skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Feedback on our concept?  "Instant Chat" when you're in a retail store
We're trying to solve the problem of a) needing help in a store and b) not being able to find an employee.

Specifically, we want the service to handle both a) where is x? and b) what do I need to accomplish y or to make z?

http://www.helpping.co/

You're lost in the store, but there's a "magic" button in front of you.

Would you use it?
stop using it.

Fair enough, but that's only Step 1. Step 2 is getting all sorts of websites to stop forcing everybody to use Facebook to use their functionality, and/or comment..
The likelihood of these chance serendipity things happening greatly increases when you're from or are in an environment that's well nourished and socially supportive.

There are probably a few graduates of Berklee that didn't end up where there were proud to end up being -- the amount of graduates of third-tier music schools that end up nowhere is considerably larger.
I would get rid of your use of "OnStar".
Don't copyright the classroom
Ah, ok. I would caveat that it is the alignment you can use for high speeds, not necessarily the roadbed, but your point remains the same then.
The "FOR NERDS" picture annoys me: there's no good way to write code on just a Chromebook, is there?
You're citing a very old paper that makes no mention of HFT? Not sure I follow the reasoning for the citation.

No one is saying that speculative traders don't serve a function in the market place. However you said "HFT serves the same purpose that human Market Makers and Specialists" when it has been proven they don't. HFT want you to believe that they serve some altruistic purpose to the marketplace to legitimize their existence. The truth is that HFT serves as a quasi-tax on each and every share traded because to execute a trade in today's marketplace non-HFT volume almost invariably passes through the hands of HFT volume thereby shaving pennies of profit off each trade.
Add me to the list of people dedicating themselves to trying something in this very area.

I don't exactly know what I'm creating yet (maybe there aren't terms for it yet), because I change things as I go and it's not done yet. But the current vision is a sustainable automation platform, where you can add/change/build/do anything (because it's open source) with what you're working with. So you can create yourself a "testing the app" button and "building the app" button, and that will become something that's available to you. Actually, I'm trying to make it so that those buttons will be automatically available for you as you naturally do the things you'd normally do, but I haven't gotten to this part yet. (Oh, and perhaps instead of buttons you have to press, new output can simply appear on your screen right away.)

In short, my vision agrees very much with what you're saying, but I still have a lot of work to make my project a viable building tool, and it is happening very slowly indeed.
Silence For Android Automatically Hushes Your Phone (And Helps You Save Face)
this is why you separate your online persona with your real life persona. Anything you do online is not tracible back to you, except by your very close friends (who should, if they are really your friends, not be judging you in any case).

I don't understand why all these people who use their real names on facebook, and/or twitter. I can understand linkedIn (i myself am hesitant to put anything real on linkedIn).
Thank you for causing me to notice that the last two haskell posts I really enjoyed were on the same blog. Also subscribed!
The good news is that there is a demand for and opportunities for those obsessed with building entire tool chains from top to bottom (or at least with coming to grips with non standard stripped out libraries).

The typical application areas are bespoke high performance robust instrumentation; satellite communications, downhole radar systems, autonomous civilian drone projects, scientific instrumentation. Even gadgets like the recent leap motion device benefit from having custom drivers developed for it that seamlessly and compactly fill the layer between raw hardware and a clean and simple device API.

Erik may never get to reuse and apply the bulk of the code he's already developed but he can leverage the fact that he has built his own components as opposed to simply banging together existing library routines.

One way out of this particular hole might be to join a team with greater breadth and take on their demands as an external driving force.
Did you read the bills before claiming that he "refuses to govern"? Just because these bills have pretty titles doesn't mean that they are sensible.
You can't, unless the recipient's email client displays images. Most do not do this by default.

If the user chooses to display images, you can include a link to a 1x1 image in the email, and then monitor your server logs to see who opens it. There are plenty of software packages that do this.

More information here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/973143/tracking-email-bou...
MoviePass Gives Android Owners Unlimited Theater Tickets for $30 per Month
Sent a friend a song using YouTube. The video was atrocious. Here's my solution
I'm with you on that. It's the surprising the number of web developers who are just now finding out about this which leads me to another questions, what tools do they use if not Chrome Developer tools?
I haven't sat down and done the math, but I'd imagine that if you compared the energy cost of counteracting lift induced drag, it would account for a larger portion of the operating cost of an airplane than the energy cost of counteracting rolling resistance does for a train. Assuming that is the case, it's less important for trains to minimize weight per passenger than it is for airplanes to do so, and space/comfort is directly related to weight per passenger.
5 ways to thwart Apple pickers and Android thieves
I recently tried out the binary at squeak.org. It was recommended to me when I described to some people what I'm trying to create (a system for building software using which you can improve itself).

