skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great comment, and I mostly agree :)

Slight digression, but I was interested in your last few sentences. Why do you not think that math or physics have an end game? I think that academic mathematics is dead/worthless, for instance.

Maybe you're talking about the difference between "ideals" and the incarnations of those ideals.

Capitalism is indeed an ideal, but its incarnation (so-called "global capitalism") might disappear as the dominant mode of human interaction. Here's hoping. This has happened in the past, right? E.g. there is no "Feudalism" as such, any more, even if concepts of feudalism are used.

Similarly (going back to Math), "Math" as such will never die - but its incarnation (the mass of all people doing all Math) might have an end game.

I'd actually love a math revolution, since I love math, but it doesn't look like it's going to be easy to re-invigorate it.
Totally agree on the PaaS squeeze. It's a very tough problem space and consolidation is already on the horizon.

These days everyone wants a streamlined, Heroku-style workflow. And yet it's interesting that despite the benefits of PaaS, many engineers just aren't willing to give up control of underlying infrastructure.

IaaS orchestration offers a different approach that provides many of the benefits of PaaS (auto-scaling, streamlined deployment workflow, etc) using raw IaaS building blocks. IaaS orchestration is also a challenging problem, but the space is less crowded.

Disclaimer: I'm the CTO of OpDemand and IaaS orchestration is what we do.
http://www.liquidmetal.com/technology/
Datomic looks quite cool, but I have to admit I don't fully understand its niche yet. Is anybody using it for anything already? If so, what are your experiences? Is this something that you'd use as (e.g.) the backend of a web app or more for data warehousing type of work?
Thanks for the correction, I didn't read the docs carefully. Buildpack's a better idea than building stuff locally. This makes slightly steeper learning curve the only weakness of Heroku compared to Ep.io.
Is the new future offline?

We have grown attached to our electronic devices and online friends. Maybe we need to step back and think about going back?
Dwolla Rolls Out a New Instant Payment Button
Probably because Instagram could ease users' transition to another social site. If something like Google+ hit it off with everybody and they could move all of their pictures with the press of a button and keep their Instagram UI, that lowers the barriers of entry for people to come along and steal FB's cake.
This isn't really addressing the issue of "Is this a good idea to create TCombinator?", it's just a personal statement. Agreeing or disagreeing with this still makes it OT.
would have thought the collisons would have opened up ireland saying they are from there..
Why would they try to bring the resources down to earth? It is so expensive to send things out of our orbit they should be selling the material to future floating stations, like the ISS. Also, satellite manufacturers and space probes could be constructed in something like the ISS with the majority of their heavy parts being made from asteroids.

Hmmmm. I don't know much about material science, but maybe they are mining silicon and fabricating solar panels? What is the heaviest part of a probe or satellite?
Paypal forced me to open an account with them so I could buy shit by credit card through their interface. And so they could try to shove their other shitty products down my throat.

I want to set every single person who works for PayPal on fire.
That's what I really like about Go. You always need to balance short-term greed and captures against vision.

There is also the balance between keeping your groups strong and claiming a lot of territory.
The priorities where always the same, its all about ROI. It always has been.
Remind me which continent Obama was born on?
Not quite sure why we would want to get it down to earth myself. Think of the markup you could sell it for by just leaving it in space. No more need to launch rockets carrying materials/prefabs - it will just happen in space.

"Yea, I know our iron is XXX% more, but you know its already in space...."

And if its for mining for energy just create the energy in space and beam it down. Rather simple.
I'm not sure about US law, but in Australia the directors could be personally in breach of their statutory duties by (even symbolically) approving such a transaction without checking it out.

This was a huge transaction by anyone's standard – it could definitely be argued that the directors weren't acting with the required standard of care by approving it so quickly and readily, which puts them in a really awkward place; damned if they do, removed from the board if they don't.

Again, this is in the context of Australian corporate law, but I imagine it's not incredibly dissimilar in the US.
"But the idea of altering human sexuality with surgery is extremely recent, and I am unaware of any precedent in nature (feel free to correct me)."

Eunuchs have been around for quite some time.
They're going to start selling archives of the past two years' of Tweets through DataSift, though for DataSift's usual hefty prices (for a real-time feed, they currently charge $0.10/tweet!): http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17178022

Presumably the target customer is researchers of the finance-sector variety rather than researchers of the sociology or history-department variety...
http://www.webelements.com/iron/isotopes.html

Radio isotopes of iron. Unlikely that you'd have to worry too much about it. Did you have a particular nucleotide you were concerned about?
Actually from a technical point of view it is simpler to land on an asteroid than on Mars (you avoid the gravity wheel).

It will be cheaper to extract the minerals locally than to "take the rocks" back to Earth.
Honestly I'd say randall is the one doing that.

