skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's like building the better "Internet Explorer".
Once it becomes de-facto standard - the world will have no choice but to embrace it's global penetration and live and work around it's limitations.
I totally hear you - I had the same experience at my last startup - it was butt in seat time not lines of code that was rewarded (and punished).
Still no support for multiple pages? Is it possible to vote for such feature?

I'm really glad to see progress on SVG and hope this will finally make Mozilla to support SVG Tiny Fonts. This bug on their Bugzilla is 11 (!) years open:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119490
It's nice to see that SVG is getting serious about custom filter effects[1], and with any luck, compositing[2].

[1]: http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-filter-effects-20121025/#feCust...

[2]: http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-SVG2-20130409/masking.html#Simp...
Yep, thanks. I clearly don't know much about bitcoins :|

In retrospect that makes a lot of sense with bitcoins going for ~200 USD each.
How often do you really need these kinds of caluclations? And if you use them wouldn't it be faster / more precise in most cases to just google it?

Honest question.

The problem I see is that for most of these you at least need SOME information (e.g. the number of inhabitants of NYC) to start from.

To get that initial information you'll most likely use a search engine anyway, so why not just invest a little more effort to find a exact number?
Keep an eye out and I'll put some in another article I'm working on.
That depends on how the transactions are structured. Most merchants new to bitcoin will not hold on to bitcoin, and only use it as a transaction currency.

I can certainly tell you from a business perspective, $2B of money supply is A LOT more attractive than $200M.
When it works with Gmail, then the world gets better.
In-kernel memory compression (Linux)
Here is the paper: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1618...
That is very true. I'll get on that ASAP. I wanted to get something up as soon as I could so I used the 'FlatUI' template which seems to include a lot of that stuff.
Modern shooters and the atrophy of fun
It doesn't, but it does too. Time is 24/7 and never stops even if you do. If you have a great idea and you believe that in it, you will be fueled to go 24/7. If you are afraid other's might beat you to it, you will have no choice but to go 24/7. The worst feeling in the world is having a great idea, slack at it, and having others thoroughly beat you and stomp you to the ground. While they are gaining traction, you are playing catch up. And you never catch up. No founder wants to experience that, this is why startup life for most is a 24/7 grind.

Because the prize most are after is the highest level. If you want to start a business making $500k a year. You don't have to grind. But if you want a chance at millions or billions then yes, you do have to grind. You are competing at the highest level. It's like preparing for the Olympics.

In everything in life, there are exceptions. But such are not the norm or the rule.
That's the right reason to work hard - because you are enjoying it and stand to become wealthy.

The thing is, most employees with some paltry 0.5% won't, but peer pressure makes them feel like they need to keep up with the 5% founding employees and 30% founders in hours.
How about not pouring energy into Bitcoin and just doing something more efficient:

http://www.links.org/?p=1179

(Or maybe the Bitcoin community should just calm down, develop a rigorous definition of the security properties they want, and then develop a system that meets that definition. Right now it is all hand-wavy, vague, and it ignores a known polynomial time attack.)
Data loss is a risk you have to manage no matter where your data live, whether on your desktop, in your own data center, or in the cloud.
I use this as a starting point for every laptop/desktop I've used in the past few years. Instant boot, no mystery services, yet access to the same great Ubuntu repos.
XMPP is used for Facebook Messager, Google Talk and even WhatsApp. Just WhatsApp adds proprietary options to it and does some weird key exchange on first signup. So there is e.g. no chance to log in from your computer or simultaneously running it on multiple devices.

You are right, a permanent connection isn't that great on mobile phones, but as a custom XMPP service you could just use push technology like every other app, too. That's what e.g. Google and Facebook are doing.

