skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not a car owner so I have no stake in this fight but I feel the need to rebut some of the claims:

* Anything is low margin if you provide a commodity. By being a car washer, the only people you see are people getting their car washed. What you don't see is people who need to get their car washed but don't. Some proportion of those people don't because the existing interfaces are too difficult to use. I just used a pathjoy recently to clean my apartment and I was willing to pay a premium to use them because I have no idea how to otherwise find a good house cleaner.

* Staffing is hard but I think you exaggerate how hard it is. Lyft has managed to solve this problem successfully and I would argue Exec has as well so this is at least two existence proofs. Postmates and Instacart also seem to have solved this problem but I haven't had enough datapoints to confirm.

I think what a lot of companies in this space are unaware of is that, no matter what problem you ostensibly solve, you are also ultimately solving how to scalably acquire talent. I think one thing that has helped immensely over the last 4 years is that the recession has created a pool of under/unemployed resourceful people that these startups are now capitalizing on.

* Proper incentive structures can trivially solve the cancellation problem. Just charge a cancellation fee if you cancel within an hour of cleaning.

* Some people are going to be fucktards the best way to deal with it is to just treat it as a statistical phenomena and price it into your model. There are lots of things you can do to bias the natural level of fraud but, anecdotally, companies I've talked to seem to report that just "has to own a smartphone" is enough to cut fraud by a significant amount.

* Barring certain mathematical proofs, it's impossible to prove that a startup won't work, only that it hasn't yet. The reason to spend $5M is that if you discover a way that it could work that nobody else had the patience/foresight to discover, it could be worth many multiples of that.
Go for trusted Cargo Services in India 
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SpaceX' Grasshopper 12-Story Test Flight
Before people go off writing this `foldx foo initial bars` pattern:

http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/D...
I think we'll live.

We could jack the price of a stamp to $5, it would still be a reasonable price, and nobody but the stingiest of cheap people could possibly complain. If mailing something isn't worth the price of a hamburger to you, then you shouldn't be mailing that something.
Link: http://mirillis.com/en/products/splashexport.html

Not free, Windows only.
In Canada we take a marker and write "no junk mail" on our mailboxes. I'm not sure if it has any law backing it up, but it seems to work.
That's the popular belief in this day and place.

Previously, "the divine right of kings" was frequently invoked. Or simply the biggest brute in the squad.
How is the junk that is disguised as bills handled by that system? Or is that not a thing there?
Sharpen the Big Data Saw Towards the Singularity
Sure, pumping enough aerosols into the atmosphere will stop nearly instantly global warming. And it opens a path to burn even more carbon. But whom would you trust to run this solution over the next millions of years until all carbon is back in Earth's crust? The point is, if it stops working all hidden and accumulated warming will kick in virtually over night. And nobody wants the planet to warm by 4°C within days.
For example, if you enter the ingredients "rye whiskey" and "vermouth", following query is generated:

@ingredients (rye SENTENCE whiskey) | vermouth

The SENTENCE operator, basically works like the & operator, just that both operands must occur in the same sentence. That is very helpful, since the index field "ingredients" contains a list of all ingredients of the recipe separated by an "!".

However Sphinx can not only do full text search. You can also filter and sort by attributes and complex expressions, that involve any attribute, the relevance from the fulll-text search, arithmetics and some built-in functions. And Sphinx does that much faster than any RDBMS does. I never managed to generate a sphinx query that took a measurable amount of time, on my 3 years old notebook. ;)

The sphinx index doesn't contain any HTML. However I return HTML, from the WSGI app, that serves the AJAX calls. So I guess that is what you are talking about. It just seemed to me, it would be simpler to generate the HTML for the search results on the server-side with Python than in Javascript.