It was very neat, and so easy to try out. You essentially download it, run it, and it's like a mini-operating system running. You can inspect the system itself and make changes, and then save/load these images. Basically what the article described. There are definitely some very good ideas there. Unfortunately, it wasn't easy for me to figure out how to write some simple programs that print stuff to standard output, and I couldn't really find any samples online. It really makes me appreciate golang.org's Hello World sample right on the front page.
"refuse to govern"... I mean, everyone else thats the opposite of this guy is obviously building utopia.
Honestly it came down to there being private keys and other shifty things in there at various points. Also there was a lot of old crap as we evolved the prototype closer to what we released... We just thought it was a good idea.
I don't quite understand this distinction between liveness and hotswapping, as all the examples of liveness that I've seen involve hotswapping code that causes graphic or audio side effects, and clearly that sort of thing has very real practical limitations.
A lot of stores already have this "magic" button. It simply pages an employee and brings them to you. And yes, I would use it.
Your story reminded me of something that happened to me the summer before my freshman year in college. I was working two jobs at the time, 40 hours doing an engineering internship at a large company, and another 20+ hours working as a stockboy at a local department store (both in Massachusetts) - my family wasn't poor, but we also weren't rich, so I was trying to bank as much money as I could for the coming school year to take some of the load off my parents.

One Saturday, while working at the department store, some blowhard came in to purchase a bunch of housewares to send to his son in Hawaii. The guy was bossy, and basically micromanaged us as we packed his purchases into boxes for shipping, much to our consternation. While waiting for someone to fetch some dishes, Mr. Blowhard and I just started talking to pass the time, and he basically started asking about my life. I told him about going to college and when he learned I was going to MIT, his ear's perked up. Long story short, Mr. Blowhard turned out to be the owner of one of the most successful restaurants in the area, and right then and there he offered to create a scholarship fund and award be a couple of thousand dollars to help pay for my tuition.

When I tell folks about this story, they congratulate me for my hustle, but there was actually no hustle involved. I was literally in the right place at the right time, if I had traded shifts with a coworker (as we were wont to do for weekend hours) or if the right plates were on the store shelf, there would have been no money. Between this, the story of how I got my first job out of college (also a story of being at the right place at the right time), and one other story that I won't share, I've come to believe that serendipity is indeed at least as important as what you know or what you do.

That said, hustle can only help, so you may as well try. :)
The rolling resistance of a rubber tire at 250 miles an hour is comically ridiculous. The Bugatti Veyron gets about 3 miles per gallon at 250 miles per hour.

And the map shows a lot more than just NYC to LA.
They wouldn't boast about it directly, simply having a bug bounty where no bugs were found/reported would do the boasting for them.
Microchip Mind Control, Implants And Cybernetics
Haven't tried this yet, but planning on giving it a shot:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5195912
Well ... battery improvements will revolutionize everything. From big battery packs for renewables buffers to return to propeller based aircafts, and maybe even a tablet that could last a whole day linpack-ing.

The problem is that we have evolution now while what we need is revolution. We need order of magnitude more density achieved without the use of rare or exotic materials.
Apple to lose iPhone trademark in Brazil: source
"I actually narrowed the problem down to a tweak I was using that prevented the landscape view of album covers in Music"

I'm responsible for that—NoCoverFlow wasn't compatible with iOS 6.1 until the update was submitted earlier today.
Being good at what you do amplifies the utility of your connections.

Absolutely, as well as initiative and passion.

Perhaps the lesson here is to a) to the best you can to put yourself into a situation where you can succeed, and b) act on every chance you get. Sounds cliché, but that is the path to success.

edit: anigbrowl beat me to it.
I imagine a text editor, terminal, browser, and a lot of Alt/Cmd+Tab, F5/Cmd+R, Ctrl+C+up+enter. But I can't say for sure.
I could be wrong, but I believe 22 rifles are used by hitmen because the bullets don't have enough power to pass through the victim to leave exit wounds. Exit wounds tell a lot about a murder.

Also, I don't know many details about this case but I thought you could only be found guilty if the proof was beyond a shadow of a doubt?
I started programming in high school as a hobby and went on to study mathematics and linguistics at the University of Chicago, where I graduated in 2006. The date is just to give a sense of the timeline: it wasn't until 2-3 years ago that these worlds felt meaningfully compatible to me.

So, I'll do my best to explain why this is "practical," as someone who spent a long time trying to establish a relationship between "mathematician jfarmer" and "programmer jfarmer."

For me, the #1 practical benefit is clarity. For example, you say that "the algebra of data types, as described, is simply the algebra of natural numbers."

Is this really true? The mathematician's move would be to abstract out this common "algebra" and isolate that structure and that structure alone. The algebra of data types and the algebra of the natural numbers then become instances of this more universal algebra.

