skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OpenStreetMap bot removes waypoints after licensing chang
So who's gonna pay off the public shareholders of FB now? Where's the greater fool?
That's not true.

Even just in the Jewish traditions related in the Bible, there are many very specific constraints. They just don't happen to be the same as "Leave it to Beaver." But maybe the Bible is too much of a button-pusher example.

To understand, just consider one of the traditional definitions - let's take the Hindu one. It isn't at all true that there is no traditional Hindu concept of marriage, there is quite a strong one and there are a great many things it excludes. These exclusions are meaningful.

The same thing is also true of many other traditional definitions. Although some traditions are a little different from others. Now as the world urbanizes many traditions are being mushed together in industrialized settings and they are forming their own new standards. So same-sex marriage is up for grabs and we see the current fight.

However, there is no traditional or modern tradition which includes marriage with dead puppies.

Some things are in, others are out - there were many definite concepts but each is changing and many are merging.
Defcon 20 – Day 1 of The DC Edition
Congratulations to the nReduce team and kudos to an exponentially growing service that's aimed to help people get their startups off the ground. We could all use a little help and these guys make it interesting. Looking forward to demo day Joe/Josh. Also kudos to the Lizi team for kicking it off.
Defcon Day 1 Keynote Notes – Shared Values, Shared Responsibility
"If you want to read what someone says on Twitter you have to use Twitter. Not a big deal it turns out."

I have to go to all the trouble to maintain my webserver and setup DNS, then go to twitter to read others? Why is this not a big deal?
Try Tom Duff's rc shell: http://rc.cat-v.org

Is available on *nix systems as part of Plan 9 from User Space: http://plan9.us
This Cute Chat Site Could Save Your Life And Help Overthrow Your Government
Is this a CS-specific mindset? Because in other engineering fields, the expectation is that students will gain a strong scientific/mathematical grounding at university, but specific vocational skills, like say how to use Boeing's wind-tunnel simulation software, will be taught on the job, in training programs for new hires.
This isn't even unusual, Swedish web retailers tend to put a price on pre-orders that can't possibly be exceeded when it goes on sale.

Even if a Swedish price was real, it says nothing about what it will retail for in the US, we both have a high VAT and tend to get gouged in the currency translation by the seller.
How Your Smartphone Could Stop a Car from Running You Over
i'm far away from it all, but from what I see the "build a feature for Facebook" business plan is now passe in the valley.

Look at how Pintrest comes from Iowa. I can think of more than one company in L.A. that wants to be the "next facebook" The exciting area in social networking is getting new groups of people involved in new activities and also bringing social media closer to other media. The tech skills in SV matter less than they used to and it's really an issue of marketing now... The unique perspectives that people bring from other parts of the world will be key.

People in the valley and SF seem to be more interested in infrastructure and SAAS plays, as well as transaction-oriented communities like AirBnB and stuff where you pay $X a month for a subscription. You can certainly find outrageous examples, but the better angels and VCs are (for the most part) making good decisions.
Hacking together a microblogging system out of RSS and Atom with a little network glue is fine for a prototype.

But in the long run you won't beat Facebook and Twitter by merely replicating their functionality.
> I thought we'd all moved on from thick-client email apps.

No, "we" haven't.
Black Hat Day 2 Talk Notes – The Christopher Columbus Rule and DHS
Minor nitpick: the keyboard toggle button looks more like a calculator and does nothing for the 'Auto' option (maybe it should be hidden until one of the other layouts is selected?)
>So you see no difference in Bezos personally contributing money without linking it to his company, and the Chick-Fil-A president making it a matter of company policy? Just curious.

No, Amazon is a publicly held company, not solely Bezos' property (I doubt his board would even let him do the same thing).

Chick-Fil-A is for all intents and purposes is the "personal money" of the owners, so I see no difference in what someone does with his money or his property.

I'm fine with the boycott. I don't support it, but I respect it.

What I'm not fine is this.

>not allowing expansion into communities that disagree with his stance

If a local government denies building permits to a business because it disagrees with the owner's speech, that is a blatant first amendment violation. Far more knowledgeable people than myself have said the same thing. I really doubt the lawyers for whatever municipality plans on banning them will allow that to happen.

If the people of a local community don't want Chick-Fil-A there, they won't patronize it. Chik-Fil-A's market research will probably find that out and they won't build there.
We need more of this. We need post-secondary education that focuses on giving people real-world, practical skills. There's only so much room in our economy for psychologists and communications majors.
>There's kids that are "doing a startup" but the only thing they're building is a gmail plugin or "a better to-do list that will change the world".

