skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some explanation:

http://polymathematics.typepad.com/polymath/2006/06/no_im_so...
Agreed, they may as well say "goon" or "minion." How about "software engineer" or "professional"?

Well, I guess with the crowd these guys are going for, maybe those terms don't really apply...
well. It certainly can "sHave minutes" from my trip...
You may want to change that typo on your homepage
This is magnificent. I haven't tried it out yet, so I'm obviously jumping the gun—but that is exactly what I'm working through in my head every time I get on and off the subway. N -> L is an easy one. I'll let you know what I think but this is an app that's very much in line with my own obsessive concerns.
Original source: http://marc.info/?l=full-disclosure&m=124669956508903...
Scientists extract images directly from brain (2008)
1. Nobody else targets such high returns.

2. If investment banks structured themselves as hedge funds, they would have a higher payout. Employee compensation routinely hits 50% of pretax profit. Assuming a bank gets an average return on equity of 10%, and bonuses are as large as salaries (lots of small bonuses, a couple really huge ones), that's a 5 and 25 bonus structure. Damn.
I don't know how to help if you can't tell the difference between the examples at < http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html >. The H.264 examples are significantly blurrier than the Theora versions.

Theora is slightly better than XviD, which is much better than DivX. They are still the standard as far as I know, though being supplanted by H.264 encoders for high-end use.
Nice to see this still gaining traction. The current growth of diverse login info that is needed for various sites is petty unsustainable.
While I have some doubts about the abilities of the poster of the ad, why are you encouraging people to judge him based on his appearance?
Don't think so, but judging by the amount replies on this topic I think they may have achieved the goal of exposure at no cost all the same.
The irony here comes from the professor simultaneously trying to impose his own social norms on the players he's antagonizing. When someone says something like "if you do that again, I'll kill you" in the context of playing a game, it's ridiculous to interpret it as a bona fide death threat.
I couldn't find any info on the site, is the name an allusion to the Brady Bunch?
Google Looks at the Economy: In Conversation With Eric Schmidt
Yea, but the article mentions that only 10% of people already go over 40 hours. The most they'll lose because of this is 10%...and it honestly won't be that high.
Liars Poker, the account of his time on Wall Street in the 1980s, is a fantastic read.
I'm sorry but building your business on another business's data without explicit permission from them is just setting yourself up for this kind of thing.
I was confused by this recent comment:

http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2009-June/002362.html

"We can't ship gstreamer. We don't ship under the LGPL.

That being said, we can link to it on Linux. We would just need
something for the Mac and Windows as well."

Though the mentions of Fennec and the fact that some mobile folk have adopted Gstreamer for DSP accelerated decoding might make it useful there too.
This is true, but it's also rather inescapable. Say you have a gold standard, for instance. The price of gold would rise based upon faith in the country that backs gold currency. Likewise, the price of gold drops when a country goes off the gold standard.

The economy doesn't lie, even when the government does things like declare legal tender. Declaring something to be legal tender, even fiat currencies, gives them economic value until it doesn't anymore.
Glad you like the idea! Hopefully we will get one in future versions. The MTA has some weird licensing for all of their trademarks so we'll have to work it out with them ;)
Since when was building a startup ever about money? Money should be an afterthought.

I agree though that people are more important than things. When break-up time happens, make sure you treat her with respect, and let her know that there are bigger things at stake.
Well, there's his problem. He's using goto's.
I love the pun/jab at MS, even if it is unintended: they included the word "live" in the name. Because the "live" brand isn't confused enough.

Good thing MS sorted out this brand mess by moving to "bing".
A long but rewarding read. Thanks.
It's strange how people don't notice problems when making huge amounts of money depends on things remaining the way they are. When it hits the fan, let the finger pointing begin.

