skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That depends on which concept of "number" and which foundation you would accept as a basis for doing arithmetic.

I would expect any useful system of arithmetic, offering addition and subtraction, to contain some concept of "nothing". Because if a is something that might be subtracted from anything else including itself, we have the result that a - a is something we should be able to talk about, namely nothing.

If you accept a sufficiently strong set theory as a foundation of mathematics, for example the Zermelo Fraenkel set theory including the axiom of choice (ZFC), it is possible to use the finite ordinal numbers - which are actually sets - as the natural numbers.

From the ZFC axioms we have the existence of the empty set, often denoted by a pair of empty brackets {}.

We can then define numbers by using the empty set:

0 := {}

1 := {0} = {{}}

2 := {0,1} = {{},{{}}}

... and so on. By this definition zero is a number.

On the other hand, by defining numbers on the basis of set theory we seem to accept that numbers are sets. Some people will have very different opinions about this matter.
Habits are Cues to Innovate
Slightly fewer, because we used the last 3 interview slots each day to have another track re-interview startups we were on the fence about. That was one of our new techniques for avoiding mistakes. IIRC there were 20 slots both times, so we therefore invited 17/20 as many startups as last time.
Whoops, boneheaded mistake on my part. Deploying fix, thanks a ton for the heads up!
If someone (like me) is having trouble visualizing, http://dave.whipp.name/tutorial/fourier.html
I really dislike the trends I'm seeing in infographics. It's information porn with no substance.

- The sources are very vague, there's no way to
verify anything for yourself.
- There's no indication of statistical significance
- Visualizations are not accurate, such as the
"salary by experience" graph which even by visual
inspection is not to scale.
- The connected line graph from "C" to "Other" under
salary by company stage is meaningless and misleading
- The visualizations are for the sake of visualization,
not for clarity. See "Average # of companies
competing" section
Box paradoxes
The funny thing is that there are native code compilers for C#, like bartok in Singularity and Windows Phone 8 deployment with MDIL.

Languages are not native or managed, implementations are.

The way .NET is currently deployed on Windows and whatever else might be happening, is a result of internal politcs at Microsoft.

If they wish to do so, they could go fully native with lets say .NET 5.
For my taste, there are too few information on the site. Here are some questions I am having:

1. What kind of drive will you send around? Spinning disk? How much capacity?

2. Is there a special software that customers have to use or could I dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb?

3. In case a full clone is okay (see question 2), which filesystems are supported when I want to retrieve a single file online?

Also, here are two observations:

1. It occurs to me that the time for a full backup is much higher than an incremental backup. You should probably cover on the page whether you support incremental backups or not. Having a slow computer for many hours could be a deal-breaker.

2. The claim about other backup systems trying to force some kind of organization scheme on you (can’t quote since the page seems down) is vague. I have used various backup solutions (bacula, obnam, custom rsync scripts, bup) and none of them has forced me to do any re-organization of my data.
Here's a good explanation about whitespace in Python http://www.secnetix.de/olli/Python/block_indentation.hawk
It's a shame AJAJ is harder to pronounce than AJAX. We need a new term CEOs can learn to say. Then when they start demanding we use this latest technology, we'll be ready.
More scare tactics to reduce our civil liberties.
The way you write already suggests intelligence. In what ways did you try to prepare for that networking class? It sounds as if they didn't provide anything for you to cling to if you weren't already familiar with the territory?
Riviera typically places people for senior positions - their business model is to charge a retainer percentage (25-30%) salary for a placed candidate, so it's not economically viable for them to deal with five-digit salaries at the low-end.
Not sure what you want me to be googling for. all the studies point to longer lifespan.

"In conclusion, this study found that overall, professional football players had a 46% lower overall
mortality rate than the general United States male population with a similar age and race distribution"
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/sports/28longman.p...

and there is a massive difference between professional athlete and your claim of "getting to much exercise"
I'm pretty much all "var" all the time.
tptacek, whenever I read your stuff, I think "he gets it".

