skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just picking your last question out of context to (re-)state what should be obvious:

Committees are bad, because you will never know what color the bikeshed should be.

You have exponentially many possible interactions between people in a group and any important information will almost surely get lost in the noise. Big committees are a wonderful stage for personal feuds, intrigues and outright sabotage (already in the formation phase).

The results you'll get will mostly be based on lobbying, popularity and whoever barked the loudest, not on benefit, cost, feasibility, let alone constitutionality.

OTOH, I don't really know what would be better. Smaller "committees", more like expert groups, can give better results if the right people are selected. Which is unlikely, given the present state of governments. At the moment it seems as if the best strategy is oversizing and over-bureaucratizing to slow down the process and limit the amount of damage done in that way. Meh. :-/
Show HN: The rsync.net Warrant Canary
The big VC firms are increasingly trying to do early stage angel investments to get their foot in the door, so to speak. They will likely have better advice at the early stage than they would have a few years ago because they have more experience with companies at that stage.

Also, Andreessen Horowitz added Chris Dixon (a very well known angel investor) as a general partner, so I think this speaks to their intentions of being able to help companies at an earlier stage.
That's for the querying part, but how did you deal with indexing ? If if understand right, you seem to precompute pretty much everything you need on the fly, so I guess that means custom data structure not relying on SQL algebra, so no pkey / fkey table like and index that would let you write new queries after you've stored the data ?
Betting Site Intrade Shutting Down For U.S. Customers
Heh. Are people from these universities so smart or do other people think that they are smart because they graduated from these universities? Are YC startups good or does YC make them good? Who knows.
Here's more university statistics though: http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/29/study-startups-led-by-stanf...
Oh, hush.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
Interesting, though using "position: absolute" for everything would be a problem on varying screen sizes (or for a more complex UI). The CSS3 flexibox module can accomplish a lot of "app" layouts pretty easily, however (and you can mix and match!).
You're wrong. (IANAL).

Let's say I'm a freelancer, and I enter into an NDA with company X. As part of the NDA, there is a definition of what exactly is the information that I need to keep confidential.

Now, my lawyers will push for a definition which is very specific and very explicit. How? They'll want Company X to mark every piece of confidential information with some kind of "confidential" mark. This way, I know explicitly about every piece of information that is supposed to be confidential.

Now, I'm guessing this is the same basic logic that big companies use when having this disclaimer. Anyone they've signed any kind of confidentiality agreement with might need to be explicitly told that this information is confidential.
A "Warrant Canary" is explained a bit further, with some historical context, in the wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
The problem with UTF-8 is that lots of tools have 3 byte limits, and characters like Emoji take up 4 bytes in UTF-8.
Leaping Brain's "Virtually Uncrackable" DRM is just an XOR with "RANDOM_STRING"
I know that you shouldn't mix Jessica Livingston with secretary - many people do, they say.
Since you're going for a responsive design, you should definitely look at the available screen real estate. The reason for this is because, it allows you to display your responsive design without worrying about not detecting new devices - which is why I personally believe trying to detect User Agent strings will become out of date.

This article is pretty useful: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/mobile/mobifying/
How would they gain access to capital? Even though our markets have/had issues, they do enable somewhat ready access to cash - of course, if the company has traction in the market, revenue, etc.
"They were getting paid already for the value they provided to the company"

Not to pull the marxist analysis card BUT: bullshit. They were being paid an agreed upon percentage of the value they provided to the company. In this case the owner decided to share the "surplus" value with those who generated it - which for some reason makes you feel uncomfortable.
CFTC Cracks Down on Intrade
I believe it was an example in the Perl Cookbook, but for picking a single line only. (Ancient UseNet thread: http://bit.ly/Thd4eE)
The section labelled Changing the magnitude of units at different x-values seems to indicate an actual error rather than any true 'technique' as only the last value doesn't match up with the axis labels. Though, it seems unlikely that it was an accidental error.
So I'm a cheapskate and don't want to bother with the BFG edition. Can I compile this and use the data off the original Doom3 / Resurrection of Evil CDs I have lying in a box somewhere?
Extend Twitter Bootstrap Javascript Plugin Library
2 Years of Personal Kanban in the Classroom
In general I suppose it is bad if people can't be honest with their feelings. As one extreme example, I think post-pregnancy depression is actually quite common and can even drive mothers to suicide. Since they can not talk about it because they are supposed to be happy, they often don't get proper treatment.

