skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you care about this, and you should.. Please open a bug to fix this: radar.apple.com

(unfortunately we cannot see bugs opened by others)
just first off, fucking love streak. now my response:

everything you say is true. a-listers won't have problems meeting other a-listers. but that's not what i'm trying to achieve. i do know though that sometimes, a-listers might be curious/open to meet others as well. couple of examples:

lars hinrichs is running hackfwd, germany incubator, definitely a-lister. he's a cool guy who regularly tunes in to random startups/founders and wants to hear what they're working on. two 30 minute slots during a business trip where he can select from 'meeting requests' would probably be interesting to him. that's startup world though.

say you're jimmy fallon. crazy popular. he flies to london and says he wants to meet 3 random writers who can request a meeting with him. promotional opportunity.

or, you, the guy from streak, goes to paris, does not want to be bothered by random 1-person startup folks but rather meet someone who might be a tech guy, but his dad owns a french bakery and invites you to take your girlfriend there and see what they do. probably worth that hour?

just a couple of thoughts on that.

then, for professional travelers, i used to fly a lot for microsoft and i always had time. evenings, or sometimes late afternoons. i knew people in cities i traveled to, but sometimes you're back in chicago for the fourth time and feel like meeting someone you don't know yet but who shares your interest or works in a similar sector, etc.

the frequent flyer thought is very interesting. as long as i get to keep out the networking crazies, that'd be a perfect monetization aspect.
I only ever experienced disdain in the other direction, PC users constantly griping about how anyone could be so stupid and buy a Mac. I do not think that either Mac or PC users are more likely to do something like that.
As someone who compulsively text-selectors when I read, this is neat.
Wow. So rather than work on making unity suck less, canonical works on ads. Awesome.
It's not clear from the article what the FBI wants.

But it's important to note that most services will cooperate fully with law enforcement when provided with valid legal documentation. (Probably a warrant or other court order.)

See, for a good example, Hushmail. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail)

I guess it's better that they're asking for transparently weakened services, and access with warrants, rather than just hiring grey-hats to hack the systems.
Show HN: Startup Launch Gamified
Neat idea, but its a bit harsh. Maybe instead of a black overlay, fade the text and images not selected to a lower opacity? Probably would be very intensive to act on all those individual elements though.
Do Google and Amazon count as web 2.0? Maybe they're 1.0. Anyway, what I think of as the three biggest "internet companies", Google, Facebook, and Amazon, have all decided it's worth their while to get into this kind of systems work. E.g. HipHop (Facebook), Cassandra (Facebook), BigTable (Google), Android (Google), Go (Google), AWS in all its myriad manifestations (Amazon). Maybe when you do anything on a large enough scale, this stuff becomes important.
After you've open the bug report, please also submit it to http://openradar.appspot.com/
Just for clarification, you mean machine learning rather than ML the language, right?

(I ask because this discussion is talking about both the genetic algorithms and Coffeescript).

Hmm... maybe some sort of GPS application that took into account current road conditions -- length of time stopped at traffic lights, performance characteristics of the current vehicle (velocity and acceleration away from lights, etc).

At one time there was talk of making the air traffic control system distributed rather than centralized. The win there is that 1) each aircraft only has to worry about the other aircraft that near enough to interfere and 2) if the control system goes out in one aircraft, the systems in the other aircraft can compensate. By contrast the centralized system has to watch all the aircraft in a large chunk of airspace, and if it goes out, well...

This is sort of what Google is doing with their self-driving cars, I think (that's just my impression -- I haven't looked into it in detail).
If I ever come to Italy, I'm buying you a beer.
Hi, I used to have a similar problem: seeing that when I do architectures they become difficult to maintain. Or difficult to talk about, to be honest, I don't understand your second paragraph :)

What really helped me is the approach to program API-driven. Don't start with your algorithms but start with what kind of functions you probably need and what would be the easiest way to use them. (In fact this is not so far from this data-centric approach as the most basic functions of APIs are usually function to retrieve or modify data.)

Try to read some good code from one of your favorite open-source projects. At some point some code may catch your attention because it's so simple and elegant. Why is it so elegant? Often because the underlying structures are just simple and made from common-sense. Don't over-engineer stuff, the simpler solution is often superior to the full-featured solution. And often you should ask yourself: do I really need this features currently to show some progresS? Shouldn't I not rather post-pone it?
so fruji is interesting. everytime i shut it down (database issues, twitter api changes, etc.) and turn it back on, people start flocking to it immediately after, and it grows from 10 signups a day to 150 a day quickly. that's awesome. payments are coming in as well, drafting new (more expensive) account types for corporate users looking good and so forth.

but i've had a couple of really popular a-listers sign up, won't name them here, but you all know them. and after i had to tell the 5th over 1M+ follower person that it'll take more than a few days to scan their account (run analysis) based on twitter's api rate limits, it just feels terrible.

