skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's glorious :o I've only recently begun messing around with SVGs, but it seems the more I use them, the more amazing they become.

That said, I really do wish there was better browser support for them. Having to embed them as objects instead of images, for example, is a tad bit lame :/ And then you're still left with anything before IE9 (I think?) unable to see them. On the mobile-end, the same goes with anything before Android 3... Or weird buggy behaviour when you're applying things like hover effects to parts of the image, etc...

It's definitely promising though
>Race, religion, political affiliation, disability are obviously all irrelevant in an IQ test... so in a way, isn't it more equitable?

Except that cultural background is not, unfortunately. And it's highly correlated with the first and probably weakly linked to the second and third classes as well.
Is This Airbnb knock-off Google-stalking potential hosts?
Why the US Can Beat China
I think you took me the wrong way. I'm not trying to be political/environmental. I'm curious on the broader scheme "sci-fyi-ness" of what the future could look like, and how we would get in such places. And the Sociological causes/effects of such futures.

That, and the theoretical thought of what would happen should we impact the weight of the world to the point of it having a noticeable impact on earths astronomical characteristics intrigues me.
Bret Easton Ellis and his terrible Twitter feed: A necessary intervention
DangleTree: Product reviews with a laugh - Nerf Gun
I'm not complaining if this generation's robber barons give us asteroid mining...
Don't forget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbirds_%28TV_series%29

The 21st century used to be way cooler than it is now.
I wonder if the guys who own asdf.com ever check the email going through asdf@asdf.com
Once you have the IP, and an open UDP port, file sharing becomes a trivial extension.

"P2P", "VOIP", "Skype", "File Sharing", whatever you want to call it. Bits are bits. A "file" is just an abstraction. All the same.
They do (or at least have in the past). http://www.asdf.com/asdfemail.html. Interestingly, their real e-mail address is jklsemicolon@asdf.com
The Supreme Court has held that a particular IQ test had a disparate impact on black applicants. This makes IQ tests essentially radioactive for most corporations in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
Errr... if you concluded that "language trivia is useless" was the point, I think you fell into the actual trap the essay was trying to warn against. For example, broad knowledge of language trivia would be a positive attribute when hiring someone to design a language.

The point, I think, is that asking interview questions without understanding why the questions are appropriate is worse than useless - it's actively destructive to the end goal of hiring good people.

You can generalize this Cargo Cult behavior to any field - blindly carrying out activity without understanding deeper principles is likely to produce undesirable results.
Re: The War For Talent

Is there a consensus in the industry who the best hackers, designers, and leaders are?
As a 92 year old veteran with not much more life to live, I don't think that's how he's thinking about it. He understands what it's like to be in a terrible war and is doing what he can to at least make life livable.

Regardless of what you think of stupid wars, and yes they are all stupid with very few exceptions, we are all still human. And showing humanity in the face of inhumanity is not a bad thing.

Yeah, war really sucks, but I'd focus the vitriol on those who are getting us into these stupid wars, not the 92 year olds who are trying to be human to poor 18 year olds who went to war to pay for college or because they couldn't get a job.
Apparently there is a Job Called Startup Consulting
Any chance of an OGG feed?
We stopped dreaming, and I'm blaming Yolo
Most redis-based queues/websocket servers makes use of Redis Pub/Sub. StackOverflow uses Redis Pub/Sub for maintaining synchronized local caches in their load balanced web servers. Whilst StackOverflow Careers uses a Pub/Sub powered RedisMQ host for its BackOffice services: https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Messaging-...

@antirez has written about Redis's Pub/Sub impressive performance:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/redis-db/R09u__3Jzfk/4hPvMJY...
The IPO Boom Is Back: Pricings Hit A 12-Year High...
I was really excited by the title, but alas, the system doesn't do what I hoped.

