skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ready-made food is more expensive (and often hot), and there's a considerable demand for it. Same-day delivery of bulk goods doesn't make as much sense.

Couriers already inhabit the same-day postal service, and they're really expensive by comparison to regular post. As a result, you're not going to be shipping non-urgent bulk goods.
And ebay has their partnership with MissionFish, which looks to be exclusive. I think it's a decent idea but the market's too small and the difficulty in doing it inhouse is not significant enough, especially for teams doing well enough to want to implement this program in the first place.
Technically, the US Air Force owns and operates all our nuclear weapons in Europe; but in the event of war, the control is automatically transfered to the host country. This isn't that different than what Kennedy thought was going on in Cuba.
Sadly, even if you have a comment section at the bottom, nobody will bothers to give their opinion.
> what if universe is a 4 dimensional sphere?

If the sphere is expanding, then the result is the same -- a gradual decline in energy density per unit of volume. So the specific geometry of the universe is unrelated to Olbers' Paradox.

But there is strong evidence that the universe is geometrically flat at large scales, which in turn argues that it's infinite in size.

How does the apparent large-scale flatness of the universe make an argument for an infinite size? To explain, and just as a simplifying example, imagine that the universe is the surface of sphere. Now include the implications of the fact that we observe large-scale flatness.

Picture this -- imagine that the universe is the surface of a sphere, but the sphere's surface is perfectly flat. How large must the sphere's radius be for its surface to be perfectly flat? Think about how a sphere's surface is defined -- it's the unique surface that's equidistant from the center of the sphere, the surface that has a distance of R (R = radius).

To make both properties true -- to accommodate (a) that it is a sphere and (b) that its surface is perfectly flat, all you need to do is make the radius infinite.

In the case of the universe, with more dimensions, to achieve the measured large-scale flatness, all one need do is assume that the universe is infinite in size.
They're obviously going to keep pushing lower and lower price points. This is just the beginning. But the point is that android phones you get for 150$ or less off contract are rough, very rough. If you can offer someone a phone that's a wee bit more but that is so much more performant, you can sway them over. But that said, this is just the beginning. You'll see Nokia push even lower price points later.
Let's see what they're fighting about. From Boaler's complaint:

"[...] research evidence that could be used to improve the mathematics achievement of students in the United States and beyond [...]"

From her critics' paper (Bishop, Clopton, Milgram):

"This study makes extremely strong claims for discovery style instruction in mathematics, and consequently has the potential to affect instruction and curriculum throughout the country."

ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/combined-evaluations-version3.pdf

Both sides agree that a positive research result has the potential to alter mathematics education in the country. Then the question is: what's true, that Boaler has found a way to substantially improve education, or that her analysis is flawed?
It was fun replicating the things you found. Knowing something is possible makes it a lot easier to do.
Nobody is debating this outside the US

This couldn't be more false.
How long has freckle been around for? How many hundred blog posts have you written to promote it? How many interviews have you done over the years and plugged it? How many joint ventures and mailing lists has freckle been on?

Yeah, if I hustled like you have with freckle, I'd be making at least $30,000 a month too.

I'm just trying to insert some reality into the conversation. It's like watching professional athletes, we never see how much of their life they sacrificed to get to that point.
I think you may have missed my point. It was that the "business person" is usually seen as "just having an idea, not doing any real work" by this community -- even though they would bring marketing, PR, product, etc skills to the table.

And the dismissive "I'll just hire a marketer" talk sounds a lot like the marketer saying "I'll just hire a programmer".

It seems like we're in full agreement: these two functions can and should co-exist.
A colleague of mine remarked that one of the things that bothered him about Go (and uC++, and to some extent, VHDL for that matter) was how much the languages resembled traditional imperative languages (like C). In particular, it was the cases where these languages did something that was different from C (i.e., "different from what the user expected") that caused him the most pain.

If the Flow language can figure out how to deal with this expectation, I think there might be something here.
Would you mind showing it?
Nokia maps are quite comparable...
You did pretty good in 18 minutes.
I love reading Vice. Truth is stranger than fiction.
I'm not surprised by this academic misconduct. I've met many mathematicians who are hostile to teaching methods not of their own invention. I suspect this comes from a belief that superior mathematical ability implies superior empirical judgment, especially on matters of pedagogy; it also may stem from intellectual independence and unfamiliarity with or suspicion of empirical methods in the social sciences. This doesn't stop the opinionators. Sometimes they embarrass themselves in writing. One imbecile wrote in a Springer Undergraduate Text in Mathematics on linear algebra that one should be a fast note taker. The implication was that less than fast note takers would and should be left behind. Another esteemed author of a book on Fourier Analysis wrote that his book was not intended for the struggling student--a gratuitous and fatuous comment.
> One can "style" text without a "markup language". For example star text star <- bold.