I completely agree. I'm also guilty of it to an
extent, though I try to avoid it. Sometimes it is hard because then in a room where you're the one not saying it is a "startup" that changes the game you look like the loser, which is unfortunate, but can be worked around.
an IPO is an IPO - aside from all the hyperventilating over share price over these first few weeks, Zuck and Co now have raised the capital they need. Let's see how things are in one year. Facebook's long term prospects will be built on the quality of their products, not the jitters of the short term investor.
This is purest headline bafflegab. Trawl through any big company's patents and you'll find stuff to set tongues a-wagging.

Also, the reason there's an PS3 like controller in the diagram is because the controller design is immaterial; so their attorney grabbed a basic wireframe clip art of a "video game controller" and dropped it in.
> Its not just that, celebrities, sports coaches, and the entertainment industry in general are over paid.

These people deliver value to someone.

I'm not a fan of sports, but I trust a few million people who enjoy watching sports as to what the proper allocation of that money is than I trust you.

> The pay structure isn't aligned with education and experience

Who cares?

The pay structure is aligned with value delivered and the rarity of the skills in question.

Your opinion that education is what should get compensated is deeply uninteresting.

> People that aren't well educated and have limited experience (like in a trade), probably don't spend their money wisely.

Baseless assertion.

A plumber making $90k/yr may not have the exact same IQ you have, but he's likely smart enough to buy a house, save for retirement, etc...and a lot less likely to gamble his entire future on one "hot" startup.

I've known a lot more tradesmen with second and third houses (for the rental income) than I've know engineers.

> As a tradesmen, there is hardly any foundation.

Have you met many tradesmen?

Any?
Show HN: Whoops, an open source tool for logging anything
How on earth does anyone believe this kind of nonsense?
Wouldn't it be awesome if nreduce become a ycombinator company? Too meta for me...
That's not why FB went public. They went because they had to...
>It seems like some people just want the founder title so they can broadcast to their LinkedIn network and impress people.

Reminds me of this quote from Ronnie Coleman: "Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights."
You could compress those images down to 4bpp or even 2bpp by encoding to PVRTC. Since they're photorealistic images you'll retain image quality despite being 8x or even 16x smaller, and the graphics chip supports the format natively so you don't need to decompress it.

I use it in games whenever a photorealistic image is required.
Some more info:

http://www.uchidacoonga.com/2011/07/pvrtc-textures-and-cocos...

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#qa/qa2008/qa1611.ht...
17 yrs old Wins Google Sci Prize For Breast Cancer Diagnosis App
Interesting. I'll give it a go.

I've tried living in iPython and eshell, and while I prefer python or lisp as a programming language to almost anything, neither is nearly as quick and dirty as sh for doing stuff with stdin/out from a pipeline of tools. I don't quite know what a better language than sh would look like, but a man can dream.

Also, universe, if you're going to get on fixing the sh problem, can we restructure how the shell operates entirely? Don't do argument expansion! This is one area where the Unix Haters got it really right.
i think the anti-college attitude comes from the cost of college being far more of a burden than what you can make from the degree. I was a self taught developer who learned a lot from reading stuff on the internet and lots of books, before going to college and getting that expensive piece of paper. In which most of the teachers that taught me were actually behind on the technology, which can cause quite a bit of conflict when you know that the class is being taught incorrectly.
Apache Cloudstack: 5x activity growth in 3 months
I'd be more a fan of:

- curl -s url-to-php -o ...
- ./configure && make && make install

But to each his own :)
>PayDragon is based on the premise that waiting in line to purchase items is neither good for the customer or the merchant.

In NY when you see a place with a line you get intrigued. Sometimes a queue is a great advertisement for people walking by.
Invention? In-wheel electric motors have been around for over a century? Using them for electric cars? That is mostly what they were used for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_hub_motor

http://en.ekopedia.org/Wheel_motor

This company is doing something similar:

http://www.proteanelectric.com/

Let the law suits begin...
Berkeley Contributes Online-Learning Platform to edX
Love it! If only YC had open enrollment.... :)
Abraham did great, with God's help. Hence "Abrahamic religions." So did Jacob. Hence "Israel". Maybe Solomon just overdid it by the numbers? And polygamy does not ever show up with a commandment against it, or a label of "abomination." God did see fit to forbid shrimp and mixed-fiber fabrics and tattoos, however, so polygamy would have to be a really tiny thing to slip under that threshold, at worst.
Word! Bit ups to Team Lizi!
Eyeballs != $$$
What ever happen to building a legitimate business. Everyone is so worried about getting published in TechCrunch, Pando and Alley Insider. They pump and dump startups everyday. Most unethical thing around
Meteor is interesting but like others, I have some concerns. It's position within node.js community is a little strange to me. Also, this idea of "best practices" for something so new is just a little odd. Is it really a "baked" state where people can really build non-trivial apps or complex apps? I think you need a baked state plus time for best practices to actually develop.
Yea you are right to some extent, but then what is the difference between seamless pickup or calling and ordering(human interaction, scary i know) and PayDragon? Seamless has a great mobile app too. I think they are entering a red sea.
This is nonsense. Hard to read all the way through and get any point out of. Reads like an angry chatterbot
What Caffeine Really Does to Your Brain
Would this be customizable... Looking forward to the first issue..
One of the problems I have with that project is that none of the functions are namespaced or sandboxed (i.e. all global); but then again, it is emulating PHP, so there you go :)
>> I don't think the knowledge learned in a CS degree is applicable, or even useful in day to day programming. The bits that are, can be learned.

