skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the same reason that anything has a mobile application, because generally they are easier to use. Why browse a website built for a 15" laptop when you can have application with the same relevant information perfectly formatted for my device? Sure you can make a mobile version of the website, and they are step up for sure. But they still do not offer the simplicity and ease of use of a good mobile application can.
You weren't kidding:

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGRPN

Brutal.
I'm sorry but I'm firm to believe that the problem lies to the mind that makes the distinction first. If someone sees Link and the first thing that pops in his head is "what a shame he's not a girl" and retcon the intended storytelling to keep the content on par with their expectations then I certainly can't blame the game's creator. Not to mention that the boy isn't always the hero. I'll just bring another Nintendo saga as an example, Metroid which the main character is Samus Aran.

I know that the problem is that there aren't enough games that a young girl can play who offer character customization and that's not just alarming but also shows that there's potentially a market for that kind of games. What bothers me is that parents do not understand that they can't keep their children grow up in a bubble. This is clearly over-protectiveness over something that might or might not be interpreted erroneously over time by his daughter.

What is he planning to do? "Patch" every possible subconscious connections that his daughter might make for the next 5-10 years?
Interesting. I believe the founder of ties.com lurks on HN periodically, as well.
The hardware Beanstalk purchased for their migration to co-location
There's the field of empirical computer science (for example http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~nasmith/erm/) - and I've seen a couple of articles recently pushing for a more evidence-based approach to methodology. No links, I'm afraid - can't find any - but it is out there.

Edit: the link I included is more to do with algorithms and the like, mea culpa, but there are also studies cited in books like Code Complete that cover what you mention. How recent, or how good the research is, is another matter...
Who gets the blame for the rest of the *kit concept and undocumented setup. Glad to see this stuff going, I could never figure out how to use it. Nothing had usable or meaningful man pages.
> I think the idea is that when kids are growing up, they make subconscious connections and observations about the world around them.

Let me say that, in my experience, this is absolutely true. I grew up in Western PA, in a place where we had to drive 50 miles to visit other asians, who weren't even also Korean. I certainly made subconscious connections and observations about the world, many of which were hugely skewed by my environment. For example, it took me until I was in my 20's to figure out that my parents were as sarcastic as any other people. Absent any Korean community in which to observe interactions in that cultural context, I absorbed this notion that Koreans just didn't do sarcasm, which is absolutely incorrect.
Elon Musk to keynote SXSW Interactive
Anecdotally, I think you got the wrong end of the stick regarding type safety.

I used to work for a defence contractor who avidly programmed everything in ADA with verified compilers and mathematically proved algorithms.

Stuff still broke because the algorithms and designs were wrong. That particular problem is far more problematic than type constraints.

Regarding BBC BASIC, it is strongly typed but all casts and conversions are implicit so you need to know what it's going to do:

REM win
p%=4;q%=4;r%=p%/q%;PRINTr%

REM fail
p%=4;q=4.0;r%=p%/q;PRINTr%

The earlier has no cast, the latter does.

When it goes wrong, it's not usually the code that's gone phut:

http://www.ntk.net/2000/07/14/dohtrain.jpg
None of your points has anything to do with "worth." Worth as we are using it is almost universally defined as the price an arms-length buyer is willing to pay for the total sum of an entity.

So Twitter is worth far more than $100mm. It's currently worth billions of dollars. Tomorrow, that could all come crashing down, but today, it's a fact. What you suggest is not anything remotely associated with fact.

Deciding a company is worth whatever amount of cash they have on hand, or have raised (you weren't clear on which metric you got your worth basis from) is really a naive view of valuation.

And now I'm sure I'll get flamed off News.YC like I always do.
Try the mushroom.
Kayak is great (was?) but Hipmunk is more than up to the task of filling the void if Priceline ruin Kayak.

Congrats to the Kayak folks I guess, when they got into the industry they really raised the bar.

