skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Charging un-funded startups to attend a conference to matchmake them with VC's is unproductive and unethical."

100% don't agree. [1]

Unproductive for the startup? Making contacts and getting some exposure and having discussions (and most importantly making mistakes) is unproductive? How so?

Charging? As the retort from the principal of the firm said what are they supposed to do do this for free?

And exactly what is unethical? Taking advantage of young people who don't know the difference between what you (or others here) might consider a "legit" opportunity (hey like spending half their life trying to get into the YC or VC lottery to begin with) and this?

[1] When I graduated from college on my own dime I paid money to fly to (get this) a "word processing conference" in order to make contacts and establish myself in what (I thought) would be the new business I was starting (computer supplies). Later when starting other businesses I flew to other places to go to expos, shows, whatever I needed to do. I used my own money to do that (that I had earned).
Yes and no.

I attempted to communicate the fact that something would have to be done about this code base if it were to scale beyond "beta," and talked a bit about making this an official part of the next sprint. The decision to do a barn storming run was a result of pressure and mixed messages. I was getting e-mails from the VP (not my direct boss) sort of implying that I was being slow and that my performance was not satisfactory.

In retrospect I may have walked into a political trap, but it's cool because I don't want to work for a company with politics like that. I also think in retrospect that there was poor communication on both sides. I didn't communicate the issue quite clearly enough, and they didn't communicate their priorities clearly enough. I also think getting mixed messages from different people above me in the company hierarchy really confused my sense of priority. If I hadn't gotten that I probably would have just done what I could on the issues at hand with the strong recommendation that the core be rewritten and moved on to the next sprint.
Distraction-free mode and Buzz
How to create value for unknown products
North Korea developing electromagnetic pulse weapons
I really appreciate you taking the time to add that to the discussion. Thank you!
I don't see this as hacking anything.
"Poorly written article, but YSV does sound pretty shady."

Did you take a look at their website and see the videos of some of the events before making that statement?
We left the fake sites up for 3 weeks. The parts of the design that required a DB connection, like sorting, pagination, contacting a listing, would just redirect to the matching operation on the live site on click.
This is your best bet:
Distributing blocks to all servers evenly.
Using RS to encode your blocks to limit storage space requirements, and make recovery obvious.

Also, make sure you don't buy all of your hard drives from the same end manufacturer. Most of these types of systems assume random hard drive failure... turns out drives can have highly correlated failures.
why i got -1 points?
Thoughts on 500 Million Lines of Code...
Fojo - the ultimate camera app for your iPhone
If he did work 80 hours a week, he could have accomplished the same amount of work in half the time, had he given himself breaks. Everyone knows productivity goes down when you work to long.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/working-...
Did you conclude this before reading the answer?
Eye Opening ‘Morris-Worm’ turns 25 tomorrow
The private chain will probabilistically become shorter than the public chain over time, unless more than 50% of mining power is devoted to the private chain.

That's why miners are normally incentivized to release a block as soon as they find it. If they don't, and a different block is found and then a block is found that builds off that one, the "secret" block will probably never be part of the longest blockchain. And the longest blockchain is "the blockchain."

Sorry this comment can't be more helpful, I haven't read the paper yet.
And how does that compare with Symbian sales before Elop? I have not looked at a comparison, but it would not surprise me if Windows Phone has not yet caught up.

Don't get me wrong, I am not a Symbian fanboy and I think Nokia held onto it for too long, but the notion that "no one was buying Nokia phones" is not the whole story. It probably resonates with the average HN reader, who is relatively young, lives in the US and carries an iPhone or Android device. It probably also accurately represents where the Symbian market was going long term. But it's not the whole story.
What I don't get is on, on one hand, you have the CEO (was it Verizon?) saying "Americans don't want gigabit internet" and continuing to build out these 20-40mbps networks, yet trying to serve TV/video through IP as well. I'm trying to understand the long game here but I'm struggling. The only thing I can think of is that they're trying to get us thinking that 20-40mbps is "worth" $40/month therefore when we finally get 1gbps, they can charge $150/mth (or something to that effect).
I fail to see how this is a hack. A hack suggests some sort of unexpectedly clever solution, often simple, that solves a specific problem.

The failure of the American educational system is not a specific problem.

Having worked for a newspaper on the education beat for a number of years and covered an uncountable number of asinine school board meetings, I can honestly tell you that what works in Colorado may not work in other states in the union.

Now for the HN cop-out. I'm not against increasing funding for education, nor increased accountability and power for teachers. These are all great things. But there's a rotten core to our philosophy of education in this country that will never be solved by the government or any legal requirements for anything.

