skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apart from the special meaning of the underscore in interactive mode, and the function _() in Django, I don't think it's common to use _ as a placeholder in Python. I sometimes do it regardless, hoping its meaning should be clear enough, but it's less suitable than in Ruby because you can't use it to ignore multiple arguments.
$10/h is way too much, India's nominal per-capita income is $1219 ($3.33/day) and its poverty threshold (below which a quarter of the population lives) is 40 cents a day. And this is for the mid-00s, not for 1960.

A "normal" pay would probably have been closer to half a dollar to a dollar per day (if even that), 300 days a year or so. So we're talking $3000~$6000 total, tops.

This is basically a big straight trench, so you could probably have done it in a few days or weeks with an excavator. An excavator rental costs between 800 and 3000 a week depending on the excavator class (size and engine power, minis in the 15-40hp range will be at the lower end, the stuff you can see on construction sites will usually be in the 150hp range and closer to the higher third, I'm excluding the ridiculous stuff such as the CAT 6090 or the baggers which make sense in neither scale nor cost for this comparison)

So the purely monetary cost would probably be about the same if you had an excavator close-by which you could rent (and you were a skilled operator).

edit: actually for that kind of works you'd probably use a backhoe loader rather than a straight excavator, but the costs should be in the same range

edit 2: but to answer the question as asked, it would be way cheaper to use even a full-blown set of heavy earth-movers (and crew) than to pay the guy $10/h, 10h/day, 300 days/year for 22 years (which would cost $660k)
kenberger • an hour ago

first comment. (gaming avc.com to fake traction).

Avatar
fredwilson MOD • 44 minutes ago • parent

nice!*

-- From the comments.
Rovio excels at monetization on mobile. Same with Popcap. Obviously these companies' mobile products are different than facebook's.

Why is mobile monetization so difficult? Seems like a company that can monetize the desktop experience can do mobile too. They're both computers on which users consume information. If ads work on the desktop then I can't see a reason why they won't work on mobile.
First, Feist says nothing about content being "scrapable". It's a 1991 case. To pull content off Craigslist against their will, you have to cross the CFAA.

Second, phone numbers are raw facts, but advertisements are not; every advertisement ever has been copyrighted, and a whole 11-figure industry depends on that.
Love is Power
I really like yours, the direction changes and merging are a bit 'robotic' but I like the cohesion.
Yes, by myself. The client so far has been understanding... they've already burnt through several contracting companies, and I think they're starting to understand what a mess it is. But still, they want to see serious progress within a month (eg. large number of bug fixes).
Weekend Edition: Siegmund Freud on Depression
And who runs the DNS servers?
Anyone who uses these glorified WebView wrappers is doing themselves a disservice.

I've never used it, but my understanding is that Titanium does not run in a web view. It compiles the JS down to C/ObjC, then that gets compiled to native code by Apple's compiler.
So why not regulate facebook and twitter instead of make another service that will essentially turn into DNS, which we already have?
It's like email. It should not matter in which social network our friends are, we should be able to communicate with each other.

Imagine that today you can only send email from gmail to gmail account. If that is the state today, won't we think of decentralizing email now?

Having a choice is a good thing, and one size would not fit all.
> The "patterny" area you are seeing is lava and if you download the game you will probably find that it's slight deficiencies are not as noticeable in actual gameplay

I suppose per your description that it looks better in movement than statically, hence not the best thing to show in the screenshots.
It would be awesome if mobile developers could put targeted ads in their apps. I've tried Admob and Apple's iAds and there's literally no targeting. Two apps, one that focuses exclusively on pizza and another app that focuses exclusively on beer will show the same totally irrelevant ad for, say, some game app or "free text messages!".
My point was that you can't, even in mathematics; for example. the (ludicrously simple) mathematical statement "2 + 2 = 4" is, in some sense, incomplete, because it does not also state all the other true facts about addition (let alone other true facts such as, say, the current temperature). I think of Douglas Adams's description of the problem with someone who took utterly literally the injunction to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" (and so was still going at it, years later).
After lengthy delay, Galaxy S III Developer Ed. released to non-existent market
Ways to make your single-page web app faster
Canada has a lot of economic emigrants living in the middle east, mostly working for the oil fields. They follow the same pattern of moving to and from the middle east as the people you have a problem with, only they were born in Canada.

And I personally see no problem with stuff like dual-nationality, economic migration, or hedging bets in a dangerous world. For one thing, it encourages trade, and for another, many people do not feel that they owe allegiance to one particular area of land when compared to another.

Also, Canada is built on and encourages immigration. These people have not tried to smuggle themselves in, rather they were encouraged and invited. It is you that really has no clue on this and your suspicion of migrants and denigration of their general motivations does a lot more to damage society than taking the view that it is better to be a bit more relaxed about the desire of many people to wander.