The villain in this piece doesn't seem to be the overbearing, but somewhat clueless boss, but the Wall Street banks, in particular Goldman Sachs. It reminds me of Matt Taibbi's recent Rolling Stone article on "The Great American Bubble Machine", though without the screaming.
The best snarky answer to this ad I have seen was someone who proposed running random bitstrings through sha1, looking for a hash that was a repetition of the ascii chars for hello world. The comment on the entry noted that they would not consider taking the job until the company could provide the string which would hash to a successful result.
I'd be surprised if many people here vote is doesnt equal one. Im a poor mathematician and I agree :D
> I don't see why American boys have to pay the ultimate price to solve a crisis which does not concern them.

Fair enough, but where is this line? I asked about WWII, but there are plenty of other instances where US got involved or folks argued that we should have. Which side is Rwanda on? How about Darfur? The Balkans? US inner cities? The pre-civil war US South?

> You should travel to other countries.

Do you really want to compare passports?

I spend a lot of time outside the US. (I've got three more weeks planned this year alone.)

> The U.S. is perceived as the biggest thug in the world, right now.

That's because the rest of the world feels safe.
Use the chain system to encourage long term behavior. Ie, each day that you do one of the items you note, you extend its chain by one link. Each time you miss a day, you break the chain and start over. Each day you score your chain score, not your daily score. Once you accumulate large chains, you won't want to break them!
I'm sure someone can point out the situation for more, but I'm curious to the practical situation of where it truly matters.
W3C, you ignorant slut
me too. the ads and one hour time limits are increasingly annoying-- I'm going to the full subscription for $36 a year. totally totally worth it.
Extending your idea to it's wildest reaches - could you make an app that used the GPS data and date/time of day to build a statistical model of the best street-level routes and optimum time of day between any given point in the city?

It would take a really long time to aggregate enough data to make it useful, but it would be pretty handy eventually.
LiveCDs like LinuxHelp and Knoppix existed years before MS Live did.
A couple of times, I didn't find something in bing, switched back to google.... and couldn't find it either.

That matches my experience as well.
I live in Atlanta, where the subway system is much simpler (and shittier), but this is exactly how I think when standing on the platform.

In short, the app is awesome.

Feature addition: Running ticker for total time saved, both for the current user and all users overall. Make it as accurate or "imaginary" as you want. ;)
Yep. Oracle are famous for this - at my office we often talk about counting the molecules to work out Oracle licensing.
Google Keyczar was using stock Python RNG for its DSA crypto code.
But yeah, sure. I mean, all they had was a Rivest grad student leading the project, and Google's name behind them. You're definitely going to get everything right with your own code.
If you're doing this startup for the money, then go with the girl. But understand that she won't ever let you do a startup ever again. What happens if you do something else time-intensive, like climbing the corporate ladder?
I'm curious as to what you end up choosing. Please let us know.
Theora is not obsolete; it is superior to most popular codecs, such as XVid, WMV, and QuickTime. In standard-definition encoding, it's even superior to modern proprietary codecs such as H.264:

Are you seriously this misinformed?

1. Quicktime isn't a "codec", it's a video player. There is no "Quicktime codec".

2. H.264 isn't proprietary.

3. Theora is roughly between MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 SP in potential efficiency; it's nowhere near VC-1 or H.264. Right now it's worse than MPEG-2 because the encoder is so bad, but Thusnelda is working on fixing that. The eventual goal is to become on par with FLV1 and similar formats; reaching more modern levels of compression will require a spec revision.

The purpose of Theora is to provide a patent-free video format, not to be the best out there in compression, since the two goals are basically contradictory. Spreading lies like these are a great way to completely ruin any chance of Theora's adoption, because expectations will be set so high that the Theora developers will never be able to realistically reach them. This is a disservice to Xiph in every way.

Despite the fact that the Theora specification is terrible and even their own developers admit it, they have one thing going their way: the quality of an encoder is far more important than the format itself. In other words, a really good MPEG-2 encoder can give better output than a really bad H.264 encoder, for example. A classic example of this is Quicktime's H.264 encoder, which is so bad that it is widely used across the industry as a marketing tool by competing encoder developers to demonstrate how good theirs is by comparison.

