skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great work, Ed! Very interesting and informative....

Looking forward to seeing more quality content in the future!
'XML became terrible for all jobs' ... you do realize that there are literally hundreds of billions of xml encoded documents out there, happily doing what they are supposed to do ... not trolling; but lets put some of the comments in context for what they are.

XML in its original role of extensible markup is thriving and completely successful ... as I previously mentioned, I am glad we are not slinging around angle brackets and happily use JSON instead.

I agree that XML was hijacked during its hype cycle to do a lot of jobs it should have never been intended to do ... AJAX (see the X) was a side effect of this, and we moved on to AJAJ ... evolution sometimes needs different routes to get out of local maxima.

Note also that there is a very long tail of XML vocabularies that you will never use or hear about that get extended and reflect their authors intents, w/o nary an agreement required between you (or I) to get real work done.

HTML5 though is where I have the problem (in terms of XML Failure)... baked in controlled vocabularies ... hmmm, what happens when your tag (or attribute) du jour doesn't pass muster with the WHATWG ?

I console myself by saying that both XML and HTML5 are part of the same markup family, just a short term family dispute for the time being; never bet against markup (or data for that matter) as they tend to stick around a lot longer then the programming languages that generated them.
"They want government involved in ensuring a level playing field."

Is that what governments do? I couldn't tell.
I had to look up "walking a slackline"... fascinating! How long did it take you to learn?
Megastorms Could Drown Massive Portions of California
Coding is to solve problems. You don't just go up to a text editor and say "hey, I just want to type some random pieces of code."

If you have to drag your feet into encouraging yourself to code more, then maybe coding shouldn't be your thing.
Google for professional athlete lifespan.
Ask HN: Why do we minify JavaScript, yet not HTML?
Sites heavy on JS often have minified, obfuscated (at least, the names are replaced) JS files. However, many sites have huge amounts of whitespace sticking around in their HTML. Why don't people "minify" their HTML?
It definitely is more relaxing in a remote place, and that sometimes leads to less stress and anxiety. But I think in a remote place you need a lot of self-discipline or intrinsic motivation to keep focus and create some amazing things. In a high-density area (ie, Bay Area) there's a lot more distractions, but because of the high energy sometimes it can help with motivation (ie, peer influence) to keep focus. In a high-density area, I find it helpful to take regular getaways out of town.
This kinda hit home for me. I live in the city I grew up in yet hardly have any friends here. I work remotely with people around the world and my best friends are thousands of miles away and we meet up any various places around the world.

Definitely feeling the need to strike a balance.
For one, I would say that mainstream is the filter bubble; big media doesn't have freedom of speech whatsoever. Newspapers are especially boring repeating the same rehashed stories everyday. For most of the mainstream community, this is all they know. I would argue this is the cause of our society's serious problems.

I'm a programmer so for me mainstream translates to Singleton<FilteredWorldEventsStream> mainStream; and that's, as Steve Yegge would say[1], a case of the Simpleton pattern; as a fun note, it's about the appropriate LISP to C++ translation too!

If this were the only API offered to you, you'd probably hack your unfiltered stream library on the side too; oh but it's C++ and everything useful is private under proprietary licensing, good luck. Isn't that how open-source was born in the first place? It seems to be doing pretty well compared to proprietary mainstream software nowadays.

Secondly, I believe sticking to your own world is a very good thing. This is where your imagination lives, this is where you create links between ideas to better picture them and therefore understand them. Be it for art, science or faith, this is where fresh ideas comes from to then be adopted by the mainstream, who forgot they too have this ability.

People don't participate in governance because they believe it isn't their 'job', they did vote and it ends there for them; they just had a hard day and want to spend the evening watching American Idol, the results of a consumption society. Our society is based on work for money, not work for the bettering of said society. Otherwise we wouldn't need marketing, public relations, sales, and other jobs we had to came up with to keep the illusion of it all going on.

This led me to disconnecting from the mainstream. However, you don't really disconnect from the community since the internet provides an open and free media platform to build your own filters upon; it also happens to build critical thinking. What you disconnect from is the endless stream of bullshit goods and services produced for the sole purpose of profits going through the mainstream pipes.

I've always liked to view capitalism as a dog chasing it's own tail; produce goods or services to make money, to spend on goods and services. If it does so for a while, you'll notice all the money going to the center due to the centripetal force of its circular motion. Why isn't society about collectively working to go forward instead of in circles? Mainstream.

I'm not for anarchy either, that's just as bad on the opposite end of the spectrum. But the open source model would definitely be interesting to apply to society as a whole; drop the ideas of government and corporations, structure society as an hierarchical flatland and let everyone contribute to everything they want to.

Until then, I'll be quietly hacking away since I actually learn useful things that way, which I can then use to help create a better world.