[edit] It also reminds me of the story I read of this guy who was born in South Africa and moved to Canada when he was 17 to avoid getting drafted, without family support and with little money, only stays a few years and also goes to college there, then leaves to go to the US as soon as he can get a scholarship. He is called Elon Musk, you may have heard of him.
Anything where the best practitioners are famous.

Sports player.

Politician.

Artist.

You can complete the list.
A few weeks ago I was commited with something like that. I just quit the job, I couldn't sleep at night and I was not making any progress in the first days. I know there is a learning curve, but it had been two weeks and I couldn't do anything.
Be sure you can work with that before accepting, because then is really hard.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. I don't think this is necessarily true for all writing, though. Political writing, press releases, thing of a nature where the point of the writing is to lead a person to a particular conclusion. Manipulation, in other words. I don't think I'd consider that process an empathetic one.
Isn't the cost of liquidity its only reasonable metric? Anyone can be "liquid" if they're willing to take a sufficient hit on prices. In that sense, "just makes liquidity cheaper" is like saying "just makes more liquidity".
John Henry is based on a real man, though his story has been embellished with time, and some of the details are uncertain. Most historians, at least in WV, have little doubt that he did exist.

If you look at the Wikipedia page on Tall Tales, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_tale, it even has him marked as being based on a historical indivdual.
Your 'publication of ideas' argument applies only to things that can be hidden.

But the patent system applies to a super-set: things that are plain, too.

Therefore, by your own argument, the patent system is operating beyond its justification, and so could indeed be described as 'broken'.

In any case, the patent system is a trade-off -- of increasing production against restricting access (see: the standard economic model of it). If it is badly calibrated, the net effect is negative. And the current state of economic knowledge is that no-one knows whether it is set correctly (see: 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003. Conclusion, p422, s3.). When there is a whole big system, of various obvious costs, and you do not even know the net effect is positive, the sensible thing is to stop doing it (probably by phasing out), until something proves otherwise.
Isn't this copied from Haskell? Being a lazy language, Haskell has the advantage that the underscored variable is not even evaluated.
Bird flocks are actually much simpler. It's just three simple rules that define how each boid moves.
how much of that may be due to not having enough relevant inventory? there's definitely a chicken/egg problem involved in targeted ad serving, but you'd have thought someone (apple?) might have been able to crack that nut by now.
Analysis: iPhone 5 defines Apple success, Tim Cook-style
Should I consider this investment advice?
I learned a lot, thx pg!
Fundamentally, the problem is that usage of twitter is both as a social network and an easy to use messaging protocol. Twitter wants you to use it solely as a social network, because that's where the money is.

It's unfortunate because it was a hugely useful platform for "protocol" uses. It's an easy way to tie together two incompatible systems, and a good way to provide automated notifications without additional clients.
Touché. We'll make sure the screenshots all look great for the next update.
Truth is I didn't spend much time choosing the default values. And there are still a few configuration variable in the code that are not accessible through the GUI.
babies have no money

Correct. But parents have money and are very protective of babies.
Great Stuff :)
Extreme gps navigator directions
This sounds very interesting. Drop me an email if you want, my email is in my profile.
That's not true. An extra market maker provides the benefit of competing market makers, which should reduce the spread.

Most markets are not specialist markets. Specialists at the NYSE were accused of skimming hundreds of millions of dollars from customers. They're an anachronism and a much more disquieting idea than robots competing to provide the best price --- which is pretty much what most HFT systems do.
We need a "slow startup" movement.

pg's definition of a startup is just one kind of startup. I like to call it the VC startup. It's an organization whose goal is to succeed big or fail, and fast. This "charter" is driven by the needs of investors, and I get that. It makes perfect sense, and from where pg's sitting, it's the attitude he needs to have to successfully manage his portfolio. But it's not the only way to grow a startup, and I think it unfairly marginalizes non-VC startups as non-startups.

pg probably wouldn't consider my company a startup, but I think he'd be wrong.

We're 4 years old, have 4 employees, profitable, and grow at a pokey 100% YoY. The pace of work is enjoyable. We build things for the long-term. We have time to help our customers. We get to see our friends and family. A lot. The principals own 100% of the equity.

But in our minds we aren't building just a tech business, we are building a startup. A slow startup. We picked a huge market (photography). We started by marketing to a small niche where we could be profitable while building the infrastructure required to scale to a larger horizontal market.

If we'd been VC funded, we might be in the same position for growth; finally finding traction after years and several expensive, painful pivots. In this alternate startup universe we'd own practically none of the company at that point, and we'd have wasted a lot more money.

I "grew up" in the 90s dot-com era reading Geoffrey Moore. We feel like we're executing that strategy and doing it well. We're poised for overnight success in a larger market, and on our own terms. I don't feel like any less of a startup than the multiple VC-backed startups I have worked for previously. I do feel a lot less stress.