As such, it is possible for Theora to beat some of the lower-end H.264 encoders if they really work hard at it, even if H.264 as a whole is vastly better than Theora. This is why Thusnelda is a big deal for Theora.

This is also why it's such a problem that people consider "H.264" or "MPEG-2" or "JPEG" to be single entities; the compression quality can vary massively between different encoders. That's why I always cringe when someone posts, for example, an "H.264 vs Theora" comparison; they're really doing an "X H.264 encoder vs Thusnelda" comparison and generalizing it far beyond its meaning.
3 questions:
1) wont this lead to everyone standing at the same positions?

2) isnt this useless at peak times ( exactly how often can you choose where to stand)

3)isn't this simple enough to build it yourself rather than pay someone else to do?

PS:i see that you and your sister are trying to build a business, rather than making an interesting project. If so, your site looks rather amateuristic
Not going to agree quite so harshly, but a technique based on forgotten functionality in one browser is rather gimmicky.
He does hint at it, but avoids saying anything concrete.

I had no idea GMail was even one of the "Google apps" (I thought that name meant their spreadsheet / word processor, but I guess that's "Google docs"). These were all completely different products, doing different things, sometimes developed outside by a company Google later bought, and developed years apart, so it's not clear to me why this particular set of products needs to be un-"beta"'d all at once.

It also doesn't speak to the more general question. I don't think their "beta" apps are inferior, in general, to their non-"beta" apps, so their "high bar" must be pretty crooked. :-)
and he calls himself "an actual physicist"
From the comments on that article, this is apparently nothing new:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/16/amazon-killing-web-serv...
In my opinion Apple had an App Store planned out from the very beginning, and just hadn't finished the public APIs and SDK.
This is the type of work environment that I would like to receive and offer for and then tell them "Sorry, based upon your application process, your company appears to be a lame place to work."

The job posting seems like something Dwight from The Office would create.
Not only, even what was intended merely proves equivalence of statements and not that either of them is true.
Charlie Brooker review of the program:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jul/04/being-neil-arm...
I like that a lot of the community took the exact same stance that we continually whine about.

Can't you just add feature XYZ to our website?

Can't you just make the buttons cornflower blue?

We (myself included) have become our own worst nightmare :( I am guilty of it too. I wrote a comment a while ago arguing that SO COULD probably be written in a few days.

(btw: I don't like it. That was sarcasm.)
When I see companies advertising poor real-world ways of engineering, it just makes me think of the documents I make on my projects showing code made by some engineers and how a solution could have been made in half the code (or less), more clearly, more abstracted, more efficient, and fewer bugs.

Do these people use dumb interview questions like asking people to list c language trigraphs? Sure, someone that knows it might be a good programmer, but they might also write obfuscated piles of crap that cause bugs since they over complicate problems.
I have noticed the restriction for mobile services in Amazon's TOS about two years ago.
Is there anything in the ad that isn't already encouraging its readers to make decisions based on appearance (in this case, that of a fun and elite group of people)?

In what possible way is 'send us the coolest "hello world" you've got, and we'll critique your style' not an invitation to judge by appearance?
can you explain the logic you think is being failed? The alternative (that 1/3 is exactly 0.3333...) seems equally arbitrary to me.

It appears to me that the people on this thread arguing that 1!=0.9999... have come up with a fully consistent, alternative way of defining equality when involving infinite fractions that is no worse than the conventional definition.

To expand his argument a bit: The argument is:

0.3 *3+0.1 =1
0.33 *3+0.01 =1
0.333 *3+0.001 =1
0.333...*3+0.0...1=1

...seems reasonable to me (again, it requires a slightly different definition as to what "equality" truly means)

Kind of an interesting idea, actually. (Of course, that's after only looking at it a couple minutes... the idea might fall apart under more scrutiny)
"Don't need", true. But can potentially really benefit from. Sugata Mitra had a cracking presentation at Activate09 in London the other week, where he showed how dropping computers in front of (illiterate) children could really make them go and investigate and learn. The trick (he said) was not to give one computer per child, but to have them work in groups.

