skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
starbucks started out this way, in downtown seattle. literally a corner cafe.

but of course this (i believe false) line of reasoning then raises the question of what tiny business couldn't be considered to be potentially an augmenter of the "human condition for a huge number of people", doesn't it?
I don't understand any of this. :\
It's not an impossibly ambitious bar. Many people have cleared it in the past, and many more will clear it in the future (including Slava the OP).
Gmail to kill old compose interface, roll out pop-up design to everyone
"How to Write the Shit Out of Something".

Maybe write it so that people can understand what the fuck you're trying to say?

Does it help swearing in your writing - apparently so?

I have no clue what "Shit" and "Writing" have to do with each other.

Ironic that a article that in theory (I'm guessing) is about writing clearly and concisely, has a title that says NOTHING about what the article is about.
In the analogous retail situation, with physical coupons, there is no "coupon code" field -- the cashier does not ask you "Do you have any coupons today?" Even worse would be for them to ask "Do you have the $10 off coupon on this dog food?" you'd feel like you lost $10. If you have a coupon, you present it to the cashier, and other customers aren't made aware of the fact that they're not getting the best price.
I would debunk this piece by piece, but it's more efficient to make my point with a single example.

>"Local law enforcement, yes--because, as the report notes, they did not have the in-house expertise to figure out what was going on."

Your argument, on Hacker News, which you find perfectly plausible, is that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lacked sufficient in-house expertise to diagnose a mass download via curl?

Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case.
The language is still oddly MPAA-centric. The writing is so outstanding it's hardly something to notice, yet the characters never say "fuck" apart from once or twice, where it was probably censored on basic cable (pretty sure the most recent instance I saw was even distorted on Netflix).

Contrast that with a motherfuckin' HBO show where you can't go a fuckin' minute without a few fucks thrown in for good fuckin' measure.
How does this compare to Hubbub, another C library for parsing HTML5?

http://www.netsurf-browser.org/projects/hubbub/
I use GNU Parallel with s3cmd to move big data sets in and out of S3. I can easily saturate any network connection. I was able to GET ~2TB from S3 onto a Gluster cluster in a little more than an hour by using GNU Parallel to spread the GETs across 8 instances. Incredibly powerful, easy to use tool.
>Most opinion based articles tend to restate the obvious but never offer anything beyond that.

Agreed. The art of writing good opinion pieces is the lay out the arguments sequentially so that the reader is led to the conclusion by himself; such that when you state your opinion he's already come to that point of view. It's time-consuming and requires restraint, but it's very effective.
Gumbo's Python wrapper should be a drop-in replacement for html5lib. Just replace

import html5lib

with

from gumbo import html5lib

The tree generated from gumbo.html5lib.HTMLParser should be API-compatible with the one generated by html5lib.HTMLParser. (Possibly modulo some minor features...html5lib's maintainer has filed a bug about implementing treewalkers in the html5lib adaptor.)

I'm not sure offhand what the speed would be - I'd imagine the Gumbo backend would be significantly faster than html5lib by virtue of being written in C, but speed was not a design goal, and so I suspect it's currently significantly slower than lxml. What Gumbo gives you over lxml is HTML5 compatibility - lxml does an HTML4-approximate parse.
Incorrect Pluralizing of "Cow" Model in Rails
Yep, that's the first thing on the list, all right. Okay, my turn: split the stock between the founding team evenly.
What had a bigger impact on the availability of information? The laptop / tablet and Google, or Gutenberg's press?

Prior to Gutenberg, if you wanted a copy of something, it had to be copied out by hand (often with errors introduced). Copies of a great book might be numbered in the double digits. Newspapers didn't exist. Few people were literate, let alone possessed a library. By the 19th century you had penny dreadfuls, mass-market novels, and literacy rates in some countries approaching 100% (Sweden, Finland, and Estonia in particular -- England as late as 1843 had a literacy rate of 67% among men and around 55% for women).

