skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked in hospitality for 5 years, and right now I'm staying at a hotel in downtown Vegas, a few miles from the author's Airbnb place. Hotels are obsolete. It's not the business model, short-term housing and hospitality certainly have no risk of obsolescence ever, it's the industry.

Service sucks, rooms suck, tech really sucks. You have awkward kids in bad suits and clip-on ties at the front desk who're trained to use Romantic terminology over Germanic. That's at the better places.

I'm staying at the original, and seemingly one of the better, Fremont Street places, in town for a quarterly meetup for the startup I'm at. The wifi costs $12.99 a day, they throttled my connection the one time I used it trying to make a viddy call, and last night I was connected to the router but nothing was coming through. I've had similar experiences around the country, for the past 10 years, and seen little improvement. I convinced the hospitality company I was at, and some that I consulted with, that the wifi is as important as the running water, but you can tell most don't feel that way.

I got in the other night around 10pm, went to a touchscreen terminal they overpaid for, and I haven't seen a single person use over this week here, but didn't have a confirmation because someone at the company booked it, so used a phone sitting next to the kiosk to call a representative, who directed me around to find a desk that I'd passed and disregarded because it was labeled as "Tickets", then spent a good half-hour getting checked-in because of various confusion and technical glitches and dozens and dozens of key-presses in their property management system.

Then, there are the guests. As soon as someone stays at a hotel, they think they're entitled to act like an asshole. It seems to usually boil down to them feeling like they overpaid, regretting the decision, and taking it out on some staff member. They know that the people around them are either other customers or employees, and treat them with ambivalence because there are no consequences or accountability. Guests can review a hotel, hotels can't review guests.

A couple weeks ago, I stayed at an Airbnb place for the first time, outside of Boston. We texted the host when we were coming, took the T, ending up on an awesome light-rail car at the end that I didn't know about, walked through a beautiful neighborhood, knocked on the door, chatted with the host for a minute, and were shown to our room. Totally painless, which made it easy to feel gracious and respectful of the host and his property and neighbors. Had a great breakfast at a local place, because good places are in residential areas. All you can find around hotels are crappy chains. You know, because of the zoning. And that good places don't want to deal with pissed off hotel guests.

The fence is coming down. Hotels are doomed.
Depends on how he decides to monetize it I guess. But at the very least a better designed site gives the impression of professionalism and security, and users who trust you will also trust you with their money. Also a better organized (I think less noisy) site would make the ads easier to see and more relevant.

Although for me, the bigger issue is finding what Twicsy offers that's worth paying for?
Engadget was banned sitewide on Reddit a couple of days ago and then got unbanned shortly after. Maybe the same thing will happen with this too.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/31/engadget_reddit_spat...
That's how you start in a market already dominated by competitors.

Just as a comparison, only Apple managed to sustain ~5% market share on the PC market since MS has dominated it. Entering the mobile market is very similar in difficulty to entering the desktop segment with a new OS.
I'll look into it, although I was thinking more of a Lumia 92x or 1020, mostly for the camera.
> this is why Groovy, Rhino/LiveConnect, etc. don't work

You were doing pretty good up to there. The Android toolchain does not compile to Dalvik bytecode. It translates from Java bytecode to Dalvik bytecode. So any language that compiles to Java bytecode could be used to write Android apps.

There are many projects to bring other JVM languages to Android.
If you were to list the hobbies of reddit users, gaming is going to trump political involvement.

reddit is a social platform first, it makes sense that the 20 year old crowd that populates it will have subscribed more to their hobbies over broader general topics.

See /r/television vs /r/breakingbad, /r/gameofthrones, /r/thewalkingdead, etc.
This is great. Salon has just gotten so bad. The series of editorials bashing Sam Harris were really over the top. Every day I see articles on Salon that are so biased it's just hard to stomach.
... even though there is no other entity which can be relied upon to solve it.

The government has shown that it, too, cannot be relied upon to solve it.

I certainly don't believe that the reason there are homeless children in American is because of people yelling "socialism."