Does this mean that there will be more code I have to fix as a result of my CS degree? I've still got people at my job that write loops with no early exit when they are searching. I learned that as a freshman. They write code that iterates through the entirety of arrays, constantly, which is a complete waste most of the time.

Hell, I've got people that justify writing memory intensive code due to the computers abundant memory because they don't even realize that program space is limited by the kernel. I can thank my OS class for that.

The point is, do you want to waste time looking up basic stuff on Google all your life, or do you want to get hands on, spend time studying things from a reliable source, and not have to look up things online and write crappy code just to get by?
Well, the design is a little wonky: the size of the logo text and the color of the logo make my eyes look to the left first, but then the size of the text and the boldness of the sign up label on the right also makes me want to look there. Let the parts of the page flow from one to the next more easily. I'd also suggest replacing the "We ... distractions" to something like" with the "Keep ... interest". Good luck.
The Two Types of Companies in Silicon Valley
> "PHP's main advantage is ..."

I wrote out a list of PHP's main advantages a while ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3347956), but I don't think there's just one.
Until it starts generating serious revenue, it's just a product, not a startup.
The Surface Pro is really undercut by the existence of the Nexus 7 or the rumored 8" iPad. Not because they are in direct competition but because a cheap tablet makes owning both types of device realistic. You would barely even notice the nexus 7 in your bag and it doesn't weigh 2lbs when you're holding it.
Why Browser Cryptography Is Bad & How We Can Make It Great
And yet quite a few people (including me) here agree with it. Perhaps your perspective is from within the cargo cult.
Whoops: Google reveals it didn’t delete all of its Street View Wi-Fi data
It's been a long time (late '90s) since I've seen a formalized (documented) interview process. It helped immensely. We basically treated recruiting like a sales funnel, had a ranking/scoring system, had self-selecting teams, etc.

Since then, seems like everyone's just making it up as they go. Hiring, evals, reqs, QA/test, whatever. The pinnacle of methodology may have sucked, but at least we all pretended to try.

When I interview candidates now, when it's a "no", I chop it off asap. I give precise reasons why, as nicely as possible. It's fair, honest, constructive, and is how I would want to be treat. I also believe in the Roman Evaluation Method, where anything less than a yes by everyone is a no.

Alas, I'm a solo act in a large organization. eg, Another interviewer, even after it's a clear "No" (we compare notes via IM), let's things drag on, always doing the "do you have any questions for us?" bit, and then wraps up with a "our people will contact you..."
You're splitting hairs on semantics - the notion of a "knowledge economy" as we've been referring to it for, oh, 3 decades now, does not exclude the value of experience.

Knowledge economy doesn't imply that experience or skill is unnecessary, it is simply a catch-all term that suggests that low-skill, menial labor jobs are disappearing (and they are). The level of training required for any in-demand job, whether it's an electrician or an astrophysicist, is much, much higher than it historically has been.

> "So are you implying that a person with a CS degree who probably did tons of programming exercises and at least 1-3 projects (i.e. requiring design, doc., etc.), who was taught by these "under experienced" PhD's who have studied the subject, wrote about it, and have done projects for 10+ years of their life produce something that is "nearly" worthless?"

I don't like to yell, but here it is plainly: YES.

The kind of things they make you work in school, even in advanced degrees, is nothing like what private industry needs. Shit, the software engineering program at my alma mater spends a shitload of time on UML, as opposed to practical architectural skills that are actually useful in the real world.

Your school projects do not in any meaningful way approximate a real software project in the real world. Your design docs are held to a completely different standard than real design docs, and the process by which they are synthesized, iterated upon, and approved is also either completely absent in academia or heavily bastardized.

Likewise, programming exercises you see your typical CS or engineering program are incredibly simplistic compared to what you would run into the real-world once you're hacking on production systems at-scale. This is why open source experience is valuable, but class projects are not.