By the way if you want to use Sphinx for your own project, and you have the data to index already in a MySQL or PostgreSQL database, there is no need to write a script to generate XML. Sphinx can index data from MySQL and PostgreSQL databases directly. However I was just saying that, thanks to xmlpipe support, you don't need an RDBMS just to use Sphinx. And that thanks to index attributes, Sphinx can completely replace an RDBMS in a lot of cases.
Qt5 on Raspberry Pi (Demo from Devaamo Summit 2012)
I am afraid that one of these days geo-engineering ideas are going to be implemented. Wasn't there some billionaire who dumped on a massive scale iron in the Ocean just because he believes this is going to help climate change?

In my opinion it is absolutely crazy to implement "stuff" in a super complex system (in which humans fail over and over again to predict relatively "simple" occurrences such as earthquakes or the weather) and present a "solution" by pretending to have the slightest understanding of all the potential long and short term side effects.
> 3) Rise of robotics outsourced a good portion of typical physical jobs to machines - iRobot, Kiva Systems, Tesla's car-manufacturing robot arms

This is really of no consequence. Do you know any janitor who lost a job to roomba?

CNC have been there en mass since 1970s, and robotics since 1980s. A robotic assembly line is featured in final scene of Terminator (1984), and it was very much state of the art then.

However, contrary to doomsday prophecies of the time, what replaced American jobs were not the soulless machines in Japan, but penniless workers in China. The future never seems to play out in the coolest sci-fi way.
Bah! Poppycock! My domain objects are also logicless, and I keep all my enterprise stuff in PL/SQL. Also, TDD is for people who can't do formal methods.
Try and learn as much as you can, even if it doesn't fall into a realm of CS that you are interested in. Little tidbits of knowledge will accumulate over time and in the end you'll be a more well-versed engineer than someone who didn't pay quite as much attention. This is coming from personal experience, best of luck! :)
Birth rates are low but population continues to grow. The US is still a nation of immigrants, once we accept that with our Immigration laws we'll be fine.
Forward: Open Source Platform For Custom E-Commerce - version 0.1 released
I'm wondering how this applies to software. If the code and design changes, it's still the same software. If the function changes, can it still be the same? Are there any examples of this?
Why everybody wants a slice of Raspberry Pi
There's way too many genres :P
Oops, yeah, the map function above composes its argument with return, giving it the type M a -> (a -> b) -> M b, making it equivalent to the Haskell `liftm` function.
NYPD Exploring Ways To Search Online For ‘Deranged’ Gunmen
It feels very bootstrappy. Is there any major advantage to using this vs responsive bootstrap?
But the runtime has a faster dispatch than Apple's ;).

Actually, I don't get all this "Messaging is slow". In the ObjFW runtime, it's just 12 instructions for x86_64. That's barely noticable. I even used ObjC in an HPC application and compared it to the C version, just for fun. There was no measurable difference in performance.

What's more important in the average application is that the foundation classes are fast. For example, C#'s and Cocoa's dictionaries are really slow (but I don't know why). While C# and Cocoa both need 1.2 sec to insert 1 Mio objects into a dictionary and retrieve them, ObjFW only needs 0.3.
That's (weak) evidence that macrokernels are superior. QNX had a head start, but did not maintain the lead.
Huh, that sounds very nice. I don't have use for it, as all my files sit on a NAS, but it sounds very useful in other cases.
...and thank god for that. I find inject a really confusing name.
I thought this was my exact point. I was responding to a comment that replacing the database connection with an API would solve the problem. It wouldn't. Accepting a score from the client is insecure by design.
NASA to turn asteroid into space station to orbit the Moon
Creating scarcity (short story)
That sucks. "Actual or demonstrably anticipated research" looks like a fairly clear attempt to make sure that companies can't just claim that they might be planning to go into some unrelated field, and it's unfortunate the courts don't see it that way.
Also, almost by definition the rocky planets are the small inner ones. If they had rings and there was also a gas giant, the gravity perturbations from the giant would probably disrupt the rings fairly quickly.

