skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's just see how this might work. Here's a question phrased both ways.

When do you use traceroute?

How does traceroute work?

In my experience, anyone can make up some kind of answer for the first one. There's enough wiggle room in the language to let them say "when you need to trace a route", only using different words. This establishes nothing in terms of the candidate's abilities.

The second question is harder to answer without actually knowing something about the problem domain. Granted, I've had plenty of people flat out lie and make things up rather than saying "I don't know", but there are ways to catch that. If they try to memorize the answer, perhaps because a question is becoming too popular, then they'd better hope they learned it all the way down to the bare metal, since that's where I'm going to take them.

Incidentally, for candidates who say "I don't know" to the second one, a good followup question is "Okay, how would you build one from scratch?". The people who know the domain but simply haven't dissected that particular tool will be able to reinvent it on the spot. That's when you say "are you sure you didn't know this?" to make them feel better about themselves.

Those who don't have any idea about what goes on with IP will be stumped.

This assumes perfect performance on the part of all involved. Bad food, butterflies, jet lag, and other human anomalies can and will affect you.

So, bringing this back full circle, maybe you don't know how a B+Tree works internally for whatever reason, but could you build one if you had to?
I don't like the solution on the page you linked. Try using it in Firefox with "zoom text only" enabled and do CTRL++ several times. The footer occupies half of the screen right now. Luckily there's Firebug / Aardvark to get rid of it.
Signaling is important in the maintenance and direction of culture. Whoever made this decision is making a statement about what sorts of projects they want google to work on in the future.
Internet porn: Automatic block rejected (UK)
If one person develops a theory and makes ten predictions which turn out to be true; and if a second person observes the same ten things, and then develops a theory without knowing the first; then I consider this stronger evidence in favor of the first theory than of the second. (The second might e.g. be more elegant, in which case I might prefer it anyway.)

This is true whatever the observations are. If they're unsurprising, then we already had a good theory, in which case I question the need for the two new ones, but that applies to both equally.

It may be that Kurzweil is falling into the trap of misinterpreting his results to fit his theory, but that can be done just as well when you try to base a theory off existing data. On the other hand, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy can only happen if you collect data before coming up with your theory.
That's the DR bit.

The TL-Did-actually-read-and-am-summarising-this-for-people-who-won't is exactly the opposite of what you've just stated.

He exhibits foresight bias.
From reading the Wiki page on B+Trees, it seems they are just a way to store data so that is is always sorted. If I ever needed to store data in such a way that it is always stored, I'd use a database+index. I don't know B+Trees because I've always reached for a database when I needed to do what B+Trees are good for. I've never had the need to learn B+Trees.

I haven't had the need to learn many low level things. Not having a computer science background, there are tons of things I don't know, but those things just don't come up ever in my day to day programming life (other than interviews).
> What other standards have appeared that support calendar, contacts, and tasks sync?

IMAP + IDLE, CalDAV, CardDAV?

Whether they are a 1:1 feature replacement is another thing, but they are options.
favicon.ico for my label-less bookmarks please :)
> I don't know of any cars that are specifically designed to cause harm to people.

You should really learn to use the Internet one of these days. I hear it makes you less ignorant about the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_armored_cars
Ever heard of CalDAV and CardDAV? There is a world besides proprietary protocol crap out there.

When will people learn...
None of the other stuff supports push very well.
Code On: Math and algebra speed up TCP.
And tasks? Plus that isn't really comparable since now instead of depending on a single connection (ActiveSync) you now need IMAP and a WebDAV server minimum.

This entire area has been so controlled by Exchange Server for so long that there really aren't many true alternatives. The WebDAV based ones are messy at best.
Actually this isn't a bad model: If you use software to easily create syndicates, you could raise a few months, assuming you keep your burn at two guys in a garage.

Kickstarter meets angel.co

If you put money in the company, it's completely through standardized docs that say it is uncapped convertible debt.

So you can create rolling syndicates of people that each contribute $50 or $250 or $1250 dollars.

This is done publicly, and is a way for angels to signal mild interest in a company in a public way.

Conversion should not be triggered by an investment under $50K, to prevent the argument that the early investors bought equity at the same price as YC.

It makes the market for equity in startups a little more efficient.
Actually this isn't a bad model: If you use software to easily create syndicates, you could raise a few months, assuming you keep your burn at two guys in a garage.

Kickstarter meets angel.co

There could be standardized docs that say it is uncapped convertible debt. Conversion should not be triggered by an investment under $50K, to prevent the argument that the early investors bought equity at the same price as YC.
Okay so people don't want to appreciate this guy. That's fine because it's nothing as big as it is tooted to be but let's also understand that he's not doing the tooting - and nor is he doing this to gain attention to himself... it's to a philosophy/policy that he wants to gain attention to.