i thought i'd just lock out people with accounts over 500k (can you imagine?!), it'd make a lot of things easier.

twitter has been very responsive and i've been able to submit a couple of bugs with them successfully. but i'm really worried this one gets shut down and i do not even have the tiniest chance of doing anything about it.

i'll keep going with it. but it just runs all by itself now. a very smart, distributed system, i just receive payment notifications.

edit: one thing about twitter: i can not spend any of the payments i receive. if twitter shuts me down tomorrow (they likely won't), i have a lot of people who paid me for a yearly account and it's money i need to refund. so that's locked up credit at this point until the year expires.
i still don't consider this news - i stumbled upon this the first time i had to implement multi-precision multiplication - its a standard technique. if someone posts linked list wiki article is that news because for some situations arrays are faster and in others trees are?
Thanks! very insightful
People Died in fire and exploded into ballon marshmello cannons
It might be unpopular to say it out loud, but I would bet most HN readers have at least one person on their Facebook page they would not hire base on what they've seen posted there - people they might have otherwise considered hiring. I hope the scenario posted in that article doesn't play out on that scale, but it's surely already happening at an individual level. Great read though!
I'd love to look at people on the train but there's a pretty serious ethic against staring at other people on New York City subways. There's also no bandwidth at all. It's a rough and loud ride. Podcasts, music, and casual games help the time pass. YOU try meditating on the 5:45 C train some time.
On a related note, what other good programming-related podcasts are out there? I'm currently aware of The ChangeLog (http://thechangelog.com/), which is pretty infrequently-updated, and This Developer's Life (http://thisdeveloperslife.com/), which, while super-interesting, is only superficially technical (and more about life interests that developers generally have in common).

What are some good balls-deep-in-code podcasts out there?
he actually wants to build a floating city where he can
make his own rules

Well, suppose just for the sake of argument that seasteading is technologically feasible (you might consider cruise ships a proof of concept). Wouldn't it be good if there was a mechanism for people who strongly and irreconcilably disagree to separate?

We have mechanisms for that on an individual level, as people can move from a city or job to a new city or job. We have mechanisms on the level of couples, like divorce. Perhaps most interestingly, we have mechanisms on the level of small to medium size organizations, in that one can start a new company. But right now there is no frontier, no way to peacefully start a new country.

If you do believe that there are multiple stable equilibria for societal organization, then it should be a good thing if all the reds and the blues could just separate and self-govern rather than endlessly squabble. Apple is not Google, but both are successful; Singapore is not Sweden, but both are very nice countries. Things that are legal in one jurisdiction are illegal in another (e.g. porn is legal in Sweden but prostitution is not; it's the other way around in Singapore).

Similarly, wouldn't it be better if all the fundamentalists could have their own island and teach prayer in their own schools without trying to make my child read the Bible? Or if the blue state residents could actually have a country in which stem cell research was legal without having to do backflips to accomodate religious objections?

I ask only that you reconsider the theoretical merits of seasteading as a peaceful means for separation. If nothing else, it'll mean that all these guys go off and drown and stop trying to influence US elections :)
I loved Sherlock. I thought they killed it because they got tired of it and it didn't monetize, not because it was unloved.
When Mitt Romney Bet on Staples (video)
Show HN: UglifyJS in the browser (the minifier that powers jQuery)
Ask HN: Why aren't more people doing stuff in the healthcare space?
I see a lot of discussion around shiny new picture sharing apps and cutesy social networking sites but almost nothing on here about anyone doing anything related to healthcare. Healthcare spending in the US is 15.2% of GDP, roughly 2.5 trillion dollars. That is a lot of money sloshing around in just one sector of the economy. HHS under the leadership of CTO Todd Park has a treasure trove of data that they've been opening up over the last 2 years to all comers for the taking via healthdata.gov - a kind of open health data platform which in theory can be used to feed data to commercial sites and applications.

Some of the big(costly) problems in healthcare include reducing patient readmissions (Medicare is getting ready to penalize hospitals for up to 280 million dollars for high readmit rates come Oct), managing inpatient and ER utilization by being able to predict rising trends so that measures of intervention can be taken. Preventive healthcare aided by the use of mobile health monitors that automatically track and log personal health metrics is another big opportunity and will likely be the biggest revolution in healthcare in over a century if it takes hold.

I am just a little surprised there is not more discussion around here on healthcare related startups. The problems are big but so are the opportunities. I work on the analytics side for a healthcare MCO and see the challenges and issues daily.
In what remotely conceivable way is this trolling? Please stop being a fucking moron. Thank you.
Compared to the others: bad gamut (color reproduction/range). Also, even if it's better than the typical low-resolution 1366x768, it still isn't 1600x1900 or full HD. Brightness- and contrast-wise it's great. But still, there's better displays in the cheaper price range already, like on Zenbook. Or if you want to compare against much cheaper iPad, iPad also has far greater resolution, much better (almost perfect sRGB) gamut, better contrast, and so on. MBAir's display is better than average though, so it's not bad. It's just there's better options available.