[Probably too late, but for anyone reading this later.]
sounds fancy, can you elaborate?
Isn't that ironical when you consider that user space hardware controllers mean much less coordination needed - i.e. be much more bazaar style?
How to choose a tagline for a tech startup
Will US VCs come to the Nordics?
Irrelevant comparison.
You can read the author's thought on the 'why' of this framework here: http://www.justinhough.com/writing-the-journey/centurion-3-a... - it seems to have same features as Bootstrap, just more lightweight imo.
I liked this post, and find the use of map/filter/reduce one of the most fundamental changes to the way you can manipulate data. Truly eye opening.

Even though I have relatively little front-end experience, and use primarily python/ruby- I only started to use these with Javascript (via the underscore library).

The only thing I didn't quite agree with is " ... the syntax is obvious enough for most people to understand even if they don't quite grok Haskell".

Whilst the early examples were manageable, I was struggling with the syntax later on. The syntax looks clean, so it seems like Haskell is a neat language, but it wasn't enough to make it easy for me to fully 'get it'. Perhaps I'm too locked in a ruby/python mindset.
Yeah, VLC is collecting money too, that's what this post is about.

Regardless, even if VLC is free, I just like Splash better for basic playback. I realize VLC is extremely complex and full of all kinds of features, but I don't use 99% of them. I recently tried streaming using the VLC browser plugin, and it failed spectacularly, it doesn't buffer properly.
Top news from Northern Europe in 2012.
> Your brain is a finite automaton

That assertion badly needs some proof, and I'm not currently aware that such a proof even exists (but I am aware that there is substantial evidence that it isn't all that simple).

A 'finite automaton' implies that you can capture the complete state vector and for many reasons this is unfeasible. So if there is proof to the contrary then please supply it. (I understand you're merely transcribing the original comment, which to me feels clever but wrong).
> Absolutely not, IO functions are not harder to test than regular ones. Is your function creating a file? Start your test, assert the file doesn't exist, call your function, assert your file exists. Done.

There are a lot of things you're not testing for. Permission issues, etc. Besides, you have -plenty of functions doing IO on databases, or doing parallel operations. That's definitely a pain to test.

> > boo :: Map Integer String -> String -> Integer

> This syntax is clean but it doesn't tell me anything that

> def boo(map: Map[Integer, String], key: String) : Integer

> doesn't tell me

It tells you it's not doing IO. Besides, what about this:

def boo (foo: Some Obj): void

What does this do? Write to a file? Change a field? I don't know.
This begs for a follow up paper from a psychological perspective, on psychological reaction by customers on finding out that somebody else paid a different price based on their shopping behavior.

If there is a very price sensitive shopping behavior this will lead to a strong increase of data noise by people trying to play the algorithms, e.g. fake accounts, deletion of accounts, groomed accounts towards specific deals, etc.
> Absolutely not, IO functions are not harder to test than regular ones

Testing IO involves systems and context that are external to both your code and your tests. This makes them more complex to set up and more error prone.
Using Github issues to track house repairs
I love that this is a thing, and that it's such a success to keep it current. However, I don't approve of Windows 8 itself and that's a bit of a problem in itself. This story still gets an upvote thought.
I wish I could use VLC more, but I can't and I can't recommend it to friends either to use most of the time. What I recommend them is BSPlayer. The main reason is because BSPlayer is so much better with subtitles. It has 3 subtitle sources to look into, and it can automatically match and download them for your movie. For a foreigner that's extremely helpful and convenient. It basically can be a deal-breaker if other players don't have that.

I think VLC has sort of a similar 3rd party add-on for that, but I'm not even sure if it's supported anymore, and I don't think it worked that well anyway. And I also found it pretty hard to set-up. It's not a one-click install.

