skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm curious what waiters would think of the startup's product. It sounds like it would make it so the customer doesn't need to interact with their waiter to order, and that the software would also take over much of the role of recommending items to the customer.

That leaves the waiter to just be someone to carry food to the table.

I'd expect people would tip such waiters less, or even not at all. This would probably annoy the waiters. Would that be enough to sink it, or are waiters low enough on the restaurant totem pole that the restaurant owners would still be interested?
Why do you squeeze your content into a tiny fraction of my preferred reading size (the browser window)?

Instant close-tab.
Mine is only single document summarization. Yes, it's an interesting technology but I think there is not much of improvement.
Do you have any sources for the separability part? From what I remember, the three assumptions should be realism (the universe would exist even if no one would 'observe' it), locality or counter-factual definiteness - the ability to talk and reason on results of measurements that have not been performed.
But it does suck to be an employee at one of these gigs...you are at the receiving end of juvenile behavior & you have no recourse.

I have to disagree strongly with this statement. Yes, you put yourself at risk by working at a startup vs a big company... this is a risky business. I myself will end up with nearly nothing, after taking no salary for 5 months and leaving the company I founded for new ideas.

It does NOT suck.. in fact the summer experiences of the interns we laid off were on average way better than they would have received at big companies. For the short time they were with us, they brainstormed our product from the ground up, went along and participated in office hours, meeting YC partners and co-founders of other startups in my batch and attend parties and events. They've made valuable connections and now know what it's like to start a startup (the good and the bad). Every intern at my s12 batchmates' companies that I've talked to raves about the experience.

Our own interns all got new internships within a week or two (at mostly yc, but a couple 500startups cos as well) that paid equal or more than we did and had fruitful summer experiences (this was our #1 priority while pivoting, even more than our own startup). Yes, they took a risk, at first it seemed like it backfired, but in the end I am sure none of them would take it back.
The fix to sharing music online
IPhone users get less loyal
These "tiny machines" are still massively larger/faster/more flexible than the enterprise workhorses of not that many years ago...

The challenge of getting "monster" software onto them is an interesting exercise in part because it reveals a lot about the software when you see how it acts on machines that are constrained and slow by modern standards.

I feel I still learn far more from working on platforms with severe resource constraints than elsewhere, because a lot of issues that still affect larger systems but that are masked suddenly become massive in-your-face challenges.

And of course it can simply be just fun.
The bottom line is that people just don't plan for 100 year storms. I suspect that's because the number of things that go wrong once every 100 years is so large and the cost of handling each one is so disproportionate to the risk that it's not cost effective. Think about it this way: under what circumstances would you double your hardware budget to avoid 1 day of downtime every 100 years?
That's interesting. At first glance, it seems like we invented Separability just to make things easier for us. In my head I'd always assumed that forces diminish continuously; But I guess that's what I get for thinking of force as something different from a particle. If all force is particles, I suppose it makes sense.
Very cool. I was pissed that Siri was not available for my iPad 2 but this works well. Nice!
I think it depends on the way you broach the subject. I made sure that he knew my heart would be in whatever job I was doing, and that I would be perfectly happy to remain in New York.

But, you make a valid point. The discussion itself makes it very hard to say "no." I made serious errors in my judgement of the situation, and I wanted this post to inform people about those errors so that they don't make them as well.

I hope people (including myself) can learn both from what I did right and what I did wrong.
Wicked Night (Halloween Song)
I scale the Ballmer Peak on a regular basis. I've semi-scientifically mapped out the exact amount required to get the desired effect. I've started trying to plot the continuous consumption rate required to spend more time at the summit.

I have spreadsheets.
How to vote well.
Massive SMS Spam Campaign Reported
Except FB (well, plus mobile), has managed to change people's behaviors. Your flight is delayed, you are sitting at the airport lounge - and everyone is monkeying with his or her device. No more talking to strangers.

Gmail hasn't done that.
This comment reads as some general pondering about "no there's no way ahead except hard work". Just because there are tradeoffs doesn't mean there's not a clear advantage.

Thinking that humans have somehow evolved to behave at maximum performance for engineering or software design is an odd belief.

As far as "it must come down, it can't last", there was a leader (for 10 years) of one of the world's top air forces that was a morphine addict. Using "office coffee or prescription" is just a no true Scotsman argument.
This is a cool idea. But the algorithm only extracts the most important sentences. What will happen is it will just tweet the most important sentence in the blog post (considering that it's 140 characters or less).
Can extracted sentences be considered as outline?
Shades of the New Atlanteans in Diamond Age.
Just because you can play Mad-Libs with his sentence to make it seem silly, doesn't mean you are adding anything to the conversation. Social networking is a fun and interesting development, but putting it in the same category as the printing press makes me think you are either greatly undervaluing the printing press, greatly overvaluing social networking, or more likely, both.
Linus "there can be only one" Torvalds
There is the off-chance that the effort to capture these experiences leads a parent to get a picture of that child meeting her favorite princess or a snapshot of their son seeing a fireworks show at Disneyworld for the first time.