Small, focused charter schools or aggressive home schooling are the only real ways I can see to truly revolutionize the state of education. But those two are so amazing unpalatable or unpractical for the vast majority of cases that personally I'm stumped.

Really, if we're all going to be honest, what's going to change this is parental involvement. Daisy is not the majority of kids (referenced in the OP), she is an amazing exception and I hope the school system doesn't fail her. But the bigger issue is the teacher-student apathy to learning cycle. And that starts with parents who WANT their children to succeed and who understand how to help their children learn and achieve their goals. In the absence of that, no money in the world will produce successful children.
I'm really curious what the major hurdles to using Cygwin were, at least from an Unix user point of view. I've been using it for the past 6 years or so and I'm quite happy.

These days I feel that the best bet on Windows is to install the 20 or so Windows specific programs that you probably use + Cygwin.
BlackBerry abandons sale for new investment; CEO Thorsten Heins steps down
You gotta share for those that want to share, not for those that look to critic everything.

I mean, come on guys, he just wrote something and put it on his personal website. It's not like he went to the President claiming he knows how poor live their lives and asked him to tax you to help them. Chill...
>What are you going to do? Expose people posing as lab-rats to millions of combinations and measure their brain activity?

Basically, yes.

Imagine there are no more theaters, because they're huge, expensive money-pits and everyone watches movies on a device anyway. Because everything is distributed on the net, and the net is everywhere people can be exposed to any number of ideas, concepts, and prompts throughout their day. Gestural devices have become, if not ubiquitous, then quite common. Every phone and multimedia device has a camera on it which can read your emotions by measuring your skin's electrical charge or by measuring the subtle shift in your pulse. Everything watches you, notes you. Huge masses of correlated data about you, your friends, your likes and dislikes, even your emotional state over time and space, are being gathered from any number of companies and state agencies. There are attempts to virtually model your behavior and expectations in any number of locations, and these models are constantly refined over time until they begin to become predictive. Most of this already exists in some form or another, if only as prototypes.

So that part at I think is plausible. Or at least concievable. We've been building a vast and intricate Skinner Box out of the internet for years, it just hasn't become that obvious yet. Wait until the real quasi-transhuman augmented reality BS starts to get pushed. Wait until your appliances have their own social media accounts and actually have conversations with your friends. Or until you can have a digital analogue of yourself inserted as a background character into a film and follow it around like a Sim. Or pay to have yourself inserted into an Alternate Reality game, the plot of which is essentially generated on the fly. It just takes a couple of generations for this sort of fine-grain observation and feedback loop to become conditioned as being acceptable and commonplace. It may require redefining terms. I'm reminded of what the Architect said in the Matrix -- that there were "levels of survival" the Machines were willing to accept. What passes as a "blockbuster" or even a "movie" in the future may not bear any resemblance to what we know.

A system more complex than the algorithms currently available will doubtless be necessary, and maybe some fields like comedy will prove elusive, but the addition of the vast amount of data available through the internet and a global, always-on surveillance system may make machine learning more feasible. Your example of McDonald's is apt. They could make better food by hiring more competent cooks, using better equipment, and serving a better menu. But, they nonetheless make an insane amount of money paying people almost nothing to put garbage into styrofoam boxes, and that's only until they can make even more money replacing the people with garbage-into-styrofoam-boxes-putting robots. Quality isn't paramount when your market is billions of consumers who have the attention span of gnats. They can be taught to eat shit and like it on a massive scale, that's already been proven.
How awesome!! :)
Here we go again. IMHO, we need a new unit to unambiguously describe angular measure. But also we need to start demanding resolution independent units that map to real world measurements as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4236429
I never mentioned the word "propietary" in my comment. I said that Google's decision to display its own products prominently and bury the rest is downright evil.

Now that you say standards.. that reminds me of Google's (non-existent) MathML support.
"Florida students have demonstrated the strongest gains on the NAEP in the nation since 2003, when all 50 states began taking NAEP exams. Moreover, between 1998 and 2008, the average score for black students increased by 12 points in reading from 192 to 204. In Florida, it increased by 25 points—twice the gains of the national average. If African American students nationwide had made the same amount of progress as African American students in Florida, the fourth-grade reading gap between black and white would be approximately half the size it is today."

http://educationnext.org/florida-defeats-the-skeptics/
http://blog.heritage.org/2011/04/02/florida-education-reform...
Thermal: A RESTful API for WordPress.
By the otehr side, not firing can completely mess up a small company, but nobody ever likes doing it.

