skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi Craig,

Thanks for your post and sending ⟨link⟩ our way, we really appreciate it and always enjoy reading about We'll Be Circling Back. Keep 'em coming!

We loved We'll Be Circling Back and are impressed by both it's background and the statement it makes. It's exciting to see entrepreneurs tackling "real-world" problems in important areas, which aligns well with our hacker interests.

However it's currently a little early for us to make a comment here. We'd like to see We'll Be Circling Back show a few more proof points and validate a couple of the core assumptions underlying the post. We've offered to introduce it to a few hackers, within our network, who we think could really analyze it and shape some of the strategic issues it'll face in the coming months. We plan on keeping in close touch and will be circling back once it's at a more appropriate stage for commenting.

On a separate note, I feel like we could be doing more to help Hacker News posters. We're in awe of what you've built over there at the Hacker News posting and we'd love to grab a coffee and talk more about how we could be helpful to both the posts and you.

Best,

Samiur
I'm now going to state something really stupid.

In none of aaronbrethorst's examples were multiple terms put inside a single pair of { }. Now I can see the advantage, as (obviously) when writing CSS it is common to have a lot of repetition of the type this lets you reduce.

Now, I can see the purpose of LESS and SASS. Sometimes when explaining something to someone, the most useful feature can seem so obvious as to not need explaining.
I'd think that it has more to do with the nature of ebay's business. Sure, I might click the link and check the prices on ebay, but why would I want to deal with private merchants, slow shipping, paypal, signing up for an account (if new user) and a bunch of other things that go along with ebay if I don't absolutely have to?

I'd be interested to see Amazon's return on advertising.
So funny. The hilarious thing is some VCs actually talk like that in person too! Even when they are really just trying to say "Hey, computer guy, stand in line at the A&TT store for 125 bucks and hour and get me that new iPhone for me."
universities could reduce the enormous bureaucracies created to manage grants. This isn’t purely hypothetical. When Hillsdale College decided to refuse all federal grant money, they found that the loss wasn’t nearly as large as it seemed because so much of the grant money had been going to administering grants.

This issue isn't limited to universities, either, and it's important to me because I work for a consulting firm that does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies. One thing I find striking is how little funders understand about how fundees respond to incentives and to funding requirements.

If funders understood more about the sheer amount of administrative hassle they impose, and the costs of it (directly or indirectly: the money comes from somewhere), I think we'd see something more like a "common application" for many grant-funded projects.

(I've written much more about this issue here: http://blog.seliger.com/2012/03/25/why-fund-organizations-th... and elsewhere.)
I was wondering about this construct several times in the past.

AFAIK English is not a pro-drop language, which means that the construct should be ungrammatical.

My impression was that it was introduced to American English be immigrants with pro-drop native languages (Italians? Slavs?) Am I completely off track?
While Apple was in a very strong position, the carriers had a strong interest in another player to counter Apple's market power. In the case of fragmentation, I think Google was just more willing to negotiate away things like this in the interest of getting a strong presence on the devices.
This is really funny, because it is not far off from the "boilerplate" responses YC sends out to rejected YC applicants.

>We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your late application for
funding. Please don't take it personally. The chances of a late
application being accepted are much lower than for an application
submitted by the deadline.

If you want to apply again for the summer 2013 cycle, the application
form will probably be online within a few weeks.

Unfortunately we can't give you individual feedback about your
application. This page explains why:

http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know
we make lots of mistakes. We have good statistical evidence that
we fail to interview a significant number of startups that we'd
accept if we did.

We're trying to get better at this, but it's practically certain
that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups.
If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us
about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.