I think it would be easier to have a rear and front sensor that detects when there's someone behind you and no one in front of you. Then it could just kindly suggest you stop driving 55 in the left lane of a 65mph zone and move the f@ck over.
Just Signed Contract for Fire in the Valley, 3rd Edition
The 2% Catastrophe: How One Number Explains the Miserable Economy
Dust 514 bridges the gap between consoles and PC gaming (video)
Given how I fill out a lot of webforms, I feel sorry for whoever lives at 123 Fake St.
Guess again - war is a huge business. And it's very complicated. You'd be surprised how much of the US economy is derived from waging and supporting war. If you were to take that away, the cost would be surprising economic depression and joblessness. Way too many businesses are in the direct or indirect business of supporting war-faring. And that's terribly unfortunate, but a reality.

Forcing the draft won't do anything to stop war making. You'd have to remove the economic incentive, and that's too painful for anyone to do. Indeed, a Senator would probably sacrifice their own son if it meant keeping the coffers filled.

Perhaps that's worth the cost, but at this point, I would hesitate to say that it is a Complex Problem, which would necessitate a Complex Solution. Intractable, maybe?
a lot of the ancient quirks of the languages seem even quirkier nowadays (e.g. Smalltalk's image-based development is just too weird for most people).

I have to say, as someone who primarily does C++ in Linux/Windows, Smalltalk and Lisp may not "fit in" enough for people to get over their hurdles. Just as an example, I've dabbled in Smalltalk and Lisp, but it always seemed kind of awkward how (at least Smalltalk) was in its own little cocoon (the images you mentioned) that you couldn't version control and didn't integrate well with pre-existing editors (eg, emacs). OTOH, the other day I was tasked with getting a Java program working; I've also dabbled in Java, but getting the program working and sorting things out (classpath, etc) wasn't that hard. Thankfully I had the source, and I could grep it, open it in vi, see that some paths were partially hardcoded and that whoever wrote it was using eclipse and didn't understand portable path separators, etc. In the end, it took me a couple hours, whereas I'm sure the same thing in Smalltalk or Lisp probably would have taken all day.

It's good to try radical new directions, but there is something to be said for at least having some hooks to fit into pre-existing environments; in particular being able to use libs from other languages (eg C => Python, Java => Scala, Clojure, etc) and working with entrenched DE's (including VCS's).
For number 2, this has been the default for tcsh for years now...
I was a protectionist during college and your number one enemy with film is dust and dirt. I would imagine the prints would be unwatchable after a dust storm in Iraq.
If it was simple, there would be no articles about "proper" ways to construct objects and arguments regarding whether using the "new" keyword is a a bad practice. It's absolutely ridiculous that such core language features need to be discussed and argued about so much.
Historic Photos From the NYC Municipal Archives
Samsung overtakes Nokia - and possibly outsells Apple's iPhone
My guess would be SSL. Varnish doesn't handle SSL directly.
The Refactoring Browser is a huge win in Smalltalk.
Maybe this is just me, but the font is incredibly hard to read (I'm on Chrome).
Prototyping with DTO/code-first (strongly typed) web frameworks? Yes!
I've always been skeptical of these liquid-air cycles, but this scheme strikes me as especially problematic in that an ejector ramjet would be mechanically simpler and have the same top speed. For the curious, an ejector-ramjet (or ram-rocket or air-augmented rocket or any of a number of other names) is just a ramjet with a small rocket motor behind the center body of the diffuser. The exhaust plume entrains the inlet air, boosting the combustion chamber pressure by cooling the rocket exhaust plume. (It also acts as a fairly, err, robust flameholder.) If you're wed to LH2 as a coolant, just bleed it in along the walls of the rocket combustion chamber, and it will mix with the main mass flow and combust. Et voila! The cooling system is the fuel injection system for the ramjet mode.

Now you just spend all the compressor and heat-exchanger machinery weight that you saved by not going with the Skylon engine by having dedicated thrusters elsewhere on the vehicle for the pure rocket mode.