Beejive and IM+, two common mobile IM apps with XMPP support, are doing this, too. The only downside is, that since they don't want to store you credentials, you have to run the app to reconnect to your XMPP server and delegate that connection to their push servers. This is just a bit annoying when either jabber.org or their servers have connection errors.
Best article on Bitcoin so far.
Yeah, a lot of people's only experience with static types is C or Java. (A programming-language-theory PhD student friend-of-mine was first exposed to C while writing her dissertation. "This isn't a type system at all!" was the diagnosis)

Also, sometimes in Haskell it's so hard to write a function that mostly-works (because they type system sees your mistake but you don't) that you can't get enough of your half-baked idea down so that you can see it clearly enough to figure out how it's supposed to really work correctly

Also, I've seen plenty of programs that provably have no bugs, but still grow to exhaust all system memory or occasionally take several hours to return from a function call for no apparent reason. And those are a major pain to diagnose.
These questions are never about the answer, but about how someone would go about getting the answer.

Some people freeze. Some of those people stay frozen even after a bit of discussion. Some people just cannot start the process of answering a question like this.

Luckily, most places have stopped asking questions like this because they'r ejust not very good for whatever those people are recruiting for.
Suggested reads for a startup... given we have oh so much time to read?
I love learning. I love reading great, interesting pieces. However, I'm also juggling time so that I can work on my startup and wrapping up b-school.

There are some great blogs and other articles out there including posts here to HN, PG's essays, LinkedIn, etc. I also know there are great lengthier reads (books).

What books would be good to read that also don't need me to devote boatloads of precious hours to fully appreciate them (learn from)? Unless there are none...
Facebook ads need clear conversion paths, immersive platforms
It's called a leak regardless. Often of it is on purpose we call it a "controlled leak," but it's still a leak. Not all leaks are bad for the party that does the leaking.
But what stops other people from making their own versions of bitcoin? Why can't somebody else create the AsiaCoin or the Bitcoin II or the OceanCoin? What makes bitcoin special other than it's the first one that was created?

All other currencies have some sort of backing. Either a government or something physical like Gold that can't be easily duplicated. That seems to me the big difference between bitcoin and other assets.
Except it's not entering a completely new market. There are around 200 existing currencies, and for bitcoin to become a de-facto standard it would have to succeed where every one of those 200 currencies have failed.
I don't think that SaaS companies have specific marketing demands. Like any other business they'll need to find where their potential customers are and make themselves known to them.
Will Microsoft be obsolete by 2017?
If you need to pivot, pivot hard
0 - Just cashed out over 200 of them for a big pile of money, will buy again when the bubble pops.
Inside the All-New Legoland Hotel
Because Hetzner is an award winning business who sells professional hosting solutions. You'd have a point if the company in question was some dodgy garage operation, but Hetzner isn't.

If EFNet are going to report the issue then there has to be a trust worthy contact at some point along the chain of network ownership, and Hetzner should have been that point. Quite frankly, it's irresponsible for a company of that size to behave in that way.
Just to add, their recent invite blockade was discussed by them on a public mailing list.
First things first, web-based doesn't imply cloud-based. You can have a web-based service that's hosted on your servers and only services your intranet. This way you get most of the advantages of the web (no software to install and maintain, and easy access to the resources by your users), and still maintain control over your stack. There is very little reason to build desktop software anymore.

>For a document that the visitor cannot afford to lose, or for anything in which privacy, security or personal control are issues, a Web-based document is obviously a mistake

I don't see the obviousness of this. In fact, if it's a document that you cannot afford to lose, a cloud service makes much more sense than something stored locally (even with backup procedures). There are cloud services that handle sensitive data (such as patient records and images) today, successfully. Yes, there may be cases in which it makes sense to have data reside on your servers, as opposed to on some cloud-provider's, but those are edge cases now. We recently went through something like this at work, instead of hosting and maintaining our own Sharepoint servers, we went with a cloud-based CRM. It makes too much sense. Our source code, which is by far the most valuable piece of our business, is hosted on kiln. We do have backup strategies in cases kiln servers get hit by an asteroid, but we have no qualms about fogcreek maintaining our codebase.

