skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've poked around the CGAffineTransform classes that Apple uses in their Core Animation framework a bit, but unless you're doing something out of the ordinary, you don't really need to know what's going on under the hood.
The article is quite interesting - but what if someone had told you 10 years ago that the New York Times would publish an article using the term "sugar relationships"?
Curious - which one?
I like the current version of HN and it's incredibly fast, so why change it?

Congrats for the 33K unique a day!
I had a friend in grad school who wanted to build a giant parabolic reflector for Burning Man. The idea was to lay the thing out on the desert floor and then be able to melt gold, or something, at the focal point so that they could trade sun-melted trinkets with passersby.

Never made it to the prototype stage. After watching the Mythbusters try this trick, I'm kinda glad the poor guy didn't spend the time.

Fresnel lenses. Better alignment. Much more reliable.
I read this as [Massachusetts Bill to Ban] [Non-Competes backed by Spark Capital], rather than [Massachusetts Bill to Ban Non-Competes] [backed by Spark Capital], so it's good to see that Spark is backing the ban.

In general I think the state should take a utilitarian perspective in matters like this. If non-competes hurt the economy more than they help it would be self-defeating for the state to enforce them.

I'll leave the rest for politicians and pundits.
It works, just like how other ads work. Do you click on Google ads, for example? Probably not. The ads appeal to the majority of people reading/watching it. If you are reading this, there's a high chance you are not part of that group.
I understood that, but he's got an audience that he presumably does care about, and he could have both snarked at Diggers and educated the people who don't understand the fuss at the same time.

(Also, if he actually wants Digg to stop this, the best possible way is to point out to Diggers why the salad they're getting is full of shit so they can have one of their classic revolts)
I do own the domain currently, but I appreciate the words of warning.
you bring up an interesting point.

also, what happens when one of these girls ends up seriously hurt or even dead? who now owns the responsibility. i just can't imagine this lasting very long, especially as it becomes more and more popular.
> What matters more to me is that the money raised by taxation of whatever kind is spent on smart things (education, infrastructure, technology R&D), and not dumb things (resource wars, policing of victimless hobbies, "too big to fail" bailouts).

My sentiments exactly. The US government can achieve efficiency when it gets its act together, but right now it seems kind of corrupt.
I always end up typing slideshare.com instead of slideshare.net (the real one) even though I know it's .net

So, go for a .com
Upvoted because that's the situation with me and my 4 letter domain name. I was able to buy it for ~$250 in 1999. Anyone know how much they go for these days?
sometimes it's very relevant.

here's a great post on bad names. my favorite: Mole Station Nursery (or maybe Pen Island)

http://www.fazed.org/forum/view/?id=24396&last
I'm aware that (for instance) a rich man is going to have to shop somewhere, and whatever he buys -- even if it's useless and pointless, or it costs much more than it should -- will put money back into the economy.

The question is, where in the economy does that money usually go? In a lot of cases, employees do not directly see the benefits of their company's success, other than to continue having a job. The money would seem to directly benefit shareholders, who are largely rich people who decided to "risk" buying a piece of a company.

Yes, the people who invest should see some of the return. And yes, the company probably wouldn't exist (along with all its jobs) without these investors. But the gains from the company are likely only to benefit other rich people, other shareholders. And investments are going to concentrate on ventures that are likely to be profitable, not in things that are more basic, such as building roads.

Tax money tends to favor the stuff like building roads. The money has to be there, though arguably the government may need to become more efficient than it is.

I answered in a different post how people become rich...sometimes it definitely is hard work, but a lot of times it is just luck and opportunity.
well what I was pointing at, is that if you can't get the name you want add a "the" in front
But the VC market isn't the labor market. I don't see why the response to that isn't simply not to take their money.
USV is one of the best VC firms in the country, and typically investing in a later stage than YC with less risk.
I just talked to Craig (videographer) and the host pulled the video seeing the traffic spike, I'm working on putting it up at another spot.
Books and paper have a similar problem. You can buy stands, and some desks have tilted surfaces.

The separation of input/output areas is an improvement on paper. Starting with the typewriter, it's been an enduring and ubiquitous design. Exceptions like the iPhone are primarily output.
Why those Microsoft ads make Steve so happy
An internal video of Steve Jobs at NeXT in 1991 gives us a clue.
I didn't know, so I had to look it up. In the spirit of helping, I toss out "WildGambool".
Generating Jacobians for Implicit Euler Integration in a numerical simulation project. SVD for rigid body center-of-mass calculations. Conjugate Gradient for solving Ax=b on 9000x9000 matrices.
I try to split up the work into milestones, with the most immediate, relevant ones first. The last milestone on my list contains all the stuff I never intend to implement. The boss/customer's happy it's on the list, but I know it'll get knocked off when the reality of the schedule sets in.
Also could the packaging be any more copied from Apple packaging?

Surely that's a plus, even though it's NIH.
First, they disagree about who precisely "the rich" that the motion refers to are. Mr Piketty defines them as the very, very rich: the top 1% or perhaps 0.5% of the income distribution. Mr Edwards, on the other hand, is referring to a broader segment of the population: perhaps the top quintile or quartile.

How you define "the rich" would be a big part of the debate. I would argue that a max rate at 35K is far to low. Most more modern tax systems go up in much smaller steps and max out much higher (Singapore maxes out at ~150,000GBP (20%) for example). Piketty's attempt to define the rich as top 1% isn't borne out in at least the UK's tax code.

I was originally making a point that the amount of tax we pay is quite a bit more than the headline rate. A minimum of 52% of everyone's money is going to the government.

If people really though about just how much of their money this is and how badly they could do with it they would probably find someone better than "the rich" to be angry with.
I'm sorry this was too funny and relevant:

http://www.fazed.org/forum/view/?id=24396&last
R&D spending in the downturn as a measure of survival
My friends and I at MIT did this once, and it's about as much fun as you'd think it would be. My favorite trick is to try to melt a stack of pennies -- I'm not sure what actually happens, but the stack exploded, throwing half-melted pennies and melted zinc everywhere. It's still there, on the sidewalk outside my dorm.

Science is fun!
It didn't used to (they didn't originally own delicious.com iirc)
Ask HN: Ph.D. vs Startup skillset
Hello HN!

What, if any, is the correlation between the skillset needed to be successful at a Ph.D. and start a successful company? Does a Ph.D. prepare you for founding a startup? Which skills are similar, which are not?

My initial hunch is that the self-motivation needed for a Ph.D. is also what startup founders need to succeed, and that launching a startup out of your Ph.D. is one of the better ways of getting a company off the ground.

To give some context, I'm a current Ph.D. admit, and I'm one of the lucky few that gets to choose between Stanford, Berkeley (my current school), CMU and UW. I'm focused on Graphics, but I'm confident that I'd like to be involved in startups after my Ph.D. So I'm trying to decide which of these schools to go to, and whether my intuition about Ph.Ds and Startups are shared by others.
Send sms via email
Um, just for accuracy: the Federal Reserve is most assuredly NOT a government agency. It is as Federal as Federal Express is.
Glenn Gould's recordings of Bach's keyboard works rank among my all-time favorites. Great music to relax to, and also great music to help enter the zone while working. I think the article got one little fact wrong though: Gould's recording staff tried pretty hard to edit out his humming, with mixed success. It's pretty audible on some tracks and completely absent on others.
My ultimate dream in life is to have mine and a few others' office be next to a home-built bouldering[1] cave. If I had to have just one goal to be self-employed, I think that would be it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouldering
That's a really great idea! Thanks!

Any suggestions perhaps as to where best to get info on click-to-buy partnerships? I guess something like iTunes music store or Amazon would work right?
Clojure Series: Table of Contents
> I don't think we should be making decisions based on principle; we should make them based on data.

I'm very sorry that you feel that data always trumps principle. I suspect if I changed the conversation to eugenics or honesty, you would claim that principle is more important than data.

In fact, principle is an overriding concern with you, despite your protestations to the contrary. I wonder if I could ever get you to acknowledge that fact? Look at what you said.

> not dumb things (resource wars, policing of victimless hobbies, "too big to fail" bailouts)

All three of these things have substantial data to show why they are important. If you think that resources are not worth going to war for, than you have no idea what any war in the history of mankind has been about. Resources are the only thing worth fighting for, and indeed, are the only thing we do fight for. As for victimless hobbies, I assume you mean drugs. There's a lot of data that says it's harmful. How many meth users do you know? I know some. I agree that drugs should not be illegal, but I do that based on my principles of freedom, not data. The data actually supports the status quo. As for the "too big to fail" bailouts, I'm told there is substantial data on this as well, but again, in principle, I'd still let them fail.

Your blanket statements prove that principle is more important to you than data. Principles are important, and as much as you claim otherwise, you and I are in the same camp on that one.
Education always pays off.

After the civil war in Spain, the republicans who lost to the newly established dictator lost everything: all their possessions, money, property (and relatives too, shot dead).

Those who had an education, including how to take care of your body self and of children, how to wash and clean and how to read and write, got out of the situation much quicker than anybody else. Such is the story told in the book "Los hijos de los vencidos" (The children of the defeated), by Lidia Falcon. A great book.
Good ideas but there are issues with this approach. But to explain them here would probably cause me to run out of characters and bore 99% of HN readers. But you're absolutely right that some of these sources could help augment the accuracy of any IP geotargeting system. Unfortunately this type of data has been hard to get a hold of because of either privacy policy issues or some strange beliefe that this was proprietary/trade secret information.

Trust me, I've tried this in the past and came up empty most of the time. That said, it is a really good idea.
Nobody is saying that government isn't good at some things that the private sector is not good at. You are changing the argument. Your statement was that we owe the government "A Good Chunk" for some "things" that cause people to be rich. All of these things were "built on the backs of people paying significantly higher taxes than our selfish generation pays today" I pointed out that your examples are examples of private sector and government cooperation at best, and government mucking around at worst.

The private sector is NOT good at some things. Point taken and agreed. However, we have rich people and private sector profitable work all over the globe, in all sorts of governmental conditions. We have businesses that operate without roads or electricity, businesses that work under onerous governmental regulations and no regulations at all. Your thesis -- that rich folks owe the government "a good chunk" is not supported by your examples. Furthermore, countless counter-examples exist. You just can't wave your arms around and say "infrastructure" a bunch of times and make an argument. Infrastructure is not a prerequisite for people to get rich. Even if it was, people should not be indebted to nations for things that their great grandparents did -- the social contract is about here and now, not 50 years ago. Rich people are in no way morally indebted, at least as far as I can tell.

Your case is thus: Infrastructure helps people get rich. Rich people live in a environment with infrastructure. The government is the sole provider of said infrastructure. Therefore, rich people owe the government more.

If I'm not understanding please correct me, but you're not making any sense at all to me. It sounds like just a slogan you're repeating over and over. I'm going to bow out unless you have something truly useful. It's beginning to sound like we're talking past each other.
Ask HN: Review my web app (steamgamedeal.appspot.com)
My Advice: Take startup advice from folks working in startups
Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One
But you shouldn't be using a normal database for this type of query anyways - it's SLOW, because you're doing a range search

Please explain to me why databases is a bad choice for data which you wish to retrieve in ranges.

If you've clustered, stored and pre-sorted the data according to the range you wish to extract, this is probably the fastest way on the planet to retrieve the data.

Or is this simply more of that good, old MySQLism? You know, the "MySQL can't do it efficiently, so databases sucks"-mantra?

but don't do IP geolocation with MySQL if performance is of any importance to you.

If you remove the "IP geolocation with" part, I think we have a winner.
The reason facebook was "thefacebook.com" is that the harvard yearbook is called "The Facebook"...

It wasn't a domain dispute. But it does bring up a good point that maybe you can just get some article to put in front of the name to get the .com.
That's for the people you pay to figure out.
As someone who has looked through of thousands of domain names I can tell you that there are still plenty of decent names left. The trick, as I'm sure you've figured out by now, is finding them. If you took the approach I originally took, you've probably spent a few hours on AjaxWhois trying to find something that works for you and your site.

To help alleviate the headache, I created http://www.domainpigeon.com, which lists around 45K available domain names (and more are added daily). Most are not very good. That's just the nature of the game, but if you're willing to look, you'll find that there are many good names still available.

More than 500 have already been registered, so it can't be that bad :)

http://www.domainpigeon.com/domains/registered

Hope it helps.
Exactly! They bought it when they became popular. My guess is a lot of people were typing delicious.com and they had to get it.
Wow, this is a horrible article. Where does the author get his facts about the quality level of "most" PHP developers? Sounds like typical religious flaming and half-arsed fud.
I'm one of the few "paying" customers of domainpigeon you've got, actually. I bought a premium membership (or whatever you were calling it) around when you launched, just for this purpose.

I check it out almost every day; it's a great site!
Operations Monitoring, Retro Style
Swedish start-up: icloud, a webOS with applications
These all things can easily be learned. Anyone can jump from 2 to 4 in a couple of weeks by learning binary trees, SVN, starting to write unit tests, and do all the other skills. Wouldn't make him less of a moron.

It is the abstract thinking, akin to what is needed at TopCoder and mathematical olympiads, that makes a programmer great, not his fucking .emacs file or nice template for a file.
Btw, if you really need high performance here use a key-value DB

Or a real relational database configured with a "key" column and a "value" column and let the wonders of proper clustering and indexing provide you with the data in realtime no matter what load you put on it, because this dataset is shit tiny.

No really. I'm dead serious.

If you feel like optimizing this further, you can ofcourse also save memory by shifting countries and cities to separate tables, this reducing the size of the dataset noticeably, maybe by up to 40%.

I'm just shaking my head at all the "database problems" MySQL users invent to excuse their choice of subpar DB.
It pretty much is that simple. I've had solid success that way multiple times. I once elanced a site that grew to making 5 figures monthly. I know a number of other people who've had even more success than me with it.

The thing is, doing dev in house may have a lot of advantages for many types of startups. But it is entirely possible to come up with a spec, get a mediocre quality (but functional) programming job done to meet it, and then launch it and it takes off. It's even possible to then have your contractors evolve it for you.

I wouldn't say it's optimal by any means, and I much prefer doing stuff in house, at least for what I'm doing these days. The number of startups who succeed by changing courses radically is large, and that's harder to do with the outsourcing model. But that doesn't mean it can't work.
That just made my day, and it's been a good day.

(See http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10216713-2.html)

Thanks for being patient with all the changes!
>Education always pays off.

That is one of those tenets in life to live by.
The first start-up I worked for allowed me and some friends to build a wall and campus board in the space. It helped that one of the founders was a climber.
And for you to suffer the consequences when they deliver you something exactly fitting your functional requirements - in COBOL.
Looks as if this may be the lens they used: http://www.sciplus.com/singleItem.cfm/terms/13603/cartLogFro...
The US government is not corrupt. It is, however, a government. Governments do not achieve efficiency because they have no feedback mechanism to allow them to. Show me a machine or electronic circuit or software without feedback, and I will show you a system that either does not work at all, or, in order to work, has been over-engineered (that's code for not an optimal solution == inefficient).

Complex systems must be closed-loop in order to be efficient, else, even if they magically were engineered optimally as open-loop, some non-linearity in the system will eventually undo that miracle. Governments are open loop.

I like the circularity of your statement though. As soon as it's working well, then it will be working well!
I'd conclude that they're keeping up with the times
I've of two minds when it comes to this sort of culture. When I was younger, I loved this sort of thing (see my comment below), and I also spent 10-12 hours a day at the office. It did foster excellent relationships, however. These days, I prefer to limit my time in the office because I'd be with my family, preferably outside.

EDIT: This makes it sound like I hate my job or something. I don't. I enjoy my work. I simply enjoy my family more. I'd prefer to go to the office, work hard for 8 hours, then come home.
A PhD is a great backup if you eventually want to go back into the mainstream. I find it fascinating that hugely successful companies were founded by dropouts: Microsoft, Apple (I think), and Google

Caustic Graphics was founded by my son, a Berkeley dropout and two of his buddies, one of whom never went to college. The product is coming out this month.

My cynical advice is to accept the Stanford offer. Instant cred in the VC community. Spend a year working on your startup and making contacts, then drop out. Guaranteed success. :-)
I don't really know where to start, but I'll point out that passing parameters to a function is not "monadic style", it's just passing parameters to a function. The article suggests that given a function of one argument, it's better to put the argument in a global variable and then have that function read the global variable than it is to just pass the parameter to the function directly. I find this to be confusing, convoluted, hard to reason about, and generally unmaintainable. (What if the function calls itself?)

Also, side-effects aren't "bad" and you aren't "sinning". It's just hard to reason about what happens when side-effect-causing units are composed with each other. The Ruby approach is to hope nothing bad happens; the Haskell approach is to let the type system ensure that nothing bad happens. Many people like to make their code robust, so they try to avoid unstructured side-effects.

One more unrelated tidbit, I had trouble understanding "monads" until I realized that "monad" is an adjective, not a noun. You can't go out and buy a "monad", just like you can't go out and buy a "red". "monadic" is a property of a type (like "red" is a property of a strawberry). "monad" is just a convenient way to say "a type that is monadic" with less syllables. Once you are happy with that, Haskell is really easy.
Isn't it illegal to purposely destroy legal tender?
I think the fact that you are motivated to learn by yourself counts a bit. If you have passion, you can make up for other stuff.

The other way is maybe to get into open source dev. You will interact with a lot of folks.
Also, physical location doesn't matter that much. See if you can hold code reviews, look at other people's code, talk to other respected developers in your team. That will help.
www.1truegamboolean.com is available
Bravo! It's so rare to see someone discuss a language's closures precisely, with implementation details, and no handwaving.

A lot of the time people use the word to refer to all first-order functions, and in a wishy-washy manner that ignores the radical differences between real-world implementations.
I think the sun will be able to defend itself.
I was pretty well camped in this school of thought as well, but I was going through use cases in my head and it kept nagging me that the iPhone has a ".com" button on the keyboard by default when you're entering a URL. So I made this post...

The advice has been strongly for a .com, and there have been a lot of really good reasons as to why. (In other words, my opinion has been successfully swayed.)

I think axod made a particularly good point with mibbit; 6 months ago I wouldn't have ever connected the words IRC or chat with the word "mibbit", but I do now; and I don't think I've ever forgotten the domain name.

I suppose any more people don't correlate the domain name with what it does as much as they used to.
The valuation might vary wildly depending on what particular 4 letters we're talking about and what order they're in.
For those unfamiliar, Steam has a growing number of game packages, each containing a number of games, at reduced total cost. If you want to buy a certain set of games, this app helps you find the cheapest way of buying packages that contain all of the games you wanted.
DevCentral Top5 04/10/2009