If VLC was as good at subtitles as BSPlayer, I'd use only that and recommend it to all my friends, too. Now you have me intrigued with Splash Pro, though. I'll have to give that a try, especially on older PC's.
Page loaded, saw the article text briefly. Then the JS loaded and all that remained was the header. Fancy web effects are all well and good but not so much when they prevent you from viewing the content.
It might not have happened as quickly as predicted. That doesn't mean it's not happening at all. http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/13/foxconn-allegedly-replacing...
Magic ink - information software and the graphical interface
The essay is not about willing beliefs into reality, it is about showing the relationships between our beliefs and reality and how the former should be based on the latter. Or to put it in another way that a true statement is a statement that corresponds to what is going on in the real world.
(for the record, I haven't re-read this essay in a long time, there might be some sort of a revision done on it, but I doubt that much has changed)
I remember seeing that debunked, but cannot find that now.

What I can find is http://www.minesweeper.info/wiki/Main_Page. Those guys aren't aware of this, and claim to see games repeated (http://www.minesweeper.info/wiki/Dreamboard). That debunks the theory.
Marriage is also lower because feminism made all women paranoid, made them want to be victims. Man can't approach woman as easily these days - will be accused of rape, harrasement, day rape if he tries. Example - suggest cup of coffe to woman in elevator - instant rapist (I hope everyone still remembers that incident) . By the way, was't there some statistics that it's men don't want to marry thesedays (for obvious reasons - women start most of divorces and takes almost everything. And men that stars divorce are famous for getting their pen1s cut off and thrown in garbage disposer.)
Why it's hard to approach feminism indoctrinated wiman (victim syndrome) kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-schrodinger%E2%80%99s-rapist-or-a-guy%E2%80%99s-guide-to-approaching-strange-women-without-being-maced/
I think 2013 will be the year where markup based layout sees a comeback. No-one is using CSS the way it was intended to anyway.
In Greece, we don't have junk mail, and the post office works just fine.
Just a quick FYI if you didn't notice, "tsaking" might need a minor correction ;)
I propose this thing: http://www.vtg.admin.ch/internet/vtg/de/home/verbaende/fub/f...
I would highly encourage you to talk to your local small business association, as well as your city officials, before you conclude that it's "worth it".
Bret Victor's The Magic Ink gives some good starting points for applying context to make software smarter: http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/
I'm not sure if either approach would improve the results.

Searching the introductions in additions to the list of ingredients, will rank recipes higher, when the ingredients you were searching for, occur more often in the instructions. But a recipe isn't necessarily more relevant, because of its instructions are more verbose.

I'm not sure if an AND function would add much benefit. Yes, at the moment only one of the given ingredients must be part of the cocktail, in order that it appears in the search result. But the search results are also sorted by relevance, so that cocktails that contain more of the searched ingredients are ranked higher, than cocktails that contain fewer of the searched ingredients.

I'm pretty sure that there is no way to PM other users, here at Hacker News and you don't have an email address in your profile. However if you want have a further discussion on that, feel free to write me an email. You'll find my email address in my Hacker News and Github profile.
Thank you for the heads up! Corrected :-)
Shouldn't the US Postal Service have died a long time ago?

It always amazes me how the US as self-proclaimed champions of the free market and technological progress still holds on to outdated, bureaucratic nationalized monopolies like the postal service.

In many countries this market has already been privatized a long time ago, and/or scaled down to the point where relics like post offices no longer exist.
How do you feel about properly anonymous opt out logging?

My feeling is that anything personal including user content and searches should be opt-in but opt out is ok for monitoring feature usage that can't be linked to an individual. Obviously online/web apps reveal at least this anyway. Does context web/mobile app/PC app make a difference?
That sounds like a good idea, but I'm afraid that you'd be left with credit card and insurance companies who could afford those high rates. Your local small mom-and-pop shops would be left out.
It's a joke, but it's possible neither GigaOm nor the author is in on it.