Remove "We should grab coffee" to "apply again" and "We'll be Circling Back" to "if We rejected you and you become successful, email us about it". In the case of the VC if I raise funding from another VC and you rejected me do you think I would let them "circle back around"?; or in the case of YC you think if my start-up becomes a billion dollar success I am really going to waste my time explaining to YC in an email where they went wrong rejecting me?
Like Apple ? If you are going to lose it, bite the bullet, better now than later. Google is about to tighten the screws and Samsung et al will be on the losing end if they don't act now. They are no friendships or handshakes, Google has been fearing Samsung for a while and vice-versa, knives have been sharpened already.

What happened to Apple and maps? Nothing, a bunch of bloggers were pissed, iPhones still selling like hot cakes, Samsung did their part but still. Now Apple has their maps and all data goes to Apple, not Google. Soon enough they'll get better, meaning Google loses. It's in Google's interests and they'll pay to have Apple, and Samsung to run Google Search and other G apps. But would you develop if Samsung Galaxy was out of "Android" ? Only time will tell.
Enjoy starting your startup
I think you're probably right, and this was one of my biggest problems with the Android platform. He did a lot of things right, but was completely wrong about security, and from what I've heard, actively stood in the way of the Chrome/ChromeOS people improving Android security.
> access to meat is not a survival requirement, or even a requirement to be happy

It is for some people. Or is their culture wrong to you?
You are honestly making a case that someone did ANYTHING that resembled research, and still didn't figure out that they made their chief competitor, who is currently doing far better than them?

Sorry, I just can't make that leap. The SERP for 'Automattic' is all that should have been required to move on.
The reason Twitter is releasing a music app
Does it take at $1M to build something interesting? [Video]
Stop CISPA petition reaches 100,000 signatures
Looks to me like some attempt to be funny and to show how bitcoins are harder to steal IRL.

So, I'd say the point OP is trying to make about bitcoins is that they're "Good" and/or better by just pointing out one situation where it would be better to have BTC instead of USD.
> pre-agriculture, that's all nature did

Not in the slightest, and I wonder where you've lived that that's ever been the case. Not on Earth, certainly.

The only things Nature provides free are sunlight, weather, and parasites.
The solving world hunger aspect of this post is laughable. This highly processed shake can be made from local agriculture. Great! Why not just eat the local agriculture itself? You wouldn't have to build the infrastructure to process real food down into a powder. You also benefit from all the nutrients we haven't discovered yet. We're just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we know about nutrition. So far we know a lot about nutrients in isolation, not as whole foods. Maybe that's why this seems like a good idea to this guy. I'm glad he's doing at least two real meals a week. That should keep him alive.
I use http://outright.com for mine and it works nicely.
No, what I meant was that University of Reddit is not an alternative to StackExchange. University of Reddit is for learning new skills, kind of like Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, or a real University. StackExchange sites are for solving problems, I very much doubt they will ever become anything like that regardless of natural evolution. I have seen plenty of interesting discussions closed on StackExchange and whether or not that's a good thing is besides the point. The fundamental purpose of the two services is not comparable.

It's called the StackExchange Network by the way, not Stack.
Congratulations on getting your PhD! And good luck.
I don't know what your situation is, but personally, being married, I love spending time cooking with my wife. For example, last night we spent 2 hours cooking crab cakes, chocolate souffle, kale chips... it was fantastic. We both enjoy one another's company while cooking.

For some people, it may seem like a waste of time, but for me, it's a way to connect to other people.
I know I'm late to the party, and no one will read this, but ...

"... Java derivatives like Scala and Clojure ..."

Someone help me out here: In what way is Clojure a Javav derivative?
Thanks for correcting me msp. I must have misread that!
> (most bizarrely "Straight (gay)"?)

There's a whole subgenre of gay porn featuring 'straight' men having sex with other men.

It varies from 'guys who look "passably" straight' to 'guys who are "straight" and have girlfriends but get tricked/coerced into having sex with other men".
> it seems to be form of the software "everything is just an [easy] problem" mindset

> when software/CS types wander off to do experimental science...

When a random nutter makes some woo, we just call them random nutters and ignore them.

