skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> The world isn't entitled to anything Twitter builds.

>> Nobody says it is.

I would say the choice of wording by the OP suggests otherwise.

From the OP:

>> Twitter has the power to topple regimes, but by following advertising dollars they are building a walled garden and making anti-competative (link to: http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/08/17/twitter-4/) decisions.

If I'm not mistaken, the OP characterizes Twitter's imposing of developer unfriendly guidelines as anti-competitive, which it is not. If Twitter was being anti-competitive, they would be preventing competing platforms like App.Net from existing - and that's not what's happening. Limiting what is essentially a "free ride" is not anticompetitive.

From the same paragraph:

>> It does not bode well for our world that such a commercially driven company should wield so much power and be the epicenter of global conversation.

As far as I know, all companies are commercially driven. Twitter wields power because people like to use it. But so does Facebook. That the author tried to "build a business on Twitter’s platform for the past 3 years" and then be upset by Twitter's change of heart suggests a little sour grapes on his part.

Further:

>> Dalton Caldwell has an interesting idea, but I don’t think it will end the Twitter monopoly

While Twitter is the market leader, it does not have a monopoly on "status updates". The last time I checked my Facebook feed, it was full of the same type of updates that Twitter provides, and Facebook is pretty popular. Google+ is also a well funded competitor to Twitter.
Github, I love you. You have saved my company months of engineering time because of all the third-party libraries that we can easily find and use through your service. We're only a year old, so taking the time to build all those features from scratch would be a massive tax.

And this is just one of the many, many benefits. Soon you'll have 3M users, then 5M, then 10M... who knows how big it'll get.
There is ONE thing I don't understand :

> No matter how large your order, we only charge $9.99 for 1 hour and $3.99 for 3 hour deliveries.

How can you make it profitable if you only charge 10$ an hour (when you have to pay for the driver, gas etc...)?
Besides the several numbers included in this interesting article, there is this statement: "Indiana’s philosophy of promoting choice has also extended to making it possible for students to apply to any public school—including those outside the school district in which the child lives."

For more than twenty years now, all public schools anywhere in Minnesota offer open enrollment to all students anywhere in the state, up to the limits of the capacity of each school district to receive students.

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...

State funding of each school district is of course based on enrollment.

http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf

More students means more enrollment, so school districts make efforts to provide attractive programs that will bring students across district lines. This competition among school districts has promoted innovation in programs and resulted in a fair amount of interchange among students who live in different neighborhoods.
It is a good thought. For now people can do that by changing the text of the message. I didn't want to require people to enter their private information.
You are right, this was just a shared hosting package from 1&1. Nothing I have root access to. Nothing I can do. I thought it was clear when I wrote the provider shut me out from my webspace.
Sorry, there's something blinking in the top-left corner, annoying enough that I won't finish reading the post.
Indeed, I hope that long term it will be a net positive, and also a learning experience. In the mean time, we'll have to deal with confusion about the brand and FUD about the codebase, however. So I sincerely hope that we as developers can see behind the curtain, recognize the wizard operating the strings, and chose to not engage with the bait.
It probably wouldn't be too hard to do. I think the problem with that for an application like this would be standard physical harddrive reliability issues. More moving parts, no matter how reliable we normally think of them, probably wouldn't be something that would thrill the people who build these rovers.
It's an animated GIF. Press the escape key and it will stop. edit: I guess this only works in FF?
A temp agency?
Amazing funding opportunities perhaps, but not so great profit opportunities. Let's not forget: app.net is actually looking to make a profit (an excellent idea, if you ask me), not just replace Twitter.
Read a little further in that chapter, and it's made abundantly clear that abuse of reciprocity is worse than doing nothing at all: the Hare Krishnas almost never hand out flowers in the airport anymore, because everyone is on to the game. Not only did airports start to box them in to special areas, but people began to hate them.

The same book goes into the importance of the magnitude of the reciprocity request: even the Krishnas, at the height of their success, couldn't ask people for huge donations in exchange for a flower.
> There will probably never be a repeat of the 1950s, where the United States dominated the world in almost every category

There will probably never be a repeat of the 1950s, where the rest of the developed world was mostly bombed to smithereens and working hard to rebuild themselves.
In my experience this is very true for most application situations with a low acceptance rate. If you're standing out by doing something vastly different, you'll already get more consideration than most. I once got into a very competitive neuro-science grad program by claiming in my application that I won't be able to answer any technical interview questions because I'm from a different field, but I could be useful in building an interdisciplinary team and helping with modeling/simulations.
The time refers to the time from order to delivery, not the time the order will take. If they streamline the system well enough and have a large number of delivery drivers in each area they could have delivery take ~15 mins, 4 deliveries an hour is $40/driver. Not great but more than enough to cover costs and wages.
Why not build it on NNTP?
If you want to work at a hipster company with no HR process. Most reputable companies will have someone who knows the most obscure languages you've listed interview you, and you will get owned.