The Guardian (event organiser) said that the videos of all speakers would be up within a month, so maybe you can see this very inspiring presentation as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugata_Mitra
You watch too many Sandra Bullock movies. Life doesn't really work that way.
Tweeteorites - a Twitter leaderboard
Isn't there some other bookstore that the data can be gleaned from? A google search would also probably work.
It's exactly what I always do, especially for fastest transfers and being the first one on the stairs. Recently I have been taking the 6, L and G a lot, terra incognito where your app comes in fitting perfectly. Love it!

Edit: Installed it, very smooth operation, took less than 6 seconds to find a perfect exit strategy for L -> 6 train transfer. Nice!
If you're gzipping/deflating your HTTP connections, 100 304 response headers are not going to be your bandwidth bottleneck. Even if you are not, a 304 response has at most like 200 characters in it, 200 x 100, 20 kilobytes in headers responses, not exactly earth shattering.

Since you brought up the caching issue, when you change any resource in the bundle, you are going to have to redownload the whole bundle. The bigger the bundle the more likely that one of the resources inside might need to be updated over time. With pipelining you only have to retransmit modified resources. This is not even considering the higher likelihood that larger objects have of getting thrown out of the cache.

Also, most of the overhead in establishing a connection over a non-negligible latency internet connection is in the TCP handshake. Not in the time spent transmitting a few packets of headers.
Hey Vincent, thanks for the questions.

1. If that becomes the case, we'll be rich ;)

2. Do you mean because you're running to catch a train? Usually I find myself pacing back and forth not knowing where to stand.

3. The data for this app is not publicly available so my partner and his sister had to run around the city to every station and mark down every exit and stairwell. The whole process of checking, rechecking, and confirming took them ~2 months

re: website. We hadn't planned on releasing this just yet but a major newspaper had a blog post that ran early this morning so we had to hack this together :) It'll get better in time!
Let me preface by saying I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate the XO-1. In my year and a half or so of blogging it's probably the only blog topic that managed to enrage me (http://www.tomstechblog.com/post/Rarely-Am-I-Actually-Angere...)

So I'm biased.

That said I'd argue the OLPC doesn't do much to teach kids how to be computer literate either. Look at the screen shots and you'll see the thing has more in common with a $99 calculator than it does with a PC of any kind. It's design centers around a few specialized apps and the Internet which are both things the iPod touch does better.

So while I don't 100% agree with the author (a keyboard would be nice) his point is a good one. The OLPC is a lousy product that only gets by because it's aimed at people who supposedly have no other choice. But the iPod touch being at the price point it is means there ARE other choices which in turn makes the OLPC just a crappy project.

Poor people deserve great computing experiences too!
I really like the video presentation. Short and sweet while being entertaining enough to watch.
I can see this being amazingly handy in the (far) future in terms of interface navigation and search. Just picture the icon of the program you want to launch, or the stock photo you are trying to find and boom.
Quicktime isn't a "codec", it's a video player.

What codec is used for .MOV files, then? As far as I know they can only be en/decoded by Quicktime.

H.264 isn't proprietary.

Cool -- so if I start distributing H.264 videos without paying the appropriate licensing fees, there wouldn't be any trouble, right? And there's an encoder/decoder that I can install legally?

Last I checked, the answer to both of those is "no".

Theora is roughly between MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 SP in potential efficiency; it's nowhere near VC-1 or H.264. Right now it's worse than MPEG-2 because the encoder is so bad, but Thusnelda is working on fixing that. The eventual goal is to become on par with FLV1 and similar formats; reaching more modern levels of compression will require a spec revision.