[1] https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/singleton-consider...
I use 5 monitors. I can't overstate the productivity edge this gives me, particularly for web and web/backend dev.
Here's the link to the original publication: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.32...
You can ask Seth Grant (sg3@sanger.ac.uk) or Tim Bussey (tjb1000@cam.ac.uk) for a preprint
Steal My Book
What are the odds you'll cross paths with the wife of a random person from the internet?

Your comments (and the others saying this should have been anonymous) are really saying that you think scottmagdalein should feel ashamed about this part of his life -- in his replies he's telling you that he doesn't. It's worth reflecting on why you feel that way.
>In my opinion this would be great a service if they provided online backups as well similar to Dropbox.

It would be nice if you could access the drive you send them online as well, perhaps.

Edit: My bad, they do this too.
Thanks, happy you like it.
Show HN: GitHub-style user autocomplete
Curious, how does Portland compare from that standpoint?
If you honestly never win, then you have an excellent opportunity to develop amazing emotional strength. Here's what I would want from you, if we were friends and you asked me for advice:

1. Don't give up.
2. Never complain. Take the 30 day no complaining challenge[1]. Not complaining is about focusing your mind on positive things, because complaining and thinking about negative things is self-reinforcing and makes you more sad. The only way to go for 30 days straight without complaining is to re-form how you think, and it worked wonders for me.
3. Read Letters from a Stoic.

[1] http://www.acomplaintfreeworld.org/
http://startup-dna.tumblr.com/
It's new, but you might like it as well...
There have always been lots of startups working on crazy sounding ideas, since the first batch. I don't think the proportion of those has changed.

(If anyone is wondering why we don't just reject all the startups with crazy sounding ideas, Airbnb was one of them.)
the O(n^2) thing sounds reasonable until i start to think about it. but then i get confused. that's some kind of cost, but my naive interpretation (number of partners scales with applicants, so total interactions is n^2) spreads that cost across O(n) partners, so the cost per partner is O(n).

what am i missing? am i just being too literal, or have you identified some real process that is O(n^2) per person, or is the total cost more important than i think? or am i just being dumb?

or maybe even handling O(n) per partner is too much. i guess that may be all it is. my initial reading was that O(n^2) explained why 66 and 84 were so different (when linearly, they're pretty similar).
You have support via GDC and LDC.
The dream of the medical tricorder
I don't think I can give them up entirely. I find them to be a valuable pastime and an occasional source of inspiration. I have always had a tendency to limit myself to putting any real time into a few (2) big games a year. The number of games that I find worthy of my time also diminishes as I get older.
Must be due to the Series A crunch eh?
Don't know if Derek has children. They sure make you intensely local. While raising a family, if you have a company/product that is aimed globally as well, then you don't have much of a choice in focussing globally if you are to succeed. The choice is not necessarily so stark for others as it is for Derek. I do understand his personal preference and that's perfectly fine.
It's rather amazing how far this has come in a very short time. Excellent post, John!
I don't know about static sites. I would imagine to be very beneficial, in terms of bandwidth, to minify HTML.

But I once worked on a Facebook-like SaaS, and minifying HTML had huge performance hit on the back-end, since we used templates, not a proprocessor language such as Jade or HAML.
pendatic. His point was that YC's expertise with advising startups comes from doing YC, not from selling Viaweb to Yahoo (it was, but only at first)--just as Apple's expertise doing the iPhone came from doing the iPhone, not from making computers (it was, but only at first). Whether Apple made the first computer or not is irrelevant to the point he was trying to make.
Sharp to Introduce PN-K321 3840×2160 LCD Monitor
> numbers to the power of two which would include two, four, six, eight or two, four, eight, 16

Ah, yes. Who could ever forget "2 ^ 2.5850"?
I enjoy P90x because I do it in my small home office. Its perfect for the non gym goer in my opinion. The results are good. I just do the slow carb diet with it. I hate looking at a 'diet plan'. I lost over 50lbs this year. Right at 15%bf now. Good stuff.
I tried julia last week looking for an R replacement. I was pretty excited but the web REPL is broken on the current OSX build. Try as I might I could not get the web repl to run when building it myself.

It still seems quite immature, but I'm very excited about it's future.
There is additional information on the Japanese website. In Japanese, obviously.

http://www.sharp.co.jp/lcd-display/corporate/lineup/k321/

And pictures.

http://www.sharp.co.jp/press/p121128.html
Yep, we launched this at AngelHack this weekend. Would love feedback on the approach from the HN community to find out if this is a viable product.
Making “doing it right” easy
YAML is better suited for configuration files.
The whole trend of giving kids names after popular products reminds me strongly of Idiocracy. Is this how it begins?
Couldn't whitespace-stripping be done as a function of the templating language? I suppose spitting it out verbatim is cheaper, though.

