skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>How do you even define the problem you're trying to fix?

The name of the problem is "uninformed decisions". Lacking real information about startups, the VCs rely on signals - social signals, their own prejudices, "common sense", that sort of thing. Had they had understanding of the field, or understanding of the emotional rollercoster that is building a new business, there would be much less reading of tea leaves. In fact, a hypothetical competent VC would inquire until he finds the weaknesses both in businesses plan and the team approach and morale, so that he knows what the problems are, rather than run away when he finds some.

To put it shortly, the problem is "dumb money".

The answer to this problem is "smart money". Raise funds from the insiders of the industry you're working in - at least they know half the game. And also from the startup veterans, as they know the other half of the game.

Dumb money has no place in the early stage business funding. The reason why dumb money saturates the startup discussion is the same reason why the interest rates are low - dumb money is at oversupply, so they are trying to get into every credible investment opportunity.
is this like a joke or something?
please do - are you back in town at all during those 3 months? would love to catch-up f2f at some point in march if you're at all around!
Rethinking The Postal System
It must have taken a lot of $$$ and planning to get the employees back into the office. Companies usually profit by making their employees work from home.
I tried not to get too deep into the explanations because I really, really wanted to keep this to a short list that could be scanned and grokked.

Truth be told, if someone wants an explanation of some of JS's weirdness, there are far better articles out there they can Google to meet that need. :)
This post is everything wrong with valley culture distilled into a few ugly paragraphs, followed by an ugly site that redirects to Bing, which the paragraphs had just harangued.
They created a frontend to Bing, and a way to group site restrictions.

A more honest title would be "I built a better frontend to Google (by which I mean Bing)".
Search programming:
c libraries

http://www.bing.com/search?q=c%20libraries%20%28%20+site:php...

good job.

edit: All things considered. I think this blog might be a joke.
Not at all. He just wasn't a good fit for the team, and nor was the team a good fit for him.

Prima-donna programmers tend to be vain, demanding, and incapable of receiving or acting on constructive criticism.

More often than not, they're also not particularly productive, either.

Whether or not you do TDD is unrelated to any of those personality traits, and I've interacted both with excellent developers that had a myriad of reasons to not test, as well as horrible prima-donnas that were religious about TDD, but only if you did it the One True Way That Only They Could Understand.
Damn those are ugly. If I had to choose though, I'd pick Chrome. The variable width is nothing compared to the rainbow text of the latter two.
I use my close friends a bit as a sounding board for these sorts of things, usually they tell me -- dude, stop working so hard, even if you fail you'll learn stuff that will make you much much more valuable in the future either for your own company or even for someone else's.

One reason, I think, that I don't use my best friends for a sounding board on this, is that they are too likely to be supportive and encouraging like that, and I don't think I want that kind of talk. For one, I'm too old and there isn't enough time left for that kind of thing. If this startup fails, it's pretty much "game over" for me, as I see it. So any talk that isn't "fuck or walk", "do this or hit the bricks pal", "do or die", etc. is counter-productive to me.

Rational? Probably not. But I don't want any fatalistic talk, or overt acknowledgement that failure is even a remotely reasonable option, because it might give me an excuse.

Of course, explaining why I put so much internal pressure on myself is a whole other story. And one that I don't feel like I could ever really tell anybody. It would involve too many uncomfortable truths and too much digging around in my past.

Easier to keep soldiering on, amped up on a steady dose of heavy-metal, adrenaline and caffeine and a mindset that there are two outcomes in front of me:

1. Succeed at this startup, and achieve some things I've been questing after my whole life.

2. Emulate Nick Cage's character in Leaving Las Vegas.
Germany under Hitler, Russia under Stalin, China under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Uganda under Idi Amin for starters.
I understand the motivation but it doesn't work. The problem isn't people don't understand how a bill was made it is that they do not care what is in the bill. It isn't rocket science finding out who inserted what in a bill. Every time some piece of pork or special interest group gets something good the collective response is to shrug. No one cares.

You actually want people suggesting changes to bills at the committee stage. What happens now is that bills are written by committee members based on broad directions from leadership. The first time the bill is seen everything in the bill has been baked in the oven so to speak. What you are suggesting will drive bill making process even more underground as members are scared of suggesting unpopular changes to bills they actually support.
Maybe this?

http://www.myfacewhen.net/uploads/714-epic-facepalm.jpg

:D
Pretty obviously a troll, their blog tagline is "Blog of the The Greatest Person to Have Ever Lived"
Although i don't personally think that this project (nor the way it was presented here) is worth much, we have to agree that we are now in a place where limiting search results is relevant and filtering content will be more and more important as years go by and the information continues to increase at this rate.
> "reading/learning. That can be productive."

I've been using one of my tablets to read through a book I'm using to tutor a friend's high school aged kid.

