skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What are the problems you'd love to work on if you have time?
Here's my list:

1. We can find remembered points easily when reading because of centuries of development of layout and typography (headers, paragraphs, punctuation, spaces). What are the equivalent techniques for audio, video, and hypertext that would bring them to parity with printed text?

2. What is the easiest to acquire auxiliary language (i.e., Esperanto, Interlang, Basic English) that we can build? Can the barrier be made sufficiently low that the language would be adopted by linking it to some body of widely desired material where translation cost would probably exceed learning the language?

3. What would a symbolic model of a "well trained" mathematical mind look like, and can it be made precise enough for a computer to train a human mathematician? Can we capture a large fraction of taste and intuition in this area?

4. What should a programming language meant for truly casual users (think a macro language for a word processor or a machine tool) look like? How do you make cutting and pasting code into a larger program trivial? What languages features save users from silent errors? What tools must the language support and have to make it explorable the way a GUI is today, but make snippets shareable?

5. A clear exposition of biology from the ground up for technical readers, going through the thought processes and experimental results, and articulating the universal principles that arise, even if we can't state them mathematically yet (I've got lots of notes for this one).

6. How are statistical sublanguages carved off and adopted by fields? For example, statistics in biology hasn't really changed since Fisher published Statistical Methods for Research Workers. Six Sigma is another sublanguage carved off for a certain segment of business users. What are the social and technical factors that let such a sublanguage survive separate from the ongoing study of statistics?

7. What is the abstract mathematical structure that arises from the study of centers as Christopher Alexander defines it in 'The Nature of Order'? It has something to do with equivalence classes of sublattices of the set of all subsets of space, where the equivalence relation is something like a homotopy but tied into basins that have strong coherence. What is the equivalence relation, and what are the mathematical properties of the structures that result?

At the moment these are the problems that I keep in my head, and file away anything that seems like it might help on any of them. What are yours?
Gladwell's Stickiness Problem
I built something similar but simpler not long ago https://github.com/yankov/nourl
But it only supports ruby on a server side and JS on a client. You guys can simplify your framework in many ways by following convention over configuration principle.
Gautama Buddha was a special case of someone in whose past lives there was endless awakening. It was for this reason that he was able to be born with very little karma left, making him able to get enlightenment through his individual practice of asceticism. So he's the one who became a Buddha for the very first time from being a Bodhisattva. But keep in mind that his practice was very different from anyone around him, and there was no one who practiced the meditation of the day who was able to be Enlightened like he was.

With that foundation, I can answer your question a little more directly by telling you that he was able to realize Buddha's teaching through the world itself, after he opened his own eyes. (Buddha's teaching means how the world is operated, so everything is its evidence and can be found through any examples)

If you have any doubts please keep asking questions :) This can be dangerous territory if mistreated
Ask HN: Where are the SoCal hackers?
Will SoCal ever have the culture of the bay area with good hackers building products? I think we have the talent, but most seem comfy at the movie studios, livenation, or yahoo... We need a better culture of taking chances to build great products and businesses down here.
Actually yes, now that I think about it, you can just include the referring site in the verification link and redirect back. That will be very handy and help with the visitor drop-off problem.

I'm really hoping Persona takes off, especially with widespread browser support. Will it still need a third party service then, or will everything happen in-browser?
Study finds patent trolls cost small companies billions
Creator of 'Portal,' Kim Swift, discusses her new videogame, Quantum Conundrum
I've often thought the same thing since becoming a full time freelancer, the talent agency model. The problem to overcome is that, much like most recruiters I've dealt with, it's hard to find someone who isn't a technical developer to understand how to fill a technical developer role. There's a lot more complexity to understanding the work from the outside than there is understanding the work of say an actor. I no more want someone representing me who's saying "ok I have a guy here who has HTML, PHP, Javascript, and CSS, and I see you have all of those on your job requirements, this is a match right?" than I like hearing the opposite from a recruiter. Essentially you're going to need to find developers who want to do sales, a tough find if I've ever heard one.
How often do you use a text editor?
I used to live in a building near a Google shuttle stop on the border of the TL. They wanted to raise my rent almost 20% y/y for a lease renewal, and the place was a trainwreck quality-wise (as was the neighborhood.)