Cries of "police state" have not stopped the formation and growth of the TSA.

When the government wants to spend money on something it seems to find a way.

The problem is that you'll never get everyone to agree that the government needs to be involved in fixing the situation

A lot of things happen despite a lack of public support. Do you think the public is cheering for the government to send billions to Pakistan?

You don't need everyone to agree. There would be enough people behind it.

This is a matter of political priorities.
IIRC from the video, at Macaw's core is an embedded webkit engine so they might not have to do any parsing at all but instead interface said engine. That being said, I'm not quite sure how difficult it would be to go from having it parsed to making something that can work with the parsed code since it might have a structure that would have to be further parsed to extract the meaning of the code.
Campus Bellhops - Software Developer, Graphic Designer, Support Engineer

We're a college moving service with a nationwide footprint. We employ college students across the country to help with small the medium sized labor tasks. We're making money and we're trying to scale from our current 48 cities to 150. More info at https://campusbellhops.com/careers/ or email newnerds@campusbellhops.com
Some monetization ideas:

* Follow the 4chan's method. Add captcha to search and offer captcha bypass for $15~ per year

* Make iOS / Android app, sell it for $1.99~ (you can make it with HTML/Javascript via PhoneGap)

* Offer API for affordable price

and please change current website design, make it simple and cleaner (Twitter Bootstrap is nice for that job and it's easy to learn)
Brightcove Founder Raises $9 Million to Take Bitcoin Mainstream
Why don't electric fish shock themselves?
How to root Nexus 5 with CF-Auto-Root
Reddit was spun off from Conde Nast quite a while ago and is a individual company.

So not only are you making claims without evidence, they are plainly false.
Evironment	Non-Server Users	Server Users	Total
KDE 4.x	392	667	1059
GNOME 3.x	376	627	1003
XFCE	378	605	983
Unity	342	438	780
Cinnamon	378	397	775
GNOME 2.x	213	463	676

Totalling the Gnome-based DEs [0], I get 4217 users versus 1059 users for KDE.

[0] http://constantmayhem.com/ty-stuff/linuxsurvey/2013.html#fav...
WebLoop is built on go-webkit2 (https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/go-webkit2/re...) (recent HN post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6644996) and exposes a more Go-idiomatic API for WebKit. The goal is for WebLoop to be a Go version of PhantomJS that can be used as a Go library or compiled to a smaller static binary with no external deps.

It includes an net/http.Handler StaticRenderer (https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/webloop/symbo...) that you can use to transparently render static HTML from a dynamic app, for search engines, social previews, etc. There's an example application of this using an AngularJS app.

There's also an included static-reverse-proxy program (https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/webloop/tree/...) that reverse proxies a dynamic app, returning statically rendered HTML. See the README (https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/webloop/readm...) for usage info.

I'd love to get feedback on this library and get other folks involved!
It feels like it. It also feels like it has kickstarted the real thing. I feel like working on it myself.
Not true. Paris had zoning laws (including building height restrictions and business location restrictions) since before Haussman, in the early 1800s[0].

New York passed the first US laws, as far as I can tell from a quick search (although I do see vague references to San Francisco using zoning laws against the Chinese in the 1880s, and a lot of people, including Wikipedia, quoting a more limited achievement of 'the first comprehensive/city-wide zoning laws' for New York), but Europe definitely predated them. I believe Germany and some other countries also had them, besides France.

[0]: http://books.google.com/books?id=dONVGtJzxrwC&pg=PA20&lpg=PA...
MeCommerce Inc / ThirdLove is hiring Mobile (iOS/ Android) Developers and Computer Vision Leads to take the lead in changing the face of eCommerce through computer vision and mobile.

About us:

+We're a motley crew of fashion designers, eCommerce supply chain and operations experts, computer vision scientists, mobile and web engineers (a YC founder on the team as well, me!) -- all working side by side to define a new generation of personalized eCommerce, with funding from a long list of tier 1 VCs and angels - http://www.crunchbase.com/company/thirdlove

+ We are straight-up flipping the traditional eCommerce experience on its head. Combining computer vision technology (9 patents, filing more) with all in-house designs, we offer perfectly fitting apparel for our customers at a fraction of the cost of other premium brands.