...But when that random nutter happens to be a software engineer during the day, suddenly it is game on for slagging engineers? Clearly it must be indicative of some sort of common hubris in the industry?

There is some selection bias going on here.
> What a bold faced lie!

I've always heard this as bald-faced lie.
Exactly my point. Google cannot afford to, high end users (usually those with money) buy either iPhone or Galaxy. Google can ignore them, or cut their nose to spite their face, but Google will lose in the end.
Google Glass Will Disrupt Social Media With Too Much Data
If the fellow from the article read a few books and then proceeded to hire a team of the best and brightest specialists to help refine and perfect his concept, I'm thinking the response would be different.
I think Google can fix many of the security issues with Android, even at the cost of breaking compatibility. They will presumably try to merge Android and ChromeOS, and taking more of the ChromeOS security model on tablet/PC-form-factor devices makes sense.
EA should just hire Toady one from dwarf fortress to do the Sim simulation. Dwarf fortress has very complex and very accurate path-finding as well as excellent creature simulation.

That model can be simplified and used in Sim City. Of course some performance improvements may be necessary, but that can be done by a large company with a lot of resources, like EA.
> "Any existing maid service that already has the customer base and cleaning teams could hire a web developer to make a booking function for their Wordpress site."

The internet has been mainstream 15+ years now, and these services still aren't online, despite pressure existing to do so.

Say Exec takes off in a huge way and the brick and mortar maid services are forced to adapt - building a half-decent web experience is non-trivial. It sounds easy for us, because this is what we do, and for the most part we operate on a very high level. The demographics of this website work on the absolute tippy-top end websites - what is a weekend project for us is like moving heaven and earth for an old, tech-illiterate business.

Uber is eating taxi companies for lunch in some cities right now, and there have been attempts to do mobile dispatch on their part, but every time they do it the results are ludicrously awful.
The example you posted is about the same as PC keyboard without keypad or with arrows/pgup-pgdn-home-end-insert-delete block in nonstandard places.

Completely non-issue in both Windows and Android.
When you build it, it converts your source into gerber files to be sent to your 3d printer. It then physically builds the source code into a layered statue of syntax. Then you compile it, but don't ask me how, because I never got past that point.
What Bill Gates Got Wrong About Why Nations Fail - Acemoglu and Robinson respond
Google is booting ad blockers from the Play Store, Android
I think Elon Musk is a prime example of why this guy is probably wrong. Elon Musk needed quite some time and money to organise sending a rocket successfully into space. He hired a lot of people for their expertise, because he didn't know everything and didn't have the time to learn everything by himself, let alone build it.

If an Elon Musk were to attack this problem in the way such a problem needs to be attacked, then things would be interesting. Humans are more complex than rockets.
BlackBerry shipping 1 million new smartphones to mystery partner
Trying to update my password: http://i.imgur.com/wLNpR0C.png
Can anyone save Groupon from itself?
Not to veer too far off-topic, but these "speculative meetings" are often (but not always) well worth the schedule disruption, even if it ripples out across several extra "productive" hours. Perhaps for Paul Graham, who has all the VCs in the world scrambling to fund his picks, it's not so important, but for the little people like you and I, the value of a good network is immense.

Business is primarily a social thing. It always has been, and is no different today. This is why inferior products can make tons of money.
But whether or not the point is exclusion, I don't think you can deny that inside jokes foster a feeling of isolation for those not in the know.
Spanish is pro-drop and much more present in the US.
Like they say, the second best answer you can get from a VC is a quick no.
Credit Reports Sold for Cheap in the Underweb
For those curious how this works: http://sudokugrab.blogspot.nl/2009/07/how-does-it-all-work.h... describes a Sudoku recognizer. One could build a chess position recognizer along the same lines.
On the brighter side for VCs, they can just link to this article from now on instead of typing out a 4-paragraph reply.
I do this using the RequestPolicy addon for Firefox.
Zen's Big Stick: The Kyosaku
I don't think Samsung has the same 'fanboy' base as Apple does. And as AndrewDucker pointed out above, HTC was the dominant android name some time ago, who's to say another hardware giant like Sony or LG isn't the next android giant.