As someone somewhere else said, Skylon strikes me as a characteristically British solution to the problem, just due to it's sheer over-reliance on plumbing.
Incredibox - Background music for programming.
I recently attended the Philly Startup Weekend (just this past weekend). I have on suggestion for you: Go.

Startup Weekend is great, if nothing more, than building something, meeting people, and maybe, just maybe, starting something great (Remember, it's Startup Weekend, where you go to start, not finish). The pressure of having something to demo, of being asked questions about the business model, of having to be judged in front of your peers is exciting.

I highly recommend attending one. Even if you aren't planning on doing a startup or don't have an idea, the connections you make, the things you learn, are awesome.
I find it easier to just hit ^R when I want to search my history. And since that's a default keybinding, it works on any machine I touch.
I guess it depend on how one sees something to have value.
There are mathematicians only consider research level mathematics have value. There are some subfield of mathematics like algebraic geometry that take years for a math grad student to even understand the language, and takes even longer to produce research paper with value.
The Problem with Threads (2006)
I just found this line in the article: The new discovery means that two of the three baryons predicted in the usb composition by theory have now been observed. It's not much to go on, but apparently there should be 3 usb baryons.
i read this and can't help but feel proud of people who dont have a fb account by choice.almost like the few who never got 'locked in'
The last time I tried upgrading to bash 4.0 using `brew install bash`, I was shocked to discover that it couldn't detect when I was logging in over ssh anymore. Such logins ended up giving me the non-login shell, which didn't source any of my normal stuff.
> The comments here seem brutally negative,(...) firm-wide aggressive embrace of open source tech.

Some of us still remember how Microsoft used to Extend and Extinguish right after Embracing. Protocols, formats, standards; you name it, they did it. It is true the company seems changing to better, but you can't re-build damaged reputation overnight.

For example, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3900348

> The comments here seem brutally negative (...)

Those aren't that brutal yet. Read up some discussion on software patents. Or on PHP ;-)
Creator of RoR, David Heinemeier Hansson on Askolo
There will still be puns... but probably not much else.
Intuit to Acquire Demandforce for $424MM
Wow. I love that the S stands for Simple. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Doesn't telling us the patient's name violate HIPAA in itself?
I'd just like to point out that I've come to Mike for help on numerous occasions and he has always given me fantastic and useful advice. If you need to get questions answered, Mike is the guy you want to talk to.

Oh and Mike, I still haven't been able to find an internship for this summer. Thought I had one locked down, but I guess not. Still trying though! Oh and thanks for the interview skills book, it was amazingly helpful.
My favorite along these lines:

http://caterina.net/archive/001011.html

Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake couldn't fly on Northwest Airlines because their system silently deleted her tickets.
Replication isn't going to help if your data is being silently corrupted, you'll just replicate the corruption.
Certainly I wouldn't expect most of them to be writing production code, but there are other benefits.

1) Before I knew how to program computers and programming seemed very mysterious and magical to me. Giving everyone a basic understanding of what your company actually does is a good thing. At the very least it will improve communication. It might help non-developers set more realistic expectations, etc.

2) Even "business types" can benefit from knowing how to program, even if they won't be writing user-facing code. Many business applications have scripting engines built in. Being able to take some data and transform it or calculate some statistics will help them do their jobs better.

3) Designers/UI/UX people who can program are incredibly valuable. They know what the technology is capable of, and will design with that in mind. Often they can produce working prototypes, or even production code.

Some employees will probably just learn the basics and decide they don't really care for programming, but others might embrace it and become much more efficient at what they do.
Each event is put on by a set of organizers, I would look at it slightly more from a franchise perspective. It's probably not Startup Weekend's fault. I've been an organizer before and I am sorry you didn't get what you won; but don't go for prizes. I've organized and been a participant, I've never seen any 'substantial' prizes other than some fun stuff. The last one in Washington DC I think had some Think Geek stuff like a lightsaber.