My wife uses one to read programming books and reference materials.

My preschool-aged son and nephew watch educational videos (type "number", "polygon", "alphabet", etc. into the youtube app; there's some great stuff out there.) They also play number, letter, color, shape, reading, and math games (the five year old plays Dragon Box! [0])

My sister uses hers to schedule substitute teaching and tutoring jobs, and on occasion she works as a manuscript editor (the keyboard dock is important for this.)

So there's a lot of reading, learning, and even production of content going on on tablets in this household.

[0] http://dragonboxapp.com/ ; HN discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4105397
I feel bad for trolls and even worse for people who made one remark that pissed off the wrong person and are a completely productive and well meaning poster (I regularly see this type on HN and notify them whenever possible) - but I have absolutely no sympathy for spammers and credit card fraudsters who get hellbanned. It's perfect for them.
...he's really taken it off the rails, adding terms from war blogging and other sources that really have nothing to do with hacking at all.

And terms of his own devising that haven't caught on. That seems like the cardinal sin of a lexicographer.
I'll be home most weekends, if not all. I usually fly in Friday night on a late flight, then fly back out Sunday afternoon. I'll shoot you an email or give you a call, and we'll set something up. It has been a long time!
You're still adding a server. But you have to write it first.
Psychological breakdown lies down that road. You can only kick the can down the road, but you can't make it go away by ignoring it. Your choices are 1) talk things through with someone now 2) struggle for a while and talk to someone later 3) burn out. The first two choices are the same, except that in one of them you get to struggle before arriving at the same end.
So a worse duckduckgo.com then?
Should add more context. What makes each one the best?
Racial Quotas, Harvard, and the Legacy of Bakke
So he made something like Blekko, but he used bing as the backend instead of his own backend. How did this hit the front page ?
It is deliberate on his part http://dcurt.is/unkudo
Yes this is constitutional. The houses can modify their procedure through a public law. This happened in the sequester bill that established the super committee and forced an up or down vote on the debt reduction proposal. If it wasn't reconciliation would have been illegal for the past fifty years.
Show HN: Sketch.app templates repository (Unofficial)
The bill should also include the fact that you can't add stuff to the bill that have nothing to do with the main topic of the bill. This happens far too often - like putting indefinite detention clauses in budget bills, and so on.
If I wear a suit designed such that I had an air supply, sufficient protection from cold, a filter system for external air and enough padding (and or other measures) to ensure I could survive a fall at not-insignificant speeds and impacts from other debris, would this qualify as tornado proof?
I wish I could see the description of each frameworks without the hoverover. That's rather unnecessary.
The Next Big Thing in Crowdfunding: In-Person Events
I love your condescending tone.

The project began with a Java-based system to a Ruby one to a JavaScript one. I appreciate things weren't as developed back in the day, but it appears the project uses what's best, regardless of the language. That, to me, is the epitome of being language agnostic and it's not a bad thing.
I used flightright ( http://www.flightright.eu/ ) once when the leap second took down the whole air france booking system. Was a pretty easy process and I got some money back. I like the general idea.

Looking at refund.me, I see a service I might want to use but I also see a lot of things that distract me from using the service.

Here's an annotated version of the frontpage:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s28/sh/d6d22247-63f2-4ec7-967...

(this might sound harsh, but I really like what you guys are doing :) )
The experience-freedom axis
Mathematica's documentation. It has live editable examples built in similar to the man pages.
Isn't Sparrow dead?
Thanks for replying. When I explored Msgpack, it was the Objective-C library that I tried using. Overall it was a great experience - nice work on the wrapper. I think you're right - I was trying to use Msgpack to do more than I could do with JSON (namely, to transmit NSData without having to stringify it). When I realized all the NSData objects were being automatically converted into strings when the data structure was inflated, I figured I'd need to prevent that behavior and do it on only certain keys (which would need to be specified somehow, hence my thought of a schema). Thanks for clarifying!
This seems to me, like the least efficient method ever for dealing with the problem. Ok you want to find 'rivers' in text. To do so you have to turn that text into an image and then run it through your app, then go back and manually correct the problem? What was the point of the app again? I don't care if it took 1 line of code or 1000, this seems completely useless, when the anomaly is blatantly obvious when proofreading. Not to mention if you wanted to fix it dynamically, you'd end up with an image of a block of text instead of text, no big deal for print, but devastating for SEO..
"ok smart ass what would you recommend?" is that what your thinking? Well, since you asked; why not take an open source text editor and add an algorithm that stores each line of text in an array, find the index of all the spaces and compare it to the previous and next lines of text. If the index of spaces are relatively 0 between lines; you have a river. If the indexes increment or decrement; you have a river. Now add an extra space somewhere or move the last word on the last line to the next line. Whatever solution is most aesthetically pleasing. Now your rivers are getting fixed on the fly and you don't need to take a screenshot of a block of text to analyze it.
Maybe I missed the point of the article, but i thing those of you praising their solution aren't taking into account what the problem actually is, and the fact that their app doesn't actually include a solution to the problem.
>When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Not American, but even I feel annoyed by your tone.
It's illegal in the US as well.
Style tip: Companies and products are not works of art and shouldn't be italicized.
15, hacked this together :)
Indeed I have and used it pretty much from the time Unity became mandatory up until Cinnamon became stable enough to use day-to-day. I do like Xfce more than Unity, but not enough to keep using it. I actually really quite love Cinnamon and Mint in general, although it could do with a lot of polish, especially the default login manager which isn't the best. mint-update is very buggy too and half the time just doesn't work. Overall though, it's a happy experience and it looks better to me too.
I agree. Also waking up in the dark tends to depress me. I think I even get more bad dreams when I'm in my later stages of sleep and it's still nighttime. It's like my mind knows it's going to wake up in the dark and it's not happy.
Legislatures run mainly on norms and customs. As people have pointed out already, no legislature can bind a future version of itself (which is why the 60-vote filibuster is unconstitutional, but I digress).