EDIT: Wait, isn't that something the template compiler could do?
ChromaNope - A Web-Based Color-Blindness Simulator For Websites
I think it was the right decision, as said, the result of going mainstream, has started to show, if instinct of more than 1-2 partners say that its better to slow down a bit >> rethink >> adapt then its best to do so. Slowing down won't hurt you in any way.

Perhaps the answer is quality, due to a overshoot of no of companies funded, the quality went down, and then it hit you guys, that 'hey! the last of many haven't been any AirBnB or Reddit' so its better to slow down a bit, and let the levels go up again on it.

"Excessive fishing in a lake can be best balanced by under fishing" that is what this looks like to me.
About 5 days I think to be able to mostly walk without falling.

(The crazy tricks I won't even try, because that kind of agility doesn't go well with my body weight/motor coordination - I'm one of those kids who could never do ollies :P)
via Functionn - Open Source Resources For Web Developers & Designers: http://functionn.blogspot.com/2012/11/chromanope-color-blind...

P.S. Functionn contains a whole lot more of awesome resouces like ChromaNope. There only a fraction of them I can post here at a time. Take a look if you're interested, and subscribe:

http://functionn.blogspot.com
This is a nice way to see how the DFT is computed, however I find the view of the FT as a change of basis as even more important - generalizes easily to other bases and and one can understand easily wavelets and their advantages. Basically, the sinusoids form a basis of the vector space of functions (every 'non-pathological' function can be written as a possibly infinite sum of them) and the numbers computed by the FT are coefficients for the respective basis vectors - the magnitude of these coefficients is interpreted as the strength of the corresponding wave in the original signal.

Another way to see the FT is as the basis where the convolution operators are diagonal - this is used in image processing, where computing the FFT of a filter + entry-wise multiplication can be much faster than running the convolution at each pixel of the input image.
We're phasing out the web repl since it's not actively developed anymore. At some point I'm going to take a crack at providing a Julia backend to iPython Notebook [1].

[1] http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/interactive/htmlnotebook....
Do people still trust their governments? Because I sure as hell don't - and I live in Germany, probably one of the more democratic countries out there.
The Fourier Transform can also be thought of as part of Linear Algebra, because it's actually funding a representation of a given function in the basis consisting of sin and cos functions (or complex exponentials).

See, the collection of non-pathological functions is a vector space. We add elements by adding the functions pointwise, we multiply by a constant in the obvious way, and the other requirements can be checked. Functions form a vector space.

And vector spaces have bases. One basis for the vector space of functions is the collection of sin and cos functions. Thus we can see that finding the Fourier Transform is just finding how much of each basis vector we need to make the function.

And as we know, the amount of basis vector u needed in the representation of a vector v is v.u, the dot product.

Thinking of it this way starts to make connections between all sorts of ideas.

Added in edit: I see the same sort of point made by dropdownmenu in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4862228
The effective supply of bitcoins can increase if we invent ways to trade existing bitcoins faster (such as convenient apps or exchanges). This is why the Federal Reserve needs to know the "velocity of money" when determining how many dollars to put out there -- half the dollars moving around twice as fast is effectively the same availability of money.

A similar thing happens if people end up issuing bitcoin-denominated debt instruments and then trading those rather than bitcoins directly. A good example is if you and I both have 100 bitcoins in our accounts at a bitcoin bank and I send my coins to you -- the bank could do that transaction without having the 100 bitcoins in reserve.
Agreed. I like JSON and I think it's the better choice for serialization and data exchange in many cases where XML is used today, but pretending it's the magic alternative to anything you could also do with XML is crazy, and it only shows a very limited understanding of what XML actually is.

Transformations, schema checking, xpath queries, well defined linking and embedding, a host of tools that support applications of XML on every platform, the list goes on and on. JSON has none of this, it's basically exactly what its name says it is ('JavaScript object notation') and not much more. It covers maybe 10% of what XML and all its related tools and standards are. The current trend seems to be that XML is 'old technology' and all the cool kids use JSON, and it bugs me. You can't possibly sincerely say JSON is 'just like XML but less verbose' unless you simply don't really know much about XML at all.
I like this way of thinking about it, but I think it is not quite accurate for discrete Fourier Transforms. In this case, we're not projecting onto the space of all sinusoids, only the space of sinusoids whose period is a multiple of (1/N). We could probably prove (if we wanted to try) that those form a basis for the vector space of N-long complex vectors, so using any more sinusoids would be redundant.

However, I believe the continuous Fourier Transform works exactly like that.
Here's a bag of dollars. That should be sufficient.
A good diet does not imply being calorie deficient.
I love optimizing front-end including HTML outputs, even prematurely so. My sites are low-traffic and lightweight anyway, but for me this is a form of zen.
The article uses the magnitude of the coefficients, which is computed using both the real and the imaginary part.
Not sure. We simply used a templating engine. Either a) we didn't take the time to read the documentation properly to find out if there is an efficient minifier, or b) there isn't an efficient templating engine that minifies.