When I went to move out, the leasing agent just shrugged and said "Some Googler will happily pay even more than that."

The real problem is SF prohibiting any dense housing from being built anywhere in the city and also the failure of running reliable/usable public transit to any region outside of the area bounded by BART and Market Street. Rent control certainly doesn't help (though I think there should absolutely be a rent stabilization law -- everywhere.)
Is it really? I think all these derisive comments against CL are focusing on tangential details to the classified ad market.

If I place a classified ad it is to find a buyer for the services or product I'm trying to move. CL currently does that better than the competition. Yet the comments I see being handed around are about UI, design, automation and other items that might, but don't actually increase my chance of selling. To replace CL those sites need to provide the person posting the ad with a chance of finding a buyer that's equal to or greater than CL.

If those new start-ups can't provide that, but only have a shinier UI to offer, then they're competing on irrelevant details that aren't the main drivers behind people's decisions to post/view CL.

Others have mentioned marketing approaches and techniques to help improve those aspects. But most of what I've read is summarized as: "we'll provide a better app/ui/api" and that's a noble goal, but the reason for existing of these sits is to connect seller with buyer, what do those things bring to the table if a new app lacks a sufficiently large viewing audience? That's the problem that needs solving, not the app/ui/api one.
Well you hit this page: https://en.gravatar.com/site/signup/

They send you an email that says this:

By signing up for a Gravatar account I acknowledge that I have read and agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy located at the following link:

https://en.gravatar.com/site/terms-of-service
I've been super impressed by the steady pace shown by the developer in improving and tweaking the many beta releases. Top quality product and I was glad to buy it.
Canadian Court Issues Triple-Whammy Ruling In Favor Of Free Speech Online
To paraphrase Jamie Zawinski, all online conversations about geopolitics expand until the United States is at fault.
Why I love Code and Coffee
This analysis is making a very specific measurement. They're only counting software crashes that are detected and reported in Windows logs.

If a machine crashes so severely that a crash report is not generated, than those reports will not be present in our
data. Therefore, our analysis can be considered conservative...

"Conservative" here means "it underestimates the crash rate by some unknowable amount."

If you drop your laptop down a flight of stairs, it will likely develop some hardware problems. But for one thing, not all hardware failures will cause software crashes and crash reports. For another thing, you're likely to just replace the drop-kicked laptop, and the hardware failures will never appear in logs like these.
Health Insurance for Austin bootstrappers?
I'm leaving my job soon to work fulltime on my startup. I'll need personal health insurance (for single individual, no dependents) and wondered if anyone in a similar situation had advice or lessons learned.
Not sarcasm. I genuinely didn't know. But the inference was very obvious and heavy, yes.
Native browser support is slated for Firefox 17, though it'll be disabled by default for a while, much like with our SPDY support. Of course, native support in Gecko is a hard requirement for our Boot2Gecko phones, and the first big code freeze for that is rapidly approaching (mid-August, IIRC?), so it's absolutely on its way!
Are you guys working on a PHP library, or will I need to roll my own?
I couldn't care less about UI changes. My tablet and my phone have virtually identical screen resolutions. The important bit is the web page itself. Anyway I worked around it by copying the apk to my tablet.
It is already.. :)
Google's Latest Internet Cat Research Is Actually Troubling
Podcasts aren't hosted on apple's servers. iTunes simply links to them, without ads.
The jury is in on the Tesla Model S (compilation of video reviews)
> because the user experience really requires you to have the "nascar effect"