A better rule is to put a language on your resume when you can think of a question, and you immediately know how to approach (not solve) the problem using language X.
YC is all about building something people want. Garry Tan clearly wanted a 6 pack of beer that day. Either that, or the other partners were jealous and wanted to know how they could order their own 6 packs.

Anyways, this guy got in because he built something people wanted. Do not try this unless you have an actual product.
You're looking at it wrong. They don't take an hour to deliver your items. The driver should, in theory, be running around grabbing the items you requested (which are put into the store based on them being quickly available: "All items on Instacart are sourced from the stores closest to you") and the items of other orders in their queue. Because of the locality, it may take them only a few minutes to get you those items, not a full hour.

You're also assuming they don't charge a small markup on each item, thereby offsetting the size of each order.
When you're ready to set it aside and learn something else. If you're not learning the language, move on to something else. This is the difference between a poser and a real developer.
It was in reply to the comment "Impressing girl X strong enough to kiss you [...]", which would suggest he did.
Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't it do the same as `IF EXISTS(SELECT ...) THEN UPDATE ... ELSE INSERT ... END`, so 2 queries actually executed?

What cases does it not cover?
So I just received my Saturday mail. Of the 3 items, 2 were junk mail.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/190299/junk-mail.JPG

One is direct tv with a low trick of a $200 'prepaid card'. This is why I really like companies like http://simple.com. If you guys haven't signed up for simple definitely do. I've been really impressed.

Anyways, I think I will add direct tv on my list next for F Junk Mail.
Is a liquor license required to deliver alcohol in CA? I don't see Instacart on a quick scan of CA ABC - http://www.abc.ca.gov/datport/LQSMenu.html

If a license is required, and they did not have one when applying to yc, it makes this story even more impressive!
Plutonium-239, the kind used in bombs, is not actually that radioactive, and most of it would go through your system pretty quickly.
The idea is to solve exactly what you are describing (whether the execution actually matches it or not is a separate matter).

The 'ration card' provides both, a way to check identity and a way to keep track of rations disbursed.

By separating out identity part and attaching it to your biometric data, at least theoretically, if someone holds your ID card hostage, you can go to the issuing authority, and get another one issued, because you can prove your identity without any form of paper.

There will be huge problems with implementing this, as any large system tends to have. But once the dust settles, it should make life much more convenient for the poor and everyone else.
There was an interesting comment recently on this topic, someone explained that some of the larger tracking companies purchase traffic logs from American ISPs and although their traffic reports aren't necessarily accurate (because they don't have all the data -- as shown by the github employee below) it's not complete guess work and they can be considered representative for sites used by the average internet user.
I noticed that too. If employees feel the need to work a minimum of twelve hours a day, it's an indication of management problems that are much worse than someone skipping their one-on-one meetings. And if the CEO can say with a straight face "It’s important to me that the people who spend 12 to 16 hours/day here, which is most of their waking life, have a good life", that says a lot about what it was really like to work for his company. (Opsware no longer exists as such; it was bought by HP in 2007. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opsware])
Retinal scanners will probably be defeated in the next 5-10 years.

I thought about this and wondered if you could make a hologram of the inverse of your retina, combined with the retina you want to have, on a contact lens.
I think we're better off for sure. Had we kept burning as much coal, things would be even worse than they are now. You are most certainly correct about the exports, though: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=U.S._coal_exports...
Delegation is important but you need the financial capacity to afford it. As a consequence, outsourcing some tasks such as accounting is usually more feasible at the beginning since hiring comes with its own many costs and risks – especially in countries with a more restrictive labor law than in the US.
The spreading out effect is a direct consequence of the linear no threshold model. If you have a total dose D spread over N people, then everyone receives a dose D/N. With some constant k converting individual dose to cancer rates, you end up with an expected number of k D/N * N cases of cancer. ( So it is almost certainly wrong, however it is not understood how wrong it is.)
Looks very slick guys! How do I specify the artists I want to follow? As great as it is pulling the data from Facebook it's outdated and I'd like to add more.
I doubt in most major cities with traffic you could manage 4 deliveries/hour/truck unless your volume was big enough to have very close-by drop offs. Factor in the time taken to unload from the truck and hand off to the customer and it's even worse.