I'm betting big on using preprocessor languages, such as HAML, or Jade.
You may want to test our site on iPad. An overlay(?) with a smiley and a frowney covers 80% of the screen and doesn't go away.

(edit) Random poking and frantic scrolling seems to have done the trick. The overlay is gone. This is a great idea, but ...

Once you have the encryption in the picture, you'll have people like myself asking why can't you mail me a drive with a preformatted TrueCrypt container, let me mount it with a native TC client, change the password, run a backup and mail it back to you, so that you'd stick this .tc file into the cloud (or wherever). Repeat on monthly basis, perhaps even with the same drive, so that I could do a differential backup and be done with it faster.

This is something that I would pay for "from $24/month", some further conditions apply.
If you ever need Inspiration "my friend jason by Shot at The Dark"
s/stable marriage/early mission to Mars
We wouldn't want to share everything on our list of predictors of failure, because some would stop working if applicants knew about them. Some though are things applicants could only fix by actually making their startups better, so I should probably write something about any of those I haven't already talked about.
Take care with Go PR, and don't mistake languages with implementations.

Java compilers to native code:

- VMKit

- gcj

- Excelsior JET

C# compilers to native code:

- Windows Phone 8 deployment

- NGEN

- Bartok

- Mono with -aot

Additionally C# has control over memory layout via pointers, aligment attributes, marshaling, structs and generics.
Doesn't seem to work for me (FF 17.01, Mac OS X 10.6.8).
Man and Van London Removal Services
Your website's HTML isn't minified ;)
With the majority of websites, the content is changing the majority of the time which means the HTML has to be compressed after each change & sure they’re are scripts to do this but in comparison, CSS/JS files are rarely changed – they’re generally changed when a new feature/design is implemented.

Another reason is because, websites are becoming more dynamic & it’s not very cacheable – CSS/JS are extremely cacheable. Since on every request you have the extra task of running minimization on the complete HTML of a webpage (especially if your website is dynamic and you’re using a script to do this) and this is time you could have used to transfer data.

Moreover, there are other low hanging fruit that most websites need to tackle first – minimizing HTTP request, removing unnecessary images, minifying images, minifying & combining CSS/JS.
Just curious: what do you use to minify? In an earlier comment, I said that most templating engines that I used don't minify. You'd have to write your own minifier. (I used Jinja, by the ways.)
In that case, I think that's what they're going to be working on over winter break for the next iteration of the class. At the very least, I'm sure it's a possiblity; there's obviously no guarantee that it is practical or will get done.

I think it's a good idea, personally. It could also make many of the assignments more interactive.
As is explained, you don't even need to project. What you do is a change of basis, which is to say no information is lost.
Actually the thing that struck us most this last cycle was the huge number of (often unpromising) startups that had already raised several hundred k. If anything it seems like there is a glut of early-stage money, not a dearth.
When will we see support for Mac/Linux for video transcoding, it appears only Windows is supported at this moment.
Hum, suddenly, the $80/hr I charge as a remote freelancer seems low...
>extra task of running minimization on the complete HTML of a webpage

Of course that would be slow, but if you have compiled templates on a dynamic site, could you not strip out whitespace at compile-time?
Winning? How do you define that?

If it's one big goal - "I want to be an X" - well guess what, you're going to have to have a thousand smaller victories to get there. And by the time you do get there you're most certainly going to have bigger goals beyond that on the horizon. Otherwise life will get very boring.

It's the messy room syndrome, for you only have two hands you can't will the whole thing into becoming clean at once. You have to pick some part of it that you can handle and make it clean, then move onto another part. As you make your way through interesting patterns will emerge that will allow you to clean smarter, so the first act of cleaning will go much slower than the last act. You still only have 2 hands, but you have something else - wisdom.
C yuck!

Nowadays I won't change the power and extra safety given to me by C++ with C, unless requested by customers, which no one was made since 2001 in my case.
Usually collections.defaultdict is faster than collections.Counter. But the latter is more concise to use.
I don't think XML is good at all for config files or UI/UX component markup, but for me that's mostly because of the end tags. Other formats, such as YAML, are able to describe hierarchical data without the verbosity of end tags, and I think that makes the files much more readable.

In fact, I think it's fair to say that WPF and all of Microsoft's config and resource file formats inherit their use of XML from mimicry of the Java ecosystem when C# and .NET were being developed as an alternative stack to Java. Android's inheritance is more direct, since it's based on the Java ecosystem. And as we all know, the crazy hype phase that XML went through was hand-in-hand with the crazy hype phase that Java went through. If Java hadn't happened, XML probably still would have as an improvement over SGML, but it probably would have remained the simple document markup language that it's pretty good for rather than becoming the "XML Everywhere" beast.