skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The hard parts (colleges, taxes, money, etc) are relatively easy to get compared to the soft parts. I think those soft parts is what makes silicon valley better than most other areas. My theory is that those soft areas are in the cultural part of society, this is the area which the vast majority of people in the world DON'T want to change.

Take one (of many) soft components - acceptance & praise of failure with learning. For some strange reason, this is a hard concept for most people to accept. Many people are shamed by failure or hide their failures pretending they aren't failures at all. They never learn anything useful from their mistakes. They also won't accept people who had any failures. This causes people to have careers of "no failures" which basically means they pretty much only succeed in mediocre things. I don' know if Austin overcame this one example but this type of thinking is a major roadblock in many areas.
Access to free courses is a freedom of speech issue
Its not a troll comment. I just spent 3 hours poring over how CUPS worked in 12.04 and trying to find out why my USB printer is not working. I just could not fix it and rebooted my laptop to Windows to print. And this after installing the official drivers and reading the official install guide, etc. The damned thing was that they have changed CUPS yet again in 12.04 and whatever the official docs says is not valid anymore.

This sort of thing has been there around Linux for ever. I have reached a stage where I am just too bored to do the endless investigation and fixing any more. I will just use Windows, which contrary to all the complaints that people keep making, actually "just works"
There are other benefits though. The exposure, and the feedback from other participants/judges.
Massive, scary legal risk here. This won't last long.
so meta, I love it! (And also would be helpful for all future Rumbles.)
Hacking a File API onto IE8
he started programming with 18. what a loser.
Your completely missing the point.

Minnesota isn't trying to stop Coursera's innovation.

They just need to certify they're teaching legitimate stuff before they can claim to be an educational institution in Minnesota.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to me. If I wanted to teach people, it seems reasonable to prove that I know the subject I'm teaching.
"Six strikes" system goes live this fall, appeals to cost $35
This is an ironic question: on the one hand, you say consistency doesn't make sense, on the other hand, the root meaning of "doesn't make sense" is precisely to be inconsistent.
If you can perform computation on the client, you can avoid some round trips to the server. Of course, you can't trust the client, so you still need to perform (some of) the same computations on the server.

If you can use the same code for both client and server, then it opens up the possibility of sending chunks of logic over the wire.

Here's a trivial example: a website uses Markdown for comment formatting. You can improve the feedback cycle, especially for those who aren't overly familiar with Markdown, by rendering a preview on the client side. However, this means that you need two Markdown parsers, one in your server-side language, and one in JavaScript. That's a potential duplication of effort. Someone has already written a JS Markdown parser, but it might not have exactly the same behaviour as your server implementation. So why not just write the code once and have it work on both sides?

I have a feeling that there are a lot more interesting things that you can do with split computation, but I haven't seen many examples yet. I think they'll come.
Well gee, sorry I didn't refute your argument in the form of a DH6 retort in the form of refuting the central point. What most people on the internet seem to miss is an incredibly profound insight.

We are on the internet. Most of these conversations will go nowhere beyond where the people reading them will take them, which is nowhere. I am not interested in writing essay after essay debating things with people who have no power to change them in the first place. This is a waste of time. The internet primarily exists as a form of entertainment. This may be against the spirit of HN but I would argue that HN is against the spirit of the internet. My proof of this is that the vast majority (99%+) of the internet is nothing like HN.

Anyway, to address your point - numerous people take drugs publically at events like music festivals. The result of this action is a lack of arrests and a lack of policy change.
A Common Gotcha When Using Ruby Regexps For Input Validation
Trying to make it right by both a) forgoing future proceeds to whatever publisher will release the game and b) offering out-of-pocket refunds. Software projects fail, there isn't anything more we could ask of a person..
They've limited participation to so-called accredited investors (with minimum income or assets as defined by the SEC). There are non-trivial regulatory requirements that come with accepting money from unaccredited investors, so many (most?) startups do the same.
British engineers produce 'petrol from air' technology
ConnectNYC Fiber Challenge - Fiber for NYC Startups
Regarding the pale blue dot.

Has the photo been enhanced so we can see the earth, or is that actually how it looks?

What are those color bands I'm seeing? Does the earth stay in it's orange color band, indicating they are orbital lines around the sun?
appleflaxen put it well. Opting out is a method of showing TSA agents that some people think about these things and care. It also puts more demand on their limited time and resources. If everyone opted out they'd have to get rid of the procedure all together.
This could get interesting! "You are hereby granted a Coursera certificate of mastery under the Church of Knowledge. This is religious."
GNOME Shell Extensions
Well taking just TV Stargate had several very intelligent characters as role models Sam, Daniel, Jonas, Rodney and Jeannie. and NCIS has Abby and Tim.

