skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do links expire so quick in HN?
Sometimes I spend hours on HN clicking next, next, next but it comes to a point where I "spend too much time" reading some article and when I come back and press next again then the page has expired and I've to go back to the beginning and click next a few times to get back where I was.
To "prevent" this I just click next a bunch of times when I first get into HN and then go back and forward with the history arrows.
Is there any "hack" I can use in my browser to prevent this? Maybe with a userscript or something?
Rather than looking at traditional 'smarts', I would look at personality factors to assess if someone of college age should drop out - their levels of entrepreneurism, emotional intelligence, communication and persuasion skills, resilience, and sheer grit and determination. These traits can be found in people from any background, and will help them go the distance.
It doesn't work for everything sure, but content is content and a web site is merely one possible interface. As soon as that sinks in, if the format fits it isn't so weird to think of how other interfaces can be used for the same content. SMS could work really well for wikipedia... a paid interface to obtain an article for a given query for example.
Visualizations aren't meant to highlight anything new, but rather to bring to light and visualize what is already known.
I just installed and launched xmms which uses gtk 1. Gtk 2 was released 2002, ten years ago.

There are many problems with compatability, but sometimes it's overstated.
Because it's infinite scrolling. They add stuff while you scroll. That's much more difficult to make smooth.
Yes, you're spot on here. It might still be ineffective, almost certainly so, but because of existing laws, it's almost all internal to the federal government rather than L-C or CISPA affecting our relationships with Facebook, Google, or any other private company with mass storage of our user data.

It also won't mean startups need to collect user data in case the feds come calling.

Very insightful comments throughout the discussion, thanks, Thomas.
The article does cover the points in your second paragraph, but not until the very end.
The consumers can and do. We collectively decided that a .99 cents for a song or $15 for a physical album isn't worth it. Equilibrium will eventually happen, the smart artists are already making money in the new music industry.

The recent HN post about xx comes to mind.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4504851
> Yes the Second Ave Subway is expensive, but how many cities are building new subway lines underground through incredibly dense existing infrastructure?

Tokyo for one. E.g. the very recently built Fukutoshin line, deep tunneled subway underneath some of the busiest areas of the city (the tunneling is complicated in part because it had to dodge myriad existing subway lines), including very elaborate and expensive stations, had a cost-per-km about 1/4 that of the SAS. The Fukutoshin line is also overbuilt in various ways because it will be interlined in the future with the Tokyu Toyoko line (an extremely high-ridership suburban line).

A number of recently built subway lines in the Tokyo area had many problems, and were considered extremely expensive—but they were still much cheaper than the SAS...

So it isn't "complexity," it isn't "density," and it isn't high wages (Japan is not a low-wage country!). It's not fares—Tokyo transit fares are roughly on par with NYC; they're distance-based, so sometimes higher, sometimes lower, but it works out to roughly the same thing. Arguably it isn't even unionization, as Japanese industry is heavily unionized, although of course Japanese unions are rather different than U.S. unions.

One difference may be that Tokyo actually keeps building subway (and other rail) lines, and thus has has kept around the necessary in-house organization and knowledge for doing so, and has a wide selection of competent contractors available. U.S. cities typically have none of these things, and end up relying on consultants (and may not even have the competence or freedom to choose the consultants well), and a limited selection of contractors. [The NYC contracting situation is reportedly pretty dire, with a very few contractors having figured out how to game the system.]
Doesn't that cause content movement?
Where Good Technologies Come From: Case Studies in American Innovation
I'm so sick of the continuing Peter Thiel hypefest. I don't like college either but his 20 for 20 program is just some ridiculous bullshit.
Just stop for a second and realise you're upset over missing out on some virtual Internet points. Your life will be OK!
Why do you think that being informed about "what is going on in the world" will translate into smart decision, which will themselves translate into changing the world?

(also, should we want to change the world? it's it better on its own??)

More so, do you think that what is short in the news are the most important problems, the real priorities?

It seems highly doubtful at best. Knowing may be half the battle, but if you can't action that knowledge it's useless.
Up already. More from http://stackoverflow.com: "Stack Overflow will be read-only briefly around 5PM UTC while we move some servers to a different rack. We _really_ hope this works."

And some comments on another "isup?" site: http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/stackoverflow.com.html#comme...
China is very densely built. They're building metros under all their major cities.
Show HN: ProgPac programming game.
I've Recently created a game. It's more or less of Herbert game from Imagine Cup. Take a look if you like programming riddles. Looking forward for some ideas and feature requests.

Code is here https://github.com/xando/progpac
My parents live near the silver line, and it's ridiculously over-designed. This huge concrete highway in the sky, for what could have very easily been a pretty cheap metal raised framework.
I've recently created a game. It's more or less of Herbert game from Imagine Cup. Take a look if you like programming riddles. Looking forward for some ideas and feature requests.