Congress could establish better customs, of course. It is customary in many nations to limit legislation to a single topic and to codify the laws on a single topic in a single published Act. For example, virtually all of the important laws relating to, say, education, might be published in an Education Act, and from time to time, a legislature would enact a new version of it, replacing the old version entirely.

This tends to make reading up on the laws (and proposed laws) much easier, and it also makes super-specific tax breaks for individual companies and things like that really stand out.

The U.S. custom of publishing bills as a list of "replace "and" in line 76422 with "or"" statements is a really poor legislative custom.
Sure, go ahead. E-mail every contact, if there are multiple email addresses at that company's domain name.
American teacher in Japan under fire for lessons on Japan’s history of racism
I use my iPad for when I don't want to work.

It's that simple. I don't find using it to be terribly productive for work purposes (especially as a data warehouse consultant). I realize that some people have, and that's great, but for me it doesn't fit the bill.

So what I use it for is when I specifically want to ensure I can't work. I grab it, I go into the sitting area of my bedroom (away from dual 27" display setup), and do things that are very much "not work" in my lounge chair. I might check on my finances. I might play some games. I might browse a few sites, catch up on them with something like Reeder, or read old articles with Instapaper. I watch my subscribed channels on YouTube. Perhaps check the weather. Perhaps do some shopping, catch up on Twitter, or maybe check Facebook to see what friends are prattling on about. If it's late, it'll get perched on a nightstand and I'll play some podcasts, stream a movie or TV show, or put something on from YouTube and fall asleep to that.

I could do that on my iMac + display as well, but then I might get sucked into doing actual work, which I want to avoid. I'm not going to work on large database apps or ETL processes on my iPad. I'm not going to code effectively on my iPad. It's suboptimal for it. So I relish in that fact and it's my "coffee table computer" or my "fun computer". And for that, it does a great job, mostly in ensuring I stay away from "doing work" when I don't want to be working. Overall, it ends up being about 30-35% of my "total computing" time, but at least all of that time is 100% leisure instead of constantly straying back towards work.
I have a netbook for such things.
A beginner's guide on how to freelance after graduation - with a free version
> Having a realistic appraisal of your problems and advantages is a sure sign of delusion and lack of maturity.

I think you meant "Having an unrealistic ..."
Here I was thinking it was a travel booking website that tried to find the least-optimal flight schedule on planes that were always overbooked, increasing your chances for a bump & compensation.

So if anyone wants to work on that idea, I'm all for it.
So, first I thought "Oh no, not another DuckduckGo!" Then the article's first line had Google misspelt as 'Gogle' and then there were a few paragraphs with too many biased assumptions and with more of marketing slogans revolved around the importance of 'you'..and so I thought it's a social network with a search engine integrated. But then, I thought "hey, isn't that what Google already does?"

And then I clicked the link, it's just a semi-polished front-end, with serif and sans-serif fonts mixed, that just builds-up queries for ONE particular search engine (Bing). Atleast, if there was an option to choose between any of the top 3 Search engine's, I would have been slightly impressed.

Honestly, this is a disappointment and the title is misleading.

It solves a very little problem. Anyway, I don't want this to be a 'hate-only' comment, so, I'll share what I know with the community, so far:

(Replace news.ycombinator.com with the site you want to search for)

1) If you want to search a specific site, then type in :

site:news.ycombinator.com

2) If you want to exclude keywords, then type in:

site:news.ycombinator.com -mongodb

This will exclude all results containing 'mongodb'

3) If you are searching for a specific string within the results, then type:

site:news.ycombinator.com riak

This will explicitly highlight the word riak in your results and also include only results that matches this string.