The marginal benefit of additional technology, as with all marginal returns with stunningly few exceptions (Moore's law chief among them) is increasingly low, while the costs of its discovery increases in real energy terms.
or more commonly I see with the big projects:
1. Big open source software project has almost all of the market share for specific task.
2. Userbase gets tired of old/bad/needless/shitty management stuff in the underlying whatever.
3. New hotness(or several) appears on stage
4. One emerges as main successor to (1)
5. Goto 1
I don't know much about unions, I admit. But, I offer these this counterpoint:

The proposal is to use elevated tube on pylons. The pylons are likely to be of a regular design, probably made with steel molds. The amount of skilled labor to build them is likely to be much less than building overpasses.

Musk has said that the tubes would be built in 30m segments in a factory, and welded in place. Given Musk's experience with robot assembly at Tesla (watch http://kottke.org/13/07/how-the-tesla-model-s-is-made), my guess is that much of the construction of the tubes, and the rebar mesh for the pylons will be automated.

Making stuff in your factory as much as possible means you can automate more. It doesn't eliminate the labor, but it does reduce it a long way.
They already provide adapters for standard Python HTML parsing libraries[1], specifically html5lib and BeautifulSoup. This is how they suggest it be used with Python[2].

[1]: https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser/tree/master/python/gu...

[2]: https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser#python-usage
The orange and blue thing really applies to live action film which gets color graded in post production. Not so much animated movies.
While I do agree with many of the things which are on this list, most of them have trade offs. They certainly are not as black-and-white as the author has stated it.

I really recommend reading The Founders Dilemmas. It covers many of these issues in detail. Here's a link: http://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders-dilemma/ar/1
wouldn't an "echo" just do the same?

$ mkdir a
$ cd a
$ touch b c d e
$ find -type f | xargs echo rm
rm ./b ./d ./e ./c
$ ls
b c d e
$ find -type f | xargs rm
$ ls
$
How changing one word lead to a 284% conversion rate increase
The original 1957 article referred to is available beginning at [1], with the drawing on the following page; the specific paragraph about pneumatic tubes is on p206 [2].

And two paragraphs later:

Contents of the world's greatest libraries and schools will be
available to anyone over special television services. From an
armchair, it will be possible to call for any information by
coded request.

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=JuEDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA100
[2] http://books.google.com/books?id=JuEDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA260
If you can’t get to ramen profitability with a team of 2 – 4 within six months to a year, something’s wrong.

That probably makes perfect sense for some random SaaS app or consumer facing app, but for an enterprise startup, I'll argue that it's off the mark. Just doing market research, a few rounds of customer development interviews, and building the product out to prototype phase could burn up the better part of a year, and enterprise sales cycles are often slloooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.........

Pick the initial team very carefully. Everyone should be pleasant to work with, have at least one skill relevant to the business they’re spectacular at, be extremely effective and pragmatic. Everyone should have product sense and a shared vision for the product and the company.

That's one of those things that is on every one of these lists, and for good reason. But, by the same token, you could spend the rest of your life looking for the "perfect" co-founding team, never build a god-damned thing, and die peacefully in your sleep, of old age, at 97. By the same token that "good is the enemy of great", one has to realize that "perfect is the enemy of good enough".

That said, I worked alone for quite some time before inviting anyone else to join up, because this does matter. But you can't wait indefinitely... in the real world, the environment around you is changing, and windows (of opportunity) come and go. You could easily miss one trying too hard to find the ideal co-founder(s).
A good thing about developing tools at Google is the access to test data with their index.

The line:

Tested on over 2.5 billion pages from Google's index.

That's quite awesome, and would cover quite a few edge cases.
Does anyone have a good recommendation for a writing/blog platform?

I am looking for something that is simple and non-intrusive that I can just put up random thoughts.