As for helping people evaluate, that seems tricky. How could you simulate the experience of having kids? I guess most people just extrapolate from what they see around them and what they experienced in their own families. And on the case of unwanted pregnancies it wouldn't help anyway.
They can be cast the other way, too. No?
its not just a custom lisp (which i wouldnt be too worried about) - its a custom db.

i wonder how much engineering talent is going to get sunk into writing a db and whether the management is going to get fidgety while the company's best talent is writing a db rather than the product? (especially with .. two guys)
Rap genius founders looking for girls with swag.
Ask HN: Do you zoom in to read webpages?
As a man d'un certain âge, I'm wondering how many of you read webpages at the default zoom setting of your Web browser, and how many of you zoom in on pages to make the text look bigger for easier reading. I think I am older than most participants on Hacker News. I almost always zoom in on webpages, from time to time discovering webpages that aren't designed to be easily resized. (Hacker News is well designed for zooming in.) What is your practice in reading webpages? Do you take every page with its default settings, and use your browser with its default settings, or do you resize pages?

I normally use Google Chrome as my main browser on my dual-monitor Windows 7 office computer, and it stores my preferences site by site. I usually zoom in on any given site until the main page text goes all the way to the edge of my screen, which typically is about a 175 percent zoom. I am designing webpages for a couple organizations right now, so I am testing on a variety of computers, monitors, and browsers, to make sure that what I design doesn't break with viewed with different hardware or software from what I habitually use. I've been reading up a lot about the latest advances in responsive Web design and the new versions of HTML and CSS. I suppose most of you are younger than people who need to adapt in this way, but I have become very conscious of middle-aged people with presbyopia as I browse websites, and I want to make sure the sites I build are friendly for them.
The problem with what this doctor and other Obamacare opponents are saying is that it will not massively increase the number of people who get free healthcare. If someone simply cannot afford healthcare, they should he covered by the number of federal, state, and private programs already available.

The biggest increase will be from people who do not have insurance available to them through work and those who cannot get coverage due to pre-existing conditions. Yes there will be people in that group who also cannot afford the coverage but currently make too much to qualify for other programs such as medicaid, but that will be a minor segment.

As for me, I have been self-employed for 15 years and have several significant pre-existing conditions. I have been turned down numerous times when trying to purchase insurance. Even my wife has been turned down simply for having seen a doctor about headaches. The thing is I could afford even the outrageous non-group rates but no insurance company would have me.

Now they can't do that. I am able to purchase insurance coverage from a private company with my own money and pay my own co-pays and deductibles. To a doctor me and millions of other people are no different than any other patient with private insurance.

It is extremely misleading to say that Obamacare is all about giving out health care for free. It is mostly about giving us the right to purchase insurance with our own money. Even those who get payment assistance from the government will often still be purchasing their insurance from private companies so there won't be anyone other than the same insurance companies dictating how much a doctor gets paid.

In fact, one of the greatest (non-imaginary) shortcomings of Obamacare is that there is nothing in there to keep doctors from pushing fees higher, abusing the fact that everyone will now have insurance. When doctors already charge 2-3 times as much when a patient has insurance, this sounds like a major windfall for everyone in the medical profession.

This doctor clearly does not understand Obamacare and apparently this article is more about expressing political views than anything else.
I understand Balanced is trying very hard to get into CA as well, so they may be a viable solution for you soon.
The "Pretty Girl" Paradox
Dealing with difficult clients
Bullshit. A simple operating system is not much work with respect to getting a kernel off the ground.