You could also search for a particular term in double quotes to be included with your result:

site:news.ycombinator.com "paul graham"

Hope this helps..
Why Learning Assembly Language Is Still a Good Idea (2004)
I remember reversing it once upon a time, but am not able to replicate it now.
The post office already offers a lot of the services you described:

"You could specify the to and return adress, you could pay with a credit card, and you could add whatever options you want."

What would the point of obfuscating your address with a 16 digit ID number be? You'd be adding another layer of complexity to an already simple system of names and addresses on a designed letter carrier's route. If you want obscurity you can always register a PO box.

Your solution also relies on other businesses easily and quickly adopting your idea, which in reality is never quick and easy unfortunately.

Truth be told, the mail system isn't perfect, but USPS has done a lot in the last 3-4 years to innovate their own business. I don't have to wait in line anymore because I can print out postage and tape it to my package and leave that at the post office.

Unfortunately a lot of post office customers don't seem to realize the online system exists.
I've used cygwin last around 2011. And yes, for the most part it accomplished it goals, but so did brew on osx. It was just every now and then I'd hit some make script or gem compile that didn't work and drove me batty.

I hope my post didnt come across that you cant do _anything_ with cygwin or brew. I just ran into enough issues that like OP all I wanted was to sit down and work and that pointed me to bare metal linux. Later after being frustrated by the desktop environments I found pleasure in having Windows manage my windows (as well as all the windows only apps) and let linux run in a VM that all I needed from it was a shell.

So as long as my VM is running in the background I can click a shell icon in my quick launch bar that lives right next to command prompt, putty connection manager, and github's git shell (which I use for projects that are win based and dont need a vm, like some .net). The shell is just like cygwin only you are limited to what you share on samba (or vmware folder share if you use that)
From the article:

‘‘No Act shall be revised or amended by mere reference to it. Every bill or joint resolution which amends an existing section, subsection, or other subdivision of any Act shall set forth the section, subsection, or other subdivision sufficiently to enable the intent and effect of the bill or joint resolution to be clearly understood," the two-page bill states.

First of all, any bill that can't be understood will be struck down by the courts immediately. The "clearly understood" provision violates the principle that legislation will be precise. If the legislation lays out a supplementary principle that serves to explain it then it can't be enforced in court so it absolutely meaningless.

Congress already lays out why it passes bills in introductions. This is a political stunt and nothing more.

Law is by its very nature hard to understand especially in a common law system like ours based on precedents. There is no easy way to allow citizens to understand the law. It would be great if you could go online and clearly see

1)what the law is and sections have changed over time
2) which law led to which changes in the published statute and see how that law changed other sections

I'm working on something like that right now. Please keep in mind that making the law more accessible doesn't make it easier to understand. There are so many terms embedded in the law and the courts may not have a clear interpretation of the language yet; or different circuits have different precedents.
http://codepen.io/icodeforlove/full/eudqF
I think the author has an excellent point until he gets to "I feel like tablets are a short-lived fad."

Fine, but are you going to spend $500+ for the new iPad now that you know its limitations first hand? That's what he may have meant. Personally I'd buy a cheap one to browse while in the backyard or couch but the price matters. What I love is a hybrid, or a light laptop (you don't even have to hold it)

The PC is not going anywhere for most people
SilkRoad customers and merchants would love this!
Most gun owners live in urban areas (which makes them even less likely to answer telephone polls honestly, particularly if there are local restrictions) and don't "go shooting" or hunt.

If you hang around with woodworkers, the number of hammers owned is going to be more than one. If you're talking about random people, it's going to be much lower.
So what do you do when it changes direction. Keep it simple, just get away as fast and far away as possible.
Do you think that people are fundamentally different than they were three centuries ago? Do people not still seek power? If the answer to the latter question is yes, then the right to bear arms is as relevant today as it has ever been.

You would throw away a peoples' right to defend themselves against an oppressive regime based on what, precisely? Your presumed ability to foretell the future? Your hunch that humanity has progressed beyond our base instincts?

If that is the case, then you are a fool, which would put you in good company with the rest of the anti-gun crowd.

Your argument is bad, and you should feel bad.
Environmentalist and nuclear proponent James Lovelock (of "Gaia hypothesis" fame) has proposed distributing nuclear waste throughout wilderness areas to avoid concentrating the effect, but also to scare away developers:

"Stick it in some precious wilderness. If you wanted to preserve the biodiversity of rainforest, drop pockets of nuclear waste into it to keep the developers out. The lifespans of the wild things might be shortened a bit, but the animals wouldn't know, or care. Natural selection would take care of the mutations. Life would go on."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/sep/16/scienceandnature...