Medium and Svbtle seem good and clean, but I don't have an invite.
Google filing says Gmail users have no expectation of privacy
Putty Updated to 0.63 to Address 4 Vulnerabilities
I think you're still missing the definition of the startup in your reasoning. Starbucks wasn't a startup, and their intention probably wasn't to be the biggest coffee shop chain in the world when they first started. Startups by definition are looking for extreme growth and want to be the biggest "X" of their industry eventually from the getgo. An informed deduction is that you shouldn't make a product that doesn't solve a good large problem if you are a conventional startup.
You're right. I've corrected it where possible. It's not nitpicky either, given that it's someone's name. I apologize.

Other words I misspelled at one or another include Heymann, personnel, guardian, and wolves. :)
High-speed rail trains hold way more than 20 people, so they weigh more. Plus in the US, high speed trains that run on "freight lines" (which include the Acela) have to be very heavy do to some idiotic crash worthiness requirments. https://www.ebbc.org/rail/fra.html
How Children Learn To Succeed
Any interest in offering a 6 month internship in the spring? I'm a product design (fairly experienced) and CS student from a top engineering school looking for a co-op.
From a cursory glance at the Hubbub source:

1. Hubbub provides a SAX-style (callback-based) API, while Gumbo gives you a DOM-style (tree-based) struct directly. Hubbub is likely faster in this regard, Gumbo is easier to use out-of-the-box.

2. Gumbo is better tested. It's unclear whether Hubbub's 90% test coverage is "90% of the code is tested" or "90% of the tests pass", but Gumbo has 100% code coverage, 100% of html5lib tests pass (as of 0.95; the html5lib maintainer has pointed out that additional tests were added to trunk recently that don't pass), and it's run without crashing on ~4.5B documents from Google's index.

3. Gumbo has better support for source locations and going between original text and parse tree.

4. Hubbub has character encoding detection, Gumbo doesn't.
Love is in the Air - OSnap Headphone Clip
Love is in the Air! A boyfriend urgently rushes to his girlfriend's house using his jaw-dropping parkour; running, jumping, flipping, and climbing through city shortcuts to save time. All the while he keeps his headphones out of the way with the amazingly strong O!Snap Headphone Clip. Tame your headphones!

Special "Love is in the Air" promotion on www.osnapclip.com.
Use coupon code "Love13" for a special 2 for $20 deal! Offer ends 8/21.
Our brains process social rank in a 'dedicated' way
Ask HN: Biggest challenges bridging the gap?
I'm a QA engineer and often find myself stuck between technology and business people speaking totally different languages. I'd like to get better at communicating between groups. What are some of the biggest challenges you face in communicating between IT departments and business team members (project manager, BA's, etc)?
FreeBSD everywhere except for the Macbook Air. I guess I should count the Ubuntu box I have as the "Ubuntu Update Canary" though.
Very true. However, when creating security policy, one should always keep in mind those that have permission to access information, rather than those that have actual access to information.

It's a nightmare to me that there could be 15 people that have actual access to information, but a random official in the chain of command could give any one of 1.4 million people access to it without any further vetting.
Probably. People act like apple was the first company to perfect their marketing and message, maybe they were, but it's completely acceptable to me that a company would want to optimize how they present their products.

Most of us are just jealous of how successful they've become, which is also not unexpected. Wolfram, however, could work on sounding a bit more humble in selling himself.
Very latest Intel is ok, older are pretty slow. AMD hardware that works with the Mesa drivers is nearly as solid as Intel, but their proprietary drivers are a disaster (kernel crashes etc). Nvidia has decent proprietary drivers for desktop stuff.