Code is here https://github.com/xando/progpac
HackerNews thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4520473
Ways to Interact Asynchronously with C# against Cloud Foundry w/ Iron Foundry
While working on the Thor Project there have been numerous situations where I need to fire off an asynchronous callback in C# while maintaining good responsiveness in the actual user interface. Benjamin (@bvanderveen) has been using Reactive Extensions with subscriptions to do this in the Objective-C code for the Cocoa based OS-X Thor user interface. See my previous blog entry for an example of what he’s doing.
You might be losing money due to cheating, but is that more than the expense of hiring all the people needed to check those tickets?
There is a very good reason for disabling Objective C in NDK.

Objective C, the syntax, has very little value without Objective C runtime/standard library and Objective C runtime/stdlib is huge (compared to C and C++ standard libraries).

NDK has a very specific goal: if the code would be too slow when compiled to Dalvik VM, you can get speed with NDK, writing in C/C++, but at the cost of loosing access to almost all of the APIs that Android provides. This tradeoff more or less makes sense only for games.

Implementing Objective C runtime and standard library would be huge undertaking and the code, when used, would occupy more memory. Also, this code would mostly duplicate C++ standard library, just with a different syntax.

It doesn't make sense to allow people using Objective C in NDK.
Why can't they just load when you reach the end? I've found this tends to be what happens for me, anyway.
Who was defrauded? Note that "AAA" has a well defined meaning, namely whatever independent ratings agencies says it means. Banks didn't lie about this.

They also didn't lie about the fact that if house prices went down, purchasers of CMOs would probably lose money. The purchasers made the same assumptions about house prices never going down that banks and regulators made, but how is that fraud?

Are the banks now responsible for convincing institutional investors, hedge funds and other banks not to make the same assumptions they themselves make?
Yeah I agree, and I think the author of the blog post does too as they ultimately say that there will always be a role for biz dev. Still worth considering where they're making the process easier, basically accelerating partnerships.
> Then in the fall of 2011 we failed to close a major financing round from the US. We basically had a deal with a top-tier San Francisco based VC. Our guys flew over to meet them at least two times. We (as a company) spent a lot of time on that financing round. We thought we would be able to close the deal, but something totally different happened. They stopped all communication with us. Suddenly. No explanations. No apologies. Nothing. We were in trouble.

Stuff like this is why I'm thankful for YC. Understanding the mechanics of raising a round has been incredibly helpful when evaluating what's actually going on. 2009 me would have thought two meetings with a VC was basically "a deal", 2012 me is much more capable of realistically evaluating progress towards a term sheet.
Scrolling and js performance differ radically between web pages in mobile safari and uiwebviews on iOS.
Why is this being discussed. It's not like Apple invented solar panels. Ugh fanboys!

;)
Mobile DevOps - My slides from MoDevTablet
I work on HBase (the Apache version of BigTable). It makes me sad to see how far ahead Google is compared to the rest of the world. :)

The notion of uncertain time is ingenious.
It's a real shame to hear this story. I met Toni back in 2010 at a mobile event called MEX and thought the concept was super exciting. It's a shame this happened... I hope the team go on to do bigger and better things.
And don't forget all the people still using WAP/WML!
Engineering A Path to Science:I don't wanna die in a language I can't understand
That purchase occurred a couple of years after the Intel switch. In retrospect, it looks a lot like a purchase intended for the newcomer iOS lineup.
Switzerland uses the honor system in their public transit and it works.

There are random checks on small routes and long distance routes have a conductor checking tickets.

About 800 are caught each day with invalid tickets which is a very small percentage of total travelers. There are about 1 million travelers on rail per day. The fine is 'only' 100 CHF for the first offence which is very small if you compare it to ticket prices. However subsequent offences have higher fines and you are added to a database which you will stay in for at least 2 years.

About half a million out of almost 8 million residence have a year pass for the entire rail system (General-Abonnemente). Over 2 million have a year pass for half-price tickets (Halbtax-Abonnemente) so any ticket they buy is half price.

It is very nice to just walk in and out of trains, buses, boats without having to go through turnstiles etc.
Google to drop support for IE8 on Nov. 15
It makes perfect sense. ISPs don't want to block their customers, so they do the least they could get away with doing.
What about the 1000's of people that use an API that a bizDev person could never spend time talking to. Sure an API will never replace a human that is needed to do a big time deal, but for everything else it's radically changed bizdev.
Neat, is there something like virtualenv or rvm so I can install it locally not systemwide?
It looks like most of these kids already have a top college acceptance in had before accepting Thiel's fellowship, which gives them a backup option in the very likely scenario their "dreams" don't pan out.