Obviously you've not used Theora for months or years. It is significantly better than MPEG-4 SP, and on par with H.264 for standard-def video.
"Rules" are not a "How to build the next Google For Dummies".

"People can only talk about it if they know about it. How will they know?"

Using it. Start with your friends, and if they like it, they will talk about it to their friends. There´s a lot of ways to make the user "talk". It´s not asking him like a favor, but, basically, regarding him. It´s better if to need your app, he MUST invite new users. It creates a powerful chain of humans.

This would be better said as, "If you're not quite sure, don't be afraid to release. Blindly releasing for the sake of releasing is risky and stupid."

Nope. I think it´s about really release as fast as possible, as long as your app can do the "mainly" think. It´s not even an beta, it´s a alpha, but if it works, it´s must be released.

What is this doing on this list? Worst advice ever. Better would be, "Your app can succeed."

Because newbies business men think that they will be successful by the end of the year. Don´t dream, stay focused and prepare to lose, a lot. It´s not a game where the victories depends of you and your guts, but rather luck and a lot of uncontrolled factors. The best advise ? Good luck !

This can easily be the opposite of #1, "Build something people need and love." You're unnecessarily restricting yourself to the relatively tiny population of things that interest you.

Nah ... there´s a trick part here. If you make something that you can REALLY use, so it´s will be MUCH, but really MUCH more easy to sell to others. If you any time tried to sell something, you should know that.

Such as...

Hum ... anything your mom ever have heard (even if it exists) could help. The point is to start something new, and then look for YOUR USERS needs ... not having the brilliant idea. Dont stick with examples and ideas, go for the reality and try to create anything your user need.

Not according to Markus Frind, founder of plentyoffish.com.

Maybe ... but if you are have something that don´t trows a lot of shit on the screen of the user, and even so that have money, your product is really for the win. Dont be afraid, if your app really help somebody, they will be happy to pay for it.

Such as...

Get one, listen to him, release, get ten, listen to them, release, get 100, listen to them, release, get 1000, listen to them, release ... remember, "we are not on the software business, we are on the SHOWBUSINESS". And, of course, believe on your work.

Sweat a little. Release shit too soon and shoot yourself in the foot. Development must be done with design in mind.

I agree.

But develop with scaling in mind. (Will you really have enough time to completely redesign your data base schema after 1000 users?)

Agree again with you here.

What if spending money is more time/cost effective? (Paying someone to do something that would have taken me 5 days to do.)

It works only if in this five days you can make more money then you have payed for. Therefore you are not spending, but earning.

Sorry by my poor english.
FYI, contrary to the site, you don't need any special tools to concatenate files other than, er, cat.

Eg:

cat *00? > android.iso

Works fine. Note since Android is designed for touch phones, you might notice that mouse acceleration is lacking.
'Flexible camera' replaces lens with fiber web
"Is that an edict handed down from on high?"

No. Any decent multiplayer game is designed and, when necessary, updated to prevent or permit certain actions.
1) Not nearly enough people will use this for this to be an issue.

2) You can choose the car you get on at all times but the very very peak times.

3) Only for routes I take often - need to be at 5th car of B train transfer to F/V to get off on 23rd. Need to be on 2nd car of B train to transfer to R to get off at Rector. I'm obsessive about optimizing things, so $2 certainly seems worth it for all my other trips.

As far as the site, I think the YouTube video should be more prominent, and should have more screentime for the app.
That's already available, to some degree:

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

(There are others as well, but I understand this is one of the best commercial products as of now).
This is fantastic! I sent this to some other friends here in NYC who have all had the same response: "I always thought that would make a great app."

It hits the iPhone sweet spot of being a perfect blend of mostly fun and somewhat useful.

Edit
I just purchased the app. Really nice and slick. Though living off the G (a cross-town line), it's hard to choose from only Uptown and Downtown options. Otherwise, this is great.