Of course, if you're not interested about the color reproduction, this might not affect to you. But if you want to edit photos or see movies like they're supposed to be, then it matters.
How a space train was brought to life
I started collecting the past month debt from studying for the first time, about 300 euro's per month for the next 2 years.

Though here in Finland student debt is not as big thing as it is in the US.
it's a bit presumptious to say who "owns" that profit, as both pieces are open source software that depend on each other for the music experience.
Buy an Ultimaker instead. You will not regret it
Sure. The point is the effort they had to find such a problem. That indicates that it is very unlikely that any given practical problem is suitable for GAs. Again, if you are aware of any real problem where GAs work better than hill climbing, please do share. Note that this is not a very high bar. For example the same applied to quicksort vs insertion sort is "find any real example where quicksort outperforms insertion sort". If you couldn't find such an example and had to go to great lengths to artificially construct such an example then I'd call quicksort a failure, given that it's more complicated than insertion sort. Why GAs were/are as hyped as they are is a mystery to me.
Iran readies domestic Internet system, blocks Google
Nice, but I really like this one: http://lab.hakim.se/meny/
I am predicting more Lap Docks coming out. They look really nice and it's basically just a screen, keyboard and battery.
I get

Uncaught TypeError: Object #<Object> has no method 'getRangeAt'

on Chrome on Linux.
I can confirm this. http://www.google.com still works, but https://mail.google.com or https://www.google.com don't.
He sh/could license it to Microsoft Metro division
I never cited the paper's conclusion as my position. What the paper shows is not what the paper concludes. The authors clearly didn't want to show that GAs are inferior, though inadvertently they certainly did. BTW, the authors of the paper conclude that further research is necessary to find cases where GAs outperform hill climbing.
> This has 3 multiplications and 4 additions. We've saved 1 multiplication at the expense of 3 extra additions.

Stratssen's algorithm, for multiplying matrices, uses a similar "trick". Naive matrix multiplication uses 8 steps for a (2x2) * (2x2), or n^3 multiplications. Stratssen's lowers this to 7 multiplications, and instead uses extra additions, thus achieving O(N^~2.807).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strassen_algorithm
I simply don't see the benefits of Facebook as outweighing the creepiness and totalitarian potential. What do I get from Facebook that I don't get from "analog" social interaction, that is worth giving them information on a good portion of the websites I visit, the social interactions I have, the pictures I take, etc.?
Because it continues to frame the debate in terms of the ggps choosing, which have no bearing on the case.

"A government action is wrong/misguided/favors some party and hinders some other"

Does not automatically lead to

"Government is bad".

You can only debate that if you are prepared to take a step back and to list the relative merits / detractions from having some government regulation some of the time and then to try to apply those to the case at hand.

In this case I figure some special interests are being hurt and some particular individuals use their political influence to serve their ends. That does not say anything pro/con the government as an institution, it says something about the particular individuals involved. See Airbnb vs the established hospitality industry, the RIAA/MPAA vs a lot of other entities and a whole slew of examples too numerous to list here.

The one thing that you might extract as a rule is that special interests influencing politics is a bad thing, but in a country where companies are allowed to directly influence politics that is pretty much to be expected.
I'd merge some ideas here:

- Different trigger
Double click is too proactive, maybe a timed click
2s + mousedown => focus.(or on drag)

- Smooth transition between selections
If on a focused state, don't fade in the page to fade it out entirely, or slower and darker.

Great thing though, similar to the minimalist/darkroom trend
With or without funding
So you are at some "Source" and you want to get to the required "Destination"(goal) -- what do you do ???? --- you plan your journey well. Let your plan take into considerations all the possibilities --- all pros an cons.

Good Programmers - well they plan; understand the requirements of the problem; case study or analyze the problem space; consider all(or most) of the possibilities to reach their goal(destination); then make a design (create a plan) and decide on the path(s) to be taken i.e. choose data structures, algorithms, programming language, and other factors. Having understood the pros and cons of their design; they begin to code. This process generally works most of the time; but there are times when you go mid way and then change the design or might consider another alternative(like data-structures); this generally happens when you've missed some problem space to analyze earlier while planning. None-the-less; planning well ahead of time; before you begin coding helps get a good product and helps save a lot of time, money and effort.

Bad programmers on the other hand know about their Destination(goal) but do not know how to get there; they simply jump into coding hoping that they would someday get to their destination. This too works, but it takes more time; and when one realizes that one has made a mistake; it becomes very difficult to come up with a new plan to move forward from that point. The product loses its quality. Often you land up starting again from square zero.
So what? Company A does not want you because of some stupid unscientific mumbo-jumbo, you just head to Company B on the other side of the street.