Before Kayak I remember having to use Expedia and Orbitz and just having to accept their crappy UI because there simply were no alternatives.
There is always http://hipmunk.com, which I think has the best UX of any of them (although maybe it is lacking some features, but none I would use anyhow).

Edit: Doh, fixed the link!
Play board games w/ Jorge Garcia, Simon Helberg, Rich Sommer - Charity Auction
Perhaps OT, but I attended a YAPC in Montreal. What a fantastic city to visit, and the conference fit in very well. If you (speaking generally) can and your housing option permits, I'd recommend taking a couple of extra days to kick around town.
Hmm, I'm kind of interested. Your UI layout looks great. I might play with it at home a bit tonight to see what I can come up with. For future reference, here are some helpful things:

http://www.hnsearch.com/api
http://hndroidapi.appspot.com/
https://github.com/glebpopov/Hacker-News-Droid-API
Twitter hacked November 8th, major password reset in motion
Wikipedia adds video feature
I was 100% with you until the needless personal attack in your last sentence.
Tablet showdown: iPad mini vs. Nexus 7 vs Kindle Fire HD
Ok great, thanks for clarifying ^^
Google: Chrome has gotten 26 percent faster this year
That's hipmunk.com, not hipmonk; however, it looks like they own that typo domain and redirect it.
It would be interesting news if intervening with blood-pressure-lowering drugs led to a reduction in brain aging against a control group.

For now it's just an interesting correlation, and it's kind of disappointing to see the Heart Association making recommendations based on it, particularly since the evidence for the benefits of reducing salt intake is so weak.
Hang out with people who don't like weed and alcohol.
This is blogspam. Can we please instead link to the much better http://www.damninteresting.com/rapatronic-nuclear-photograph... ?
I don't know why anyone downvoted this. Some of the demos on the old archimedes platform were awesome.
These prototypes were developed by designer Andrew Allen https://twitter.com/asallen working with prototyping engineer Amit Pitaru https://twitter.com/pitaru

If you'd like to discuss our approach to color blending, I can be reached at https://twitter.com/cmchen
How To Be Remote (an e-book about hiring, managing, and being on a remote team)
+1 for !Draw. I nearly cried when I got my first PC which had Paint on it. I then spent 5 years dredging through various applications and I still haven't found something better.
I agree their UI is somewhat nicer, but they don't have all the features. In particular they don't have one way.
Clever IoT hack - umbrella reminder on rainy weather
High on Science: How do you get into a marijuana study?
I've got
http://placeguitar.com - Guitar Image Placeholder written in python on google app engine

http://themepiggy.com - Open source themes based on bootstrap - written in padrino - still a work in progress - I really need to get more themes up there as well and finish off some of the code
> Corporate pages are often translated paragraph by paragraph by humans which results in perfect raw data to train these algorithms.

Actually this may be one of the reasons why Google's Japanese translations are so terrible. The why isn't really relevant here[0] (perhaps you already know anyway) but it there are times when the raw data becomes the most misleading.

[0] Obviously I still mean those actually translating by hand, not the companies which just throw all of their material into Google Translate and consider it a finely proofed document. There are plenty of the latter which makes for an amusing loop in the system.
A few things that Australia has invented
118:78 right now.
Ask HN: Is it wise to learn OS X rather than staying as an iOS developer?
I have two years of experience as an iOS developer. I have now two opportunities: continue working as an iOS developer by adding major new features to my existing apps, or work on an OS X app from scratch. I think working on the OS X app would be great because I would learn more than in iOS at this point. However, I have the impression that there are more opportunities for iOS developers and Apple will eventually merge these 2 OSs.
Is there an obvious choice? Is there anything you would add to my analysis, regarding these two possibilities? Career wise, is it more promising to say I've worked with both iOS and OS X or would only iOS be better?
+1 for awesomeness :)
> What is he planning to do? "Patch" every possible subconscious connections that his daughter might make for the next 5-10 years?

Maybe the plan is to make a bunch of noise about it so eventually game creators get used to the idea of catering to both halves of their audience.