And the BBC's new sherlock also has a hyper intelligent character.
To be inconsistent is the easiest thing in the world: just refuse to think about the meaning of what you believe or do. I don't think the point of Bezos's remark was that we should aspire to be inconsistent, but rather, we should be open to considering that our ideas might be wrong.

A better quote for this idea: "Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."--Ayn Rand
This is the first release of Ubuntu that I am not excited to upgrade to. The whole Amazon web search is bothersome to me. I can understand Canonical wanting to make money, but getting in bed with Amazon is kind of weird. Also I did not see any features in 12.10 that I was excited about. Disappointing release.
>3. You have competitive companies that export products to other nations.

Author seems to forget that these companies don't need to be of finnish origin. It's completly ok strategy to just educate lots of engineers and let IBM or other large company hire them (and pay income taxes to Finland). Educated workforce does create value even if there isn't silicon valley of start-ups in Finland.
I agree. I think this change is motivated by two things. First, it's a planned obsolescence by the manufacturers finally admitting a small health issue and offering a solution. Second, it's a move by the TSA to combat opt-outs and other pushback by providing the same privacy violations but now with slightly less cancer risk.
Save your time and Money. Download Free logo PSD templates
I notice that some of the tips have code examples and some don't. I know that people other than the author of the tip can post comments, but it may be useful if they could also post gists along with the comment. This way tips without examples could be fleshed out by someone other than the author.

I do like the site and I plan to use it!
This is super cool for getting up and running supa dupa quickly.

Side Q - Does anyone have conversion data on what oauth works best? If you know of a blog, video, or insight.. would love to hear about it - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4675010
The tool looks great, but as a developer I have to say I still really prefer having HTML and CSS in front of me.
Message Machine Starts Providing Answers
Doesn't seem that anyone has mentioned this, but that watermark is the only thing stopping me from immediately putting this into production. Would be nicer from a consumer perspective if I could try this out in production with the full feature set, but just a limited element quantity.
Did they standardize the side of the car for the receptacle?
They'd probably do the same thing they do now during the 2 months of summer vacation..
Depends on what you want to do. For gui development you should use a solution that has a GUI editor so you dont have to manually code your interface , i find it pretty important , that's why in my opinion Java with Swing is still the easiest way to go for multiplateform GUI development. Java is not that hard and tools like eclipse or netbeans provide gui editors. You want to use HTML5/Javascript ? then go with adobe air , you will be able to develop your app in full javascript/html and take advantage of the air API, and deploy in any plateform that can run air.
The Next Web loves us :). What can I say.
5 Non-Programming Skills Every Programmer Should Have
1. hygiene
2. an affinity for numbers
3. rofl
4. starcraft
5. omg fml
Indeed. I opt out, I will opt out my children. It is a unnecessary risk.
Even medical grade x-ray equipment that is seemingly well and regularly maintained operated by trained medical professionals in hospitals can go horrifically wrong.

These machines are none of those things. Why should I give them the benefit of the doubt?
One thing to remember about politics is that there is a much higher degree of moral positions. Flipflopping on moral positions make people think the preson not worthy of trust, in a whole other way than flipflopping on technical solutions since technical solutions are a lot less dependent on core values and soft issues without hard truths compared to how politics is.
Its more consistent, responds instantly to everything, 100% intuitive, never requires reference to a manual, silky smooth and everything was blatantly obvious, configuration was beyond easy for everything and everything works flawlessly straight away.

I spent 2 days with a loaned galaxy s2 first and it had none of the above. It was slow, clunky and inconsistent and pretty damn hard to get it to sync with my pc. It also lost outgoing emails when plugged into exchange.

The three other people I've shown it to (android users) remarked at how it is quite better than the diatribe against it and they found it intuitive.
I'm sure you have your reasons for thinking this, but having read Hacker News for 4-5 years now, whenever people start making claims of startup failure based on legal risks, for me that's now a pretty sure sign of a winner-in-the-making.
The comparison between iPhone and Android doesn't make sense. iPhone is a particular product, Android is just software licensed to 3rd parties. It doesn't amaze me there are more deployments of phones with Android than iPhones, it's pretty obvious in fact.

Android is a second mover maybe if compared to Windows Mobile or other systems licensed to manufacturers.
Ask HN: How do you solve social issues easily?
Why is it so difficult to solve social issues?

It seems so much easier to find ways to grow large prize winning watermelons in the middle of the Sahara Desert then it is to get people to actually solve a real social problem.

I've seen hacks (e.g. guilt for donations) to solve problems but these hacks rarely change the way people and most of them don't seem to be very permanent solutions.

Has anyone here thought of any way to solve real social problems easily?
They mention that they use anycast rather than geoip-located DNS. (which itself would probably use anycast) I was under the impression that with anycast it was possible for routes to change mid-connection and you could end up with packets being routed to different datacenters as a result. Is there something they do to prevent this, or is it not a problem in practice?
+1. I was using marionette, but again, it's buying into an entire system. I ended up writing my own lightweight (15 lines?) version of their region manager and use that now.