Back in the old days before the pc took off and people started expecting abstractions for everything conceivable, this was a normal part of a project. At university, I was tasked with building an rtos platform for the m68k. Took about a month from zero knowledge to working multitasking os with DMA, memory management and protection and a virtual machine which ran plc-style ladder logic.

The only problem is if you start with x86, you're going to have to fight the layers of fluff that have built up since the 8086 (ldt/gdt/long mode/segments/pci bus/shitty instruction set etc).

I'd go for ARM.
Zim - A Desktop Wiki
I work in "publishing"... and we have to develop mobile apps because advertisers want to display ads on mobile apps. They want interstitial with video, they want fullscreen ads...

It's sad and it's wrong for the user's experience but we just have to do this. If we don't have our mobile apps, advertisers will give their money to competitors.

I won't send a link to our crappy apps, they are too crappy indeed.
Apropos: http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-encoding

TL;DR:

- Javascript engines are free to internally represent strings as either UCS-2 or UTF-16. Engines that choose to go USC-2 tend to replace all glyphs outside of the BMP with the replacement char (U+FFFD). Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari all do this (with some inconsistencies).

- However, from the point of view of the actual JS code that gets executed, strings are always UCS-2 (sort of). In UTF-16, code points outside the BMP are encoded as surrogate pairs (4 bytes). But -- if you have a Javascript string that contains such a character, it will be treated as two consecutive 2-byte characters.

var x = '𝌆';
x.length; // 2
x[0]; // \uD834
x[1]; // \uDF06

Note that if you insert said string into the DOM, it will still render correctly (you'll see a single character instead of two ?s).
> Although the app is small, it’s easy to imagine that a larger app made of multiple components such as this could also be made to feel just as native.

It's easy to imagine, but in my experience, doesn't match reality. Unless things have changed drastically in iOS 6, CSS can be incredibly redundant. Imagine that you have a feed with a lot of drop shadows + gradients on, say, comment buttons on each feed item. Even though the dimensions and styles are the same, for each DOM element, it's going to recalculate layout and re-rasterize the graphics. So while things may be snappy in a mockup, with real data, often times HTML5 (really the CSS) will be exceedingly memory hungry and slow to initialize, thereby killing the experience.
The first big chunk of time is getting data into a usable format. Customers (internal or external) all have different data formats, and nothing is consistent. So you write parsers, deal with the corner cases, and get data into a form you can analyze.

Then you have to write software that lets you both experiment and release your models to production. That involves writing pipeline architectures to apply things like feature extraction and pruning in a consistent way, and to make sure the result can be serialized and deployed. Off the shelf packages typically haven't solved these problems very well, so you have to make sure the thing that looks good in the scripting environment is reproducible on new data.

Then when you have a model and can deploy it, you start working on automating the training process so the model automatically adapts as new data comes in. Usually the customer has gotten the impression this was happening on day one, so you have to rush to deliver it.

Then, you deal with customer complaints that something that would have been obvious to a human is wrong even after they corrected it.

At some point you try to measure the gains you're offering over the non-ML system you replaced, and try to tweak those metrics until they make you look good.

If you're lucky, you got to experiment with some interesting algorithms somewhere in the middle, but you probably got the best results from something fairly standard like random forests and not the latent bayesian slice sampler you dreamed up when you first heard about the problem.
indentured servants on Mars! hooray!

Sarcasm aside, this actually sounds quite possible, and all other things being equal, I might even be interested.

Funny creatures, those humans
An Evening with Google's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt
Another factor is that for much of the past two decades, there was a self-fulfilling prophecy that real estate prices would continue to climb indefinitely. Buying a home was a no brainer decision that would bring asset appreciation and tax deduction benefits to the owner.