YC hackers are like Z.
SpaceX is like Z.
Therefore SpaceX is YC hackers (in spirit).

piotrSikora isn't literally asking why such a thing is a property of only YC hackers. He's asking why randall is using property Z to label things as 'YC hacker'. I don't think your jumping on his imperfect wording is very helpful.
I read the headline and hoped that they had come up with a way to create new repos from the command line. That being said, this is a great improvement, especially with the templates.
I really want to pre-order one. Reading the comments it seems like a gamble. It is possible, I really hope not, they won't end up making the watch. Any guesses how much it will cost 'retail'? In essence, I want the discount rate I'm getting for taking a gamble on them.
I think we were agreeing
Boston party bus pub crawl network that brings people together at great venues.
Trendslide, a mobile BI startup is seeking an iOS or Back-end Developer
IQ is just defined in terms of standard deviations. Having an IQ of 130 means you are 3 standard deviations smarter than average, i.e. in the 99.7th percentile. Presumably, they just put Motzart in the top 99.xxxxxx% percentile by guess and calculated the resulting IQ.
It may not be focused, but I've had good luck with webfaction.
I guess I'm confused. Creating repositories was difficult?
Well, if we're going to be technical, you don't alter sexuality (mindset) with surgery, you alter sexual organs. And that wasn't so much a change in sexuality as a change in ability to reproduce. :X Also, "surgery in a nature" seems like a bit hard a precedent for.
the YMCAcombinator generator.
No problem. They don't actually talk about buildpacks all that much but I see it as the major differentiating feature on Heroku.

One thing you may be interested in is heroku-buildpack-multi[1] which lets you run multiple buildpacks. You could theoretically use this to include the standard Python and Node.js buildpacks plus a small custom one that just installs and runs Brunch.

[1]: https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi
Upvoted because I find it interesting, not because I agree with it.

FreshBooks has a very significant amount of their usage/profit from their API. These are just their endorsed/vetted add-ons, let alone all the ones out there in the wild: http://community.freshbooks.com/addons/?header_addons=1 and they clearly built an app AND an API.

The API for FreshBooks was a major portion of their (very successful) strategy, so I can't see why people can't do both, provided they do it intelligently.
It's not really possible here; the value of you going out and doing some unrelated pet project is much lower per-hour than working on an actual company project but it is non-zero. It's not like the company can look at what you are doing hour to hour and negotiate some random hourly amount that changes every hour.

Besides, hourly wage really doesn't make any sense for most jobs and certainly not software engineering. If someone works for 5 hours a day and gets more as much done as someone working 10 why would they get paid less? You could do some backwards math and come up with some hourly wage for the 5 hour guy but that's really just putting the cart before the horse.
The economics of this could be better than you think.

A fair-sized chunk of an asteroid could contain a few trillion dollars worth of platinum group metals. If money can be found for it, a sample return mission to a near earth asteroid could probably be accomplished SpaceX-style.

A key step in all of this could be the mining of water from the asteroid Ceres, which is a much more practical destination than mars. At that point you could set up a solar or nuclear powered water cracking factory that would make large amounts of fuel available. Any needs for water in space could be so satisfied.
Yes that will be a small fix to show the lives and as far as the instructions popping up first that is something I thought about but now that you mention it too I think that will be added next
I know somebody who could work for either one, if he were so inclined.
Scale Something: How Draw Something Rode Its Rocket Ship Of Growth
If it wants to know how to build rockets it should go and capture it's own Nazi scientists like we had to.
It's a distributed real-time database with lock-free transactions so writes are fast. You can use it for a Web app or analytics -- the query engine and datastore are de-coupled from the transactor.
I think the point is that the US opened up the market where other countires didn't and he wanted to point out that low laber costs and alot of money is not everything you need to make a good spaceship.
I do not have that book with me now but he provides brain scans in the experiments he conducted, most of the book is just exercises (math equations , stroop color and word recall)
All the praise I've heard about Stripe has been from a developer's perspective. But, as a user, I find logging in to PayPal(/Google Wallet/Amazon Payments) and clicking a couple buttons much more convenient than having to enter (+ look up) all my information every time. I find it great that Stripe makes the developers' lives easier, but should we be excited about making things harder for customers in the process?
You won't be taken seriously unless you can demonstrate your technical\business chops. If you fancy yourself a Steve Jobs then show the world something worthwhile. Build something that is impressive on its own merit and you will inspire your peers to do great things as well.
there was a python implementation of something like this in tornado (s3server and s3client), though now I don't see it. Anyone follow that project and know what happened to it?
My main analogy when talking to chess players: chess is a battle and go is a war. I played chess, now only go. My main problem was the arbitrary set of rules in chess: go is more like axiomatic. Given two players, black and white pieces and a board, it's almost "natural" to develop it
That's a philosophical question I don't have the energy to properly answer right now. In the most general terms, I'm just saying that we will always have to make decisions within certain constraints, and widening the constraints is hard so there will often be competition between different actors within those constraints, much as in evolutionary terms.
For what it's worth, I wrote a similar post recently that some might find interesting:

http://blog.printf.net/articles/2012/02/23/computers-are-ver...
Perhaps Stripe would consider a login service. Create a Stripe account and rather than it be a full blown Payment service ala Paypal, it would simply store your CC details.
I'm of moderate strength at both, being a chess expert and a 1d-1k KGS. Some brief comments:

- Go makes me confront my fear of heuristics. My unconscious ability to pattern match the right moves is always ahead of my ability to understand why they are right, although I try to catch it up by thinking really hard. It's a unique experience.

- Both the rules and strategy of Go feel more elegant in the mathematical sense of being a composition of simple ideas, which I like. Chess feels more like a set of arbitrary pieces of knowledge.

- The handicap system in Go is an objectively awesome way to have players of different strengths play competitively. In chess, you can almost never play with someone 400 rating points your inferior and have it be a satisfyingly competitive game -- giving piece or pawn odds changes the game completely. In Go, if you give someone four stones, it feels like you're still playing Go.

- When watching strong players, I like the fact that there aren't draws in Go. It makes the game dramatic until the end.

- I like chess problems better than Go problems, and I personally find a level of beauty and variety in amazing chess brilliancies which surpasses what I perceive in great Go moves. I don't know of a Go equivalent to http://timkr.home.xs4all.nl/chess/chess.html.

- At least at an amateur level, it's harder to make a critical, near-irrecoverable mistake in Go -- there's not as much of a snowball effect making an advantage into a bigger advantage. That makes it feel less stressful for me when playing long games.
A company is an OPEN system (they can cut jobs and make more money), but a country is a (mostly) CLOSED system (someones spending is somebody else's income). Even the most ineffectual government employee is more valuable than another mother or father on the dole when unemployment is already high.

I'm not supporting government waste, but the way. Efficiency should be the goal, but you obviously have NO idea what you are talking about.
Oh come on. Really, who cares about this?

Github has /so/ much more to fix before moving the New Repo button up to the top bar.

Cluttered news feed and activity stream and redundant notifications are issues that need desperate attention. Github, please fix them ASAP.
If it is NASA or SpaceX they both can look at the original research by nasa. The question is if NOW SpaceX and NASA got requirments for a new rocket that could do X. How long and how costly would it be to do it and SpaceX clearly looks much better at that.

Nobodys claims NASAs people or its research in the last 60 years sucked.
At Gondor, we've had some success offering app-level consulting in addition to hosting as a way of differentiating ourselves from the bigger players. For example, not just hosting but helping the customer to get their site ready for production.
Cool! I don't know how many times I have used a silly 500 x 500 image and just scaled it to random sizes as I built the views. Only to have to go back and check sizes in code when cutting stuff up in Photoshop.

This way I can just keep an instant overview of the pending sizes. Thanks mate!
I too have heard nothing but good things about Stripe. I've recently started a partnership with a good friend of mine in Sweden to build some apps together. I wanted to use Stripe but soon found out that it would not work outside of the US =(
I think part of "drastically overestimate people's willingness to pay" is that the customers also "drastically underestimate the effort required", so they tend to compare PaaS pricing against what it'd cost to roll-their-own on a VPS or on EC2, which really puts a squeeze on pricing.
The semantic web has one huge problem imo: There was/is typically zero incentive to semantically encode data. As shown by things like IBMs Watson, you're better off extracting sentence semantics with NLP than by hoping someone has encoded the data for you.

Another thing is that huge ontological databases actually exist, it's just that no one seems to be able to use them for anything useful. Knowledge bases and formal reasoning over them used to be a big deal in AI.

This comes from someone who tried to do a startup that essentially tried to incentivize creating semantic data. It's a hard earned lesson, but I now have zero belief that manual formalization of data is ever going to take off. Even if lots of cool things would be possible if it did.
My point is that it is likely they will mine for other metals and materials overtime. As long as you can amass materials in space and keep it in geosynchronous orbit you can wait until future people get to space and can build spacecraft with them.

To your point, water may be the best thing to mine but I wouldn't invest my time there specifically. I would get whatever material I could as easily as possible since I would not know what future missions/propulsion systems would be.

Further, if you found an abundance of something with even a low energy/weight ratio or no known way to use it for energy it is entirely possible that someone on earth will figure it out, buy it from you and use it to travel.