1. He knows what he's doing. Only a fool would actually make this crazy idea so public.

2. $37 is nothing and he accepts it publicly so let's keep those "it's cheap, it's a spam, it's a joke, it's crap" comments to ourselves :)

3. It's not a speculative offer: at least, not after it's got so much public coverage and someone will be snooping around to see if he keeps his word. So $37 for focused publicity is pretty good.

4. In fact, he's doing a good thing. Most startups need nothing but exposure and connection with the right people. A few good men talking about the startup on their blogs gets a lot of good for the startup.

5. The part about convertible debt is going to be very debatable... and downright condemned but his investments in the form of time and contacts-expertise is going to be more than what a million-dollar VC would invest.

6. or in short, "it's not about the money."
Ask HN: Why do you want to start a business?
What is is that compels you to start a business of your own? Dreams of freedom? Money? Success? Autonomy? What is the key driver? I mean, you know there are a lot of hurdles and endless hours of work, and no guarantee of succeeding, so why do you feel you still feel you have to do it?
Why don't you just pay someone reasonable to host an ActiveSync compatible mail server or mailbox for you?
why would you upload to imgur when you have droplr running?
An interesting set of questions to follow up this fair hypothesis are:

Is it better or worse than existing religions? In what way? Societally? Individually? Scientifically?

Is it better or worse than no religion? In what way? Societally? Individually? Scientifically?

Religion is arrogant, for sure. And it all started when some of our very distant ancestors decided to bury their dead instead of leaving them in a pile of trash. Which, interestingly, is considered one of the defining points where we became "humans" rather than just intelligent monkeys.
Keep in mind that Google has to pay MS so that you can use some non-standard MS protocol.
There are alternatives.
I thought GoInstant was for sales mainly.
I'm using IMAP IDLE for a few years now on my android phones.
Works like a charm and is not slower then ActiveSync (which i also used some months, on the same account).
I get email notifications between 1 and 10 seconds after they are in my inbox.
screenception
HN has more than its share of misinformation. Just because people use big words around here doesn't mean much.

As for WIRED, the journalistic quality has been going downhill for years. I stopped my subscription back in 2004.
Under some version control systems, you can commit to your own local repository, which no one else uses. When you're ready, you can push your repository out to others.

With Mercurial, git, and other such system, you can auto-save without affecting others. Only when you push to trunk (if that's your development model) could you break the build.
Push notification + Terminal = Win
The value in accepting $37 from pinboard or a16z is in getting a lot of exposure and not the money.

Are you serious or joking when you made this offer? Either you guys missed the point or you want to put your name on the meme of the day. Can you give me a compelling reason for me to accept the $37 from you?
Let's imagine -- and this is a hypothetical that treads on fantastical ground -- that due to this tragedy, the US quickly passes a new Constitutional amendment banning guns.

There are millions of guns that are already in circulation. Anyone who wants to flout the new law will have plenty of warning and opportunity to start stockpiling them.

Gun control might work, if guns had just been invented and were only in the hands of a few governments and manufacturers. Or if we were some European/Asian country that's had a tight grip on weapons for a long time.
Fixed :) Thanks for pointing that out!
Nice troll, but one Marine in a large force committing a horrible crime and then being punished isn't really indicative of a national policy. If it were, the US would also be supporting killing US soldiers on military bases in Texas due to MAJ Hasan's spree shooting a couple years ago.

OTOH, it's crazy that that guy got only 4 years. 10-20 would be more appropriate. Hopefully being convicted under Japanese law doesn't prevent additional action under UCMJ to run consecutively.
Benefits of Indexes
I'm not sure I agree with your temporal notion of difficulty. One thing is not harder than another simply because the latter took less time to figure out. So what if many people have failed?* If someone with great insight like Ramanujan comes around and proves a bunch of new mathematical theorems, the fact that we now know those theorems does not imply that they are easier (or harder) to understand or make use of compared to some theorem which was not proved for another seventy years (there are examples here that go both ways.)

So why is robot.walk_to(...) "obviously harder to implement"? How could we know that simpler implementations will never be discovered? What you call "immense work" is not even a century's worth. In hundreds of years, making a robot walk convincingly might be no more difficult than implementing an effective chess AI.

I suppose I'm getting at a concept of minimality (like Komolgorov complexity). Just having a solution does not mean it's a minimal solution. We know enough to say perception is harder right now but not enough to say perception is intrinsically harder. We can't know that new breakthroughs (or just lots of gradual development) won't make these problems simple ones.

(*Actually, I do agree that lots of smart people failing at a problem is probably a good indicator that the problem is hard. This is still no guarantee though.)
This is good news. I fear that the two sides of the debate have been talking past each other -- it would obviously be a good idea to stop children from viewing porn, but there are three problems with that requirement: it won't stop all access, it won't magically just block for children and it won't only block pornography, even by the conservative standards of what I'd prefer not to see.