Things we’re looking for:

iOS / Android
+2-3 plus years iOS and/or Android development experience, degree in Computer Science or related field, robust Objective C / Java knowledge, proven end to end app development
+Experience in the consumer space strongly preferred
+A Flip Cup champion

Computer Vision
+A Master’s or PhD in computer science or a related field with a strong passion for and extensive experience with computer vision technologies
+Strong C++ coding skills and robust experience in OpenCV
+An ability to product manage, be creative (think augemented reality) and get involved in various aspects of the broader business
+Experience with object-oriented programming with modularized systems and SOA based architecture
+A karaoke advocate (especially when said “karaoke” involves early 90s hits)

In a nutshell:
This isn’t a call for those looking for a job just to pay the bills. We want visionaries, challengers, and dreamers who are excited to join a well backed technology company looking to change the game for millions of people!

Send me a note with any questions - eugene@mecommerce.com
Not robust yet. Try: http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/insurance_plans?zip_code=9404... and see an error.
Twitter Bootstrap, a developer's greatest ally
I've beaten FF many times before and have seen the early credits screen...but I would've never guessed that just a single programmer was behind it:

http://squarecave.blogspot.com/2012/06/nasir-gebelli-program...

> Although Final Fantasy is one of the most popular video games on the NES, programming an RPG proved somewhat difficult for Nasir. According to Sakaguchi, "it was the first time he had programmed anything like an RPG". Gebelli did not fully understand what an RPG was and how the battle system for such a game should work. I believe that Final Fantasy may have suffered from so many bugs and glitches due to Gebelli's understanding of RPGs. Nevertheless, Final Fantasy is still a fantastic game and Gebelli did not cease to amaze. Players were in awe at the battle system that Nasir programmed; being able to use four characters at once, the turn-based combat, and especially the spells and their glorious 8-bit animations.

I don't remember there being "so many bugs" in FF. As far as I remember, it was the only released-in-America FF to have any real challenge.
Absolutely. Reddit is a platform more than a monolithic entity. There are portions of that site that consider each other mortal enemies.
The way the moderators leverage their position is by blocking content, not promoting it. If you hang around Reddit for long enough you'll see the moderators are the weakpoint as they can arbitrarily remove a story that most users are engaging in and make up an arbirary reason for it. There should be some kind of process the moderators have to go through or at least be voted in.
> The moderators of Reddit take bribes.

Provide evidence for this assertion.

> Also, Reddit is owned by Conde Nast and most of those sites blocked are competitors to Conde Naste's publications. Conflict of interest.

Reddit is not own by Conde Nast. It was spun off into an independent entity in 2012.
We've been using Go for our startup as well and love it. Having programmed in a variety of languages, including Java, Scala, and Python, I have to say that Go has been as easy to work with if not easier than my previous experiences with other languages. Particularly awesome is the tooling they've built around the language. Dependency management is a cakewalk compared to other systems (say goodbye to Spring/Maven/etc. headaches) and compile time is extremely fast. Plus you get all the benefits of static type checking without much verbosity.
A few comments from an initial glance:

- Site could be improved a lot for mobile. If you get a lot of mobile traffic, which wouldn't surprise me, I'll bet it massively underperforms desktop traffic on site engagement and ad revenue.

- You need to A/B test your ad locations a lot more. The locations do not look particularly good to me, but then again this does depend a lot on how most people interact with your site (which likely isn't starting at the homepage).

- More ad networks isn't always better. Are these ad networks actually outperforming adsense? Are you banned from adsense?

Edit: Ignore these two below, thanks jim-greer. Twitter is in fact hosting the images!

- (ignore) You probably could compress the big images more to save bandwidth. I don't know how big of an expense your edgecast bill is, but I'll bet you could cut it down by a lot.