But that's not why you go to these events. It should only be about the experience and building something. If there happens to be a prize, that's gravy.
It started out that way, but then they made all of CORBA's mistakes.
Show HN: suppose_its - a simple tool for testing date-related code
"IQ test" is too broad a term to say if it's "illegal to hire in the US based on IQ." Some purported IQ tests are provably biased towards a particular race. Those are illegal. The rest are presumably not illegal, but if you were sued, there'd probably be a pretty large burden in proving that every IQ question you'd ever asked was both not racially biased and directly relevant to the job opening. Hence, very few business even look twice at IQ testing anymore - it's too deep a minefield.

For more background about IQ testing for employment in America, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. .
> This is why shopping online is less common in, say, south america, than it is in north america

not completely true: I'm a south american (Chilean) currently living in the US. Shopping online in south america is not as common because: a) access to credit cards is not as common as in the US b) there's only few companies doing the inter-bank connection and credit card processing, which btw charge some excessive fees, c) because of the previous two things, there's no culture for online payments, although that's changing. Oh, yes... also d) interest rates are stupidly high.

> if you want to give your friend $20, you just log into your bank and send him the money

Totally true: internet banking is so, so much easier in Chile than here in the US, that I really miss it! Back in Chile I could easily transfer money from my personal account to a friend's account instantly and from the bank's web site, with no fee. No wire transfer but seamless inter-bank money transfer. The security while it could improve is very good...

Anyway, just a side comment on comparing online and internet banking in south america and the rest of the world :)
I don't think the Skylon will ever be practical, but it's easy to imagine a multi-reusable-stage launch system combining air-breathing jet engines and wings to take you to 60,000 ft, a second one with Sabre-derived designs and tiny wings to add a couple Mach and getting to the upper stratosphere and a third one that can get to orbit.

The SpaceX folks should talk to these guys.
Can Apple Patent the Design of the Macbook Air?
The trouble with JavaScript is the name is misleading - you're lead to believe it's a scripting form of Java. Instead it's more akin to Lisp in C clothing. Doug Crockford explains it best. http://www.crockford.com/javascript/javascript.html
oh man thank you!

runs to her terminal

tealfour:~ egypt$ rvm implode
-bash: rvm: command not found

Well poop. Thanks anyway!
FotoFest Pays Tribute to Russian Photography
Ask PG: Is Y Combinator (still) a startup?
Dear PG,

I recently finished reading "Founders at Work" and I liked the adventurous start-up story of YC back in Cambridge. Being in 2012 now, my question to you (and the team) is:

How far is Y Combinator (still) a startup itself?

To me, this question can imply subquestions like: What do you do not to become a company? How far do processes, iterations, standardizations and scale influence the entrepreneurial atmosphere? Do you like the term "Startup Factory" in this context?

I´m aware that this question sinks within the interviews (and is within a gray area of posting rules), however it might be that it is something the YC crew is talking about these days.

P.S.: @Jessica Livingston: Would be great to know whether you plan to publish a new book on founder stories on recent YC (and non YC) startups. Maybe "Loser Stories" would be good theme too.
Yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent
gud work dude
I post ads every single day of the week. This is the first occurrence of the term being blocked.
Steve Blank had a fantastic post about this you might want to take the time to read.

http://steveblank.com/2012/02/27/killing-your-startup-by-lis...
You say potato, I say potato. To someone who spends their working life in gmail (or whatever) having it suddenly go away, being replaced with a different tool which requires different workflows is certainly a "disaster" in some sense. It's an equivalent annoyance, for example, to losing one's laptop or phone and having to restore a new one from scratch (assuming you have working backups anyway).

What it's not is incontrovertible proof that the new one is "bad". It might be great, but it's still a net loss of productivity while the users learn it.
Let's call this the familiarity theory of value.
Investor horror stories
Fair enough, and sorry. Sci-fi version: once you're moving that sort of tonnage, logarithmically speaking you're closer to Ringworlds and Dyson spheres than you are to near-future asteroid mining.
What in the world was this downvoted for. Seriously. I was explaining a misunderstanding.