This is only a problem if no employer wants you at all - if they have enough safe applicants so they can reject anybody even slightly unsafe.

But that, even if it would happen, not a Facebook fault.
This article was an eye opener for me:

http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/07/old-school-developers-achi...

"Old school developers - achieving a lot with little"

I'll quote:

> [Ken Thompson] debugs only via printf statements, hardly ever uses unit tests, starts his projects by designing the data structures and then works bottom up, with throwaway test stubs.

Also, Joe Armstrong, the father of Erlang:

> He uses prototypes to solve the hard problems first, and for debugging, just uses print statements. He is a critic of Object Oriented Programming, and favours functional programming languages like Haskell. He never uses an IDE, preferring just Emacs and the command line (no mouse required).

Also, Jamie Zawinski:

> During development he hardly ever uses unit tests, believing it slows things down - he thinks there's a lot to be said for getting the code right first time. In his view, its a matter of priorities, "do you want this to be good software or do you want it to be done next week - pick one because you can't have both".
Saw this on metafiltet yesterday, a testament to the human spirit.
This article was posted here a while ago:

http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/07/old-school-developers-achi...

It mentions that Ken Thompson "starts his projects by designing the data structures and then works bottom up".

Adapting this approach solved several problems I was having during development.
It's nice, but you have to watch out for ending up in the dead zone -- a company that's hasn't failed, but is just sitting there and staying in place.

It's really tough to find the right middle point, and it's probably different for every business.
Falling in love with the idea of something, while ignoring the reality.
Business Desktop Remix 12.04 LTS

http://www.ubuntu.com/business/desktop/remix

has Java, flash, vmware installed, and has had social clients removed. I imagine that the next version of this would omit the 'enhanced' Dash search 'feature' as well.

Enterprise is not the issue, the issue is the consumer tablet/netbook/TV space with crapware added.
XEX
I also don't consider it news. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell if something is news to everyone, news to most people on HN, and news to a few people.

For me this falls into the category of "new to me, but it's old news if you're in the field."
Very cool. I love all the experiments on the site. Really creative stuff.
Suppose some well-funded nonprofit filed FOIA requests for all the unpublished data from every single clinical study, with the intention of putting it online. What would happen?

(Edit: oh, this was already discussed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4560263)
> As a simple thing, imagine an LLVM or Javascript virtual machine implemented in reconfigurable hardware and how much faster that would make it.

We don't have the benchmarking data, but I strongly suspect that these kinds of implementations will actually be significantly slower than what compilers are capable of doing on x86-64. This is almost certainly going to be true for stack-based VMs (stack operations are ridiculously slow compared to registers, and because the push/pop sequence done by instructions is implicit and linear you can't take advantage of any parallelization techniques like superscalar execution, branch prediction, out-of-order execution, and even pipelining is less effective).

Even for register-based ones the obvious things like type checking are actually extremely efficient on modern processors (I wrote an explanation on Quora: http://www.quora.com/What-is-a-lisp-machine-and-what-is-so-g...).

To get the same level of performance as modern CPUs you really need to take advantage of all the parallelization techniques I mentioned above. This is extremely difficult to design because you need to ensure all the permutations that are possible in valid instruction sequences produce the correct results in the presence of all the reordering/parallel execution going on. Modern CPUs actually have a lot of bugs that are found relating to this, but they only occur in very unusual code, and these bugs are fixed either by patching the microcode on the CPUs or by the OS, so you rarely encounter them. And this despite the amazingly thorough testing and huge amounts of formal verification that go into CPU designs.

I think FPGA-based designs will continue to be very algorithm specific for those reasons, even if we get FPGAs everywhere.
Google Maps' new help site doesn't have iOS in navigation
The iOS maps problem is a dataset problem mostly. Google has a huge head start in that department. That is not a talent problem.
I don't think this scenario could play out that way.

- Facebook profiles can be made inaccessible to non-friends. People who post pictures of themselves naked and using drugs use this feature.

- The hypothetical conclusions drawn are only possible if users post extremely frequently and in great detail. Otherwise, the predictive analytics will suffer from garbage-in-garbage out. Huge companies spend millions of dollars collecting decent data, and the claim here is that a 16 yr-old's facebook profile will have high quality data.

- If the situation presented in the article gets even close to coming true, people will know about it and compensate. The end game won't be all-knowing companies, it'll be SEO for social media profiles that make people look good for a fee.

[edit: removed meanness]
That's possible today, and even easier than tapping a phone conversation since Facebook stores the content of the communication essentially forever and is more than happy to turn over their data pursuant to a warrant.

That's not what's being talked about here.
Why AirBnB is so disruptive