But that's a markup language. The difference between * text * and <b> text </b> is a matter of syntax, not kind. Also, in most forums like this one, asterisk text asterisk gives italic text.
The USPS once had twice-daily delivery (ended in 1950).

Back then, mail could be delivered same day within a city.
It will take a while for this to be truly "Massive". There's still too much nostalgia business-wise regarding MMOs and the only viable comparisons with them could be graphics. However there's much harder issues to get clear first such as long term platforms stability, proper execution of current business models, cost effective production and distribution methods, among others.
I can totally agree with calling that tinkering - and also that it is interesting, if only (due to my diverging opinion on the merits of the approach) as a warning tale about how far one should go to try and fix a problem.

But, just like you, I consider that not newsworthy to hackers, yet at the moment it is the #1 item on HN and it kinda makes me sad especially because of the threshold - the idea that some people do consider that hacking - here of all places - is chilling :-/

Worse - #2 item is "more people should write". I beg to differ- more people should code, so that fixing a printf and recompiling ls wouldn't be newsworthy.

I'm sorry if it was interpreted as being rude- it was not the point - I just wanted to present alternative approaches to the problem, because reconsidering the problem is sometimes the right thing to do, especially when it escalate quickly in complexity.
"none of [his] products are about how to build products. They're about how to do better consulting..."

The question is: What is being consulting on?

Is it substantive?

Building products seems substantive. Especially building products that can produce sufficient income over the long term. But if it's not on bulding products like this then what is it? Is it about how not to have to build products that make sizeable but not sufficient income and instead to sell advice to people in that position? How clever.

If every developer were to become a "consultant", then who is left doing the grunt work of actually building products? Who is left to discover these websites, while they can produce decent bursts of monthly income, are not enough to sustain someone over a long period?
i always use one hack for ls. alias lsd="ls -ltrF | grep ^d"

This way, I quickly run lsd to only look for directories.
From the website:

"Of course, I’m ending up reimplementing a lot of TCP, with packet resending and ordering for most things, so I’m not totally sure all this work is actually worth it, heh."

Then, maybe, don't, and just use it... :)
Looks cool, but if you ask me a monthly subscription model isn't optimal for this kind of thing because the churn[1] rate will be so high.

Why do I expect a high churn rate? Well, there are two options. Either the splash pages created with quicklytest.it get some traffic or they don't. If they don't get traffic the user will get demotivated and stop. Cancel subscription. And if the user does drum up attention for his idea? Then he's going to replace the quicklytest.it page with his own thing. Again, cancel subscription.

I like the idea, but it will be very tough to make money from it.

[1] Percentage of subscriptions canceled each month
The single biggest problem seems to be that the adhesive phosphorescent strip is attached to the rim, which on most bikes is what the brake blocks press against to stop the bike. If you look closely in the video, his bike has no brakes!!! (You even see him use his feet to stop.) So much for "saving lives"!

Disc brakes would overcome this, but that's going to be an expensive retrofit for most cyclists.
That's quite possible, and that's part of why I would have probably gone with Android instead. Windows Phone is a really interesting OS, but Android -- even if you couldn't use the official Google branding -- gives you access to a much bigger ecosystem than WP's and a more vibrant one than Symbian/MeeGo's, while porting Qt would have let them keep the existing development community from feeling torched while also likely letting them bring along their new MeeGo UI, which was actually pretty cool.

I think Elop placed a very high -- possibly too high -- value on having a "partner" in whoever made their new OS. Microsoft was willing to be a partner on Nokia's terms because Microsoft was desperate; Google wasn't.
Not applicable here --- the two people in this case were outed by somebody else posting private information more widely than he intended. (By adding them to a public group, which he didn't anticipate would broadcast the news to their friends and family --- and I'm not sure I'd expect it to be obvious that it would.)

The only cure in this case would be to unfriend anyone who shouldn't potentially know everything that you or anyone else has entered on Facebook. Which is often not a practical idea for those with delicate family issues.
How To Bounce Back From A Big Mistake
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that most of this guy's ideas are either a bit half-baked or simply flat out wrong.

Consider the argument for his proposed language being Turing complete on the flow manifesto page. He claims that this follows from the Böhm-Jacopini theorem. However the Böhm-Jacopini theorem requires variable assignment is allowed in the subprograms (which does not appear to be the case in flow), and without this the theorem does not hold, as this paper by Kozen demonstrates: www.cs.cornell.edu/~kozen/papers/bohmjacopini.pdf. Then he goes on to argue that order duality implies the existence of a selection operator in flow, which doesn't seem to make any sense.