One thing I don't understand is who is doing the delivering. I doubt Instacart is using their own trucks, and instead is piggy-backing off somebody else's infrastructure.
I'm going to finish reading, but it really is a UX nightmare. Terribly distracting and annoying :(

Since I don't want to be one of those HN posters that's negative about everything, I hope jfornear will take this as constructive criticism that removing the animation (or making it something less jarring) would improve readability :)
i guess that's what a i get for not double checking my math. here's a revised version that (as long as i haven't made any other math mistakes) still fits within a 32 bit signed int but doesn't guarantee simple equality:

float a = 0.0;
float b = 10000.0;
for (int i = 0; i < 100000000; ++i)
a+=1.0;
b *= b;

why in the world would you use a float instead of an int for addition, subtraction, and multiplication, and truncated or floored division, within the 24-bit integer range? it seems like there's no benefit to offset the facts that floating point operations are slower than integer operations and that ints can store integers 7 or 8 bits larger.

and what happens when you go beyond 24 bits? since it's a float no error or warning will be thrown, but now equivalence won't work for numbers that are easily stored by an int.
Yotel is indeed great after a long flight. Guarulhos in Sao Paulo also had some semi-capsule accommodation.

Here is a picture from the Schiphol Yotel: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bergie/5818894255/in/photostrea...
Handy radiation dose effect chart provided by Randall of XKCD (note: 1 microsievert = 0.0001 rem)

http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/03/19/radiation-chart/

Perhaps an interesting meta-discussion is the phenomenon of how choice of units affects the framing of a discussion. 0.1 rem doesn't sound nearly as dangerous as 1,000 μSv, though of course both numbers are completely meaningless to most lay people.
number 2 and number 2 are golden.

(yes I mean this to be funny, but it's also true. Especially the first #2.)
They're delivering things like groceries, I assume they're similar to exec (https://iamexec.com/) but specific to delivery. It's just "some guy" hired by Instacart to pick up groceries and then deliver them when they're told to, no trucks needed, bicycles or cars would be fine.
It's not going to work for the next 100 unimaginative wannabes that are guaranteed to try it.
Riding the open wave but failing to deliver
Hey Chris,

We're working on a page that suggests people to follow based on your interests, and a way to search for specific artists.

For now, you can follow artists from the all page - http://hipset.com/all/ and any of the genre pages under Popular.

You can also go to a specific's artist page and follow them there, like http://hipset.com/lilwayne
This is a great idea if not too expensive and implemented correctly. (Clean and wakes me up for my flight). I was trying to get my fairly liberal school to put hammocks in. I had a lesson at 9am and then at 2pm, sometimes I had little to do and left and returned.
I read your links. I know the audio is almost an hour, so I don't expect you to have listened before you posted.

According to Mr. Corbett, who lives in Japan, the predicted shortages did not in fact materialize this summer, and in fact, a SURPLUS of power was reported. He doesn't assert that without the 50 plants currently offline there will be no power shortfall. Most of the report is about alternatives such as solar, geothermal, thorium, and wave power.

The point is that Japan has gone over a year now with almost NO nuclear power, and the sky has not fallen. There are alternatives. There are also large corporate/governmental interests who PREFER the present nuclear policy, and that policy is now opposed by a large number of the Japanese people.

Did you personally suffer any consequences? Are you perhaps suspicious of TEPCO, or the WSJ's motives?
(plug) For a little while I tried to make some "practical" puzzles for new programmers [0], but with school and work I've found excuses to not work on it. I also began rewriting the site in Ruby on Rails so I could leave Wordpress, but, for the same reasons, I haven't worked on it in quite some time.

[0]: http://programthis.net
It's strange how I love or hate infinite scroll based on the use case: when wasting time looking at funny stuff on the internet, I hate it, because it's so hard to find a clean stopping point to get back to work. But when shopping, I love it, as it makes it convenient to browse a large selection of products to try to find what I'm looking for.

Either way, it's a psychologically powerful design pattern, and it should be used with care.
I disagree. When I'm interviewing, I take any line item on a candidate's resume as license to hammer them on their knowledge of that technology and its paradigms.
To those giving serious replies: I'm quite sure (rather, I hope!) the parent is being sarcastic.
Well, to be fair, nobody has cracked the discovery nut yet. Pandora is passable, but it's still impossible to beat discovery curated by humans at your local record store (if you're lucky enough to still have a local).
Why aren't you capitalizing your sentences? Are you too lazy to write properly?

Where did I say I'd use floating point numbers for integer math? Yes, let's move the conversation to a direction it never existed so that you can pretend you were right.

(The place I'd use it would be in a Javascript implementation, or a Lua implementation, and other situations where I'm designing a programming language where I want the simplicity of having only one numerical type. And that would be a 53-bit range, not 24-bit.)
Rare Nature Video: Giant Cross-River Silverback Gorilla Recorded
You probably can't buy Minion Pro and use it via @font-face; most professional fonts are sold with licenses that forbid that, because it makes a perfect-fidelity instantly-usable copy of the font available to anyone who visits your site.