Seriously. I love SO, but this is one of the scariest log in pages I've ever seen: https://img.skitch.com/20120627-d49s8rqaeu5p5d3dkmn2p26tim.p...
Tuts+ Premium Account Security Compromised. Plain text passwords.
I've done the same (50 resumes for two positions, phone interviews with 15-20, follow-up in-person interviews with 4). That's 10X interviews. But 100X? Assuming anyone he hires goes through multiple follow-up interviews, I don't see what information he's getting from these interviews that couldn't be handled by a subordinate or by email. Evaluating someone for "fit" is impossible in a short interview like that.
The Biggest Problem Facing Consumer Web Companies in Boston
I read your message - i've heard but never learned about anatta and anicca, so I don't know what experience you had. But I'm interested so I'd like to confirm about it through simple questions if it's alright..

So, my question is, what could you know (or become to realize) through that teaching?

Thanks
Programmable Feedback Notification for the Simple Email Service
(Someone figured out LIMIT for relational algebra, and ORDER can be coerced to relational if you define a bunch of edge cases. I don't think it's fair to suggest that a RDBMS can't/shouldn't/wouldn't do LIMIT or ORDER).

I agree, relational algebra sucks to code in. That wasn't the point of it, of course. Codd's goal was to prove as long as your language is reducible to relational algebra, you're relational. And with that, you get all the side benefits.

I'm not so sure Date et al are advocating coding purely in RA. At least, I've never heard them say that. Their "Tutorial D", as the name implies, is for educational and specification purposes more than a useable implementation. Again, if you can make your awesome language reducible to "Tutorial D", you get all the nice benefits of the True RDBMS, which is pretty awesome.
What should someone do if they're moving to SF and want to live in SOMA or nearby neighborhoods? Does anyone have any recommendations? It seems like there aren't that many choices for buildings, and a lot of them aren't that new. All of the reviews I have read (for almost all of the buildings) sound mediocre or negative.
Looks fantastic - not being a day-to-day programmer this is exactly what I've been looking for. Building my command and control platform will be significantly easier.

Anyone else notice that the pip install is broke though? Complains that 'README.md' is missing from the tarball.
Blocking technology based upon the perception that it could be used illegally isn't sound reasoning especially from a company that advertises their file sharing feature as ideal.
I've once watched a group of sculptors argue about the merits of various drills for a whole evening. So yes, artists also obsess over their tools just like we do over ours.
Exactly. This reminds me of facebook and every site with "login with facebook" implemented. For example, I choose not to log into hulu with facebook because I'm sure its great for facebook to know what bad shows I watch to serve me better ads. But i don't need all of my friends and family seeing that information on their news feed. I believe Spotify forces this on their users and as a result i get the joy of seeing every song my friends listen to on Spotify.
Why do you need to "retinafy" at all? Do all pages look messed up on iPad 3 or something?
Each candidate probably had more than one interview. 100 interviews for each hire is not all that high, especially if you don't have a lot of intern conversion hires (that's why larger companies can hire more efficiently).
I don't think they're prohibiting dense housing per se, just not approving/building enough of it. There have been several 50-story condos opened in the past few years, and several more currently under construction, but they're not enough to keep pace with growth in demand. It didn't help that there was a ~2-year lull in construction when a bunch of developers got into financial trouble during the financial crisis and had to put projects on hold. It's not as if SF isn't dense; it's the 2nd-densest city in the country, and way-way-way ahead of local peers San Diego and Los Angeles.

I agree on public transit, but it's not clear what to do about it. An east-west Geary subway line has been proposed since the 1930s, but it's really expensive to build in an earthquake zone, and the city / taxpayers just haven't been willing to pay what it'd cost. A cheaper alternative that leverages the already-built infrastructure might be to convince people to live in under-developed areas that do have good transit already, such as Oakland, which is actually closer to downtown SF by transit-minutes than much of SF proper is.