There's a difference between mindless capture and capture with a purpose. Some people do it terribly (I've been to a few really nice restaurants, and have had the experience nearly ruined by my friends' attempts to take snapshots of the admittedly beautiful meals), but that shouldn't dissuade the idea of wanting to capture an important cultural experience. Hell, I've never been to Disneyworld, and you'd bet your ass that I'd want a picture with Mickey.
It probably made more than $1.1 billion in actuality, thanks to Hollywood accounting. :)

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121018/01054720744/hollyw...
This is also a great news for Rubinius, it will probably boost Rubinius adoption and I'm eager to observe how it behaves compared to MRI.
Tried Summly, as a matter of fact, it is included in my related systems. I don't know what happen to them that they don't exist as of today. Well, in my opinion, it doesn't summarize that good.

You also might want to check Cruxbot (http://www.cruxbot.com/).
I can't tell for sure, but a little Googling seems to indicate that there is natural gas available in at least some New York neighborhoods.

Why aren't data centers built where natural gas is available? A natural gas powered generator could run from the gas lines, which should be more reliable than fuel that has to be trucked in.
The Jobs example was about vision, not "code".
Because steve jobs said it that way... and we all love worshipping jobs.
For what kind of apps I mean?
I was curious: when optimizing a leading indicator, what sort of effect does that have on said leading indicator?

Presumably there can be a correlation-not-causation effect, and optimizing said indicator wouldn't have as much as an effect on engaged users as it did on the indicator itself. Does anyone know of a situation where they had an increase in the leading indicator but none in engaged users? Might the relationship change over time?
> It's hard for many to accept that their ability to read other people is only as accurate as flipping a coin, but that's what we've got evidence for.

Does anyone have any links that support this? Thanks if so.
Sure, but it will take 1min of evening news to tell them google is now spelled bing.
I look forward to when I can replace my current quad-core 3Ghz x86 server (running Debian) with a many-cores ARM box with 16G+ RAM and use much less power - nothing I do on that machine needs x86. It's all webserving and email and IRC and such.

Got my Chromebook in yesterday, and it's exactly what I've been wanting in a portable system for years. The screen isn't perfect but it's "good enough"; my only worries are about durability and build quality. I'm afraid my 2012 Macbook Air won't get near as much use now...
Mistake: Using Rackspace Cloud Sites for Production
Kinect + Projector + HTML5 = Programming environment for physical spaces
All I can say is that we've had standardized tests in the U.S. my entire life, and none of that has happened. I just looked up when the SAT was introduced: 1926. Over eighty years ago! It hasn't ruined American high school education. (If that requires magic, then magic is real.) Of course standardized tests can be misused. If we make standardized tests into tests of rote regurgitated knowledge, if we design tests that reward cramming and mindless drilling instead of learning, if we replace the college admissions process with a single do-or-die test, then the results will be unfavorable. But we haven't done that in the U.S., and we aren't going to.
> Years ago I ate a pinch of mushroom dust and found that 25 minutes later, I couldn't keep my eyes straight to even look at a computer screen.

Can I ask what you thought was going to happen? Not to discredit your experiences (obviously everyone's different), but it sounds as if you're trying to place a lot of blame on perceived expectations, which can lead to some really disappointing results in any situation.
In case anyone is unfamiliar with the "Balmer Peak" : http://xkcd.com/323/

For extra points, I would love to see your spreadsheet data plotted as a xkcd-style graph (http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/11350/xkcd-st...)
Color scheme editor for Sublime Text and Textmate (works only in Chrome)
No. Simple things are hard to create.
I was going to suggest Amazon's Cloud Player music service, EXCEPT no app in the App Store. Did Apple block this?
According to the report, outages could actually get worse before they get better, particularly for mobile. Mainly because many wireless cells are on backup electric power, but running out of that backup power.
The Startup’s Guide to Budget Design
My mistake, sorry. Just found the app.
That leaves the waiter to just be someone to carry food to the table.

Or, it could give them more time to talk to and engage with customers on a more equal level.
When the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel is flooded, it's hard to blame anyone else in the city for being insufficiently risk-adverse.

You might as well blame a data-center for going down when the building it's in burns to the ground.
Define "better code."

There are medications that can influence focus, energy levels, productivity.