For those who don't know, Airbnb has a posting-to-Craigslist option. It is not an auto-poster; rather, it formats a post into the html that'll be accepted by Craigslist, then you have to log into your Craigslist account to post to Craigslist what Airbnb's given you. We haven't used this option since we started. It does invite you to go to Airbnb's site so the transaction is not being conducted via Craigslist's email system. It chooses "no email - see below" as the default option and does not include a phone number. You can, of course, since you are the poster and it's not being auto-posted, change anything and everything about the format and the options.

Then you have our situation, the situation that has developed. We indicate our reviews on Airbnb and other services. The other services remain fine and untouched. But we can no longer show potential customers our Airbnb reviews.
could you have added some text at the end of the id before sending it and then removed the extra bits from the end on recieving side? something like a parity value.
I disagree. Of course not _everybody_ can abandon C++ but some really can. I have developed C and C++ software for many years but with Racket Scheme (a functional language) I am MUCH more productive now. This works because I think and code functionally which is a totally different approach to the way how coding in C++ is done.

I doubt that functional programming in C++ will be as elegant and effective as in a real functional language where everything is functional. The approach of C++ seems to be and to support "everything". But will that support more maintainable code? I don't think so. Quo vadis, C++?

Btw Implementations like LuaJIT demonstrate that virtual machines have become amazingly fast. So, even for performance you don't need to be stuck to C++.
I have many years of first-hand experience; I'm an American who has lived in (mostly rural) France since 2006.

This may well be true; but I've found that in actual, real-world interactions, the fact that I'm speaking a non-native language is mostly a disadvantage in decision-making.

I'm normally relatively non-confrontational even when speaking English. But in French, I've found that this is hugely magnified, and I suffer for it. Even when people are being unacceptably rude to me or people around me, I'm stuck being polite and agreeable.

In French, when someone calls me on the phone, trying to sell me something, I'm only now (after 6 years here) getting comfortable interrupting them.

Not long after moving here, I had a clearly intoxicated man invite himself into my house (even though my wife & I had two visitors staying with us), and he eventually even asked to borrow one of my women (because apparently my wife plus the two women visiting were "mine"?!), and I eventually got rid of him, but I never said anything remotely impolite.

I hired a local workman just starting his own construction business to replace the fence around our garden, and he persuaded me to pay in advance even though his incompetence was already becoming clear (and the end result was already falling apart by the time he "finished"). I never said anything confrontational.

These are embarrassing stories to tell; I'd never let things like this happen if I were on my own turf, linguistically. In English I can be subtly cutting, or curt, or strongly rude, or whatever I want with no further thought, when the situation calls for it.

In French, when someone insults me I'm still wondering if I may have misunderstood, or am missing social cues, or if I've accidentally offended them and their behavior is justified. In a confrontation, I immediately feel like I'm in over my head, and taking control of the situation is almost impossible.

It's slowly improving -- my French is already quite good, and I'm relearning how to manage in difficult situations.

But it's been a serious downside I hadn't expected before moving here, and if this is a general effect I imagine it would offset the advantages studied here pretty significantly.
A click of an ad. Their ideal user is be somebody who regularly uses the service through the website, rather than mail clients, doesn't use an ad-blocker, and clicks the ads.
This post reminded me of that also. I find myself sending someone that post every quarter or so :)
Why is that? You get the same thing with emails / IRC / some IM protocols / VoIP. What's so "scary" about someone knowing your current IP?

I mean - it's one thing if Skype was advertising itself as a privacy protecting, identity hiding service... but they don't. They provide convenient A/V connections.
AirBnb By The Numbers: 85% Of Users Inactive?
Windows users (for the most part) are not Microsoft customers.
BTW, nothing is stopping you from sending DVDs to people in the Peace Corp. Maybe you should do that and be a force for good?
I got isolated in kindergarten for not being cool enough to hang out with the cool kids.

I'm not saying that there should be some kind of enforcement to get nerds accepted into society.

I am just saying that you either deal with it or go away.