On laptops, dual graphics (Nvidia calls it "Optimus", don't know about AMD) doesn't work right so Intel and Mesa-supported integrated AMD graphics are the best choices on laptops currently. There's some light at the end of the tunnel for Nvidia: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/HybridGraphics
I don't know where to begin listing all the problems with a situation like this....
I did mean the tribal sense, yes. It's more likely that someone talking about free software is a proponent of copyleft, and someone talking about open source software is a proponent of permissive licensing. Then again, there is open source code out there that is not free (in the RMS / FSF "four freedoms" sense) due to patents, tivoization, and the absence of a requirement that end users get access to modifications, e.g. you can run a website with open source software but I'm not guaranteed access to your changes.
I wouldn't recommend it: http://caniuse.com/input-datetime
I never said "make a bunch", other people may have tried to put those words in my mouth, but that was certainly not my intent. I am, in fact, arguing for quality over quantity....just a sort of slightly stodgy quality of actually letting talented people create instead of just writing a ginormous check to whoever is hot at the moment. Think BBC Miniseries sort of approach, but with actual budgets - not extravagant, but not skimping either...the Coen brothers are probably the best example in Hollywood. Woody Allen is sort of on the same wavelength as well, and has turned out a film a year forever, and they pretty much all have made money.
You could just build the tubes bending upwards slightly, so that the sag will pull them straight.
There are two answers to that.

The more relevant one for the current discussion: people who use and identify with the term "Free Software" generally care about software freedom as a valuable principle independent of its practical benefits (in other words, software should be free because it's wrong to restrict developers' ability to use, copy, modify, and distribute it), while people who use and identify with the term "Open Source" generally care most about the practical benefits (software should be open because that's the most effective and efficient way to produce software). There's a great deal of overlap between those two communities, but in general those two terms imply a different set of underlying principles held by the speaker. People who want to be all-inclusive sometimes say "Free and Open Source Software" or FOSS.

The origins of that distinction come from the original creation of the term "Open Source", often described as a marketing campaign for Free Software: the term often helps win over people (and businesses) who are unconvinced by software freedom as a principle but highly convinced by the effectiveness of Open Source as a software development model.

In terms of literal definition, Free Software is defined by the Free Software Foundation's "four freedoms" (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html): use/run, study/modify, redistribute, and redistribute modified versions. Open Source is defined by the Open Source Initiative's Open Source Definition (http://opensource.org/osd), which in turn was derived from the Debian project's "Debian Free Software Guidelines" (DFSG, http://www.debian.org/social_contract). In practice, almost every license that passes one definition passes the other; it's exceedingly rare to find a license that's actually Open Source but not Free Software or vice versa.

Also worth noting: both terms are unfortunately ambiguous, in that "free software" (especially when not capitalized) can be confused with software available for no fee, and "open source" can be confused with software with source available but not under an Open Source license.
Hyperloop De-hyped
First of all, creating a new free software license does not alter the freeness of any software/license. GPLv3 incompatibility does not make software non-free, otherwise Linux kernel would not be free anymore.

Second, the Tivoised BSD code is free software. The fact that a piece of hardware exists that refuses to run a modified version of some BSD licensed code, does not make the code non-free.
We are scheduled to have flying cars by 2015 according to "Back to The Future Part 2." I'm sure the car companies will announce something in the next year to get us ready for it. I would just be happy with a hover board.
you are making my point for me.
Did Obama lie on national television
Ladar Levison Shuttered Encrypted Email Service
The files themselves point out that the Secret Service first began investigating Swartz with the publication of his "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto."

The smart people in law enforcement are scared sh*tless of hacktivists, so it's totally possible they lumped him in with the Sabu/Hammond/Lulzsec crowd.
Well, I'm going to take the FSF as the authority on what freedom means with respect to software, since it's their term. They clearly view GPLv2 code as less free than GPLv3.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.html

Quoting the relevant bits about tivoization:

> The manufacturers of these computers take advantage of the freedom that free software provides, but they don't let you do likewise... Freedom means you control what your software does, not merely that you can beg or threaten someone else who decides for you.
An handy blog post optimization tool
He is so right! No wonder why he wrote such beautiful and useful piece of software. A sort of genius. Thank you, Ryan!
I don't agree with this guy's analysis.