Problem is - we still don't really understand how the human brain works. The implications of introducing outside chemical stimuli can be horrendous. You may have noticed that big pharma companies are now focusing less on psych meds.
I'm completely okay with irony-ish things. But smugly calling something ironic when there actually isn't anything resembling irony there is just odd.
I fully agree. Please address your question to ntumlin.
Pathjoy seems to specialize in cleaning only. I really loved using them. The whole before, during, and after experience was seamless and great. The lady they sent over was extra sweet and stayed out of our way while she cleaned. She even left a note on her way out that really showed how much pride she took in her work and how hard she was willing to try to meet her own standards (which beat my standards of "clean" ;-) ).
I really should dig it up - I have a copy of it somewhere. The original author seems to have disappeared without a trace, and the website was taken down... A shame. It was rough around the edges, and some of the features were a bit "creative" (requiring gcc to be installed so you can runtime-compile C code into .so's was perhaps a bit over the top...), but it was a fascinating experiment.

Grip used to be written in it (only "production" quality application I saw using it): http://freecode.com/projects/grip but I think it was rewritten without Entity at some point.
This is exactly right. The truth is you can spend infinite money on various scenarios, and that cost has to be paid. The manufacturer side of this is 'warranty', you guarantee that something won't break in 90 days, a year, 5 years, what have you and you price to that probability.

Another risk in New York that will take data centers offline, earthquake. It will happen at some point, but the chance of it happening in the next 100 years small (contrasted to Santa Clara where we're much more likely to get an earthquake than a flood). So you could pay to have your Manhattan high rise put onto base isolators and proofed against an earthquake, but what size earthquake? Magnitude 3? Magnitude 6? Magnitude 9? And then if your building is still standing brightly after the Magnitude 9 earthquake are your fiber optics still there? How about the network tie point? Did it fall into a hole in the ground? So the cost to make all of Manhattan resistant to a 9.0 earthquake?

Its impressive that they are carrying up the fuel. I might be inclined to see if I could tractor in a 12kW generator to run one elevator. Sure you'd be burning fuel at both ends but it would be easier on the crew hauling the petrol.
Will client Hyper-V on Windows 8 for the phone emulator work if Windows 8 is itself a guest OS?
I intend to create concurrent programs, in pragmatic and lightwieght way, a good community support is a plus. Here the jvm and the googles' baby clash....
A wall of text is often more a reason to instant close-tab, especially with our short to long form target content lengths.
one should be extremely rigorous and analytical when thinking about what drives engagement, and not rely on your gut, or company lore.

Except the end result is usually the exact same.

A wildly inaccurate model for the sole purpose of impressing advertisers|investors|stakeholders with fancy, meaningless charts.

The conclusions you can draw from these models are either utterly obvious, or false. I'm looking forward to hear about a single example of the opposite.
You could take advantage of the replication for some kind of highly reliable monitoring device: take different samples with each raspberry pi, the data is duplicated on N devices, and then you can come back later to collect not worrying about sd card or device failure.
What problem did your first script solve?
Today I wrote my first (trivial, but "real") bash script... 10 years after studying linux scripting in university: https://gist.github.com/3714934<p>Do you remember what was the first problem you scripted your way out of or how long after you learnt your first scripting language?
I suspect because Natural Gas Lines can fail in a disaster situation as well, where you can "always" truck in diesel. If I'm ever building an insane data center I'd do both now!
API Hack Sunday Recap: Tuner.io Won
I often think the same thing about cheaply available photography. What was tourism like before cameras? Whatever he's talking about has already happened.
> ... a well-supplied Yglesias (at a higher cost) is of no more benefit to the local economy than a less well-off person whose access to storm supplies is protected by laws against price gouging.

But a big part of the point of this article is that laws again price gouging do not protect the latter person's access to supplies. On the contrary, such laws ensure that supplies will run out quickly.

> Yglesias has plenty of money, so he doesn't want to have his time gouged.

A very good point.
I can't believe I missed those posts by pg, but I think it's fair to say that in all but a very few subjects, my opinion is of the 'middlebrow' variety.

I now have a very real (though very slight) paranoia that any dismissal I offer on HN is going to be categorized as such, and heaven help me if it gets upvoted substantially.

In all seriousness, I both thank you and slightly hate you (in a valley girl sort of way) for pointing it out.
AK47js: observable properties in JavaScript
I don't think it's possible to have a worse name for a TV show about the internet.
Sorry, but if you need a paragraph of text to explain to your users how to navigate, you're doing it wrong. The "individual tiny pages, turned one by one so each has no context" metaphor, while a necessary evil for printed books, is pointless and broken on the web.

Most Web users, especially those drinking from firehoses like HN, don't actually read pages end to end, they skim them looking for interesting bits worth reading. This is why they're skipping page 1 without reading it, and since your navigation system doesn't allow "skimming", you're seeing people giving up in frustration.

Another way of looking at it: I still have no idea what pen.fm is trying to do, and the only thing I'll remember about it is the broken navigation system. This is probably not the first impression you want to give people.
It's a good question. You need to find a leading indicator that really is causal of engagement, and not just tangentially correlated with it.