Post 2008, I imagine that much of the country is unsure that such a price increase will occur over the next decade. Faced with an uncertain future value of a home versus a defined cost for renting an apartment, perhaps more people will choose renting to avoid facing cognitive dissonance over this matter.
Marketing Hacks for iOS: How we got 250k downloads in 4 days
PRWeb Statement on Fraudulent ICOA Press Release
How about: People should be able to trade freely. People should be free to associate. If people want to form cooperatives then they should be free to do so.
Yes it was, in 1991 when NT and Java and Cocoa were new or under development. In 1996, Unicode 2.0 came out with surrogate pairs and astral planes, and Unicode was no longer a 16 bit encoding.

I'm pretty sure work on V8 started after 1996.

More likely is the idea that the authors of V8 felt that UCS-2 was an acceptable speed/correctness trade-off.
App that converts .htaccess redirects for servers that don't support it(IIS)
>I suspect even with GPS failure they could run entirely on atomic clocks, it would just increase their uncertainty

Using GPS is an operational convenience, not a necessity, I would think. If GPS didn't exist, they would have to have a master atomic clock, say, in Mountain View. Then they would have to bring each remote clock to Mountain View, synch it with the master, and then ship it (running continuously) to its final destination.

I remember perusing an HP catalog in the late eighties. You could buy a portable "traveling clock" for around $40,000. It was intended to be used to synchronize remote clocks. Here is a 1965 article from the Hewlett-Packard Journal, which describes the process:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/1965-04.pdf
Why you get sick when flying
you have to understand that YC & the start fund has little to no control over the companies, except perhaps moral authority.

YC has common shares (and a small minority at that) while the start fund is arguably even worse off with a convertible note.

so, if the founders decided to, they could just pay out the rest of the money as a bonus. immoral? yes. illegal? i don't think so.
We consider the SnowShoe Stamp to be superior to NFC because, unlike NFC, our technology works on the vast majority of existing smartphones, including all iOS devices.

As regards QR Codes, the vast majority of the population finds the scanning process to be too cumbersome and counterintuitive. Several surveys have shown that only about 10% of current smartphone owners are able to correctly scan a QR code.

We think our tech is significantly more intuitive (the user experience is exactly analogous to that of using an inked stamp). In fact, we've launched punchcard loyalty apps with zero training for the POS staff at two separate coffee shops in Madison, WI, and both times, the POS staff were able to figure out how to authenticate purchases in less than thirty seconds.

It is very hard to communicate how intuitive the Stamp user experience is without actually trying it in person, so, if you'd like, shoot us an email at snowshoe@snowshoestamp.com and we'll send you one of our developer stamps to play around with.
First, its not off CID, its off ANI (ANI is what is passed to the remote endpoint when you call a toll free number), not that you cant spoof ANI - but often it can be a little harder, as its used in billing on the telco side.

Second, every bank does something like this, I can access my credit card by phone with just the last four digits of my account number, and by calling in from my phone. I can do the same thing with my BofA account number in lieu of my SSN.

Third, again, every bank is like this to some extent - every CC I have, if I call in from my number, and key in the last for digits of my credit card, I can get info. I should also point that knowing someones Tel Number, Account Number and/or CC number is a considerable amount of info to have.
Honest question: but isn't that just a broken implementation (and a very obvious brokenness at that)? It seems to me there's a big difference between someone not coding to the standard, and the standard making your taks impossible.
Antifragile is Nassim Taleb's new book, which debuts tomorrow 11-27. I very much enjoyed Tabel's conversation on EconTalk [1]previewing this new book, and am looking forward to reading it.