(Marionette is a great project though!)
congrats to a great team and amazing execution! FundersClub isn't the first in the space, but it's definitely the first to gain so much traction in such little time. I hope they keep killing it!
My take on this was along similar lines. To me, the presence of a "design pattern" means the language you're using isn't powerful enough to just encode the pattern in a reusable way; i.e., a design pattern is what you get when your language won't let you just write a library function.

It's a bit interesting that Norvig talks (some) about design patterns in Lisp, since the whole point of Lisp, and particularly Lisp macros, is to be able to rewrite the language itself, so if you find yourself wanting to use a design pattern, you just write the macro that implements it for you.
Free pre-flight massages. Why wouldn't you opt out?
It shows that they're aware of the negative public pressure. They may just be playing a shell game at the moment, but at least the pressure is forcing them to respond.
The badge is meant for free accounts. But please, email me (mark@copybar.io) and we'll get you setup ASAP.
And one 6oz container isn't ok, but two 3oz containers is?
There might be a way to make manual grading scale. Perhaps set up a cooperative system where students grade others' papers in return for grading of their own papers in another subject matter. By having a larger body of graders, you could have each paper viewed by several people, and it would check that the graders agree on its score (without communicating with each other or knowing how the other evaluated it).

It's just like using TAs, except with casting a much wider net, though a lot more details would need to be worked out.

Remember, you have the advantage that grading a paper is easier than writing one (in compsci terms, the former is in P, while the latter is NP-complete).
Mathgen - random math paper generator
? Doesn't this show that we aren't stuck with the same hammer? Opal is a different hammer.
The full sentence, which should relate to the issues of politics elsewhere in the thread: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
What’s the difference between the old and new tracking systems on iOS?
Ant Task for Encoding Text Files - Reencode 0.1 Launched
And not just a naked picture taken. A naked picture taken of you and potentially stored on disk.
On the other hand:

- The vibe of all the comments from backers seems to be "well I knew what I was getting into, I'll stick around."
- There are people interested in contributing to the game gratis.
- There seems to be a publisher interested in picking it up and doing the final round of polish and debugging necessary to finish it.

Have a look at today's update. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2066438441/haunts-the-ma...

All of these people who invested money in the game are now, well, invested in it. And are talking about it. Some are offering to help. I'm not going to make any predictions, but it looks like this one still has a fighting chance of delivering.
You guys make good points and you changed my mind. I think you guys took the more logical route on this than I.
"Spiritual - I am still not sure whether I should have included this one or not."

And I can see why! There might be a point in this section, but it's tough to find among all the fluff.

If you're trying to say that meditation is helpful, that's great, but I don't see why that would be labeled "spiritual". If it's something else, I can't find it.
FundersClub firmly believes it’s legal because it never handles the money directly, instead raising money for a venture fund that funnels into a startup.

-- Intersting. This sounds more like lead-gen.
Yeah, the games will have problems, but you don't need to sift through hundreds of lame cash-in microapps that make early-2000 era "punch the monkey" Flash adds look gameplay rich to deal with.

I was assuming the meaning for that statement was on that point, not on a developer supporting an 8 year old game.
It may not be "wrong" per se, but it could easily have the unhappy result of making dissent invisible (or at least less visible). Unpopular opinions, if expressed honestly and well, ought to be encouraged.
The most frustrating part of all this is the astronomical cost of the defunct X-ray scanners, and now the cost of their replacements :(
Your site fails to load almost completely past the homepage, when I try to use your demo I get quite of a bit of resources 504ing.
HTML5 Game Development - Building High Performance Web Applications
The government loves their fees. You can't take a dump Minnesota without paying someone. Same in California.
Show HN: StatMilk - Football Stats Visualized
Facebook Officially Begins Shutting Down “Questions” Product
Clarity? Calmness of Mind.
We sit in the YC house. We full well know that we rarely end up with the idea we start out with. This makes the idea itself, worthless, and starting to validate any idea much more important and valuable.

Ideas are relatively worthless because there's so many out there that are reasonably possible. "Software is eating the world".

Ideas are also relatively worthless because any idea person is paralyzed by at least 47 of their own before someone shows up asking to sign an NDA for the 48th. Ask any technically capable business minded person.

Ideas are also worthless compared to execution on them.

Ideas are also worthless without the implementation expertise and marketing expertise to get it real, and the money that it might take, whether its funding or bootstrapped.

If the idea doesn't come with an owner who can code or market, they better be bringing their own money or some way to pay for the time of others. I have plenty of my own reasonably validated ideas and niches dying for attention that I could rather lose time and my own money on.