I think it's telling that he has been working on this since 2010, yet has no decent proofs of his claims, nor any working implementation.
And once again techcrunch crashes the ipad ...
Surely the correct response is more research and preparation of further peer reviewed papers?
I don't have the chat history handy, but I replied to the effect of: "If I need a POS tagger, I will get a specialized POS tagger." Someone else chimed in and criticized NLTK (noting that it seemed rudimentary).

Then discussion moved on, and I don't think I was asked any followup questions.

I don't think the pace was any different than other IRC channels, where sometimes people get bored of an interesting topic quickly, before it's really been explored.

I'm happy to discuss my criticisms of NLTK. I'll be giving a talk at PyData in NYC in about two weeks and I'll be discussing my choices in more depth.
The main problem with IP laws (and I exclude trademarks here because they have different properties) is that they discourage the use of content and ideas that have been created or invented. This is an unintended side effect of current system - the original aim was to reward and increase supply, rather than decrease demand.

So the Swedish Pirate Party are asking the wrong questions. They should be asking how can we continue to support innovators and inventors, even if they don't have the means to be producers, while not decreasing demand.

A good solution is to provide an alternative to the monopoly model with something more like a tax. A business can elect to pay a certain fixed percentage of their profits before IP costs, IP revenue, and tax to a pool of money which is distributed to creators / inventers. In exchange the business is exempt from IP laws (excl trademarks) as long as it only trades with individual consumers and similarly exempt businesses. Each participating business is legally required to declare what content / inventions they used to create their product / services, and the participating businesses that supplied them, or face penalties; copies of content or inventions made by anyone must be labelled with the reporting code. The pool of funds is distributed based on a formula taking into account the direct (used by business making profit) and indirect (i.e. used to create something in the supply chain of participating businesses) use of content / ideas that contributed to the profits.

Under this system, participating businesses would want to read and apply as many relevant patent documents as possible, and use as much outside content as possible, since they don't pay any more, meaning that there is much more reuse of ideas, but the creators of that content would still be rewarded.
Naming classes and methods is difficult (2009)
The only thing this would accomplish would be to further distance the internet-centric innovations developed here in the US from the rest of the world. Consumers in tariff enforcing territories would be at a disadvantage. Fragmentation of the internet would surely ensue. Fees would no doubt be passed along to consumers who, in some non trivial fraction, would simply not make use of new innovative services. But perhaps, obviously, this is the intended result.

This is complete political buffoonery.
I hate to be that guy, but this looks just like an existing product: http://www.lunasee.com

The major difference seems to be that Lunasee is powered by a hub dynamo (rather than batteries). It's also currently only available pre-installed on some bicycle models, and as an aftermarket part for motorcycles, but they say they plan to sell an aftermarket bicycle part, too.
While I think that is the point, I don't know if was the author's originally intended point. You see 'hacking it' would imply just getting it to work, I expected to see something, well hackish, like replace the format specifier with %s and then wrap the number in a function call to something which read an environment variable to figure out how to print the number. That would be a hack, what Greg is doing is engineering a change to ls(1) which allows for pretty printing the numbers. So to my way of thinking the title is wrong, it sets the expectation of a hack and leads to an engineering exercise.
When you order cooked food, you're already paying a premium for someone to work on your order right now. So the price differential doesn't seem that great to go from takeout or eat in to delivery. This is why pizza delivery seems so cheap ($4-5 depending on how you tip).

When you're ordering delivery of something that wasn't already priced as on-demand, you're going to find the price dramatically increases and you really don't want to pay 2x the normal price for your toothbrush and 12 pack of soda.

There's also the economies of scale that aren't set up yet--those will help somewhat once same day delivery is widespread.
The Beatles had a company called Apple
How to safely determine if JavaScript is running in Node.js or the browser
Well, keep in mind my point wasn't "MeeGo was poop," but rather that MeeGo wasn't -- at least according to Nokia's own internal estimates -- ready to go with products beyond the N9 in a reasonable timeframe.

I don't think I'd blame Elop for the N9's hardware, though; Nokia tended to go with pretty low-juice designs as a matter of course, from what I saw. There were some good reasons for that in terms of overall cost and battery life, but the first iPhone came out in 2007 and the first Android phone came out in... also 2007, I think, and it wasn't until 2010 that Nokia had anything resembling a credible competitor in the N8. And frankly, the N8 was a credible competitor to the iPhone and Android phones of 2008. This is a venerable Nokia tradition that Elop perhaps can be blamed for not doing enough to change.