- (ignore) Additionally, fix the cache headers on your images (change them from max-age: 0 to cache forever -- they look immutable). This will immediately lower your edgecast bill by a little bit and really help performance.
"Machine Learning as a Service" - API Opportunities for Developers?
Several have tried to "accelerate" Android, like Myriad with Turbo Dalvik, but it's not so simple. The ART benchmarks are tantalizing, but how much battery life do you give up to get 2X performance in a synthetic benchmark? Hopefully ART is at least as efficient as Dalvik, but nobody outside Google has measured that yet.

Potential improvements in the VM need to show they don't give up in other performance dimensions what they gain in JIT'ed code performance.
Users do vote: with their subreddit subscriptions (also PMs to moderators, and/or text submissions complaining about policy). I don't get the sense that this was unwanted from the community either.

I don't know if this makes me biased, but I for one welcome fewer low-quality, link-bait, and/or recycled-story articles.
I've been a redditor from the beginning, and have always agreed with the sentiment that communities should reflect their userbase.

The issue comes when in the case of /r/politics moderators do something outside what the majority sentiment is. Change comes slow, it's far easier to get a mod removed than it is to get 3 million subscribers to move to a new subreddit with a "better" moderator team.
This is a tiny update, but I figured I might as well incorporate it into the tutorial, especially since it might be useful for people who haven't ever upgraded Rails before. Indeed, because it's so small, it makes a good exercise.
I don't use twitter much.

But recently there was a large tanker crash near where I live. The truck had exploded, and there were lots of people killed and hurt.

I wanted to see some pictures, but one hour after the incident the story was not (yet) on the TV news. So I turned to twitter, and using the standard twitter search, I found a few ransoms photos of the incident.

What I needed was a better way to search twitter for photos, with a specific tag or time frame posting, and perhaps even a geographical filter too (since the incident was at a specific place).

I'm sure other people would find this useful, especially when large events unfold live (I.e boston bombings, plane crash etc etc)
It looks like I won. There's no log from the battle, though, so if I had lost I wouldn't know what to improve. In the page for the battle there's just some kind of weird string (http://robotgame.org/match/2)
> In the winter, you literally light a fire under the floor of the building and radiant heat warms the entire structure.

Yeah, and occasionally die of carbon monoxide poisoning.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22948168
Unfortunately, an un-branded email looks suspicious and unprofessional nowadays. You'll get more complaints and unsubs than ever versus a well-crafted (not over-the-top) engaging layout.
Make a Twicsy app, price it at a dollar, push it through the site and you're set.
The ad placement is basically terrible. You should place fewer ads, but put them nearer the content and above the fold.

For example, get them out of the sidebar and make one banner in line with the content between the navigation and the pictures. Basically get rid of the rest.

Also, have you considered selling ads on BuySellAds.com? With that amount of traffic you should make decent money on a CPM or monthly basis.
So much of Android middleware is written in Java, and uses Android Java's IPC and RPC, a "second runtime" in Android would be a second class citizen.

Android-in-Go, with the middleware in Go, would be a different OS. Maybe a good one, but it would not be Android.
You're right, I didn't realize they became independent. I removed that sentence. Although I don't have any proof, there are dozens of incidents/stories I've seen removed that make me suspicious of the moderators and the justifications given rarely seemed sincere or rational. Is it really so hard for you to believe someone would use a position of authority for their own personal gain?
> You probably could compress the big images more to save bandwidth

He's not hosting the images, Twitter is.
Cloud-based speech tech humanizes humanoid robot
That looks almost exactly like Windows Phone with an iPhone or Android style apple launcher.
As a condo owner and resident, the last thing I want is to find myself living in a boarding house. My personal belongings, safety, privacy, the quality of the grounds, and the value of my property all seem to me to be threatened by AirBnB's take down of local regulations, taxes, and HOA covenants. As an individual, my rights are eclipsed by disproportionate corporate power. What are the realistic prospects for Class Action Lawsuits against AirBnB and other scofflaws ala the States vs Big Tobacco?
Thats a good guess.. theres a way to be sure of it..