People repeat a lot of "mantras" that say you should do something contrary to human nature (fire fast, get shit done, speak in a lot public, try to falsify your hipotesis). They are very important, as human nature dictates the default action every time, we need to be constantly reminded that the default may be wrong, and that we should stop and think about it.

But then, stupid people exist, even if they are stupid just a small fraction of the time. And those people will make stupid decisions. There is no procedure, environment, or technique that solves "stupid".
Sad to see so many technical folks wanting Blackberry and Nokia to join the Android bandwagon. The mobile market needs more competition and diversity, not less, or it will end up like the PC market did. If you want an Android phone, there's an immense variety already out there. It's like recommending that Apple scrap OS X and ship Windows on their Macs.
Google's job is not to keep those other sites in business. They serve their own users (this is arguable, I know, but I think my point here is clear), by making it easier to access information. This makes my life as a Google user easier, so it's something they should pursue.
Agree. The 'ugly banking site' is a traditional design who is still a reference for a major part of visitors.
Self-hosted server platform arkOS starts crowdfund for new features
Use Amazon Smile without remembering
Of course they are. Get them doing that other thing they are good at. People naturally gravitate to tasks they are good at. Are they're any tasks they are voluntary doing? Is there a full-time position for this?
That depends on if there's any more massive paradigm shifts, and if those shifts are created by new players or not.

My guess is that, due to Apple and Google's expertise in touch screen and motion capture software, you won't see any new players coming out of the woodwork with a new phone everybody wants.

That said, the crowdsourcing of Firefox and Ubuntu phones could potentially disrupt things a little longer come 2014.
I bought a stationary bike because of this. Everytime I spend more than two hours working with the laptop I do some bike.
Shit, I can't believe you took the time to ready.
As a former middle school science teacher in a low income school I believe the author has this wrong. The education system has so many complex issues that throwing more money at it or "adjusting a teacher-tenure framework" is not revolutionary and should not be praised. There are many districts who have taken these steps already including the one I previously worked at.

IMHO, there is no silver bullet, but there needs to focus on welfare, poverty, and long-term investments in our society. Better welfare support, pre-natal support, etc. In terms of teaching there needs to be a dramatic cultural shift in how we view teachers which can happen only through increased barrier to entry and more autonomy.

I was shocked as to how terrible teachers were treated and viewed and how so many people have it so wrong when it comes to education, which is why I left the profession to become a software engineer. It is one of the few professions where everyone seems to be an expert on and knows solutions for the industry as a whole without ever being a part of it from the side of a teacher or administrator.
Hey symbol, what do you mean by Net-speak? What do you mean in this specific instance?
Smith is saying that the value of something to you is the labor it saves you, and the cost of something to you is its opportunity cost: what you have to give up to get it. But the "labor theory of value" says that the cost of something to me should be determined by the labor it costs you, who are trying to sell it to me. That's not the same thing.

The statement that "They contain the value of a certain quantity of labour which we exchange for what is supposed at the time to contain the value of an equal quantity" is the closest Smith comes to saying something like the labor theory of value, but note that he says "supposed"--in other words, our intuitive sense is that, on average, equal amounts of labor should produce equal amounts of value. So he's still not saying the same thing as the labor theory of value says; he's talking about an effect of the free market, not how prices should be set in such a market. (And, as you note, the full answer is more complex: for one thing, we have to account for differences in productivity.)

If you have any quotes from other classical economists like Ricardo, I'd be interested to see them; my sense is that the labor theory of value is mainly due to later schools of economics, not classical economics.
Pretty cool. Audio lags behind video, at least in Super Mario.
95M Americans used mobile for health in 2013
Gaining 34 lbs of muscle in 4 weeks is impossible, even for a young man.

Even gaining 34 pounds of weight in 4 weeks (not just muscle, but fat as well) would be a serious challenge: 34 pounds of weight equates to about 119,000 kilocalories[1], meaning you would have to eat 119k/28=4,250 kcal a day in addition to your "maintenance" calorie level (i.e. the caloric energy that you burn with everyday activity -- usually 1500-2500 kcal). So he would have to eat about 7,000 kcal a day in order to gain weight at that rate.

Furthermore, gaining weight and gaining muscle are very different beasts. Muscle is only "built" when muscle fibers are broken down through strenuous activity and then rebuilt. This is not a rapid process. It's widely accepted in the weight training community that without steroids, muscle can be built at a rate of a pound or two a week at most.

So either the author is lying about his muscle gain, which throws his other statements into doubt, or more likely he's simply confused about how to actually measure weight vs. muscle gain, and reporting erroneous conclusions. There are many fitness-related misconceptions out there.