But I'm pretty sure that MeeGo was doomed at Nokia from about five minutes after Elop was handed the same test unit that I saw in late 2010 -- and that unit, both hardware and software, was designed before Elop had been hired. The idea that there was an internal war that crippled it seems completely plausible to me, but it would have been a war between Symbian and MeeGo partisans.
In case you're about to jump into your IRC client to join, note that it's ##hackernews not #hackernews.
I like that bicycling is gaining in popularity outside of my country (The Netherlands), but do you need to re-invent the wheel every time? Simple (theft-resistant) reflector strips have been the norm here for a long time:
http://www.fietsen.123.nl/thumbs/300x205h/2010-03/2bs_bicycl...
At good metric for an indirect peg on number of people using something is the "star" count on Github. It's not an ideal metric but it is a reasonable proxy. The other thing I'd look at which requires more effort is to look at the number of subscribers to the mailing list (if you can get it.)
Google "feminist math". I thought his argument was emotional but also referenced enough original sources to be credible.

It is kind of stupid to think Babbage wouldn't have written programs for his own machine.

That being said, Grace Hopper is one of my heroes. It's like having a black friend so you can feel free to criticize Obama! Haha.
Brennan,

We met at LessConf, and talked quite a bit. I think you're a great guy and you are obviously very talented and very smart.

But...I got into this business because I got tired of the get rich blogging circle jerk I was part of in the past, and I'm very disappointed to see it coming into the tech world too.

I don't take issue with what you are doing, but between the turn Andrew took at Mixergy (pumping out a bunch of subpar marketing courses), the #leanstartup hysteria, and Frank Kern's IM marketing buddies infiltrating the space, I'm grossed out by the pitching and the polish.

Please let there be solace from this stuff somewhere...
Wow totally agree with you about this. What is scary is when you hear predictions by Wall Street experts, on Facebook's future, they don't even mention the possibility of severe backlash to the the privacy Facebook has stolen from everyone. Its only a matter of time before kids either shun Facebook or become masters at creating false identities that make the network even more useless. It sucks that so many smart people are being used for this garbage.
Sorry for not being clear. Brennan is a programmer, and his audience (myself included) seems to overwhelmingly be programmers who do freelance programming. So his products are specifically for programmers who do contract / freelance programming work. Is that clear enough?

This discussion might be more productive if you had bothered to even check out his products.
Not sure I understand enough about the Facebook market to understand the cost/benefit of likes.

I get that Facebook charges for a 'promoted post', is there additional revenue capture on a 'like' ? I wonder if someone who is familiar with this could give us a run down of where any money flows (both source and destination) for a transaction like this. The only one I can see from the post is a one time purchase for 'promotion' from the vendor to Facebook.
It's going to be interesting seeing how this plays out. Much of Minecraft's success can be attributed to serendipity, so it'll be interesting to see how this new game measures up, especially considering the scope of the project.
You can't target only people in the US for promoted posts. The only options are to promote to Facebook fans or to promote to Facebook fans and friends of fans. Many of those friends of fans have ended up coming from foreign countries in my experience for a local restaurant.
ls -alh

You guys have to much time.
I think that's reflective of how experience levels change your perspective on how to approach a problem.

Someone with command line experience that is mostly a user of system utilities would think passing the output of ls through a filter is the way to go whereas someone with C experience that already has insight in how Unix is architected would do something more along the lines of what the author is doing. That's pretty much how unix got built to begin with, and probably both parties would qualify their solution as a 'hack'.

It's all perspective.
If you're positive that you're charging as much as you possibly can and there's nothing you could read or learn about the way you do your consulting that would help you raise those rates by even $1 / hr, then I wouldn't purchase this particular book.
I found only estimates: http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/
40-50 billion pages. From the site:

"The size of the index of a search engine is estimated on the basis of a method that combines word frequencies obtained in a large offline text collection (corpus), and search counts returned by the engines. Each day 50 words are sent to all four search engines. The number of webpages found for these words are recorded; with their relative frequencies in the background corpus, multiple extrapolated estimations are made of the size of the engine's index, which are subsequently averaged. The 50 words have been selected evenly across logarithmic frequency intervals (see Zipf's Law). The background corpus contains more than 1 million webpages from DMOZ, and can be considered a representative sample of the World Wide Web."
As it's a cruiser the more likely explanation is that it's equipped with a rear coaster brake. Not sure why he's not running anything up front, however.