So, if you want to enjoy life, build great things, and potentially make a ton of money, don't think it's not possible. Find or found a slow startup and change the world!
I had a go at this too a little while ago.

It's not web based unfortunately so here's a short video of it running: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY4DHcsuv1Y&feature=youtu...

And sourcecode: https://github.com/OneHP/murmuration

Also because I'm not great with my vector maths you'll spot that the boids have some odd behaviour where they favour vertical movement. Strange little bug.
Let me see if I understand the argument you've made: the idea that there are no layering violations is silly because people can make bad designs? Should we blame poor layering discipline for all the C code out there that calls gets(3)?

Modularity is a good thing. Composability often is too. For systems deployed in the large, the end-to-end argument also guides designs to simple cores and complex clients.

But none of that means that any given layer "owns" any piece of functionality. It would indeed make a whole lot of sense to start thinking of IP as the new Ethernet, for instance. But we can't really do that, because the greybeard priesthood uses concepts like "layering violation" to shut down discussion and maintain intellectual turf.
Hidden iOS6 Ad-Tracking settings
Does anyone know more about the hidden Ad-Tracking setting?
General → About → Info → Advertisement
To be sure, i just deactivated it! 😋

Content:

Ad Tracking

iOS 6 introduces the Advertising Identifier, a non-permanent, non-personal, device identifier, that apps will use to give you more control over advertisers’ ability to use tracking methods. If you choose to limit ad tracking, apps are not permitted to use the Advertising Identifier to serve you targeted ads. In the future all apps will be required to use the Advertising Identifier. However, until then you may still receive targeted ads.
Some Thoughts on Klout as a Business
> Also before twitter/facebook, we had email - a distributed > social network. How is the "new" distributed social network > going to be better than email?

Imagine you cannot use a word document created in windows cannot be used in linux or mac. Imagine YOU need to use windows just because other people use. Will this be good?

Choice of operating system is upto you and you must be able to exchange data across operating systems. That "interoperability" is needed for any good system. You don't need interoperability only if you want to monopolize the market.
> If I gave everyone in the world a $1 every time they visited my site I could also have the most traffic'd site in the world, but that wouldn't make my site worth any money.

Sorry to quibble, but no you couldn't. If you had 7B dollars and you literally made this offer to every person in the world, you still would not get Facebook's traffic.

And in any case, Facebook has a lot more than traffic. Just because their monetization is lackluster so far doesn't mean they don't have a ton of interesting directions to go in. All this hand-wringing and analysts attempting to project a realistic valuation for Facebook is just anguish and sour grapes over being hoodwinked by the hype generated by a bunch of greedy investment bankers.

However if you take all the IPO hoopla out of the equation, and you see that Facebook is still growing, still evolving, and has a lot of unique assets that could propel in the company in new directions. I wouldn't bet against Facebook just because some cranky financial experts want me to believe they know where Facebook is headed. They don't know. Nobody knows.
High-Fidelity Harmony
I've faced similar Augean stables in the past (and present, unfortunately).

I'd suggest that correcting the DB is one of the last things you can do, especially if queries are scattered throughout the code instead of in functions. You could attempt to abstract it with an internal API and as you update the codebase replace with calls to the API. Once fully abstracted, you can then focus on getting the DB corrected and only need to modify the new API functionality.

As to the code itself, sit down and map out all the verbs and nouns in the system. If you have a Contact noun, what is the definition of that role and what verbs can be applied to it or what verbs could it do. This gives you a good map for creating functions that can then be used to replace existing inline stuff.

Triage the worst bugs or performance bottlenecks and see if they are particular to a noun and/or verb, which should give you an obvious starting place to begin refactoring. For emergency hotfixes and such, feel free to just tweak the existing crap code but otherwise try and work on your functional units to get ahead of the game.

And always remember, pimpin' ain't easy. ;)
Why does _ need to be special cased like this? In Python this works with any variable name.

e.g.

>>> p = { "Alice": ["g", 1, "a@a"], "Bob": ["b", 2, "b@b"]}
>>> [(name, email) for name, (unused, unused, email) in p.iteritems()]
[('Bob', 'b@b'), ('Alice', 'a@a')]
On a similar note, few months ago I posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3827675 (Indian Man Single-Handedly Plants a 1,360 Acre Forest)
The Dow could reach 18,000 in a year, or 5,000. FB has $billions to devise new profit streams.
This just seems obvious to me. Granted, I'm only 16 and have had but one foray into the world of corporate employment, but the notion that someone can learn a skill early in their life and practice it indefinitely without expanding or improving upon it literally makes me want to laugh. The world simply moves at too rapid a pace not to constantly be learning.

The need to improve yourself as an employee doesn't exactly count as news. Intellectual stasis is career death.
The need for continuous education is accelerating for a lot of careers. I have taken 4 online classes this year, I have bought at least 12 technical books (probably read about half of the pages in them) and I am working on writing a new book (actually a revised edition of my old Java AI book).