I have primary-school-age children, and to my mind the best way to protect them is sensible supervision and a good ad-blocker.
The Expert Builder Paradox
I guess people didn't get the joke! Atleast it should have ended here.

Heck, I will wager $37 that submitting your startup idea to HN will get you more exposure than posting on Pinboard's blog.
I'm genuinely shocked that this made it to the top of hackernews. I would expect better. While the idea of having the Python interpreter in the browser is very likely better than having a compiler Python -> JS (if we care about Python), the implementation here is both half assed and really bad. It takes quite a bit of effort to create a python interpreter that can be called python. This is nowhere near there. On top of it double-interpretation in dynamic languages is very slow and I doubt someone is willing to pay that price here. A good example of low quality is here:

http://code.google.com/p/brython/source/browse/trunk/py_clas...

this is both incorrect (exceptions are propagated, http://paste.pound-python.org/show/28457/) and has wrong complexity. It's not even a dict at all!
I'll match the $50 in development services from AbtainLabs.com as long as Ruby on Rails is used. Small sites could actually host on Heroku for free.
There's a best practice acronym for creating lists like this - MECE: mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive.

I'm not sure this list passes the "mutually exclusive" test - for example, eBay fits into both the "marketplace" and "auction" category. "Freemium SaaS" is clearly a strict subset of "SaaS". Might seem like a minor quibble, but a categorisation system isn't very useful if the categories are all jumbled up.
> Flattery will get you karma beyond your wildest dreams (for wildest dreams = 1).

It's encouragement, not flattery.
haha, thanks for the correction :) that does change the meaning a bit doesn't it? homophones always seem to slip by me...
Libraries in Sweden, and probably in other countries as well, have their own "algorithms" to decide what to purchase - at a university it could be everything related to a particular topic, for instance. This means that these computer-generated books are in stock in many libraries (at the taxpayer's expense).
It's an insult linking a respectable firm like 37signals to this drama.
Due to the reduced size of the round, the announcement can only cite investment from a1z.
I've been thinking about this problem. If you email me (hrishi @ prettygraph.com) with some more details, I might be interested in building something for you.
A paperback copy of Lauren Ipsum [1]. It's sort of like Alice in Wonderland for the 21st century. On the surface it's a fantasy adventure, but the dialog and situations teach the reader about the joys of abstract thinking. Seven years old might be a little young to read it on his own, but it would be a great bedtime story if an adult's willing to read to him on a regular basis.

I can easily imagine this being a story you could come back to again and again, getting a little more out of it each time as the reader gets older and wiser.

[1] First sample chapter: http://www.laurenipsum.org/mostly-lost
It already illegal for convicted felons (who serve more than a year in prison) to own a gun.
Maybe, but he could dmca them. There is basically no penalty for that, even if they win.
Islamic civilization took over from Roman civilization from about 632 AD in the Middle East, centered around North Africa, Iraq/Persia, and Turkey at various times over the next 1300 yrs.

Perhaps more important was the Sui/Tang dynasties in China around 600 AD kicking off over 1000 yrs of being the most developed place on Earth. They built the Grand Canal connecting the Yellow and Yangtse rivers, turning them into a single economy based on trading rice for coal.
This is indeed a win. I'm thinking of the possibility of using this to receive notifications whenever Jekins builds and runs tests after commits to our git repos.
Honestly I'm amazed it works at all. They run it in WINE.
Uploading patient/client data to the cloud where a Google bot can read it is a breach of that patient/student's privacy. Blackberry email and the like can make email within the organization secure, and most teachers/doctors have the sense not to email sensitive documents to people outside the organization. However, most don't realize that emailing something to your gmail or uploading it to google docs is a problem. The mental model is still "this is private" even though Google is reading every word.
A gentle and conceptual introduction to Node.js
Why do we have to think in such complicated ways?

Aren't we supposed to make a great and compelling product that makes each one of our customers pay us this $37. Why do we even need to do do all this rolling syndicated thingy?

Investment from anybody is a pain that is worth taking if you are getting a large amount in return. For the smaller amounts, working with customers is better on the pain-return axis.

KISS
Somebody outside of this forum told me the question was pointless: go do something that makes you money instead, he said.

So my answer was something like this:

On the contrary. The answer to this question will make me money. Thus far, I have made $100,000 online, and I am one of those people who "have to" do it, and I know what my motivation is.

Now I am wondering what yours is.

Why do I wonder?

Because I am making a product that targets you, obviously. So this is basic research

...

So there you have it, I guess that was a "full disclosure" that should have been included in the first question.
Online sparen met hoge bij MoneYou kan nu ook bij ons
I will be more shocked if I discovered that people dive this deep into code before upvoting, because it is generally not the case. If you think of it, we would have missed your valuable input if people didnt upvote this for you to see. :)
Inside The NSA~Americas Cyber Secrets~2012
>Sure, but who uses iCloud as their primary email provider?