--The double-Irony is that you think the kid has a "fall back option" just because of his letter of acceptance. =D

Part of thiel's critique is that education is mis-priced. That the signalling is most of the value. He's also speaking from experience, having made money outside the content area of his training. So its not irrational or self centered of him to be saying: the content is not the value of a degree, per se. If you believe that, looking at other "content" to substiture or complement the "signalling" makes sense.
The title of this submission does NOT do it justice. This looks rather important to me: researchers at UCSB have apparently built a Quantum computer that successfully executes Shor's Algorithm for factoring numbers into their prime components. So far, they have successfully factored 15 into 3 and 5, but according to the UCSB release, the system can be scaled up to factor arbitrarily larger numbers.

If true, this has major implications for cryptography, because virtually all modern encryption and hashing/signing algorithms in use today are based on the assumption that factoring large numbers into their prime components is computationally very costly.

Does anyone here have the expertise necessary to judge whether these results are as ground-breaking as they look to me?
fax, really?
For my site in the travel industry, I need a bizdev guy to get me access to the APIs.

Also, not really. There are a ton of biz dev relationships that require more than just an API. Making a public API where "The constraints, the terms, everything is all there" probably isn't worthwhile if you don't plan for many to use the API. In the cruise industry, not many players want access to the cruise API, so they negotiate usage costs and commission individually.
If you go to Germany you can see gigawatts of solar, they had a recent 22 GW peak, even though the largest single installation is only 91 MW - http://www.secondpagemedia.com/jadblog/2012/05/germany-nets-...
American construction projects suffer from tremendous over-engineering. Here in Chicago we have the El and the Metra, which were built a hundred years or so ago. The El runs through the city mostly on elevated tracks above the existing roadways. The elevated tracks are supported by simple steel frameworks above the roadway. There's not a lot of room for stations, so they are simple platforms hovering over the intersections with stairs leading up to them. The floors are wood plank and there are some metal railings. The Metra is similarly simple. Metra tracks run on embankments across the city. They're simple dirt embankments with a retaining wall. Simple metal bridges cross the roadways, without a huge amount of clearance. The stations are mostly just wood and metal platforms with wooden railings, with wooden stairs leading up from street level. This all works really well--Metra is the busiest commuter rail system outside of NYC, shuttling 300,000 people into the downtown core every day.

Now, compare this to the new Silver line in DC. It's monstrously over-engineered, even though it runs on a dedicated right of way. Instead of running the train on a simple embankment in the middle of the road or on a simple raised platform, it runs on a huge elevated concrete platform: http://transportationnation.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/0...

And this is in a low-density suburban area!

Compare this to the El: http://marcel-marchon.com/img--117945132--Chicago-El-train--...

Transit does not need to cost a billion dollars per mile. Just build elevated metal-framework tracks above the existing roadways. It's cheap, durable, and actually much more pleasant for riders than going to a stifling underground subway station.
I like to think PR and costs weren't the only drivers of this...Steve Jobs was quite the hippie capitalist, so I like to think he instigated a move into this space :)
I'll tell you what, try riding a motorcycle sometime. You'll gain a lot more appreciation of what it means for you and the people all around you to be moving at 55mph (let alone 70+) in 2 ton metal boxes, in relatively close proximity. I think the problem is not that speed limits are too slow, it's that modern cars are too comfortable, lulling you into a false sense of security.
Macheist 4 is now open
Is it common in the valley for VC discussions to just go stone cold of they for some reason they decide they no longer are interested? What sort of courtesy do most large VC's have at the we're no longer into you point?
Another research publcation from Google that's more-than-worth reading.

These just pile up, I must find time and get my hands on them...
its not that scary...
Their site looks interesting and the pricing looks good. Do you use them at the moment?
[My world view doesn't stand up to factual analysis, so here is this irrelevant rant instead]
>By itself, speeding is a victimless crime: if you hit something or someone with your car, you were doing something wrong besides just speeding.

This is so untrue I don't even know where to begin. The number of accidents that could be prevented if people would just slow down is amazing. Icy, rainy, foggy... going too fast is by far the most common cause of accidents.

http://ec.europa.eu/transport/wcm/road_safety/erso/knowledge...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/road-safety/8702111/How-...

I said this in another reply and I will say it again, speed limits are designed by engineers, not by "untrained, politically-appointed bureaucrats". Of all the things you could come down on the government for, this is one of those first-world problems that just makes you look uninformed.
No, I think I understand the OP. That's why I said "I do not mean to disagree..." Did you catch that part?

I'm simply pointing out that for some people the news is very valuable to what they do. As you say, for the OP it might not have as much value. It depends on what you're trying to do.