I probably spend 1 hour on these self learning activities for every 2 hours I spend making money on my business (consulting). I am comfortable with this investment for two reasons. First, I feel like this provides me with a secure long term business. Second, the learning time is fun and relaxing - not as much as my hobbies hiking, cooking, and music, but still, I count studying time as a form of recreation.
That's not unique to complex analysis; there are smooth real functions that are nowhere real analytic.

Did you accidentally get my intended point backwards? My point is that real analysis admits all sorts of fine gradations of counter-examples, and complex analysis does not. In this case I was indeed thinking of a smooth real function that is nowhere analytic. (For non-mathematicians, that would mean a function that can be differentiated any number of times at any point, but which cannot be written as a power series.)

Contrast with complex analysis where continuous at a point and differentiable in a neighborhood of that point implies analytic. Even something as ill-behaved as the point at 0 of the absolute value function is not possible in complex analysis.
The question then is how long before someone creates a business around "staging" your Facebook profile to fit certain profiles.
Shippo: The brain-controlled tail that wags with your mood
Whiteboard Exercises are a Terrible Way to Investigate Coding Ability
I don't think good ideas are ideas that are overlooked. I think we saw many times that being second is better. Google vs Altavista, Facebook vs Myspace, Github vs SourceForge, Google maps vs Mapquest, Foursquare vs Yelp, Stackoverflow vs ExpertsExchange, and the list goes on.

I think the ideas are overrated, what matters is the small twist in the idea that makes you better than the competition, and most importantly, execution. Once you are out with your product, getting the right talent, getting the right design, getting features out there faster than your competition (like your own company in the past based on one of your posts) is what matters.

I think there are not that many ideas that are overlooked, just people that don't think they can do something with them.
the chance that an idea was not thought by someone else, that reads the same blogs, have a similar lifestyle, and is a smart person like you, is very low (or the problem you are trying to solve is not a real problem), but the chances of that person to have the courage, time, effort and perhaps money to start a business, and find good co-founders, (and willing to risk his marriage and apply to YC) is what's a bit more rare in my opinion.

On the other hand, I have zero experience relative to you, and it's a little weird for me to disagree with one of the biggest startup mentors of our time, but still, this is just my opinion.
Peer Power, from Potholes to Patents
Like others here, I had a run at this using lua love four years back.

https://github.com/iamwilhelm/frock

In my experience tweaking the variables, to make it look 'realistic', the settings need to change as the number of boids increase. So what might work for n boid, won't work for m boids, where m >> n.

In addition, you need to limit the turn angle for the boids. They don't look like they're flocking as much as they're orbiting. Just as birds can't turn on a dime (actually, they can. I've seen a sparrow change direction in mid-flight just as I was going to hit it with my car going 40 mph, but for the purpose of flocking it looks better when they can't.), you don't want your boids to, so you get a swooping effect and feel.
Hey, I'm a product manager at Wave. Would love to learn how we can do a better job. Could you shoot me an email? yosephATwaveaccounting.com
I've been coding for over 20 years, and I can't say I find it "exhausting" having to learn new languages, tools and techniques. On the contrary, learning new things keeps me from getting bored.

Also, constant learning is already a prerequisite for programmers, since coding to a large extent is a discovery process. You learn and discover more about the problem as you develop the solution.
I wonder if Wallstreet fully grasps what Facebook is all about and how it fits into the grand scheme of things.

I think I'm with Wall Street.
Michael? Is that you?
The existing decentralized software out there (except for maybe bitcoin which is actually quite simple and a couple others) are not sufficient for normal people because of the way they are presented. Diaspora failed horribly because it was hard to use on your own system. That and it was rather scrambled at launch. The code was horrible.

If there was a system that acts like current centralized systems out there it wouldn't be a matter of it being hard. The technology is becoming easier and easier.

If presented properly, there is no reason a decentralized system couldn't attract normal people.

Facebook and Google make it appear that what you are using is actually on your system. That you control the information. Yet, the so called "small" price of that is you have to give away personal information to them.

With a system that is completely decentralized and secure and keeps people's privacy while being so easy to use that my Mother can use it w/out problem, centralized systems would be in danger.

So yes, the current way of doing things is for geeks. That will change with projects like Tent. Centralized services will ultimately fail simply because of the violations to peoples privacy are starting to really piss people off. Normal people. Like me.

If I want to share my music playlist with my friends, I should be able to do it. I also don't like being censored and watched, which is exactly what these systems do. Don't believe me? Search it. And if you don't mind that type of thing for convenience, then I'm not sure you understand freedom.

And by the way, those "neckbeards" are the ones who are going to set things straight. A decentralized system doesn't necessarily have "servers". Everyone will be their own type of server.