In other words, the picture you have is that "A is an instance of B" of really it's that A and B are instances some third thing, C, that isolates their shared algebraic structure. If you're curious, the shared algebraic structure is called a semiring (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiring).

Why is this helpful? Because it makes for clearer explanations. We can understand what facts/theorems are true because of this shared structure vs. what is true because of the particularities of one of the more specific structures. We can prove things about semirings per se which will be true for any particular semiring. We then have a new strategy available to us: if we can show some structure is a semiring, a whole universe of facts become available to us without any additional work.

Moreover, from this perspective, whole classes of seemingly-distinct algorithms become instances of a more abstract algorithm depending on which semiring we're operating over.

For example, the probabalistic and and non-probabalistic versions of a CKY parser are instance of the same algorithm which vary only according to which semiring they're executed over. ({TRUE, FALSE}, OR, AND) and ([0,∞), +, * ), respectively.

That's not just a curiosity; it's an entirely new axis of thought that reveals connections between what previously seemed like similar-but-unrelated pieces of software. It opens up the possibility of writing a function that takes a semiring specification* as input and returns a function for the "instantiated" algorithm over that semiring.

* : This example requires more than just a semiring, but I'm just trying to illustrate the point.
1. Improving dramatically with improvements in energy-density. The weight of a battery-pack capable of >140miles plus electric motor weighs less than the gasoline engine it replaces, not counting the weight of a full tank. (this is based on battery packs available commercially from several years ago - a friend built an electric 911 with Kokam cells with these specs).

2. Conventional Li-Ion (cobalt) cells are definitely dangerous, best stick with NiMH or LiFePO4 to avoid that problem.

3. Those temps are a bit extreme... arguably small markets there.

4. Newer battery tech is reducing the charging time massively... I've read more than a few quotes of ~5 minutes for an 80% charge (diminishing rates beyond that). Example (granted, not near market ready): http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134635-scientists-develop...

5. That's a much bigger problem... towtrucks would have to have a considerable powerplant on-board for this.

6. Again, improving by leaps and bounds all the time. Just one example: http://www.a123systems.com/lithium-iron-phosphate-battery.ht...

7. Well designed controls should prevent this (shutting down the on-board systems when batteries get below a certain point, rather than taking them past the point of no return).

8. This is coming down fast enough that by the time you have to replace the battery pack, it'll be a non-issue.

9. Again, avoid cobalt-based Li-Ion batteries, and this is not an issue. LiFePO4 batteries are an enormous improvement on this problem - less toxic than the lead cells in your car now.

10. Yet another massive improvement that's a side-effect of the lowered internal resistance in modern batteries. This goes hand-in-hand with the improvements in charge-rates (lower internal resistance means less heat from current, whether going in or coming out of the cells).

Which 3 are you referring to?
The most enviable posts from my friends are from those who make less than I do.
Twitter Adds LOLcat, A New Language Option
I find it strange that this is as high up as it is. Articles like this have been circulating for several years now.

You don't even have to stop using it, you just need to stop paying attention to it.
Stay Up to Date – Basic Security (2012)
Meh.

Rest of world (including many governments) "we are not allowing use of Facebook for the intelligence threat it poses against our entire societies". Techy people: "Facebook isn't good for your privacy, internet users!"

Facebook PR puff piece: "Look, we take security very seriously, we even dumped some serious money on it!"

Bottom line: you can have great people but when you are such a high profile target holding the personal information of millions, it's not going to stop you from being abused or strong-armed by your host-government.

Fundamentally, centralization of anything to the level that Google or Facebook represent is a bad thing.
We've seen this to. Target has been particularly good about doing this.

Have you used the current solutions? What did you think of them?
Thanks. We've dropped the "OnStar" adjective.

What do you think about the "Instant Chat" analogy?
Heroku Dynos (in Depth)
I disagree with your idea of running native code on the client as a replacement for the web in the context of laptops and desktops. The app store works because apple curates it. In the Android marketplace, many applications are viruses (http://www.androidguys.com/2012/12/14/lookout-18-million-inf...). If more than 9-10% of laptops and desktops had access to the app store, I would imagine that malware would be a more significant problem. Therefore, while I agree with the rest of your complaints, I disagree with the idea of making the web run using native code. I think that an interpreted environment will become good enough to do everything a user wants as computers get faster. In fact, if we can assume the standard user watches Youtube videos and sends and receives images and text through Facebook/Instagram/..., then interpreted code is fast enough today. On the web, where the user must constantly accept and run code from unknown and untrusted developers, code must run in a sandbox to minimize risk of unwanted access to the user's computer.

Side Note: I also just really, really hate app stores. I find them to be much more restrictive than just throwing a website up and allowing anyone to access it. The idea of having to pay someone to allow users to be able to use my stuff is way too restrictive to me.
I'm not sure I follow.