I bet stable founders have more stable relationships with their SO's.

Dave Ramsey writes about how his company uses dinners with spouses as a part of their interview process. They won't hire anyone "married to crazy". They also fire anyone who cheats on their spouse. I found his book quite misogynistic and offensive (not to mention having the worst title ever), but I wonder if he's onto something.

The idea of YC (or any company) using personal relationships as part of their filtering process makes me extremely uncomfortable, but it's interesting to think about.
YAML, which is a superset of JSON, adds the potential to be just like XML but less verbose. It never went through the same kind of hype though, so the tooling is not nearly as pervasive.
What are the salaries engineers would expect in Berlin in a startup/non-startup company pre/post taxes? Few examples or ranges would be very helpful.
This article appeals to our deepest and most widely-held educational values, which makes it all the more dangerous, being wrong in several ways.

The author rightly belittles the concept of talent but it seems to have found its way in through the back door: “Two of our four turned out to be musically gifted and before long were shuttled out of Suzuki to hard-core classical violin teachers.”

(Talent is just the way we describe people who have some competence in a field which is inexplicit; nobody knows why they are good, otherwise one could learn it.)

Another thing to point out is that apparently none of the children have developed careers in music or composition (yet), so it remains to be seen if they have any creativity intact.

Why might they have lost creativity in adulthood? Because of childhood coercion. Those long hours of practice -- children don’t do that without being forced. It can be subtle, such as the worry of a slight loss of parental affection, sibling rivalry encouraged, etc.

Children will play for hours on end and this is where true learning occurs. Some children are bright enough to make their ‘practice’ a form of play, so they manage to improve despite appearances.

Creative adults continue to play, it’s just that the subject matter appears more serious. But progress remains open-ended, with stops and starts, switching between activities, and unpredictable (not ‘guaranteed’) results. The unpredictable nature of achievement follows from a law of epistemology: we can’t predict future knowledge (including our own).
I think the Apple doc is slightly inaccurate: the OpenStep part which include a graphic user interface was not available on HP-UX but the non graphic part: WebObjects, Enterprise Objects Framework, and Portable Distributed Objects was available.
Looks like Wikipedia has avoid history of OpenStep:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep
I've been following Tonido for what feels like 5 years now, and I am always impressed by what you guys do. Keep up the great work!
Paul, of course, it's far easier to write out a suggestion than to
actually do it, and free advice on the Internet is seldom worth what you
pay for it. Anyhow, my idea might help...

I might be misunderstanding your "ahead of the aircraft" statement, but
personally, I think it's unreasonable for you to expect YC partners to
be "ahead" of the startups in a batch. In fact, if YC partners are not
behind in understanding a startup, then that startup is in trouble. The
startups may not have the benefit of experience possessed by the YC
partners, the startup founders should always know the state of their own
business and market better than the YC partners do.

I believe one of the reasons why you regularly advocate being concise is
due to your own personal overload problems as well as the stated problem
of all YC partners not keeping up with all of all of the issues in all
of the startups in a given batch. It's the classic many-to-many
communication problem where the ability of partners to assist and advise
startups is limited by their ability to stay informed.

Even if you're never able to isolate every single metric a YC partner
should know, identifying as many of these metrics as possible and having
a reporting mechanism would still reduce the load on YC partners. Though
its not publicly known, I'd bet you do already do something along these
lines, either formally or informally. Your "growth.html" essay seems to
hint in this direction. None the less, making improvements to your
identification, collection, and reporting of useful metrics should still
be a worthwhile investment.

I sincerely doubt you would want my help implementing a startup metric
collection and communication system, but I'll offer to help anyhow. It's
a fascinating problem and it seems like a really fun challenge.
Ah, thanks for the info! I mean stuff like how you need a power adaptor, a USB wifi card, USB hub, etc.
Minifying dynamically generated files on the fly is harder than static ones (Its obviously possible but you have to take it into consideration) & there are some cases where it actually might decrease performance as, every page request requires minifying.