The bitcode from Pnacl is different from the LLVM one..

But the "portable" backend naming scheme maybe could mean they will use the PNacl-LLVM instead of the pure LLVM one..

I wonder how Chrome could glue with this.. but if the Nacl/Pnacl uses the PPAPI api, in this hypotethical scenario they would replace the PPAPI runtime with a runtime compatible with ART..

it can be done, and the final c++ application source code would look like the java one..

edit: This could also mean the ndk applications will be first class citizens and wont need to rely on a java shim + native bindings..
I think that is more likely than the ChromeOS integration scenario
Qualcomm and Cerberus Joining in Founders’ Bid for BlackBerry
How about insurance that contractually requires me to never settle and pays for me to fight until the patent is declared invalid? That way I look like the worst possible troll target.
Hey HN, the chrome extension is about 3 days of work at this point but mobile/web versions are in the works.

Lot's more cool stuff planned and feedback welcome!
Having attended UWaterloo's CS program as well as other institutions, in addition to completing many courses from elite US universities (MIT, Harvard, Stanford, etc.), I've come to an interesting conclusion.

Elite US schools have an unparalleled reputation built upon hundreds of years of pedigree, and as such, there is incredibly fierce competition for entrance. Once you are admitted to an Ivy, the hard part is behind you, and you can get on with your courses. Uwaterloo is the the reverse: it is almost trivial to gain entrance, but surviving the devastating curriculum is another matter entirely.

Elite US schools have the best teachers in the world in my opinion, as the quality of their online lectures have shown. However, it appears that the assessment difficulty is similar to a top level Canadian schools (UofT, McGill, etc.). This is the crucial difference between UWaterloo and every other university.

UWaterloo assessment is brutal. In every way that an assessment can be made hard, it is done so. The tests are purely theoretical, making rote memorization useless. Furthermore, they are very long, putting slow and deep thinkers at a disadvantage. On top of all this, there is an extremely strict system of producing completely new exams and assignments, while making sure previous years' materials are not released. Combine this with an uncompromising curriculum in terms of breadth and depth, and you have one of the most rigorous CS programs in the world.

Now you can argue whether all of this is unnecessary (whiteboard vs terminal coding), but the truth is, the sheer difficulty of the challenge tends to weed out the uncommitted. The reason why UWaterloo grads are humble, is because they have had their egos beaten out of them. Without exception, every UW Math/CS undergrad is one of the smartest people in their high school/town/province. They come to UW, and within the first year, they have a serious confidence crisis as they are failing courses and getting marks they've never seen before (50s 60s 70s).

Once this occurs, they either quit, or swallow their ego and just focus on learning the material and preparing for the exams. There is no psychological foundation for arrogance, as even the best and brightest suffer failures repeatedly.

To summarize: UWaterloo is war. Your morale suffers, your friends fail and leave, and you lose all hope. But the few who survive are battle-hardend engineers by the end.

Unofficial UW motto: "Cry in the dojo, laugh in the battlefield."

Addendum: Co-op terms are a refreshing break from this academic war zone. I was always amazed at how simple, straightforward and fun actual work was in comparison to the ruthlessness of the curriculum.

Addendum II: Couldn't resist adding this hilarious interview with Elon Musk regarding his time at Queen's (another good Canadian school). He decided against UWaterloo, but for entirely different reasons:

http://queensu.ca/news/alumnireview/rocket-man
He could do something like the new Pinterest ads. You search for a pic on Twitter and inside the results is a picture with an ad with a relative theme.
An update was published after Facebook's representative contacted me.
Let's hope I was the only guy who was treated in such an ugly way.
No, they do not. It's a form of price advertising deception that I'm glad is outlawed in most of Europe.
I suspect that reddit's management is looking for the kind of audience that's perfectly content just staring at a TV screen no matter what's on. This appears to be an active push to chase away people with higher functioning intellects.

The market for dumb is huge. I can't say that I blame them for going after it, but I won't be one of their users anymore.