One thing that would help on the latter issue is if more of the suburban cities on transit lines also dropped their anti-development attitudes. For example, there is enough demand that there should be condos/apartments near the Palo Alto Caltrain station. But Palo Alto won't allow it, because they have some idea of an upper-class suburb full of single-family homes that they'd like to protect.
This Fanless Heatsink Is The Next Generation In CPU Cooling
Dropbox engineers don't owe Boxopus anything. Why would you expect them to jump ship?
I already have far more than I should, as you can get some really nice names which are normally taken. Now if only I had a use for -any- of them.
PAR38 LED | Dimmable LED Lights | PAR30 LED
"JavaScript engineer", really?
> That is, impeachment will be impossible unless an actual violation of law is found.

The European parliament can't impreach the commission. What it can do is sack them (but all of them, not just one). No evidence of illegality is needed.
I've tried it in the past. It's hard to keep up over long periods of time in my opinion. It started to feel like a chore and pretty restrictive after a while. But that's just me.
Bot with boyish personality wins biggest Turing test
I think you've overlooked the point that I already have a job. I'm "on set" 10 hours a day already.
Jadwal Euro 2012 Terbaru
I guess the only thing left is...build your own alternative to Dropbox?
Get roommates, get ready to pay, and don't expect much.

There are some great old houses in South of Market, but turnover is rare, and they're all expensive. There are some great/awful new live/work buildings there too, but most of them are condos and all of them are expensive.

Affordability comes in Outer Mission, Excelsior, Outer Richmond, Outer Sunset. Occasionally Potrero Hill toward Cesar Chavez. "Affordability" is relative of course, but if you're finding yourself priced out of the places that everyone talks about and look nice on the map, check prices in the places I listed.

Also, remember that East Bay near BART is closer to South of Market than most of San Francisco city is, time-wise.
... Dropbox is a megacorp? They have something like 100 employees.
Well, that's ok, because we have a new local version, too. It'll sync your projects both ways.
sthatipamala is correct. A few more points on the differences between ZeroRPC and Bridge:

* ZeroRPC has been open-sourced by dotCloud with no plans for monetization. It's just a fundamental piece of infrastructure which we think is worth sharing. Licensing fundamental infrastructure software is not our business (also: it's very hard).

* I see very interesting scenarios where ZeroRPC can be integrated with Bridge. There is already work on integrating it with systems very similar to Bridge, for example Stack.io (http://github.com/dotcloud/stack.io).
memSQL is NOT durable by design. you can lose the pool of unwritten queries
There are huge numbers of claims, but who among the multitudes has the evidence? If any Buddhist monks or temple has Buddha's teachings, they should also have the ways of life from the problems to the resolutions. But they don't have them, and instead they use meditation to trick people into giving up the real answers. It's the same thing as giving themselves up. This is an important point and the root cause of this needs to be informed to people in society.

Every time I've gone to religious institutions, temples, etc. to verify, 99% of the time they turn out to be false gurus with self-contradictory or hypocritical claims - they just use words to get the better of people - and there's a huge gap in their level of consciousness and that of a truly Enlightened Being.

The evidence that someone is Enlightened and a Tathagata (one who opened his/her eyes completely to the world) is that s/he can explain things in the living reality precisely and can answer all concrete questions on the spot with exact answers. But if I were to go to the Buddhist temples and give them some basic questions they might be very uncomfortable and tell me to leave.

The only reason someone does not give an answer to a question is that they don't really know.
There are many schools of thought on how learn meditation, ranging from "just sit!" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikantaza) to very detailed instructions on posture, states of mind, etc. I thought the manual part of "Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond" was very well written. Another good one is "Turning the Mind into an Ally".

Good luck and remember to enjoy the journey!
Ask HN: What's your job?
I'm just curious. Are most of you CEOs of your own startups or part of someone elses? Or are you in larger companies as programmers and some day want to create a startup?

Are there any IT/security auditors here? What about non-tech jobs?