I think a more interesting title would be: "The power of being able to think for yourself". For example, it's possible to be able to read the news, when it is overwhelmingly negative or even low quality news (e.g. it doesn't tell you anything you don't already know), and still derive something positive from it. And there are many examples that prove this: businesspeople who read heaps of news and still manage to accomplish quite a lot, at least in the opinion of their peers.

You may stop reading the news. But most everyone else is still reading it. And to the extent your business is concerned with some segment of that group I refer to as "everyone else", the news is a factor to consider.

Hope that's a little more clear.

pg's essay on PR as it relates to startups is a decent intro into how the news can be important for hackers.
A year or two ago I read Tim Ferriss' The 4-Hour Work Week. Most of the advice in the book did not pertain to me, but one tidbit of knowledge that I gain is that you can save time by simply ignoring the news. Most of us are not in the position to change anything, and much of the news does not pertain directly to us. The benefit from being informed often not great than the cost of losing the time needed to read/watch the news.

I tried to find some quotes from the book, but the best I could find was only this article: http://www.evomend.net/en/tim-ferriss-4-hour-workweek-3-5-le...
> "i still don't think they would want to give apple a CPU platform that was undoubtedly better than their flagship phone so soon after releasing it"

You need to bear in mind that the division of Samsung that sells the chips is totally separate from the division that sells the phones. The silicon division doesn't particularly care about the phone division - they care about their bottom line alone. And Apple turning up with a dump truck of cash, which is basically what they've been doing to secure component supplies, is not something they wil turn down lightly.

Apple is somewhat unique among consumer electronics companies in that it is very singly focused. Samsung, along with Sony, Microsoft, and others, are multi-conglomerates, with vast reaching business interests, and Samsung's chip fab division only really cares about the profits their division is making. Money from Apple, money from an internal cross-charge: profit is profit.

> "3. ARM aren't really a supplier to apple, they just licence designs. ARM have no manufacturing expertise."

I don't think this is what you mean. You mean ARM have no expertise manufacturing at scale. ARM have extensive manufacturing expertise, because they need to supply reference designs that work in production. ARM has manufacturing expertise because they need to produce designs that are easy to manufacture.
I think that's the kind of lesson one should learn fairly quickly if you talk to experienced entrepreneurs. I was at a panel fairly recently where literally every single panel member (including a VC guy) mentioned you should never make the mistake of thinking that talks, no matter how advanced, with a VC mean a deal is forthcoming, and that you should always be continuing to look for other options until the pen hits the paper. You don't really need something like YC for that lesson; just talk to experienced entrepreneurs or other VCs (assuming you have some contacts with either camp).
well you could cut down a "regular " ( i think the regular was "mini" as the original was a credit card sized thing) SIM into a micro sim without great difficulty so it should be pretty easy to do the same for a micro sim an get it to a nano sim. However the painful part of all of this is needing a sim or micro sim adapter to put it into a non nano sim phone - kind of the same situation with SD, mini SD and micro SD cards
That's the boring part. Sure, that's what's actually matters (or at least a good deal closer to what actually matters), but Apple hasn't been shy to share some technical details at pretty weird opportunities.
I take your point, but I find it unlikely that anyone would defined the correct language semantics that would guarantee correct results under concurrency without designing for concurrency. Which is the point of Boehm's paper: your language (and its compiler) need to know about concurrency in order to get it right.
I think it varies depending on the VC firm, but the impression I've gotten (I haven't actually gotten to the VC round with my company, so this is all second hand from talking with VCs and other entrepreneurs) is that the radio silence scenario is far from atypical.
""The Washington Post's news video editor, Jason Aldag, said he'd be surprised if the third frame doesn't take picture of the year."

--why this was posted to HN
"Have you considered putting this on kickstarter?" - It's harder than you think.
Little-Known Awesome Algorithms: Fenwick Range Trees
My business also suffered many of the same indignities, concluding with the freezing of my account and a 6 month hold on thousands of dollars. Our paypal account had an 8-year track record of perfect customer service - all issues handled immediately. We sell website construction software and marketing training services. We were taking in 28% of our income via paypal, with the rest through a standard merchant account. Losing this much of our business, along with having the funds held, was enough to collapse everything. The company is now in the process of being sold. I'm not saying it's all paypal's fault - we obviously should have had contingencies in place for such a circumstance - but they obviously had a huge part in the failure. I'm no longer angry about it; I'm just really sad. We posed no risk to paypal (years ago they placed a $5,000 reserve on our account which I was happy to comply with) and they couldn't give any reason for why they were doing this to us. 8 years of successful business is an eternity on the Internet. That track record seemed inconsequential to them. Causing this level of pain and heartbreak "because our TOS says we can" seems nothing short of... evil.