The "idea" guys in my life know now an idea is worthless without the real legs that will prop it up, the skills to build, the skills to build the right thing, and the skills to find and reach your audience. Giving an idea more value than traction with a paying audience is confusing activity with results in many ways.

Ideas might be more valuable to someone who doesn't have any other value to add in getting from activity to a measurable result.

Got an idea that still stands that test? It's much more worth talking about :)
Are we prepared for such an eruption today, and what can we do to prevent/fight consequences?
Unless no one does, which is very frequently the case.
I don't think violentacrez is using Reddit as a scapegoat. I think he's genuinely and understandably surprised by the outrage. It's that transition from being hailed as an Internet hero to being derided as a vile monster that has just left him bewildered.

From what I understand he was instrumental in driving traffic to the site in the early days, and contributed a great deal to not only moderating his own subreddits (including many of the most popular subreddits) but training other moderators.

An awful lot of people held violentacrez in high regard despite his controversial antics, but now this has all blown up in the media, violentacrez himself is being used as a scapegoat.
It looks like Udacity is doing a similar course in the new year: http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs255/CourseRev/1
Replace programmer with cook and then comes the shocker - these still apply.
What I learned from giving my game to a 3 year old
> I don't think that decreasing risk will result in more entrepreneurship.

Wait, really? You don't think people factor in downside risk when making life choices?
While I never finished it, my "CappRuby" prototype supported method_missing since it compiled to use the Objective-J runtime. https://github.com/tlrobinson/cappruby
I would call it attempting to save face. Don't trust what they say about their motivation.
Almost 100 Mobile Apps Acquired on Apptopia
Ideas are seeds. Figure out that analogy on your own.
Landmark in quantum computing
A bunch of machines in someone elses DC isn't launching a data center...

This article basically amounted to "we set up machines with some provisioning tools".
31 is older entrepreneurs? :-)
JAPAN RADIATION,WILL KILL MORE THAN UK GOVERNMENT PLAN TO MURDER
They might publicly state that radiation safety concerns are not the reason, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's true. If they admit the reason is radiation safety concerns, then they wouldn't be able to relocate them to smaller airports because they would still cause safety concerns at smaller airports.
This is exactly what I was going to ask...it can't be that visible, right?...
The Earth takes up much less than a pixel in the image, a combination of other factors cause it to be much more visible than it "should" be, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot
Silicon Valley Luminaries Reveal Their Preferences
PayPal (banking laws), YouTube (copyright laws), Airbnb (hotel laws), Uber (taxi laws), Facebook (FTC privacy laws).
Good discussion about 'overview effect' http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/05/space-euphoria....

Also http://www.overviewinstitute.org/
Saudi Arabia reveals plans to be powered entirely by renewable energy
Be the Change
Anatomy of a Hoax (Sony Nexus phone)
French media to Google: pay us for news searches
"Possible" ideas and "profitable" ideas are two different things. YC is a place where ideas are devalued the most since PG has admitted he's just taking a scattershot approach to investing and focusing instead on teams. At the end of the day, you need to have a good idea. Yeah, there are many ideas that are feasible but only a few blockbusters - that's the point.
Silesia Python Group
If you're from Silesia area (Poland) and you're interested in Python language you're welcome to join us on our first meeting next Thursday Oct. 25th. at 5.30 pm. in Zabrze.
Yeah: think time is typically >> than type time. The one thing that good hand-editor coordination is good for is not breaking flow: the faster one can do a brain dump (without having to micro-manage the typing/translation of mental pseudo-code image into real runnable source code) the better.
I find the bottleneck theory fascinating - for example it seems there is one gene now identified that in the six cases where it is missing the people simply cannot talk. Now was that mutation Pre or post bottleneck? If Pre, what was spread of talking beforehand - was there a family advantage - or did it take a whole talking species to have an advantage?

How on earth you can answer those questions is beyond me but what makes us human is such a fascinating study

(and on the "no eugenics here front" what really makes us human is our humanity)
Basically, "Because it's an SEC regulation"

OK, then I understand why this company and other start ups follow this rule.

But not why the rule is in place in the first place. To me, it sounds extremely discriminatory that any government regulation would have a fixed income or asset level requirement.
while i don't have a problem with anything here, particularly, these kinds of post (and we seem to get a lot) usually strike me as "a list of good things about me" or "why everyone should be like me".

i'm not sure how you avoid that. perhaps it is up to the reader to piece together a more balanced view by reading several.
> Invoking a function suspends execution of the current function, passing controls and parameters to the invoked function.

False. JS functions execute asynchronously, without suspending the execution of the current function.
In other words: breadth-first search is better when dealing with hard problems
Why I Sucked as a VC
I think they are trying to make it harder for you to mix things.