Personally, I think the benefits of minifying your HTML won't pay off until you're receiving a significant amount of traffic anyway. Which is why, for the large majority of sites they'll see better value through minifying/combining their CSS/JS and tackling the other low hanging fruit first.
I think they are trying to speed up the initial backup phase. Uploading 300 gigs of data is no fun. Once they have the data, it's trivial to make the contents accessible via the web/native interface if that's what the client want.

But this would dillute the focus of the service. It'd become just another Dropbox clone with a minor twist.
I'd suggest you make it easier for people to read the specifications. The html is minified into a single line, making it impractical to read the source straight out of github.
Thanks for the great feedback. Yeah, we need a lot more explanation.

Basically the point we need to get across is that you receive a drive and you can put data on it however you want. We provide a helper for you, but if you want you can use whatever backup mechanism you'd like. We just take the data and sync it to Amazon Glacier then resecure the drive.
Why C++ is back
We met at HackFwd Build 0.9, I was the 16-year old cofounder of Holalabs, one of the finalists of Pitch In Berlin. I just wanted to say... congrats!
A list of supported countries is a must have.
No iOS (MobileSafari, Chrome) support yet, it seems. At least not in iOS 6, on an iPad 2.
Very soon. It is under development.
I don't understand why Airbnb was considered as a crazy idea and I hear literally everyone refer to it as an example of crazy idea. I always thought it was a genius idea from the first time I heard about it. But the way I see things, it doesn't matter what the idea really is as long as there is a market (not too big nor too small) and the team's ability for solid execution of the idea (kick ass product, partnerships and vision).
>As financial, economic, and political crises of all kinds continue to erupt
>all over the planet from time to time, demand for Bitcoin as a currency or
>store of value of last resort should gradually expand from niche markets to
>the broader population.

I don't buy that argument. There are all sorts of measures that people take during crises (barter, for example) that they don't continue with when the crisis fades. A true test of Bitcoin would be to determine if Iranians are still using Bitcoin after the current crisis fades and the sanctions have receded somewhat. If they're still using Bitcoin then, you can make the case that Bitcoin is displacing the Iranian real as the currency of choice in Iran. But otherwise, all this proves is that Bitcoin is temporarily more convenient than the current currency system, which isn't a very strong assertion at all.
Will we ever solve the niche appeal vs. universal acceptance problem? Lots of stuff has this problem: Movies, TV, music, games (all entertainment really including Facebook.)

That's what this article highlighted the most to me. It's hard to make something that feels small and personal and quirky yet appeals to everyone. If you make something beautiful and targeted inevitably someone says "Hey! You should expand!"

I had this conversation with the owner of a tiny Japanese steakhouse in Tokyo where I had the best steak of my life. There were only like 8 tables and I was there alone so he sat down with me and we talked for a half hour. He told me how many times he had been approached to expand to other cities or the US over the 30 years they'd been open. But he didn't want the stress and he didn't think he could deliver the quality of meal if he did. Sushi and ramen places are like this in Japan too. They may be the best but they often stay small.

I think we've lost track of that in the USA and particularly Silicon Valley (or maybe we never had it.) Would we be happier if Facebook had stayed elite university only and there were 100 social sharing websites for different niches? I dunno. Probably not. But I think we're also learning that one size fits all social is not as interesting on a massive scale as we thought it would be. Path isn't doing that well either though. Maybe the best we can do is subreddits. God save us.
ForFreedom: this community is mostly more pragmatic than that. People will use html5 when it can fulfill all their needs.
Yehuda Katz - Why Rails is Hard (Railsberry 2012)
How big are said monitors. I think 2, maybe 3 is my limit (although the screens are pretty big). Can't imagine being productive on 5.
I think the problem is that we're all interpreting this differently... I'm not saying you should force relationships at all. I'm saying cutting someone off just because they're going through a rough patch is no way to treat a human. You can afford to slow down your life a bit to help out a loved one.
So essentially you are doing what Amazon already offers (http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/), just cheaper (currently) and with a regular schedule?