The cool thing is that whatever you get could be traded on some type of commodities/futures market with delivery in space which means you could theoretically sell it right after you mine it even if no one takes control or uses the material for 20 years.

While the author assumes they will mine asteroids, I think it is just as likely they will build something to pick up and consolidate space junk. That will probably be the most profitable venture and has the dual property that it will prevent damage to other vehicles once pulled from orbit.
You do realize that many of the launch vehicles NASA uses are provided by private companies?
Sure, but you could find similar examples of companies extracting economic rents to benefit their shareholders until they were disrupted by a more agile competitor. My underlying point is that citizens are more like shareholders than employees, you can't just fire them because you don't like their demands. Governments are instituted to secure the interests of theri citizens, who then compete among themselves for control of institutions.
Have you tried this? http://defunkt.io/hub/

# create a repo for a new project
$ git init
$ git add . && git commit -m "It begins."
$ git create -d "My new thing"
→ (creates a new project on GitHub with the name of current directory)
$ git push -u origin master
Not so much any more. I was laid off a mere day later. :(
HP’s Printer Cartridge Recycling is More Than a Shred Ahead
And we're working on /so/ much more than new repo screens too :)
Twitter’s patent pledge not what it seems
Corrupting the Youth with Computer Science (2010)
> Isn't this just a method of implementation for your option 3? I don't really see a substantial difference between mocking the server and mocking the API.

The short answer is that there is no difference. Just as you could mock out a call to S3API.get(object_id) and have it returns my_object, you could write a server that responds to the S3 API call for getting object_id.

The long answer is that using mocks is a lot quicker to develop, easier, more straight forward and has faster run time than maintaining a real runnable copy of S3 that behaves the exact same as the real S3. With the fake S3 you're still spending CPU cycles inside your S3 client while it talks HTTP with your fake S3, which slows unit tests down a lot. Plus fake S3 may have slightly different behavior when your S3API library interacts with it, which could lead to really hard to track down bugs later on. Trusting your APIs is what unit testing is all about.
Completely off topic, but I wish this could have just said "my wife uses her own last name" or something like that. It reads like your wife needs an excuse to keep her last name, which I'm sure isn't the case, but is indicative of the weird - slightly misogynistic - society we're in where the default is for women to give up their names at marriage.
Demo Day St. Louis...Featuring Cobra Commander
yep, number one thing I hear is "why wouldn't I just use my own VPS?"
At some point, we need to kill the myth of backwards compatible. This has caused more problems than it fixes. Further, at this point in history, app updates are trivial and built into everything, so retaining backwards compatibility is not so much of a necessity.

When designing APIs, use versions and have a kill date in place. Even if you don't change the API, release the same one under a new version number. Kill access to the old version on the kill date. Keep N versions accessible at a time, to reduce the burden on app writers, but don't slack on the kill date. This will give you a timeline and procedure to avoid hacking in crazy backwards compatibility, and targets for total rewrites.

Yes, people will still complain. It's OK though if you provide a reasonable balance.
Not sure about this but I think in Japan a lot of train projects where funded by the central bank by printing money. Classic Keynes Style.
I accept the rebuke. :)

But it seems to me that part of the purpose of TCombinator is to get people to take TG individuals more seriously, and I would think that includes dialoguing with Neanderthals like me. I posted in part to spill my guts, but in part because I want to hear the other side as well.
AT&T Stores Are Almost Completely Out of Lumia 900 Stock
How Can Hackers Help In The Fight Against Cancer?
Apparently. Judging from what it does the implementation could be a nice example of layering shell tools on top of each other to get new functionality. Probably it has some uses for people that work entirely with the shell.
Fascinating. Even more interesting. Thanks for the information.
Twitter and Pinterest are new forms. Tumblr (what with reblogging and such) could be something new or it could just be yet another blogging service.
this doesn't work in the case where there are two (and only two) similar documents get ingested into the system as new singleton clusters at the same time; this case is very rare so it is not a big issue to you, i guess.
I hope the author (Alexis Madrigal - usually writes on energy issues) is right. By now a "startup" is presumed to be more of the same first-world social-mobile navel-gazing. The world will be better off if/when such forays stop being the most profitable. (good sign in Bloomberg news today: US wireless contracts "may have shrunk for the first time ever in the first quarter.")

Its anyone's guess how much innovation the next decade will bring in energy and biotech. But as for IT, my money is on the opportunities that will come from bridging the digital divide (emerging markets).

The Wired article "Want to become an Internet billionaire? Move to Africa" didn't get much interest from HN[1] though it was also covered in Forbes. The informal economy (as written about in Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy by Robert Neuwirth) is an oft-overlooked angle which should be particularly interesting, as it intersects more and more with an expanding global internet.

1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3210000