably took place after the 2002 exercise you have linked to.

Without being too deeply informed on this subject, it seems to me like the US military refuses to acknowledge the weaknesses of its doctrine in a large-scale conflict against a sufficiently skilled and advanced adversary.
Think 4G is 10 times faster? Think again
Generally a useful thing to suggest, though it has some holes.

The proposal to give selectors namespace awareness seems to be overlooking a pretty fundamental truth about selectors: they don't have context, they don't even belong to a particular class. There is therefore no ambiguity to be resolved; the selector "performAction:withArg:" is already isolated. Now, if you were to call something like "respondsToSelector:@selector(performAction:withArg:)" then you need a particular class or instance but again this should be clear from the context: in a new namespace-supporting Objective-C the object that you call this on should be clear and the selector expression itself should need no namespace at all.

This namespace style may also be clinging a bit too much to the C++ approach. In particular the tendency to double-@end everything due to the namespace suggests a cleaner syntax is needed. Oddly this isn't consistent as sometimes "MyNS.MyClass" is used and in other cases @namespace/@end is used.
إدوارد جيمس مويبريدج - Eadweard J. Muybridge
You're on YCombinator, everyone here is teh bestest programmer in the world with l33t skilzz.
Hi chubot,

Two things:

1) A data.frame is in fact a list of vectors of the same length "compacted" together.

2) I find the types very "sensible" for a person doing statistics. But I guess (almost) everything makes sense once you get used to it...
Why men can't and shouldn't stop staring at women
That may (likely) have been put there by a sub editor, not the author. Still impinges on the credibility of NYTimes though.
One thing is probably the huge number of statistical packages it has (see: http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/), including (static) graphics (e.g: ggplot2, lattice, and just the base graphics).
If you're already used to Matlab, then you may not find my comments as relevant. If you were already proficient in both, then they're both interchangeable for many tasks (which is in fact why I always recommend learning R over learning Matlab).

Licensing isn't just a minor thing - getting Matlab to run on non-Debian Linux is a painful ordeal. I never actually got it working, because I never bothered to debug its cryptic error messages, and since it's distributed as a precompiled binary, I wasn't going to sit around trying to patch it. A corollary is that R is easier to integrate into other toolkits, and there are a ridiculous number of freely available R libraries that make your life easier.

My issues with Matlab may be things that someone familiar with the language would care less about. That said, I find Matlab to be incredibly, incredibly irritating, and I think that's because it's design is tailored towards people with minimal experience with other programming languages (like research scientists), whereas R's design is simply based off of S - so I find it violates the Principle of Least Surprise less. Matlab is not like Lisp or Haskell (where the journey of understanding the language is valuable in itself) - it's really just a means to an end (number crunching), so the POLS is especally important.

R, unlike Matlab, imposes almost no restrictions on the structure of a program. The
way I see it, Matlab makes Java's broken one-class-per-file model even worse, by imposing more filesystem-level restrictions on my program.

R, unlike Matlab, uses a type system that's more familiar to someone used to programming with multiple datatypes, as opposed to someone used to thinking in terms of strictly numerical structures. I never got the hang of when I should index with () or {} or [] Matlab ... I'd have to look it up to tell you. R, on the other hand, is more like Python in this regard - even if it's not quite as clean as Python, it makes basic things like importing/maniplating CSVs much easier than Python (or even Excel, which is even designed around that exact purpose).

R, unlike Matlab, returns the last value computed, not the last values with the same local names as the return value names.

R, unlike Matlab, uses a more intuitive (to me) definition of dimensions (and of row- vs. column-vectors). I spent 80% of my time in Matlab figuring out how to get dimensions to match in a robust manner, and I've never had to do that in R.

You get the idea - my frustrations with the language itself are mostly with the fact that it's so unlike most other languages, and it's too much of a hassle to learn. My frustrations with the language environment is that the free alternative (R) is much easier to work with, and much more cross-platform.
Wow, I didn't expect my first submission to hit the front page. Should have done that third edit I decided to forego.

There are some good replies here. The only point I want to make is that the people accusing me of lacking self-control are 100% correct.

I disconnected my internet not because I see no value in it (far from it), but rather because unfettered access was taking too much time away from other things that I value.

Lest you get the wrong idea, I'm quite capable of avoiding the internet. I wrote ~350,000 (profitable) words last year. I got lots of other things done, too.

But, I had to use up willpower at all times to avoid the easy pleasure of surfing the web. It was unpleasant.

Most of my work is on the computer - I'm no technophobe. It's so much easier to use my computer now that it mostly does work related things unless I'm in a cafe.

I readily admit that some people may have no trouble with the internet and self-control. That's great - you have all the advantages of limitless information, and none of the disadvantages of distraction.

Many people, unfortunately, are more like me. The internet is valuable for us, but a potential pitfall. I'm hardly the first to point this out, pg had an essay on point.

http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

I'd be interested to know if he ever figured out a workable system. He posted somewhere on here that his dual computer system eventually broke down.
Only if you think we also need(ed) the following:

bitcoin.ycombinator.com
sopa.ycombinator.com
apple|facebook|google.ycombinator.com
privacy-issues.ycombinator.com
techcrunch.ycombinator.com
mpaa.ycombinator.com
...

I think we'll survive.
Fundamentally I think we agree. Shepherds, sheep and wolves.

If you think you're dealing with a wolf at your level in the company, look up. Ultimately, what the executive allows, it endorses. Odds are they see a man cut from the same cloth, admire his drive, his self interest and and his hard-headedness. If he's still there in a year, I'd say he represents the company's core values.
I don't know as much about that, but based on the whitepapers[1] the GA144s aren't designed to tile. They have a whole bunch of different kinds of peripherals attached to different nodes like analog I/O, busses for RAM controllers and so on. The GA144 is just a network of tesselated F18 cores, though, so if there was some kind of application available that could use a larger grid of them it might be possible to work with GreenArrays to develop the silicon- they wouldn't have to start over from scratch.

[1]http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB001-100...
The above fact(s) missing from the documentation seem to indicate otherwise.
I find all of this hand-wringing over working conditions to be the biggest pile of bunk that I have ever heard of.

The only reason that China is manufacturing just about every consumer product out there is that sending work there allows you to exploit cheap labor, lax environmental regulation, and other regulation found in western countries.

So now some westerners who "care" are waxing on about the poor iPhone workers. Why aren't the Chinese people making shoes, underwear, leather coats or other unpleasant jobs worthy of our pity?
Blame needs to be proportional to amount produced, not amount profited.

But the profit margin is an important factor in your ability to make things better.
> I think the main problem with R is that there's a different way to do everything. It feels like a language that was not so much designed as gradually evolved.

I don't know how much you know about the history of R, but you're spot on about that.
Scientists explain the mob mentality of Groupon, LivingSocial
http://marynaaleksandrova.info/labs/happy-easter/style.css (6500 lines of CSS)

What you save in CPU is heavily outbalanced by what you lose in code maintainability and bandwidth