It's a pseudonym for Larry Chiang, a MLM/credit score/etc. promoter who I believe has some kind of fraught relationship with YC.
Wouldn't that affect, for instance, eBay sellers who need to ship their goods? You'd need to bump parcel mail up in cost in order to stop people using that instead. I've got small items from fricking China for less than $5 total including shipping!
The word "Pro" in its name tells enough.
I spend two minutes a day collecting junk mail from my mail box and throwing it into the recycle bin. That's 624 minutes a year. One government employee puts trash into my mail box and another government employee takes it away. Any useful mail I receive can be either delivered by electronic methods or UPS/FedEx.
I recommend Rene Girard insight into that.
This was my one complaint as well, and it happens with the example given of any'

Defining any' as

any' f xs = foldl (\acc x -> f x || acc) False xs

Then trying to evaluate any' even [1..] runs forever, but if we modify it slightly to use foldr instead as

any' f xs = foldr (\x acc -> f x || acc) False xs

Then evaluating any' even [1..] terminates basically immediately with True.
“a dribbling selfish jerk” – an analysis of getting on the front page of HN
Canada Post has a policy of respecting people's wish not to receive junk mail.
People like to chat with other people in real time. CompuServe's CB Simulator was a huge money draw for them (back then you paid per minute of connect-time).
Assuming we can handle the "421" problems, a world population in the 1-2 billion range, purely through low fertility rate, would solve a lot of environmental problems. You could have first-world quality of life for everyone, with reasonable technology advances, and still have a much lower impact on the environment than we have now.

Under 2b seems like the right number unless space colonization is seriously in force.
Probably marketing. You need to buy your initial leads to get the business going.
Cool idea, but this desperately needs a better way to deal with history. I mistyped

apis.tts("hello world");

as

api.tts("hello world");

and then I hit the up arrow (as this is how to go back to the last command on any other console I have every tried) and nothing happened. In fact, the only way to correct my mistake, seemed to be to retype the whole thing. I couldn't have come up with a better example of "dangling by a trivial feature" (http://prog21.dadgum.com/160.html).
Somewhat different context. The Netherlands has privatized the postal service ages ago. The interest in artificially propping up what remains of this relic beyond the current monopoly license on light weight letters is minimal.
Yes, it can be tricky, but sometimes what gets cut is the stuff that professionals with a deeper understanding of their field require. Ask any pro photographer about iOS Photos not using metadata (I don't know if that's still the case, but it once was). The example in that post is a great one, it seems to me. Something that seems extraneous but really makes a real difference in the user's ability to get things properly done with a minimum of friction.
Don't logical positivists usually assuming only testable assertions are meaningful? See: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ss/no_logical_positivist_i/
Why do we need to continue to increase or maintain the population?
Er, yes. Windows 8 and Windows RT are very niche products, aren't they, with install bases in the millions...
> Yeah, VLC is collecting money too, that's what this post is about.

VLC is collecting money to port to a platform with which the current codebase and toolchain are completely incompatible (see jbk's comment above), and that money is solely collected from people who want to support the port (or VLC itself), using VLC or hacking on it costs $0.
Taleb's Antifragile book has a number of direct entrepreneurial references and many other ideas that are relevant but of more general interest (economics, technology, health related, etc). For example, he talks about the concept of options (based upon the financial vehicle) applying in other areas of life. In general if you have something with a small downside potential and large upside potential, it is an option that is antifragile. Learning new technical skills seems to me to fit into this area. By sacrificing a bit of time and a few bucks on training / books / videos you can develop a product that will delight users, address a need in the workplace, or otherwise create value. Limited downside and great potential upside.
Not yet. Europe (and Japan) gives us a taste of things to come.
It's not a hypothetical scenario. Plenty of banks work under Sharia Law and prohibit usury. Hell, the majority of the world's population was emphatically against usury for a long time.

> Are overdraft fees annoying? Yes. We've all had to pay them. But under the current system, we all have a choice as to whether or not we pay them. The simple choice is: balance your checking account. Punishing the banks for an individual not taking responsibility for his or her own money is shortsighted at best, and unsustainable at worst.

This argument is rooted in a logical fallacy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis