skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The idea isn't bad per say, but while it may be a good solution for you, it may not be the best solution for everyone. I live in the south, and I know a lot of people would be outraged at the idea of this. When it comes down to it, most people are selfish. They think having a gun is to protect them and their loved ones, not me or you. They wouldn't like the fact that they have to spend extra time and money for their 'God given right' to bear arms. An 80 hours course isn't going to stop people from being violent, look at the hijackers of 9/11, they had to go through and get their pilot training which costs thousands and a lot of time, and that just shows where there is a will there is a way and a course might help these situations but nothing is going to totally alleviate them.

I don't think a lot of people who don't live in the south or a rural area understand how guns are used in normal culture in places like here. People go out and hunt. A lot. They go target shooting, they have competitions, etc. It's a big deal and it's an issue that sits very close to the heart of a southern person.

I personally am not sure what should happen, but these are just some things I have seen and grown up around. Almost everyone has a gun here, most of them never get shot, but they are still really prevalent.
Yes, Indeed.
Intuitive. Simple. fast. Would like to have such a native text editor.
Should startups have original ideas when big companies can just clone them?
The Gun in the Closet
To me, guns are created for a single purpose: killing. They have no place in a house with children. But to others, including people whom I respect, guns are objects of pleasure and entitlement. Guns are for protecting children. They enjoy teaching their children how to shoot. Every time a friend reveals he has a gun, I feel like my shocked 3-year-old in the playground all those years ago. I can't quite wrap my mind around their position, nor they mine.
The difficulty in defining what to regulate is probably the hardest part of the problem and he just throws out a completely unworkable definition.

A double-action revolver would fit his definition of an "assault rifle".
"Worst interface is one that's trying to learn about my habits without having a broader knowledge about my personality and the world as a whole."

I'm a big fan of self-learning systems, in many cases. Tivo? I love it. A self-learning climate control system? Sure, as long as I can override it if I'm leaving for a week in January, for example.

Now picture a robotic lawn mower without that broader knowledge of the world. If it has limited sensors, it may mow over things you don't want it to; even if it does it less than you do yourself, it's a problem. How about if it cannot self-diagnose situations where it should not be working or has some of its safety features disabled for some reason?

For some equipment, being able to operate independently is a much harder problem than simply learning where the mowable area of your lawn is.
I'm from the UK, recently moved to work in Germany. The tax is high by the standards I'm used to but the infrastructure and quality of life is much better and things are much cheaper to buy (food, rent & many household goods). There are major cultural differences though. Personal debt is frowned up - good luck in trying to use a credit card there and they don't have the culture of borrowing to buy (invest in) real estate in the same way.

There is also a subtle sense that sharing resources and participating to make them as good as possible is the logical approach to things, and it feels 'socialist' in a modern sense. I'm struggling to describe it but there is definitely something there when they prioritise what, where and how to spend money that is difficult for Brits to get their head around.

Also, I know a fair few Swedes and they all comment that they like our country but it's where they come to slum it and have fun. We were described as 'charmingly rough.'
Just as an FYI, at my local grocery store (Whole Foods), you can buy Electrolyte Water by the liter. It's essentially pedialyte for adults. There's also Gatorade, which is an electrolyte drink for athletes, etc.
Other than display what I type, I couldn't reckon anything else this can do.

Reading the comments I see I missed some things but that's a pretty clear failure of UI design.

So I went back. Still can't see any features other than display what I type.

So I try again, this time on Chrome. Now I hear very annoying audio as I type, and no hint of any other features.

How the hell does this POC make it to the front page of Hacker News?
Minor details aside, this is a spot-on analysis in the grand scheme of things.

Computers should be doing more for us. They're smart, they're good at logic, they can make decisions. It's our job as programmers to make the do more and allow us to do less.

I'm tired of complexity. I don't want a car that has a touch screen—I want one with a knob that's tactile and has a blue-to-red gradient that makes sense and only controls the thing it looks like it controls. I don't want to think about it. I don't want it to take three steps and two cluttered screens.

And if my fridge is going to be smart, I want it to be smart about being a fridge. I want it to do one thing smartly: make things cold. If it's going to do something else smartly, I want it to be relevant to keeping my food, so I don't know, figure out when I need new milk by allowing me to scan the barcode when I buy it. Then how about making it available on my phone so I can answer the age-old question "Do I need to buy milk?" when I'm at the grocery store. That might actually be useful.

But for pete's sake, if it has twitter, I will not buy it.

Computers should simplify our lives. If it adds complexity, screw you, start over and try again.
Two things people who put 10,000 hours have in common are:

- They are naive and believe they can conquer the world - or are discouraged about their original inability and hide it.

- They share a sense of destiny in what they do. They can't imagine a world where they wouldn't be working any more in their medium.

So if you wanted to predict who will become a great programmer you could look for naivety and commitment. You could look for people who can't tell what they've accomplished. And which continue to obliviously work on (naively ambitious) things only because noone was around to stop them.
Here you have a 4 year old "bug" aka enhancement:

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1030&...
You're saying that every generation starts with nothing, as if they were new immigrants to this country. If so, then the American Dream is dead. Most immigrants worked hard because they believed that they could pass on a better life to their children. They saved to put their kids through college so that their future generations could have a nice life, white collar jobs, take vacations, etc.

But if they knew that future generations would be worse off, they probably wouldn't have bothered.
A lot of this country is "built out" under current zoning regimes which require auto-oriented detached single-family construction in most of the country, which is extremely land-intensive compared to traditional walkable urbanism.

Because land use in most of this country is very tightly regulated to prevent densification (or even cause de-densification in a lot of cities), most construction of new housing units has been on greenfield land at the outskirts of cities, so housing affordability has been correlated to access to new greenfield land at a city's edge, first via streetcar and street, then via expressway.

As the interstate highway system has been completed, and all developable land within a reasonable driving distance of the most economically successful metro areas has been built on, people have instead been forced to bid up existing housing, hence the ridiculously high housing prices in most coastal metro areas and ongoing gentrification of central neighborhoods in these cities. Moreover, as time goes on, many people who've grown up in single-family-only, automobile-only neighborhoods have discovered they like walkable urbanism better, and the current zoning regime guarantees it is in short supply in many markets.

Hopefully, we realize the economic folly of mandatory suburbanism as time goes on, and work to allow urbanization (a/k/a private property being used as its owners desire) in many mandatorily suburban areas now. It's happening to some degree already in Virginia:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/realestate/commercial/a-su...
http://dc.streetsblog.org/2011/10/27/transforming-tysons-cor...
> “No person can own or operate an assault rifle as a civilian except for honorably discharged veterans, current military officers or enlisted personnel at E3 level or higher, or persons who have passed an 80 hour course. All assault rifle owners are required to serve as volunteer police (or some other analogous public safety service).”

Because nothing could go wrong with conferring special rights only to members of the military, right?

This proposed solution would have had limited impact on the recent killings that have stoked the current gun control argument. Adam Lanza would've have passed the 80-hour training requirement. Columbine and Virginia Tech was perpetrated by handguns and shotguns. Aurora did involve a rifle but VT still resulted in more fatalities with just handguns. The older perpetrator of the Beltway sniper attacks was an Army veteran.

This is not to say that gun control is bad. But the reasoning behind this solution is very specious.
I would like him speak to Peter Norvig.
I'm not sure why you are using logarithms.

A) 50K at 5M valuation is 1%

B) 100K at 10M valuation is 1%

If the company sells for $1B, the first investor gets 200X, the first investor gets 100X. The first investor can also invest 50K in another promising startup, increasing the likelihood of them making money with their 100K capital. Given that any individual company has a low chance of a $1B exit (if it had a high one, the valuation would and should be much higher,) diversification is important to investors.

Alternatively assuming a fixed investment amount:

A) 50K at 5M valuation is 1%

B) 50K at 10M valuation is 0.5%

If the company sells for $1B, the first investor gets 200X, the first investor gets 100X, and made a drastically different amount of money - $10M vs $5M (less investment). If the investor has a large number of investments, a 200X vs 100X can significantly change the overall outcome of the portfolio. This is less so when we are dealing with these ridiculously high numbers (very few startups exit with this kind of return), but with more typical $20-100M exits, the valuations of the investments makes even more difference.

The key point here is that the startup's likelihood of being a winner is a key component of the valuation. If a startup had a very high chance of exiting for $1B, then a $100M valuation may be perfectly reasonable. YC startups, on average, do not have a high chance of a $1B exit.

When a startup raises at $15M instead of a more reasonable $5M, it is riskier to invest because the upside, and therefore the expected value, is much smaller.

The idea of getting a piece of something no matter how small at any price is just bad investing and bubble mania.

This sort of unsustainable logic is what leads to boom busts cycles. It's important for everyone involved to maintain rational pricing in a market, because volatility breeds fear is ultimately damaging to the startup ecosystem.
I think the bigger point is, "Don't put touch screens on them either."
> Just because you don't die before you're 90 doesn't mean you can work any longer than your grandparents did

Why not? People are healthier than ever before, and are working jobs that require much less physical endurance.

> even assuming somebody still wants to employ you

Again, if you're living longer, your usefulness is decaying at a slower rate.
Fear Not Deflation
my numbers are a few years out of date. The US currently has 14k homicides annually, but the proportion of firearm homicides is around the same (~two-thirds)

base stats http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/c...
homicide methods http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/c...
Everyone's big deal is different.

"I made this" is always welcome here.
No need to be hostile. The guy is trying to help you.
Great idea guys, and well executed.

I can totally see how this would increase the amount of followers you would get. Agreed with with @michaelhoffman though - it would be nice to have the option to permanently remove (there will always be those that hate seeing these things).
He did mention an 80 hour course.
"A union: some sellers of labor merge into a single legal entity, and it becomes illegal for some purchasers of labor to buy from alternate suppliers."

I have seen references to this many times. Is this true in the States? I was once a teacher (not in the States) and did not have to sign up to any union. Apart from lawyers and medical personel and maybe a few other "special" professions you don't have to belong to a union to offer your services - at least here in the EU.
I tried that too (https://github.com/mihaip/web-experiments/blob/master/tempor...). It still flickers, I'm guessing because the frame delay interval is specified as an integer, and both 16 and 17ms don't quite line up with 60Hz (or whatever the screen's refresh rate is).
I'm so sick of hearing about how bad we--us poor, lost kids from Generation Y--have it. I'm so sick of hearing about the odds, about the unemployment rate, about how everything's our fault because we're too entitled, or about how nothing's our fault because the economy you see.

I live in a rented house with several other young folks trying to get by in our industry. I'm working today instead of taking a bus home to see my family. I'd work tomorrow if I needed to. My computer equipment is worth more than I have in the bank, because that's my capital investment in myself and my work.

My roommates are all fleeing rolling boulders of student debt--a situation I'm not in only because I devoted a sizeable chunk of my old salary to paying it off. Once that debt was paid off, I quit my job, because the company was never going to go anywhere with its attitude and codebase.

We don't have or want picket fences, we don't have two cars in the 'burbs, we don't want to sit in front of the TV and veg out. That's something we inherited from the boomers and Madison Avenue.

The people I know, whether they're architects, or lawyers, or coders, or dealers, or hustlers, all are in pursuit of the same dream that our forefathers pursued. We're all good people, with strong work ethics and a desire to see our kids grow up better than we did into a world kinder than ours.

We want to live in a country where you can build a business, help your community, and do so without worrying about getting blackbagged or destroyed by bureaucracy, where you can smoke a joint or drop acid and go into work that afternoon and change the fucking world with a commit or a hammer.

(And we're doing this in the Midwest, in Texas no less--no Bay Area bubble for these views!)

We aren't afraid of evil brown people somewhere else in the world, and we don't want to cast a "supporting vote" in a system as obviously corrupt and rigged as the current US government. We don't want to take away people's rights because we're afraid for our own little lives and our stuff from Ikea. We don't care about your abortion, or your sexuality, or whatever you do in your free time.

Don't tell me, don't show me, don't bloody try to sell me this notion that the American Dream is dead--we're just returning to its roots.
And yet there are more and more law schools gleefully suckering new students into the major and getting rich off of it, while not being able to provide a return on the investment. That's a very bad thing.

Lawyers as a whole are not a symbol of malaise. It really depends on what kind of lawyers are around. You increase regulation in an industry, then companies in that industry are going to need to hire lawyers to advise the companies on how to comply. You're also going to need people familiar enough with the law to write good regulatory legislation.

You want startups to make deals with each other, and to receive investments? You're going to want lawyers who can sort out the terms and put it in writing that reflects the intent of all stakeholders. So much misery and broken friendship between co-founders could have been easily relieved by using contracts instead of handshakes.

If you're investing in a company, it's likely you'll want a lawyer to perform due diligence on the company's current contractual obligations.
What Happens to Authors When Their Publisher Goes Bankrupt?
This is specious. Many people understand monads, and their ability to teach and explain varies wildly.
Mumford & Sons Warn Against 'Unauthorized Lending' of Their CD
Dangling by a Trivial Feature
Really? You'd think the generation that let World War I happen, or the many generations that practiced lynching as not merely a means of punishment but a form of entertainment, or the generation that thought Andrew Jackson's bank policy was a good idea, would have us beat.

I would be more worried if your peers were satisfied with drudge work for low wages. No kind of progress is possible if you're content to live in the gutter.

Also, if wages were rising, social security taxes wouldn't have to go up at all.
Yes. It is illegal for the employer to fire union workers and replace them with non-union workers. It is illegal to hire new workers at wages lower than the union wage, and in many states to even hire non-union workers.

Unionization is by employer, not by profession, though a few professions (e.g. managers) do lack the ability to gain legal protections by unionizing.
Fewer employers taking chances? What about Gen Y being the generation of job-hoppers? It's hard for a demographic to build up seniority in the workplace when they're so mobile between them.
The SMB linux port of SMB was done by a third party developer, not the original team.

If you ran into the same issue I did (blank screen but sound) there's a fix here:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/151567/super-meat-boy-gives-b...

I have a feeling the issue might be at least partly caused with issues on OpenGL/SDL/X11 or something like that. I've had no end of issues with fullscreen games under Linux.

To be charitable here, we're talking about a 2 man team (who shipped a successful product on their own) rather than a large AAA dev with an actual QA dept. Tommy might not be the greatest programmer (I remember reading something he wrote where he had some strange views on threading) but I think criticism has to be offset against that.

And at the end of the day they shipped a Linux game before Steam on Linux was even announced, apart from that one issue it seems to work flawlessly (for me at least) under Ubuntu including actually recognising an Xbox360 pad which Braid didn't.
Where the logic hides in rails apps
Interesting, are you that kind of guy?
I guess the "unrelated to work" might be a point of debate once you create IP of high value.

In fact, in Germany we have the "Arbeitnehmererfindungsgesetz (ARBNERFG)" [1] which stipulates that your employer has first right to all patents and inventions related to your work, even if you create them in your spare time. The basic reasoning is that your employer supplies you with all tools and ressources required for the invention in question. It would be way too easy to just clock out, return to your desk and a minute later write down the world formula and sell it for billions. You're entitled to a compensation though.

The law looks a little stupid when applied to computer science but makes much more sense in a research or engineering context.

[1] I just adore german legal terms.
Hi Tom, Thanks!
We will probably add such an option soon enough.
btw, I'll contact you soon regarding Buffer integration :)
It's HTML5's "localStorage", a local database that is all key/value.

localStorage.setItem("theKeyToSaveItAs", "theValue");

OP is saving via localStorage every 2 seconds:

setInterval(function() {

localStorage.setItem("text", textarea.value);

}, 2000);
Right...and that provision would've likely been passed by Adam Lanza. And it seems likely he would've been able to inflict such a massacre with lesser weapons; the VT killer caused more casualties with handguns.

The point is, the logical reasoning used to single AR-15s is so flimsy that the argument should be about regulating a much wider category of firearms. To single out AR-15s is just pandering.
The carriage return sound isn't preloaded. You misspelled the preload attribute as preloaf.
Everyone is non-violent until they're not and there is a rational trade-off between civil liberty and security (the risk/reward balance ranges from the U.S. to Singapore to Stalin's Russia). There is a proper way to do this - peeking into suspects' lives for suspicious activity, and if nothing is found, to hide away the file. While most protesters in Benghazi weren't bad it created a predictably attractive environment for violence-biased individuals.

As a personal aside and a New Yorker, I've been concerned by the sometimes violent proclamations of OWS protesters (as well as thoroughly pleased by the coherence of a diminishing minority's arguments). I would be dismayed to the point of taking action if NYPD CT weren't monitoring the group (once an individual leaves the group the civil liberties side weighs in higher as a temporary phenomenon indicating an elevated risk profile has passed).
Are there any statistics to show that YC companies who optimize for bigger valuations reach product market fit and then the scale stage more than YC companies who optimize for the most compatible investors? (Which may or may not mean lower valuations)

It seems like that data wouldn't be anecdotal evidence, but cover a fairly large sample size.
The overriding message was really just to work hard and everything would come good.

On the other hand, every gen before Y was told "just work hard", no light at the end of the tunnel, no 'it gets better'.
Central bankers rethink their devotion to slaying inflation
Expecting an 80-hour course to somehow deter a psychopath from shooting up a bunch of people strikes me as rather naive.
Next, we'll add the DVD burner laser to a reprap 3D printer, and print graphene objects.
As with most departments, legal works on a continuum.

Some coders push buggy code and some coders polish their bits endlessly. The good ones write code that meet the requirements in a reasonable amount of time and move on to the next task.

Some lawyers are strict letter-of-the-law types and some will approve anything to make the profit centers happy. The good ones balance the legal risks with the commercial reality.

Under the circumstances I'd be curious to know what the cost-benefit analysis of this change might look like. Given how seldom employment contracts are negotiated and how rarely these IP clauses are enforced, my guess is the biggest cost might be something even more intangible, such as stifled employee creativity.
Wow, workflowy is excellent! Thanks for the tip!
An exercise in trading anecdotes isn't going to get anyone anywhere. The fact that the people you've surrounded yourself are relatively well off does not offset problems surrounding unemployment and falling wages.