1) The problem with aviation for routes like SFO-LAX is not the TSA (which could be solved), but airport capacity. Without huge capital upgrades (which are infeasible, and would be well more than $10b per airport due to surroundings), you can't really handle more planes. It makes more sense to use SFO slots to fly to NRT than to LAX. You use smaller planes for SFO-LAX than you do for SFO-NRT, too (although I guess you could use something like those crazy high-capacity Japanese 747s, maybe with turboprops...)

2) On the SF side, there's a reasonably well developed infrastructure of public transit to tie in.

3) Hell yes I'd drive or BART/Caltrain from San Jose up to SF to take a 35 minute TSA-free ground level trip from SF to LA. If I could do SF to Las Vegas in 55 minutes with a 5 minute layover, I'd be even happier. The alternatives are a 5-7 hour drive in my own car, or an equivalent ground travel to an airport, pain with TSA, flight.

4) There are specific routes (downtown SF to LA, LA to Las Vegas) where there really are essentially huge volumes of people who want to swap location frequently. This doesn't replace all air travel, it just replaces those routes.
Bio Inspired 3D Printed Spider Robot [video]
Now compare it to a car.
"people have done it" doesn't mean that its a good lesson (or a lesson at all)

i think @beachstartup's point is that the problem with treating this as a "lesson" is that you're imposing a value judgment on other peoples' value creation by saying that what they're doing, possibly their LIFE'S WORK, is NOT WORTH DOING just because they may not "augment the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way".

For example, any failed venture could probably be said "not to augment the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way". Goodbye scientists who are trying to cure cancer but haven't succeeded yet. No offense, patio11, but bingo cards? Come on... try to augment the human condition a bit.

It just comes off as judgmental and moralistic bs.
There hasn't?

The theory under which Apple justifies an insane valuation is the one where they continue a constant stream of innovation, defining new products, keeping everyone else guessing.

The simple fact that in the last year Apple has not delivered evidence that they can continue to do that should justifiably weaken belief in that theory. Which means that our best estimate of its future returns is far worse than this optimistic scenario. Which means that we should give less weight to that possibility, and therefore our best estimate of Apple's correct price is less than it was.

Because of this where you see evidence that the market is not pricing efficiently, I see evidence that you are not as smart as the market about finding what price signals to pay attention to.
even more fun is that you should be simultaneously

1. Getting to ramen profitability with a team of 2 – 4 within six months to a year, AND

2. augmenting the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way.

Well shit... if SV is a community of 2-4 person creating profitable products that augment the human condition every year...
Ask HN: What other major could pair well with CS?
I'm considering Econ + CS
A bit of self-contradiction here:

* Product sense is everything

* Product comes first

* Sales fix everything

* Development speed is everything

* Do everything you can not to attach your self esteem to your startup

I'm reminded of a former CEO who, after careful analysis of a failing business, decided there were nine critical areas of focus for the company. (She was eventually fired.)
Google Treks
The notion of "freedom" is complex and context sensitive. Some people (whom I largely disagree with, as I think this usage of terminology is itself context sensitive; it is, however, useful as a first approximation to get the ball rolling) look at the difference between "freedom to" and "freedom from"; by taking away my "freedom" to own other people, chaining them and forcing them to work for me by force, other people obtain the freedom from being slaves, and now have the freedom to run their own lives. The "freedoms" being looked at here are simply being given to different people: the GPL restricts freedoms of developers working with th software to provide and guarantee freedoms among the end users f that software; on the opposite side, BSD-licensed software tends to give developers more freedom, but the freedoms they are given are specifically for and really narrowly able to be used with the one purpose of later restricting freedoms of others. The question, thereby, comes down to which freedoms are more important and how many of each kind of consumer there are, in an attempt to define which philosophy provides more freedom. Advocates of GPL would say that there will always be more end users than developers, and that their freedoms are porbably more important anyway, so the GPL provides more essential "freedom", even as it is actively defined in a way that "restricts freedom", in the same way as we usually like to think the emancipation proclamation brought "freedom" even though it really was stating that slave owners had to give up some freedom: its all about perspective.