Chamath stressed how critical it is to both minimize the time it takes to deliver a user their first 'Aha' moment, and then to continue to deliver those moments as regularly as possible. Presumably how many friends you have is causal, to some degree, of those 'Aha' moments - I expect that many of the 'Aha' moments on FB are to do with seeing cool content from your friends.

Nabeel also mentioned that it's also important to have various KPI metrics that you are aware of. His view was that there should be one over-arching operational metric that is broadly predictive of future engagement, and that the growth team should focus on that, but that, for any given tactic that you try out, you should be aware of its effect on a number of KPIs.
>I have to disagree strongly with this statement

Dude, you can disagree all day long. You have no locus standi - you were the employer, not the employee. One of these days, the shoe => other foot, and then you can tell me if it sucks or not. Especially when you are stuck in a new state with no healthcare & a family dependent on you, after leaving a 6 figure job at a bigco where chances of getting canned was like asymptotically close to nil. Anycase, I was not talking about you here...am sure you are an awesome guy & ran an awesome startup etc...just that there are other not-so-awesome startups & not-so-awesome founders out there.
Not in the way that you're imagining. Otherwise, you could easily communicate by repeatedly observing and then unobserving until finally you see the bit that you don't want to send, and then you let it be.
So you posted a "completely random-topic blog posts where [you ] come to some conclusion, which conveniently allows [you] to segue into a quick little pimping out of [your] app, startup, or whatever"?
Nice!!! looks like i'll have something to do this weekend :)
It's kind of sad I only have TM installed for theme editing!
Recommendations from friends. Fully insured, licensed, independent business owner. As for supplies it's really nothing I don't keep on-hand anyways. Dish Soap, SOS pads, windex, pine-sol(have to love wood floors), swiffer, feather-duster, laundry detergent, dryer sheets; to count these in my costs would be a misnomer, I have to buy them anyway lol!

To be fair if I were to make a cost of living adjustment it would probably be closer to 15-17 an hour in a place like Silicon Valley. Still, people simply need to ask around for references if they want to find someone reliable and affordable.
Bellevue Hospital had (has?) the same kind of operation going on.
due to flooding in the basement and diesel fuel spilled everywhere, they wouldn't power up the elevators even if they could. The building's entire electrical system is under salt water/diesel mixture.
Seems so, but from various sources, it appears that rich's working on the primary jvm implitation...

Btw, will jvm remain the primary implimentation, after clojure in clojure ?
Is it fair to call this a similar service to Zapier that runs at a lower level of abstraction?

This appeals to me, because I find its much easier to express myself in code. Zapier is awesome because it makes it so non-programmers can link apps up, but as a programmer I'd rather work in pseudocode* like this instead, and this still keeps me from having to run cron jobs or respond to API changes.

Very cool!

*I realize its Lua, but I mean pseudocode to where I can just say twilio.sms and that magically happens.
Wonder if this might have any effect on Google/Motorola's licensing of the Droid trademark from Lucasfilm?
How easy is it for me to upgrade? I have been using Django REST framework for a while and this upgrade path seems scary. I looked at the migration guide but it doesn't say anything about what I should be specifically concerned with.
Wait until you hear it said in a commercial. It really makes you hate.
After reading a bit more about this, it seems that they are an established lab with protocols in line for the questions you asked about. The PI's last publication (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...) states that they are affiliated with Princeton, so dealing with hazardous materials etc are dealt with Princeton's Environmental health and safety dept.
The same applies to animals, radioactive materials etc.

It looks like a lot of the details of the experiment are purposely left out of the application as they are looking to appeal to the general public and I think that is a smart thing to do. Putting details into the application would make people's eyes glaze over, so keeping it simple was the correct way to go.

From my understanding of their proposal, they are looking to do something quite common in neuroscience research. While I personally haven't done autoradiography, I know people who have and it is a commonly(although not much now) technique that has been used numerous times.
To do this as a new lab, without university support would be dangerous, unethical and worrisome, but it seems clear this lab is already established.

What they propose seems to be an initial step in a nice project that could lead to something useful. Doing the anatomy (they are basically trying to see where the drug binds within the brain first) and then the molecular techniques makes sense and I wish more labs did stuff like this.
As a neuroscientist, I applaud their going outside of the system and I'm happy to see that they will share their data with everyone.
When Floodwaters Rise, Web Sites May Fall
PHP style node
Unless you're willing to take a long look in the mirror and recognize that the primary fuckup here was in abusing someone's trust, I hope this story serves as a cautionary tale to others. You can tell yourself whatever you want.
Well, I agree that he is about 80% wrong, but I don't think he's a charlatan -- I'm pretty sure he's sincere in his beliefs.