I hope it works.
Obvious solution is obvious. Children need to be forced to play more Metroid.
As of this month, here are the best fitness apps for iPhones.
You mean by having Captain Kirk do commercials for them?
"Hang out with boring people" isn't good advice, because it's very difficult to follow.

Try finding something you'd rather be doing than drinking with people in the evenings. But that's also not very good advice. I'm not sure if there is good advice for this, but I was in a frat...
I certainly didn't mean it as a personal attack, and am sorry it came off that way.

I was trying to say that it if the parent writes clean, clear, and efficient code, it might qualify as the sort of beautiful code that people are striving for.
Why I'm bearish on Apple
Numpy is a dedicated library where the critical code is in C, but that's a library, hardly a language feature. I don't know if there is any numerical processing library in Ruby.

Cython is not intrinsic to Python either. I see there is a ruby2c gem, but I have no idea how it compares to Cython.

As for pypy, that's about switching to a different runtime, the same way Ruby people would go to JRuby.

None of this turns Ruby into apples and Python into oranges, I'm afraid.
>There are traits of a good programmer that are immediately evident to any experienced programmer.

Replace the word 'programmer' with 'coder' and you might have a point. Whenever I hear the word 'coder', all I can think of is shelf-stacker. A coder writes lines of code, a programmer builds products or 'things'. All the rules and standards regarding code belong to coders - they have nothing to do with finished, shipped, or successful products.

But what do I know? I've only been building products for 13 years. And I'm drunk.
PeerConnection is an API now enabled in vanilla Chrome.

http://www.webrtc.org/blog/seeyouontheweb
you can jump to 6 minutes and read the text to save time. chinese voice starts at about 7:30.

it is pretty neat.
Skip to 8 minutes to hear the actual translation.

I'd love some comparison - that doesn't sound like the same voice to me (awfully close to the 'standard' computer voice, IMO), but some of it is crummy recording quality, and showing the flexibility would go a long way toward convincing me.
If you are talking about the Tortoise and the Hare, I personally also identified the tortoise as a male, but the hare as a female. It's just how the words sounded in my head.

I have not read GEB; perhaps it's a different tortoise you are talking about.
Habitable-zone super-Earth candidate in a six-planet system found
Samus is hardly an exception; put into a suit that erases secondary sexual characteristics, the question of gender was (in the first game) left until the last possible minute, as nothing more than a "gotcha." In future games, Samus's gender is still hidden behind the suit.
Well, that probably beats C#. Are you in the finance sector?
Social= Discovery

Search= Conversions
This is what I said/discussed over 200 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3870044

It still has another billion to go (now at an equity value of $2.56bn), I guess that shorting now hasn't got the upside/return it had 200 days ago.
Relative volatility of KYAK was 3x the normal amount during the day. The news was released after hours. Long live insider trading!
Pseudoscience
Great question!

As far as diet and exercise go, researchers from UCLA conducted an experiment. They found that (in mice) a high fat diet reduces the level of brain derived neurotrophic factors. These levels are a predictor of how well you will learn. However, exercise can counteract these effects.

Dehydration causes a range of neurological problems. Essentially, if you don't have enough water to cleanse your system, your body starts using amino acids. These amino acids would normally be used up building neurotransmitters, so, this can cause all sorts of problems, from what resembles ADHD, to depression, or even conditions that look like autoimmune disorders.
ChesSMS: Using Unicode to play Chess over SMS
I don't like any of the existing travel sites, so even had to write one for friends and family (we like pick a random place and just go):

http://www.somewherenice.net/

This was put together over several weekends, so don't be too harsh on me. :)
I created a disposable email service - http://dudmail.com - this was a interesting exercise to attempt as I didn't have any experience dealing with mail servers before this.