Why use one locally and a different one remotely? Different default bindings? You could change them.

Or is it that tmux might not be available remotely? I'm sure you could build a static binary and dump it in your homedir.
Note that with jailbreak tweaks, which critically depend on hooking various random internal functions of closed-source binaries (and coexisting with any number of other tweaks that may be hooking the same functions) to do their magic, it's not so much "sloppy code" as "not extremely meticulous code".

Then again, this doesn't matter at all to a user - broken code is broken code. (And there certainly is some true sloppy code.)
Depends on how you define 'job', if its something you do to make money so that you can do the thing you really want to do, no that wasn't what I was suggesting.

Engage with people outside of your Internet friends, you can do that easily at most churches, volunteers are always scarce, or with your any number of organizations in your community.

Depending on your life circumstances and the time of year you might not be in a position to live as inexpensively as you would like but the problem our author has is that he loves to figure out systems (cool) but doesn't have any meaningful systems to figure out (bad) so he's rewriting the systems he can get his hands on to burn up creative energy. And yet there are lots of broken systems that could really really use his help, and they aren't all technical.

Lets talk about Aaron Schwartz for a moment, I met him at a small conference we were both attending and I got to talk with him a bit about his aspirations for making information available. Organizing around that goal gave him tremendous focus. Our author doesn't have a mission yet, that thing he's going to do. He needs to find it, and to find it he has to stop thinking job vs recreation vs my time vs work time. He has to think, goal, requirements to achieve that goal, next one on the list. That will organize his life for him and he won't be going crazy any more.
How to make Twitter lists
Signs of startup dysfunction
What It Takes To Build A Good Startup In Israel
Assuming you have access to the repo, it can be pushed either to master or another branch of your choice.

If you don't, a fork is automatically created.
User-Built tDCS Research Device
There's no app/service for this already? This is a pretty good idea.

I like the "chat" aspect especially since (on the backend) it could be taken care of with machine learning & automation. Most of the time looking for a store employee I just want to know what aisle product X is in.

As a third party service for smaller stores and a white label solution for larger chains, it sounds like a nice business model.
Thank god that "regular people" are smart enough to not care what you think.
Especially see the .doc he links to at the end of his post. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/491815/tDCS%20Session%20Setup%20with...
I don't know much about hitmen or the case in question, but off the top of my head it doesn't sound like a terrible choice.

You can buy a .22 rifle without any sort of record-keeping, they don't cost that much, neither the gun nor the ammo will raise any eyebrows, they're still very lethal at close range, and depending on the ammo you use they don't make that much noise, making it easy to fire off a couple shots and leave undetected.
Twitter's dangerous lack of transparency on terrorism
A more apropos comparison is Paris-Lyon-Marseilles (480 miles, 14 million people) to Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison-Minneapolis (430 miles, 14.9 million people).

A train from Detroit-Chicago-Milwaukee-Minneapolis would in a single 700 mile line cover 1/3 the population of France.
Glassdoor salaries are out of date, munging together years of comp and reporting them all as current. $160 to 180k including bonus/equity, and you're finally getting into competitive territory for poaching talent. You won't be best in class but you'll be better than average.

If you hired workers like you shopped for housing, getting rid of unrealistic expectations based on prices from years past, you'd find them much easier to recruit.
private keys and other shifty things

This was a SOP at a company I worked at, for any repository, either for OSS or when delivered as work product to customers. We just didn't want to have to do a commit-by-commit, line-by-line audit for any of an unbounded universe of Things That Would Be Very Bad If They Leaked. A surprising amount of them are not things that are technical in nature -- for example, many developers treat commit messages as watercooler talk between themselves rather than something which could potentially be reviewed in a courtroom. (Guess the precipitating event: "Memo to all developers: One should never, ever, ever, ever, ever mention a developer who is no longer with the firm in a commit message.")
There is one demo in Bret Victors' IoP talk where he is live programming a sorting algorithm and something non-graphical is visualized (in this case, control flow and local variable states). The hotswapping really isn't the focus at all; its the live feedback that is important.
yea, no. i'm pretty down the middle and appreciate opinions on all sides... but read more about this guy.
Read the legislation. It's eye-opening how much stuff has a pretty sounding name, with lofty intentions, that have pork and other garbage attached. I'm afraid you just fell for the "think of the children" style reasoning.
Facebook doesn't make me feel bad about myself. Just today I used Facebook to communicate with two classmates from elementary school about a meet-up. They have lived in this same sprawling metropolitan area that I live in for most of our joint lives, but we haven't seen one another in person for forty years. For the last year or so, we've been regaining acquaintance through Facebook. That's cool. Seeing them in person will be even better, but I wouldn't be seeing them in person soon at all, most likely, but for Facebook.
Startup Professionals Musings