Furthermore Samsung isn't in the software business, its in the hardware business. Unless they find some giant profitable reason to fork and diversify into becoming a software business also, I see no reason why they would not simply keep riding the innovation coming out of google.
There are "introductory books", which can also be used as reference manuals. The beauty of them is that some of them are very accurate in their concept portrayal, but the concepts are in a order than lends itself towards learning the whole thing from the beginning.

Also, never felt the feeling of "Whoa, this is cool, I'll refactor this method using that?"
Someone should tell him there is a reason babies and cubs don't drink milk when they grow up.

He probably discovered milk, but it seems to me that milk tastes better.
How many times should you draw a random number from [0,1] to have it sum over 1?
Cryptographers Demonstrate New Crack For Common Web Encryption
> That's still a person who has to make a living.

No, that's not an excuse. Having to make a living is not a free pass to be a douche[1] to strangers with impunity.

1: And the lies - "I was researching" which then makes "I'm sorry for the cold email" a second lie - makes him a douche.
Good point.

An information technology startup with just a Web site or app can be an advantage here: Have a shot at getting to be nicely profitable before having to start hiring. The standard example is Plenty of Fish, the Canadian romantic matchmaking site, long just one guy, two old Dell servers, ads just from Google, and $10 million a year in revenue. The lastest I heard was that now he's hired a lot of people.

I've thought that if my startup is successful, then my first hire will be an 'office manager', your RH man! Next would be a server farm administrator -- get the parts, plug together the computers, position the computers on shelf units or in racks, connect the computers to the A/C power and LAN switch, get the software installed and configured (hopefully using some automatic tools), get the system monitoring and management software installed, get the computer connected to the system management system, monitor everything, when there are symptoms of problem, diagnose and solve the problems, track performance and plan upgrades. Next would be the start of a group for ad sales and customer service. Next would be a software guy to bring up, say, a Web site for self service and 'analytics' for the advertisers. Next would be an internal guy to handle the money, that is, instead of just dumping all the paper on a CPA in town. Then grow it.

But the key thing is to get the software done, go live, and get users. Back to it!
Tying shoelaces with a robotic arm
There's some interesting discussion around this phenomena on this Quora question:

http://www.quora.com/Manners-and-Etiquette/How-do-you-polite...

and this follow-up:

http://www.quora.com/Manners-and-Etiquette/How-do-you-dodge-...

I consider both threads to be worthwhile reads.
Meteor 0.5.8 Released
James Randi Foundation Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge
I fairly often look at Timeline - usually when I remember a posted link, associate it with a particular person, but it's no longer obvious on my own wall.

Which, of course, brings me to the fact that searching for posted content is so sucky despite being such an obvious candidate for monetization. I have no idea what they're smoking up in Menlo Park.
Are you actually advocating for these, or just trying to point out how extreme the government's powers could be if CISPA were passed?
Well he will soon find out that these things interact and you can't take them all together. Example: Calcium against iron http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/1600930/ It will take him 2.5 months. At least that's how much it took me to find out.
There is a local filesystem on a dyno, but it's ephemeral. They are ephemeral for a good reason too: http://12factor.net/processes
Do you have any actual evidence that ingesting all nutrients known to be essential in powder form will lead to a nutritional deficiency or was your fallacious appeal to authority your whole argument?
143% conversion lift with mobile-friendly email
Yep.
They don't know I plan to leave.