As for me, I'm just finished college so I am job hunting at the minute. That's why jobs are on my mind. To fill my free time I'm working on a website.
that and the claim that it's a durable db
I think there should absolutely be a rent stabilization law -- everywhere

Do you think this on the grounds of economic theory? The empirical finding is that rent control laws limit the supply of rental housing unduly wherever they are enforced. What's a successful example of a place with a "rent stabilization law"?

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html

http://econjwatch.org/articles/rent-control-do-economists-ag...
Instead of a subway line, would it be possible to close off one of San Francisco's many east-west streets (Geary if you like, probably a couple north-south of there would be better) and run a light rail line (using Muni Metro or similar cars) on an east-west route?

You could adjust the timing of the traffic lights to ensure that the rail line always (or usually) has priority and cross the whole city in ten minutes.
We do now have autocompletion. You can flip it on in your Settings panel.

Also, try hitting Command-Shift-E (I think Ctrl-Shift-E for Windows/*nix) to get a code outline of your current file.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generaliza...
How Hierarchy Kills Creativity
Realize you are going to get what you pay for if you want to live in SOMA. Realize that most buildings aren't new in SF in general, especially the more affordable ones. Then decide if you can't pay that much, whether or not you can stomach living in the tenderloin. Next up, you decide what other neighborhoods might be a good alternative, probably the Richmonds or the Sunsets, or maybe outer mission.

And unless you have 3+ months to look for a place every day, don't expect:

1. A bargain
2. That you will get picked for said bargain
then your marketing is bullshit, claiming durability when you know that's not what you're doing with memsql. talk about wasting people's time with claims of 30x speedup, laughable
And here I was thinking I was special because I was getting two (sometimes 3) recruiting emails a day on Linkedin ... smh.
I guess it depends on your hardware and connection speed.

I'd rather opt-in than opt-out to the full experience on a mobile device if the main pages are full of images or bloated with many external objects.

Look at these mobile examples which I find much more suitable for tiny screens with underpowered cpus: http://www.640pixels.com/design-showcase/15-beautiful-exampl...

But most of those sites will not detect Firefox mobile (yet). Again, this is not Firefox's fault.
Ask HN: On the app store, making money... now what?
Recently, I made an app with my girlfriend and we put it on the App Store. We did it more for fun and enjoyment than financial gain (figuring that the App Store is pretty much a lottery so we didn't really worry about it), but it's starting to pick up steam and is well on its way to bringing in the equivalent of a few months worth of paycheck.

Relevant details:

- She's a US citizen, I'm not (I'm here on a work visa).

- The developer account is in her name. (we did this because it seemed more solid to setup a US app store account under the name of a US citizen rather than under the name of an alien)

- We both agree that we put in roughly the same amount of work (her in assets and design, me in code).

I'm not really sure what to do to make sure that we make the best out of the situation. Should we just split the profits as they come? Should we set up a joint developer/bank account? Should she start a US company in her name? (She's currently freelance, and I don't intend on leaving my current job.)

Is this a situation that HNers have experienced and found a straightforward solution to, or is the best thing to do seek legal advice? (and is it worth it to put 10-20% of the profits towards legal advice?)
... Then you would have OpenIDs for those email accounts. Or you could just as trivially make throw away subdomains to use as OpenIDs with free providers. (There are several DNS providers with hundreds of free second-level domains that you can make as many subdomains as you like for free in 45 seconds.

Between this and your comments on G+, you seem really interested in villianizing your service providers when there are obvious ways to avoid their naive account associations [1], as you even take advantage of.

[1] I say naive because I would be willing to be a large amount of money that I could track you between accounts unless you're taking some insane precautions against it, even without an email address or OpenID url.
Reddit is just a variation of a message board. But having said that I do think a social site within an organisation is a good idea.

We have social networks for businesses (Yammer), who wants to make Reddit-style sites for businesses with me? :P