I do.

>They've already changed people's email addresses as least twice, which is beyond uncool (mac.com -> me.com -> icloud.com)

And they all still work.

>Unlike your username to their services, your email address is tied into all sorts of other third-party services (not to mention address books) and is incredibly painful to update.

Since the aliases still work, as mentioned above, this is not an issue at all. Personally I prefer to use the me.com domain as it's short. It still works and the services that I use with me still work, I continue to get email from them. The same is true with .mac addresses.
I'd like to take this opportunity to offer PICPCReject membership to anyone rejected by the horrible elitists at PICPC.

We don't have any funding yet, so we can't make any specific promises, but I hear the dumpsters behind Denny's have a wide variety of semi-rotten food available for "Tuesday dinners".
Ask HN: best commercial email provider
I'm looking for an email provider to free myself from Gmail and my own mailserver setup.

Requirements are: rockstable, fully encrypted (IMAPs, storage), reliable and a good webinterface.

Thanks in advance.
Been freelancing in iOS dev for about 4 years. Don't charge hourly, only day rates.
About $800/day - £500/day
I think that the google translator did pretty good on that fragment.

Garbage in, garbage out! If you use 'I' in a sentence fragment when you mean to use 'We' then you can't really blame the translator for getting it wrong.

'We need to meet up' is a sentence with a completely different meaning from the incorrect and semantically confusing 'I need to meet up', it really does sound as if you need to meet up to some expectation.
MECE is a good idea indeed for the list but It is clear that one company may have more than one item from MECE.
My company will offer $38 to every PICPC reject (1) as a bold signal to the industry to not undervalue the vibrant entrepreneurial spirit our community is made of!

(1) requires additional investment criteria to be fulfilled, left to our descretion
> It's not that you need to even devote time to sports, or to know anything. It's that posturing that shows you respect others' interests in sports, is valuable.

This makes my head hurt. Pretending to like something you don't actually like in order to make other people like you seems like:

1. It's a lot of effort

2. It's a sad commentary on your intrinsic interestingness as a person

3. It's slightly unethical because you're misrepresenting yourself.

Extroverts who are able to understand these social concepts intuitively are weird.
.... (Picks up jaw from the keyboard) Awesome, I REALLY need to speak with you on this single man project I'm building.
Someone needs to do PICPC-T next. That was one of the oddest things of the past 18 months.
In fact: An unethical programmer produces 800000 spam entries on Amazon, earns money from those who got tricked.
Have a look at Opus, another free audio codec that provides lower latency (~22ms) and better quality than Vorbis.

It also scales down to low-bitrate speech, but I doubt you need that for your application.
Ha! You've triggered me to put my own PHP multi-layered neural network on GitHub. Available for forks & downloads here: https://github.com/infostreams/neural-network
google is hedging itself against singularity. When the day comes. Google valuation will jump exponentially within a matter of minutes.
Meh I see it in a lot of C++ code too. I don't understand it, especially from people who use an IDE so they shouldn't be typing those full names out anyway.
I'm not sure whether you two are referring to the same 'he'.
>Kurzweil seems to always get technological capabilities right. Where he sometimes falls flat is in technological adoption - how actual consumers are willing to interact with technology, especially where bureaucracies are involved- see his predictions on the adoption of elearning in the classroom, or using speech recognition as an interface in an office environment.

This is a problem common to other AI pioneers, including Norvig.
It has always worked pretty well for me but I only share one screen.
None of the email addresses exists - hence all the emails bounce back. The user records are added to the system when the user registers but they cannot confirm it since they never get the email. The bounce messages are real.
> What made it impractical was the slowness.

Although, speed is way less important when the code is running on lots of browsers out there, compared with running lots of instances on your server.
That is also too simplified to be applied to the real world, since the interactions we have we other people are very far from random.
> aren't all that different from how neurons work

Nobody knows how neurons actually work: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/11/ibm-b.... We are missing vital pieces of information to understand that. Show me your accurate C. Elegans simulation and I will start to believe you have something.

Perhaps in a hundred years, this is the argument: for several hundred years, inventors tried to learn to build an AI by creating artificial contraptions, ignoring how biology worked, inspired by an historically fallacious anecdote about how inventors only tried to learn to fly by building contraptions with flapping wings. It was only when they figured out that evolution, massively parallel mutation and selection, is actually necessary that they managed to build an AI.
Cool idea,

some recommendations are spot on, but some are a bit wierd [recommending annual Maxim's subscription for my wife - this I consider wierd... :-)]

Check for the possible bug - when I was paging down and the adtl data was being fetched from the server the page kind of flashed, i.e. the scrolling was not smooth [Ubuntu, FF].

Overall - really like it, good luck!