A CS student, sans external experience, is like a Call of Duty player joining the Army. Heart might be in the right place, but by God they are a long way from ready.

[edit]

On-topic but aside: consistently the second worst programmers I've ever interviewed in my life are PhD candidates or holders. They are almost universally clueless, able to rattle off all kinds of incredibly complex knowledge, but are absolutely clueless about real-world engineering issues, and generally poor at implementation. Scalability and usability are theoretical constructs to the bulk of them.

They can talk a lot of shop about algorithms, but to get them to implement their own algorithms (and do it well) is nigh impossible. Code quality is on the whole probably worse than fresh undergrads.

Off-topic and aside: the worst demographic I've ever had the pleasure of regularly interviewing are current/former employees of outsourcing consultancies (Accenture, InfoSys, and the ilk). I'm unsure what percentage of their programmer population actually know how to code, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's < 25%. I've interviewed multiple such candidates who couldn't put together a loop in a language of their choosing.
I remember back in the day of 60 MHz PowerPC with 16 MB RAM, that I used software that would decode JPEG files in blocks, so you could look at high-res photos without holding the whole uncompressed image in RAM. In fact, I have an app like that for my Android phone for viewing a very high res bike route map I rendered out of a PDF.

Are there any libraries like that floating around that would work in this situation?
I just learned about nReduce the other day - very interesting model. Two questions for Joemellen:

- How are you guys going to make money? I realize the virtual model is very, very lean...but I imagine you'll have to pay the bills eventually. What's the business model?

- How does nReduce feel about smaller side-projects, lifestyle or micropreneurial projects? Is it only for teams and startups that are looking to get big?
why stop there? put your sneakers on and go for a multi-mile hike in an open space. no phones (they don't work out in the woods anyway), no computers. just you and your thoughts.
Brooklyn Integers | Integers as a service
> it should be possible to interface with the engine

Agreed. I was simply saying that from what I got from the video, it is not interfacing with the vehicle. Maybe it should be but it seems that is not what they are building. I'll leave it to the people that have been working on it for 4+ years to make that decision as they certainly know a whole lot more than I do.
>Popular distros like Ubuntu and Mint have shifted away from it.

This is news to me since my colleague, running Ubuntu 12.04 is using Gnome/Unity. Did I miss a memo?
I don't live in the Bay Area, but here in Boulder it's always been "cool" to do a startup, regardless of the environment. The only difference I see since Facebook/Web 2.0 is that it's cool to invest in startups again.

(I've been doing startups since 1995.)
I remember back then when CEOs were associated with powerful and rich business men. Now every one is a CEO including broke college students with big egos.
God is just. Wait for it. Job.
> "When I did organic chemistry, I spent 2 weeks immersing myself in the subject before making the first video"

I'm sorry, but 2 weeks is not that much time. Most TA's for ochem classes have at least taken 2 quarters (and yes, I can assure you, they also are 'immersed') of the subject, and they aren't in charge of the lecture.
Not available in large parts of the world. But yeah, otherwise great. Amazon even offers rss feeds for various categories.
Be a free user, be a paid user.
Three thoughts:

First, this comment on Reddit isn't fundamentally better or more informed than any of dozens of comments that have expressed the exact same thing on HN. I'm not complaining, so much as again remarking about how "A Reddit's comment about $X" has become such a powerful signal of quality.

Second: there's a grain of truth† to the "bad decisions by VCs" or "working for VCs", but he's overplaying it in this comment. There's two countervailing forces here: (a) VCs don't care as much about which "flavor" their portfolio companies are producing than they do about the economics: there are indeed plenty of solid businesses you can grow that aren't VC-compatible. But you can't fault the VCs for that: when you took their money, you promised not to go down the slow path. And (b) when companies are doing well, VCs tend to get out of the way. It's when you're not doing well that the board's opinion starts to matter.

Third: The numbers he's using here set off alarm bells for me. He calls 1-10MM/yr companies "lifestyle" companies and "100MM+/yr" companies VC-style companies, and implies 10-100MM/yr businesses are in a no-mans-land. Uh, no? Companies doing 20-30-40MM/yr in revenue will probably have investors beating down their doors. I don't believe anyone is shunning companies doing 8 figure revenues.

† The first VC-funded company I worked at/cofounded was derailed by a crazy, VC-instigated decision to build out a CDN to go head-to-head with Akamai. But even then, our lack of traction is what set the scene for that dumb decision.
This does not sound like an argument against home schooling. If it sounds unfair, that's kind of the point.

My issue with home schooling is the lack of variety and specialization. With only one teacher, the child just isn't going to be exposed to as many viewpoints as they would in a traditional school setting.