[1] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/01/taleb_on_antifr.htm...
Misread your comment earlier. Actually 150k is enough to secure an H1B, all other things being kosher.
Right now: doubt it, but couldn't hurt to try if you've already got the proper environment to compile it anyway. Give it a few weeks and I'm sure someone will "port" it (if nothing else, likely for Doom3 mod compatibility).
Seems fitting: the birth of QNX itself was Dan Dodge and Gord Bell collaborating on writing the operating system for the computers that they had respectively homebrewed. (I don't know if this is still true, but for years dtdodge had the computer he had built in his office -- it was an amazing piece of engineering, with the hand-made modem in particular inducing a kind of slack-jawed awe.) Motivated by Unix (and implementing it originally in B, if I recall correctly), they called their OS "Quick Unix" or "Qunix" -- which (after a brief infestation of AT&T lawyers) became QNX. Point is: great things spring from motivated amateurs.

Oh, and agreed that Tanenbaum was right. ;)
I don't think it's specifically a 3-byte limit, I think it's just that lots of tools decode UTF-8 into UCS-2 internally instead of UTF-16.
The animations are smooth and I wouldn't be able to tell if it was native or not based on what the app can do.

The problem is, the app doesn't DO anything. There's no scrolling. There's no loading anything from the web (except for the blurry non-retina ads). There isn't anything in this app that makes it a candidate for an app (vs a website) in the first place.
Also related:

Map of accelerators around the world:
http://god.dinopost.com/fullscreen.php?layer=1

Based on the post of Silicon Valley Economics here:
http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/27052637228/silicon-...
The Zurb responsive tables solution is the best I've found for souping up basic HTML tables to work across devices. I've got it integrated with Bootstrap too.

http://www.zurb.com/playground/responsive-tables
https://github.com/zurb/responsive-tables/
The way to get around that is to remove drop shadows as scrolling starts. When the scrolling is complete add the drop shadows back again.

Drop shadows and alphas are the main issue, just need to manage them.

It's easy to do with a single css class added to the main body tag (i.e .isScrolling).

Then in the CSS use .isScrolling .myDiv { / no shadows / }

// On scroll start
$('body').addClass('isScrolling');

// On scroll stop
$('body').removeClass('isScrolling');

Works a charm!
Please, if you're going to post text to a Gist at least use the .md extension:

https://gist.github.com/4151124
3rd Year ECE + Hope . How did this make HN?
And I thought the social-proof's "Hot tech boy of the week" was stupid. But this is just really really stupid.
Yes, and several C/C++ conventions and types seemed to make that a safe choice, for example wchar_t. Let's face it, collectively we really screwed this one up. It's the biggest mistake since Microsoft chose the backslash as a path separator in DOS 2.0.
On iOS, using any non-basic Latin character in SMS makes it switch to 16 bit, even when there is no reason for that to happen. It's a thing that most foreign language speakers must live with.

By doing this full of excuses write-up, this guy wasted a substantial amount of time that he could have spent better researching the issue. Your consumer doesn't care that Emoji is this much or that much bits, it doesn't matter for him that you're running your infrastructure on poorly chosen software - there is absolutely no excuse for not supporting this in a native iOS app, especially now that Emoji is so widely used and deeply integrated in iOS.

How is that a problem they are focusing on, anyway, when their landing page features awful, out of date mockups of the app? (not even actual screenshots - notice the positions of menu bar items) They are also featuring Emoji in every screenshot - ending support might be a fresh development, but I still find that ironic.
Greenspun's tenth rule in action!
Emoji NPM package for Node.js
By the look of it, no, but I'll have to check the source more later.

You could try watching the price of the BFG edition in the upcoming Steam Winter sale.
Untrue! I know "kernel people" who use Vim, too! :-)

However, my impression is most of them edit code in MSVC, build with the DDK tools, and debug with windbg/ntsd/kd like most other driver developers.
Indie game Beat Hazard earns more on PC than on X360+PS3+iOS combined
Cosmo? Really? And on top of that, a post that's essentially a collective dating profile?
At Heroku we call it Postgres in all things and at all times unless we're referring to official community stuff.

It's a much better name, and it's the original name, and I hope some day it will be the only name.
My fiance works at cosmo and gave me the heads up that they were in the office. Was wondering how bad the interview would be.