I hope you have a lot going/planned in the UX part and would love to hear about it :-).
A Google A Day
The page states they are "working closely" with E-Ink Corp., and even plan to have color versions by 2014, so maybe they're just showing off the most recent tech (which may or may not end up in the actual gadget).
This looks like Small Data. Here's why:

<5 years work experience:

T20 school => $102,500

non-T20 => $123,300

... which seems to be counterintuitive, with more prestigious schools correlating to lower salaries, but stranger things have happened.

5+ years of experience:

T20 school => $128,500

non-T20 school => $123,100

In other words, the people from non-T20 schools stagnate as they cross the 5-year mark, while the T20 students improve considerably. That makes no sense, because the effect of a T20 degree is highest early in one's career.
Awesome!! Glad you were able to reproduce the effect! :D
#3 is also usable from the shell in a similar way:

echo '{"foo":1, "bar":[1,2,3]}' | python -m json.tool
I like this idea, but often economics isn't the only thing at play. Imagine for example, after 28 years, Halliburton wanted to make use of a John Lennon song in their advertising (pun not intended). Seems unfair that John (or his heirs) would have to pay to keep it from being used in this way.
Many kids also hate programming. It's boring, sitting there in front of a screen all the time, typing in incomprehensible text that the computer throws back in your face because you missed a comma here or a semicolon there. There's a huge groupthink bias here in favor of programming as the solution to all problems here at Hacker News because we're all programmers and we tend to frame problems and solutions in a way that makes them amenable to solving via programming.

That's why I suggested that we need to figure out what sort of math education works, rather than suggesting a particular alternative. There is research showing what kinds of mathematical education is effective. I posit that we would be much better off asking for those results to be put into practice everywhere, rather than foisting yet another folklore-based curriculum onto our already overburdened teachers.
How does Instagram develop their filters?
I tried Julia recently and am very excited about it as well, especially with the addition of DataFrames. The only thing that worries me is the disorganized nature of the Base and Core packages. I fear that 5 years from now Julia will have a mess of functions in the global namespace like PHP, rather than a clean standard library like Python. Is this fear misplaced?
Hi Peter Sisson here from Line2 - I cannot replicate your problem, but I'll certainly have our ops team take a look right away.
Thank you for the advice. It is a single line because it was parsed from the specification.muse file, which should be quite human-readable (to a certain degree).
I will put the specification into README.md.
I'm not sure how I feel about legalizing it but part of me thinks we don't need yet another substance that will make people more likely to act like idiots or endanger others.

I get the idea of having the freedom to do what you wish with your health and body but it just seems inevitable that there will be more people abusing it, using it as a gateway drug and causing negative affects on society. I can't really think of anything positive society as a whole would gain from this except maybe tax money?

[Edit] Then again, a lot of this can be said about alcohol. I'm not sure which one is easier to abuse.
I'm curious how you get an app's keywords? I didn't think that information was public. For example I tried your lookup for my app and it was incorrect.
'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.

I sure do. I perhaps should have conceded that once you get up to the level of Large Enterprise Monstrosities (LEMs), you have something almost by definition "terrible" (or at least messy from the viewpoint of smaller, more coherently architected systems) and thus in that situation, I might not, maybe, have any basis for criticism.