>Why do you think the big players in cloud-based and Web-based storage and applications are having such a hard time getting people to adopt them?

That is absolutely false. In fact, the opposite is true. The trend has been to offload almost everything to the cloud. The big cloud-storage guys all had phenomenal growth.

>The data loss was apparently small relative to the total data stored, but anyone who runs a web site can immediately understand how terrifying a prospect any data loss is."

And how are you immune to this when YOU are responsible for managing your backup strategy and maintain your servers. Do you know how many horror stories there are of data loss that occurred because of things like bad RAID setup. Backup, replication, server maintenance is hard, expensive and time consuming, and most of the time it has no relevance to the underlying business. If you're in the business of making plastic widgets, you want to focus on making plastic widgets, and leave server maintenance to those whose entire business is server maintenance.
A post on the future of programming languages without mentioning Agda, Coq, or OMeta?

I think we are just now getting beyond the "low-hanging fruit" era of programming languages.
Aside from collaborative editors and chat clients - what other valuable use cases could firebase help solve?
I am aware. And as I said, I hope he spends some time learning about programming languages and programming language research. Not just a tiny subset of virtually identical languages that are not used for research. Look at what he has published. His work has been entirely in the world of unityped languages, and his characterization of type system research is that "some stuff has happened but I don't know what it is and its types so who cares". Making claims about programming languages as a whole requires a far broader knowledge base than he appears to have acquired. Very deep knowledge in a very small space is certainly very useful, but not for making general statements about broad topics.
But what stops other people from making their own versions of bitcoin? Why can't somebody else create the AsiaCoin or the Bitcoin II or the OceanCoin?

Absolutely nothing.

What makes bitcoin special other than it's the first one that was created?

Nothing.
Persona seems terribly important. And well designed, particularly compared to the ad hoc social login systems. I don't understand why it doesn't have more mindshare. Is it not yet ready for use by consumer sites?
What I meant is that you never say "we had those ten features and we added five more, now we have fifteen".

You can't really count features and derive something meaningful from that. Every other new feature is a game changer. Or sometimes it is barely visible.
Right, even though usually Google is very hard to reach on similar issues.
Even if you get paid in bitcoin, if the real value of bitcoin increases, it's unlikely that you'll maintain the same nominal wage. Your real output is relatively constant, so your real wage (whether it's paid by an employer or is the profit from a business) can't dramatically rise every time the currency fluctuates.

So even if you're paid in BTC, deflation makes it very difficult to repay a loan.
Yes, but you place too great of emphasis on a certain kind of achievement/product as being indicative of this ideal mixing of childlike wonder + wealth. Or else how could you characterize Bill Gates' work as being somehow less creative or less wondrous. Bill Gates is trying to foster a world free of disease and poverty, which requires no less of a cool, sci-fi-brainstorm to accomplish...how is that less of a crazy childlike ambition than building an electric car?

In fact, I would argue even that Gates' path is even far more crazy and childlike. In order to do what he has done, he's had to get out of the relatively clean, logical bubble of technology and deal with messy, real world politics to accomplish his goals...and yet he still pushes forth in idealism. Contrast this with Musk, who after a less-than-favorable review in the New York Times, threw a fit. I'm not saying Musk was or wasn't justified, I'm pointing out that real world revolution takes both child-like wonder and an ability to handle out-of-your-realm realities...Gates is farther along in this difficult path than Musk, though I agree, Musk is more likely to have an Iron Man-like movie made about him.
The same question was asked for my grad. qualifying exam: "how many dentists are there in Ann Arbor?"
Stanford's touch-sensitive plastic skin heals itself
Please, guys, change the pastel orange background of the blog to something a bit more serious. It gives wrong first impression and starts things off the wrong foot.
It's new. If it does become our nouveau de facto global currency, it will first become an intermediary for traditional currencies to facilitate transactions. Buyers will exchange their dollars and euros for Bitcoins, and sellers will largely exchange their Bitcoins back pounds and krona (or whatever).

However, the more people accept Bitcoin, the more people can spend it. There will be a network effect. Eventually, if this pattern holds, the food producers will start to accept it and that's where the "trouble" occurs.

In theory, if people perceive the stability, utility, and value of Bitcoin to be greater than a traditional currency, and it starts to replace that traditional currency, the traditional currency will collapse, hyperinflation will occur, and there will be a period of pain. The late majority and laggards will lose a lot of money, and the early adopters and early majority will gain. There will simply be a redistribution based on tolerance for risk and foresight. At this stage the value of Bitcoin will soar.

Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if governments did their best to make it illegal. Governments don't entertain competition because their role is to maintain the stability of the status quo, which is fair. We all enjoy living in a degree of stability, as opposed to a Hobbesian state of nature.
> Inspecting into his marriage feels dirty and indeed, tabloid. But if we want to get the full picture of entrepreneurial life, we can't ignore personal life.

On the contrary, you can, and you should. The era when a man or a woman is defined by his relationships and family is over, and good riddance. People shouldn't be pressured into a family lifestyle if they don't feel a motivation in that direction.

Can you tell me the names of Einstein's children? No? How about two-time Nobel Prizewinner Marie Curie? Ironically, on Curie's Wikipedia page, her children (two) are only mentioned in passing -- they just weren't important enough to include in her list of noteworthy lifetime accomplishments:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie

And if we accept the idea that children are an option, not a requirement, guess who benefits the most? Children, of course. The children who are brought into existence without social pressure can feel assurance they they were planned, not mistakes.
Haven't looked into the code/docs deeply, yet, but would love to know if it can be customized to send data to one's own backend service for private implementations. Love the editor. Also had a few great laughs trying to use it alongside so many other people.
My first thought was, "Isn't this sort of like job hunting? It's unrealistic to expect a company advertising a job to respond to each and every resume, regardless of how much time the user put into it. For the same reason, I would guess the "Freelancer" threads would be the same way." But the more I think about it, the more I agree with you. The difference here is that these people personally reached out to you, rather than you just sending something to "hr-resumes@intel.com" or whatever. So yeah, makes sense to me.
The idea that you can be competitive developer with only a couple days of practice per week is not feasible. It's like being a pro athlete that only trains one day a week while telling the everyone you're a coach. They have the outward appearance of being a credible athlete while trying to gain the powers of a coach. When it's time to perform they are a coach. When it's time to celebrate the victory they're an athlete.
this is some entertaining shit going down in the 'chat'
what do you mean by expressive?

are you _really_ sure it is not just your bias that is preventing you from "expressing" what you want? ie. you want to write python/java in Go?
Does comic 'bravery' go hand in hand with being offensive and stupid?
There's a new philosophy of road safety in Europe based around reducing the usability of roads for drivers and increasing it for pedestrians. (You might say that it follows as a lemma from the observation that Volvo drivers have more accidents.)

E.g. if you make the boundary between "road" and "not road" less clear and remove lane markings, drivers will drive more carefully. (Amazing!) I visited some towns in Switzerland a few years ago that have taken this approach to extremes -- there are no hard boundaries between road and sidewalk, seven-way intersections (with trams) and no traffic lights -- and it works well (especially for pedestrians).
There is a case for Ada being a fun language to program in. Ada will likely appeal to those who enjoy organization. A fan of Ada will likely have a neatly-ordered garage, or if they do DBA work, they will be drawn to the elaborate and tidy typing which C.J. Date demonstrated in his Tutorial-D language. To reuse the garage analogy, simple types will likely appear to those naturally drawn to Ada as unboxed tools or unshelved parts.

Personally I prefer C or Go's approach to typing, eg., use base types (int32, int64, string, etc.) as often as possible or practicable and keep the type hierarchy flat by avoiding multiple-inheritance. Using base types keeps things simple as is reflected in Go's documentation; when descending through documentation for types one can be confident that there is not far to go before hitting a base type. The object is understood.

I do love Ada's use of the range operator (".."), as with it one can simply create 1-based domains and thereby avoid C's omnipresent 0-based domains.
Its not very sci-fi but I find what Bill Gates, Warren Buffet are doing with the Giving Pledge to be every bit as important and inspirational as what Musk is doing with Tesla and Space X.

There's a lot of ways to contribute to society, to each their own.

http://givingpledge.org/
What is the political situation of Super Mario Universe
I am curious, why do you need multi-page support in an image format file? I don't think it is intended to be a document file format.
One problem: He assumes that the market is being adequately served, i.e. that supply and demand are relatively equal. What if tuners have a 1 year backlog and they're charging triple what you'd pay in other cities because there aren't nearly enough of them? This one piece of information could drastically affect the accuracy of any response.

Not exactly relevant when all you're concerned with is determining whether or not someone can "estimate the answer without any specialised knowledge". But, then again, why would you only be concerned with something so trivial?
Until the time comes, as it almost certainly will, when your bitcoin crashes in dollar value and the "value" you were trying to transfer, becomes severely depleted.

Bitcoins have real issues and you ignore them or reject them at your peril.

The USD is not going to halve in value overnight - Bitcoins could easily do just that, or worse.
Like the author I also have my reservations about how solid bitcoin is, but regarding what such a currency would do for emerging economies I totally agree with his article.

From personal experience, the situation here (in Peru) like in most countries in South America is a milder version of what he describes in Africa where if you belong to the top tier of society, it is not that hard to get a credit card, but it is a big problem to get veted to collect payments. If
you don't belong to that top tier, then you can hardly participate of it. (Banking use in Peru is 30%, cell phones 70+%)

While bitcoin would incredibly accelerate development of the economy, banks would not be happy at all of loosing control over a very profitable market and government would have a heart attack over tax revenue, money laundering and such.
> "Not "that every wealthy person should behave in a particular way.""

This was not the claim made by GP. He did not object to any attempts to prescribe behavior to billionaires, his objection was this:

> "if shit ain't being blown up, then who cares?"

Which is an admittedly snarky summary of your post, but accurate. As you said, your complaint is that people aren't doing enough to inspire childlike wonder.

Except they are - Borlaug as a good example. He saved literally billions of lives, revolutionized our every day lives, and has changed the face of food forever using science and technology. When he died, the bulk of HN didn't even know who he was.

Likewise, others in this thread have brought up a great many people - many of whom billionaires - who are doing "cool sci-fi shit", where "sci-fi" means more than putting stuff into low Earth orbit.

The answer to "why aren't more people doing cool sci-fi shit?" is "you need to look harder, because cool sci-fi shit doesn't always have a solid fuel booster attached to it".
I have a bowl. What types should it accept?

Well certainly soup. And nuts. And everything in between.

Plus washers and ball bearings and my son's head for haircuts. Solids, liquids and gasses need to implement the Bowlable interface. Just to be <type> safe, vacuums should probably implement Bowlable as well.

I've got some classes to write and inheritance to track. Then all that's left is to implement Microwavable, Edible, Spoonable, and Unhealthy. Then I can enjoy my Maruchan Ramen.

Bad things will happen if I put a can of Rustoleum in my Microwave and power it up on high for five minutes. So I'm not saying type safety doesn't matter. Just that it is not always better.
No, fair cop, I've only ever used Virgin Cross Country, never the WCML. So obviously I've only seen one half of things.
I like Persona a lot and I would love to implement it on some of my sites, but I wonder how to best describe what it does to the average user. "Sign in with Persona" will probably look just as bad as "Sign in with Facebook"...
CanvasInput - HTML5 Canvas Text Input