It's been moderately successful (as far as disposable email sites go) - there's about 5000 registered users, a few hundred active users, and after a year or so am on the 1st page google results for "disposable email". (I'm number 7 on the page, but at least it's the front page =)
I speak bad Japanese after having worked there for a while. But Japanese is extremely context dependent. They leave out a lot of words and you just deduce the meaning. (Don't hit me if that's wrong, but that is what I remember thinking back when I was learning it.)
I think you need to read the entirety of tptacek's post.
Maybe that's why so many places in the US still have shitty internet - to teach the gamers to cope with lag better.
Have you ever heard about http://www.trustedfamily.net/
I think they are doing a great job offering a comparable service to rich european families.
Reason in open source press
The article does implicitly address why this is an alternative to Facebook. "We feel that your work life and your social life have been well-addressed online, but no service has truly helped you stay in touch with your family".

Facebook is not for intimate conversation with your family. Path is mobile-first and isn't as big of a thing (yet). Google+ allows you define circles but is rather complicated. As with other spaces where network effects are important, only the biggest will survive and the biggest currently (Path/Google+/others) do not address the family niche conclusively (product wise/platorm wise).

The real question is whether the family niche itself is an important enough one to a large enough base of people. It makes more sense to assume that this is the case...than not right? The upside here is pretty huge if there's something to it.
Speech Recognition would probably be best fed in the same way - find a neutral-sounding speeches for which transcripts exist.

Best would be parliamentary speeches with transcipts, and the closed captioning for national news programs. The main constraint is storage space/computational power.
We looked at a number of color blending algorithms that operate in the CMYK colorspace. None of them work well. Ultimately, colorspaces are designed to solve the problem of representing colors in isolation, not color blending.
Perhaps having a DB.sql script, plus a data generator and/or a dump of the data before doing the branch plus auto-create & load the data when switch.

Yep, look like not as easy I think at the start of the reply...
This is a very cool hack, and I support the intention behind it. Still, it is something I would never do for two reasons:

For one, as an author, I disagree with altering a text for a political purpose. To be sure, this instance is fairly innocuous, and parents frequently change bedtime stories on the fly to suit their kids. Nevertheless I consider the Legend of Zelda to be a text with its own mythology and themes, and just as I wouldn't rewrite Hamlet as a girl for my daughter, I wouldn't do it to Link.

Secondly I think it is important to teach kids to have role-models of BOTH genders. Two of my brother's biggest fictional role-models growing up were Wonderwoman and Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell. In the same way, girls can learn leadership and toughness from male protagonists and heroes. I'm not accusing this father of not knowing this, but it would be my approach were I playing Zelda with my daughter.
Hipmunk looks interesting, haven't seen it before. Minimalist is the way to go, I think. Can't stand busy travel sites that try to be everything to everyone.
IPhone 5: Summary of Case Reviews
>You can ship all the code you want, but even if it's lots of mediocre code, it's still mediocre.

The code might be mediocre, but that doesn't mean that the product is mediocre. Pristine, beautiful code, that forms part of a bad product, is like a soprano singing the most god-awful piece of bilge anyone has ever heard. Doesn't matter how good her voice is if the song is rubbish and makes everyone cringe.
29 Brilliant Minds Share Uncommon Content Strategy Advice
I doubt you are being productive. You have to isolate yourself from distractions (on a college campus this is most likely people).

If you really are studying with perfect productivity, then you need to ask yourself if you are triaging your time properly. For instance, say you have three tests: one easy, one medium, and one hard. Do you study equal amounts for all of them? Probably not. If you have already spent seven hours studying for the hard test, how much will one more hour help you? Maybe an 85 to and 87? But then if you spent that hour on the medium subject maybe your grade would jump up from an 80 to a 90. Thus your time would better be allocated to the medium test.

There is an economic concept about this though I cannot remember its name. Marginal Returns and the Law of Diminishing Returns, I think.
How fast can your browser calculate all 255,168 possible Tic Tac Toe games?
How Snow White Helped Airbnb's Mobile Mission
Honest question: Why do we want to pay for this?
More interesting still -- the mottling is from the remains of the casing and the shot cab (the little building the bomb was housed in at the top of the tower) splashing against the shock front at the fireball's boundary.