For a similar reason, most of the HF+J fonts either require sIFR or image replacement, or for you to be cool enough (like Kottke) to get to use their beta web font service.
Too Many Startups
This is a nice explanation about how category theory relates to programming, but it doesn't explain how mathematical rigor helps us in this area. Making a rough analogy with function composition and unix pipes seems sufficient to get the point across to most programmers. I suppose you could actually write generic code that works with more than one category but that seems like unnecessary and unhelpful abstraction, compared to just writing the code twice in more concrete terms.
Please don't do that... at some point you're going to run into someone interested in such language, which you can use only for "hello world". And he'll be happy to ask you all about it, in details.
Drill in this context means to lift carbon baed fuels stored deep underground and bring it to the surface where it will be converted to energy and then go into the atmosphere.

Irony requires a reversal of expectations. The logical expected consequence of drilling is increased greenhouse gas emissions. What in fact happened was the reverse. This is textbook irony.
Everytime I see a new technique I get all excited. Then I check it on Internet Explorer and the excitement fades.

On IE-9 it works the first time you try it but then the other buttons don't have any effect.

Just once I'd like an organization to have a corporate standard that mandates Chrome's latest version.
Reading this article I thought about two things:

1) This guy is a real entrepreneur. He made a deal. I am thrilled! Congratulations! :) Reminds me of the book from Donald Trump about the deals.

2) Y Combinator partners are undoubtly clever people and they can't afford themselves to apply each pitch or idea and you should look for a hack to stay out of the overall group to be noticed and given a chance to win or fail.
this wheel already exists. it does not need to be reinvented.

http://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/

http://ostatus.org/about/
I'm down with the exhaustion with the startup cool kids too. Creating a Svbtle alternative isn't all that hard so I don't have much to say about that but I just want to say I like the sentiment and I agree that someone will come out of nowhere to win the post-Tumblr era.

Also, I'm one of your first few paragraphs you called Georgia a sans-serif font. That's wrong. Georgia is a serif. Serif fonts have the little stylized decoration dealies on the ends of the lines (man that is a really inarticulate but you know what I mean) kind of like, well, Georgia and Times New Roman and such. The sans-serifs are the ones like Helvetica and Arial. You seem to be a bright guy but among a lot of web savvy people, especially designers and developers, a rookie mistake like that can tota
Ly discredit you. Just edit that real quick and you're good to go.
Yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Horowitz -- "Known for:	Co-Founder of Opsware [the company being written about in the article] and Andreessen Horowitz".
Fuller is the best example I can think of (with the single possible exception of Tesla) that supports my theory that genius is composed almost, but not quite, entirely of crazy.
You can pay for lounge access, it's usually around $50. But you can get free wifi, eat and drink as much as you want, grab a paper, etc. Makes up for the cost.
When you have a project to complete in a time crunch and feel comfortable doing it in that language.
Does that in itself prove the point wrong?
Was interested to learn about Nike actually doing the right thing by their logo designer when they made some money. Which doesn't excuse their manufacturing history.
The author of the submitted article, Richard Muller, is the developer of a Physics for Future Presidents course at UC Berkeley, author of a book with the same title as the course, and author of a new book Physics and Technology for Future Presidents: An Introduction to the Essential Physics Every World Leader Needs to Know

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9226.html

that is well worth a read. In other words, Muller has been thinking about how to apply the facts of nature to the contentious issues of public policy for a long time, and has a good sense of economic and political trade-offs in policy- making. The article submitted here is a great example of clear thinking on a scary issue, and I endorse it as well worth reading and thinking about.

P.S. I have just been to Colorado Springs, Colorado, transiting the Denver, Colorado airport to get there, and I am not worried about increasing my cancer risk by returning to the Front Range each year for the business that brought me there.

http://www.epsiloncamp.org/

I checked some of the statements made in other comments in this thread since posting this, and I can't find any confirmation that the country-wide shutdown of nuclear plants in Japan has been anything other than bad for the country. While Japan continues to need electricity (for life-saving medical technologies, among other uses), and until other sources of electricity become less expensive, it makes sense for Japan to be open to restarting the other nuclear plants in the country.

P.P.S. I live in one of the states of the United States in which an exceptionally large percentage of electricity is generated at nuclear power plants. Both plants are located along the Mississippi River, as is most of Minnesota's population centers. Electricity is unusually inexpensive here, and health statistics are unusually good here, compared to other parts of the United States.
...and from the other side Y Combinator partners will receive 100 beer bottles for free :D Not that bad
If there's one thing I've learned from my years of internet use, it's never use the word "irony."