As I said elsewhere, they have fired a lot of loyal people in last ~18 months, so I have no problem with leaving.
We're all free to leave anytime we want, be if for a different position, start our own business, or to go traveling, or anything at all.
Sounds like you have encountered the standard problem and are doing the right thing: With a lot of equity funding you could hire a lot of people, get big digs, spend a lot on office furniture, etc., become a manager, and delegate nearly everything. Otherwise you will grow slowly, slowly automate much of the work, outsource a lot of the work, and add people as pre-tax earnings permit.
Google Now aparece no Chrome para Windows.
Um programador acabou de descobrir que o Google Now já vem instalado na mais recente versão do Chrome para Windows. Por um lado é bom porque temos mais uma funcionalidade ao nosso dispor mas por outro lado é mau porque a Google nunca forneceu essa informação.
That's because manually indenting text in HN's commenting field is a tedious, error-prone process, and I am a profoundly lazy person. ;)
This sounds like it was possibly some time ago. If so, don't discount the effect of having less resource-intensive sites too.
You can mock their marketing, but it looks like it worked for them: http://www.inc.com/ss/inc5000/john-mcdermott/inc-500-top-10-...
"Pro-drop" languages usually incorporate the person in the verb. So "grab" in "we grab" is different than "I grab". In Greek, it's "πίνουμε" vs "πίνω". You omit the subject because you lose no information. In fact, it's redundant to include it, so you only do it if you want to emphasize it.
I read alternating ridicule and conspiracy on the subject of facebook, and I can't help but feel it's all posturing because the effects of this system over time exceed anyone's ability to imagine.

The inferences possible through 'network theory' simply stun me. I'm privy to information about small company, without access to any sources of 'big data' aside from the address books of people who download the app, and it's absolutely shocking what you can learn about people when you know some of their friends. And they're only looking at one signal.

I think you're perceiving accurately to describe FB as something alien.
and cause muscle wasting

Low carb diets do not cause muscle wasting - at least if one continues to exercise.

I.e: Very-low-carbohydrate diets and preservation of muscle mass

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1373635/
If only they were as reasonable stating this as you.
Would love to give, but 2 busy

Sent from my mobile device. Please excuse typos.
Prenda Vileness: Transcripts of John Steele's Voicemails To Alan Cooper
Show HN: IMDB and RT ratings on Netflix
This is what I thought Action.io would be, but after a support ticket where I asked them about this use case, they said:

===

"Hi Sergio - Thanks for the note and glad you like action.io.

Please keep in mind however that Action.IO is not a hosting platform - we are a cloud development platform that works with hosting providers such as Heroku, AppFog, EngineYard or Google App Engine.

You can read more about how you can deploy to Heroku from Action.IO here: http://help.action.io/customer/portal/articles/1011326-deplo...

===

So like you said, someone fills in this hole, and a lot of people would love pay for it. I don't need to add even MORE services for something as simple as file storage for uploads.
Doesn't this overlook the issue of Heroku's random load balancing system?

This article seems to suggest that the number of Dyno's required for more load scales linearly with load but, as Heroku now admits, the routing is random and therefore scales much less efficiently.

I found this great simulator that someone put together to demonstrate the issue http://ukautz.github.com/pages/routing-simulator.html

If I'm using it correctly, in his first example using 82 dynos would actually result in requests taking over 9000ms. It takes about 150 nodes to get the average wait times down to around 600ms.

Parameters used:

1. Nodes 82
2. Process/Node 1
3. Requests/second: 338 (20300/60)
4. Duration request min/max 243
5. Timeout 100000
6. Time multiplier 2.00 (not exactly sure what this does)

Using multiple threads per dyno does help considerably. I guess it's equivalent to multiplying your whole dyno pool as well as having intelligent routing within the dyno itself, but problems still crop up if you have slightly inconsistent request times.

Also, one problem that seems to be overlooked is the possibility that multithreading within the dyno itself is less efficient than threading across many dynos since the threads may have to compete for resources. I can imagine that performance may drop across Heroku's platform as a whole as customers switch to threaded application servers and reduce their Dyno counts.
It will always be a stretch, because there is no such thing as proper grammar.
I know about that. Still not useful for 99% of the use cases where you would need ot save files.