(http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Tumblers.html)
Because not every site is made for every platform. But also, I enjoy reading HN but leaving to one site and then coming back to HN its a bit of a pain. Also lets not forget every site has a different layout, banners, distractions, etc.
This article presents a false dichotomy. There is no reason why you need to sacrifice code quality for the sake of speed of development. "Getting things done" is a hugely valuable skill, but don't conflate having that skill with meaning you are too busy to code clean. Productivity and beautiful code are not mutually exclusive.

I write very nice, commented JavaScript that employs consistent whitespace and indentation and validates in JSLint all day long. That's just how I do it and I'm way faster than the coworkers of mine who code things quick and dirty.

You reach a certain level of expertise and your code will just naturally have these qualities. It will be both beautiful and will be developed quickly. Senior talent gets this. Junior talent doesn't.

This was a thought provoking article though. The main takeaway is that "getting things done" is the most important skill a programmer can have which I completely agree with. For the sake of other developer's sanity, clean code is so important too. Ugly, sloppy code takes longer to read, more effort to maintain and is frankly demoralizing and tiresome to work with. Clean code for me is probably right underneath getting things done on a skills ranking. Ideally, good developers would have both...and my experience shows that good developers do.
The New Gumroad Blog
I have no doubt a few more long years will have to pass until those solutions reach the mass market, but this is extraordinary especially for someone like me, passionate about travelling. Our generation witnessed the shift towards cheaper flights, easier accommodation booking and web/mobile tools growing year by year becoming more helpful in organizing our visits and seeking information about places and cultures we don't know. We, or the future generation, will probably witness the fall of the language barrier, it's truly amazing and one of the most important shifts in our global experiences.
> They tend to happen because someone is trying to address a personal need

This I understand and do not contend.

> and decides to share their solution with the world

This is marketing, not necessarily for the money. It may be for recognition (yeah, I too know the "high" feeling when somebody comes to you and says you're doing something cool); for the hope that more people will join in so you get to be the leader; for having a non-trivial (hopefully) successful project to put on the CV; to feel yourself useful to the community, etc, etc.

Bottom line: when you make something publicly available, you're marketing it. You're "selling" your product in exchange for some of the immaterial goods (see above) that you can get only from other people.
I've found Google Flights[1] to be a much better experience than either. It is stupid fast and has a great interface for comparing prices if dates are flexible.

[1] http://www.google.com/flights/
We're lucky enough to have founders that are designers and engineers, and we have a design-driven process and a commitment to high quality standards. It's a pleasure to know you'll get the chance to get things right.
Facebook Explains How It Built A Better MapReduce System With Corona
Some (Facebook) times UX mistakes are so simple
Hipmunk definitely does one way, just don't fill in a return city :)
And only Metroid? Or can you produce a list?
repost: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096793 [202 comments]
Although (to the extent that SpaceX has accomplished it so far anyway), what SpaceX has done is what the Russians had done.

Competition is good. (Though I do admit I see NASAs expertise more in the experimental/exploratory.)
This is the second time Deep Neural Network research from the University of Toronto has made the front page, the first being when it won first-place in a Kaggle competition http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4733335
From the Kayak IPO S-1:

In particular, for the nine months ended September 30, 2010, Expedia and its affiliates, including its Hotels.com and Hotwire subsidiaries, accounted for 25% of our total revenues. Also during this period, Orbitz and its affiliates, including its CheapTickets and ebookers subsidiaries, accounted for 19% of our total revenues.

I guess Priceline wants to get a first shot at all that business, and then to get paid by their competitors for bookings they don't get.
I guess I'm missing the Manned Moon Missions part. Something about an L2 base, the only thing about actual moon missions is something about "teleoperating rovers".
Go for all the feedback you can get, harsh or not ;)
I do the same. All my personal gh repos are public. And I push as I work, I don't wipe commit history.

I'm no one special, and I seriously doubt anyone looks at my code, but, if someone ever did, they'd see work in progress.

Just like the code base at work. Nothing's brilliant the first time out.