But still, one thing I'd speculate is, that that one attribute/value ambiguity problem just might be sooo bad that even in the realm of whatever-monstrosities-that-have-meld-together-messy-stuff, XML would do better replaced by a different whatever-monstrosity.
How Qt's signals and slots work
How is it determined who is on which of the three interviewer groups? If it's static, is there a group with a higher acceptance rate than others?
That link seems broken; it works for me by changing fv to just v.
Look for cofounders, not ideas
You might be right, but what's your alternative? The current state of affairs wastes a lot of money and ruins lives.
manage growth --- always the hardest thing for startups and those around them
Maybe it is the large batches themselves. What if, instead of a bi-annual intake of two large batches YC moved to an always open intake with classes starting every month. That is, to stream many small batches continuously. Effectively running 12 academic years concurrently rather than 2.

Everything from lean manufacturing to project management has come out in favour of the small batch size, maybe the thing to do is to work out how to split the existing large batches into many smaller batches.

This might also help increase your learning as you would have a much tighter feedback loop.
I must be one of the few who thought that XSL was a great way to build visual interfaces to data, in browsers that support XSLT (this was an area where IE had an very early advantage over other browsers, not sure what the state of things is today). Sorting, filtering, drilling down... all trivially easy and declarative with XSLT, once you groked xpath. Yeah it was verbose, but otherwise great.

There are some similar approaches for JSON data now, I think... but none are standards-based AFAIK, meaning they are mostly single-vendor or project solutions.
ClickFacts still operates, although it doesn't have such astonishing story as Reddit does.
More info: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/08/05/y-combinators-first...
> Maybe the best we can do is subreddits. God save us.

Sub reddits are just Usenet on the web but worse, rather than anything social.

Maybe if Reddit added a profile page with some social stuff (for paying users?) they could destroy Facebook.
I'm working on ticket on rails http://www.ticketonrails.com an easy customer support tool dedicated to startups. Check it out, it's free!
The site is also hard to view in landscape mode on my Android smartphone. I can't see below the step #s, and scrolling down doesn't seem to work either.

It's a cool idea. Maybe you can partner with (or be acquired by!) BackBlaze.
This is a pretty good intro to DFTs. I was excited to see that others were also motivated by the connection to music and math! I looked into this quite in linear algebra in college and found Benson[1] and Smith[2] to be really thorough and interesting resources on the topic. Hope they help others!

1. http://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/mth192/pages/html/maths-music.ht... (free pdf)

2. https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/mdft/ (skip down to applications and the digital audio number systems for a preview)
I'm willing to pay some premium for Apple RAM, particularly if I'm not the end user of the machine. I also buy AppleCare for laptops, and AppleCare+ for iPad/iPhone devices, and increasingly, just get AppleCare for desktops, Mac Mini, etc. too. (I used to just rely on Amex Platinum 2x warranty extension, but that's a more annoying process than being able to just take it to the nearest Apple Store for OS or hardware diagnosis and repair.)

The purpose is to have a single point of contact for repair. Not having to personally figure out if the RAM is defective on someone else's machine is a big plus for me. Being able to have the entire thing drop-shipped directly from Apple to the user, also. It depends on the premium -- for a personal Mac Mini, I'd probably do the RAM through Crucial for $50-100 savings or more. If Crucial didn't exist, and I had to go hunting for "good" RAM every time, I'd probably go Apple for $200+. (it is so fun getting a $200k box of RAM for servers, especially left on a porch with no signature required, though. The actual RAM/chip distributor in Fremont that had an 18 person triad armed robbery a few years ago was amusing.)

The annoying part of all of this is that there are some machines where you must pull the drives before any warranty service. The correct thing to do is to have an Apple service rating internal to your company (it costs $200-300 I think, and not much training), but I've never gotten around to it. Lack of swappable externally accessible drives is one of my only complaints about Apple hardware now.

(OTOH, my personal 2010 MBP 17 actually has Crucial RAM, a Crucial SSD 512 in an optical bay adapter, and a 750GB drive in the main bay, all aftermarket. The Crucial drive failed and required repeated disassembly and RMA and firmware loading on another machine, which consumed about 4h of my time, which kind of sucked, and makes me a lot more likely to stay 100% Apple in the future.)