[1] http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/calories/WT00011
This is even more nitpicky, but the worst-case running time can be improved to O(n log n) by choosing the median of the input numbers to be the pivot each time, in O(n) time. This works irrespective of whether the list is sorted or not. This is /not/ useful in practice because of the overhead of choosing the pivot this way, but hey, theory is theory!

"... given a worst-case O(n) selection algorithm, one can use it to find the ideal pivot (the median) at every step of quicksort, producing a variant with worst-case O(n log n) running time. In practical implementations this variant is considerably slower on average, but it is of theoretical interest, showing how an optimal selection algorithm can yield an optimal sorting algorithm."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort#Selection-based_pivo...
Yep. That's armchair futurism for you.
The rem unit is awesome! All the benefits of em (relative to browser text zoom level) combined with the benefits of px (does not change depending on parent element font size).

If you don't need to support IE8 you should start using rem today.
Favecast - Creating the Next Generation Recommendation Platform Through Video
Samsung makes pretty hardware, BlackBerry doesn't. I'm not sure anyone buys a Samsung device because it's running Android OS.
Goedkoop overnachten in een luxehotel
In this case my part of the sprint probably would have run over by one day, since I had one more feature to implement around the new core I had written and I had to spend extra time refactoring code for existing features a little (not too badly) to make them work with said new core code.

The logical thing would have been to punt that one feature, make everything else work (it was very close), then spend the rest of the sprint testing before swapping the old boat anchor out. Either that or keep the old version in place until the end of the next sprint to give time for complete unit tests to be written.
Nope, and nope.

> WTF are you talking about? Vim have may have many demerits but segfaults is not on that list. If segfaults are that frequent you described then people would have jumped ship already.

Vim is all segfaults once you introduce async, and it's highly unstable during any dev work. On any given day visit the Vim dev mailing list and scroll down. Today I see:

Scrolling in a c file segfaults: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/teRV3RyDtzc

Referencing an old buffer seg faults: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/Mssm8pKtnGM

Segfault opening a readme: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/SE31YUccJN4

Segfault selecting a lot of text: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/yzVqZ3qogho

Segfault on autocompletion: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/lqcn57eRGGs

Segfault on tab switching:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/Vc9Z8rfe22w

Just keep scrolling, the segfaults never stop.

> Though async future is not built-in there are several plugins for doing async operation, for example...

For your other point, some plugins fake async using a cursorhold hack that break vim for users who use leader keys. That is they insert fake key strokes. Vimproc actually quits on cursorhold:

https://github.com/Shougo/vimproc.vim/blob/master/autoload/v...

That's right thess plugins inserts keys to trigger autocommand. I would like you to go ahead and type a long vim command using leader keys and see if that works for you. When a plugin inserts keys while you are inserting keys everything stops and you have to start over.

Go ahead, go implement a clock with a plugin that updates every second. I bet that plugin fakes user interaction. It doesn't work.

Edit: Also nice on the downvotes, perhaps explain how my post is wrong in addition to downvoting. Everything I have said are matters of fact. Are my facts wrong?
Charlottesville, VA / Montevideo, Uruguay - Systems, Ops, Front End

Our company builds database management tools for the world’s leading technology companies. Our users are recognizable, leading websites that you use everyday. We run agents on highly critical production systems, collect a large amount of data, and our clients use our webapp to run their systems better and faster, automatically identify problems, and look at systems in a new way.

We are backed by some very smart investors (#2 on the Netflix Challenge, founder of IPOed tech company, founder of leading AdWords consulting firm), Battery Ventures, and a lot of other cool folks.

https://vividcortex.com/blog/2013/11/01/hi-were-hiring-in-ch...
You never have to click anything in sublime
Can you provide some details on the "bold" changes and how they improve education from the students perspective?
Facebook is starting to track your mouse cursor. Here is what you should know.
Are all Business Insider articles glorified Buzzfeed articles? Just change the title to "10 Signs That The Tech Sector Is In A Massive Bubble" and it could be on Buzzfeed.
You are quite wrong, on any given day vim dev's mailing list has recent seg faults at the top of its list.
Which makes more money? That's the one i'm talking about. My point is that the only difference between replacing the physical labor of the auto factory worker and the intellectual labor of the programmer, designer or artist is just a matter of complexity. Yes, it may be a difficult, apparently "hard AI" problem, but so was textile manufacturing in a way until the Jacquard Loom came about. If one doesn't need human labor to build a car, or weave complex patterns into a rug, one may not need human labor to make a movie, write a book, or compose a song. It doesn't have to be genius, when most commercial art is merely sufficient anyway.