skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why so many delivery startups? Are these real problems needing solutions or entrepreneurs chasing the perception of a market that, in reality, does not exist?

Quick story: A good friend of mine thought he saw an opportunity to make money when 3.5 in floppy disks came out (yes, this is ancient). He found a supplier of bulk disks and placed ads in several magazines offering 50 and 100 disk packs at a good deal. One of the magazines printed weekly. A week after he placed his first ad a competitor came out offering a similar deal. A couple of weeks later, another. And then another. And so on for several weeks. At the conclusion of his agreed-upon twelve week run for the ads he did not renew the contract.

He sold exactly ZERO disks.

He watched as every single one of his competitors pulled out as their contracts ran out.

His conclusion was that these entrepreneurs simply followed each other into a non-existing market. He was first. Others saw what he did and thought there was money to be made. They all followed each other taking a virtual dive off the edge or a cliff. Nobody make a dime.

Ever since he told me that story years ago I've kept an eye out for that kind of behavior. I've seen it many times and in different industries, some with massive capital investments. One such example is the consumer 3D madness that keeps coming back to bite those who try it. But they keep trying! Amazing.
It is nice.

One thing that got me stuck for an entire coffee was that I needed to run Chrome Mobile Beta on the device to get the Screencast toolbar button to appear, otherwise you just get regular remote debugging with no button.
Stenography is one of the NSA's worst nightmares. Encrypted strings sent over the Internet they know are encrypted, and often know what algorithm and key length. But the fact that any image can contain an encrypted message, and there's know way to know whether or not something exists within, scares the shit out of them.

So, good work.
I don't disagree with what you are saying, but I think you are saying something different than the person I replied to.

To me, the statement "What kind of a person even idolizes someone for writing great code?" suggests that programming is not an art, not worthy of further consideration, a mere means to an end to whatever product to be sold. To me, that statement is like saying "Who even idolizes <insert great painter here>? The guys who sold this art didn't even know how to paint!"

I am not saying that is an invalid viewpoint. I just think it's a weird viewpoint to have on Hacker News. For me, mathematics, code, etc is not a means to an end, but its own reward. To me, that is part of what it means to be a hacker. I wish there was a place where everyone felt the same way. Hacker News used to be that place for me, but the demographic has changed a lot. That is sad.
Looks very nice. When the team is small and everybody can have lunch in office together it's fantastic for the culture and strengthens the bonding.
Agreed - nobody is arguing that throwing together sloppy code is always a good thing. Mostly I'm just saying that some amount of sloppy code isn't necessary a bad thing. Like you say, the amount of sloppy code that you can get away with depends on what you are doing.

There are vast discussions about this both online and in books, referring to "sloppy code" as "technical debt". Just like monetary debt, sometimes it is worth taking on a significant debt, while there are other times that it is best to avoid debt. It's a judgement call either way, and I've found that I tend to err on the side of being too scared of technical debt.
Making Mobile Ads That Work
No, it's close to an appeal to authority fallacy. The person you've replied to has reimplemented the Minecraft server along with a few other frameworks.
Well, excuse me for being lazy and using less specific terminology than you desire. Yes, I know how 23andme's SNP probing works. I just prefer to imagine a personal genomics market in general that evolves to the state where we can all have our full genome sequenced. And we're not going to get there without having early adopters and baby steps instead.

I don't need government protection from this, certainly not over a one time fee of $99 that has ample disclaimers, and at worst, will cause me to waste time asking my doctor over a condition I don't have, and at best, find out the cause of a disorder that doctors haven't been able to diagnose.

Yes, and in some very rare cases, some people will be told they don't have the BRCA gene when they really do, as if there's an epidemic of women have been avoiding mammograms because of DNA tests, instead of lacking healthcare, or being given confusing directives over the years over when, and how often they need to have exams.
Sounds like a disagreement over whether one is referring to the act of refueling or the refueling rule.

Both mid-race refueling and the refueling rule have had brief stints.
Has anyone sensible done any kind of analysis of this?
>He is a terrible, terrible coder.

Oh come on.
Not so fast. There are incentives for teachers to help talented, excelling individuals who have no problems. It makes the teacher and the school look good, especially for local and national government programs that reward teachers/schools with good results. You could say this is much more relevant in universities where millions of dollars may hinge on the ability of a student to develop something the school can shop around.

Actually, there is one incentive for teachers to help troubled kids: High school and college sports. The sports brings in the money, and so they need to make sure the kids don't completely fail out so they can keep bringing in the dough. Other than that, though...
And you've got Wipeout :-)
What I’ve Learned in My First Month as a VC
HelloGit: Hello World tutorials encoded in Git commits
Do you think they'll ever move away from Java?

Do you think Minecraft requires a complete rewrite to be maintainable?
R/GA announces the 10 startups in its connected devices accelerator
I see a lot of folks here talking about college education in economic terms. So, sure, the evidence is certainly mounting that we've mucked something up: tuition is stupidly high, graduation rates are low, people are dogging their way through college 'just because' et cetra. But nobody (around here, anyhow) seems to be speaking on higher education in terms of intrinsic value.

I'm talking about the way going to a university integrates you with a ton of strange, weird, different people. How there is a tremendous amount of information and culture that is absorbed, either by directly learning it or simply by osmosis. The 'by osmosis' thing might be a bit of an assertion, but I think that most people who've been to university can probably relate to the concept.

In my opinion that adds a lot of value to a society. I know these are not original ideas, and it wouldn't be nice to live in a highly educated society where absolutely nobody has work, but I wouldn't immediately discount the value that is added by sending the masses through university. As explained by numerous people here, this strategy is clearly broken as a method of certification and job training. Does that mean that we should do a 180 and reserve anything beyond vocational training for the Marxes, Shakespeares, and Feynmans? I think not. I'm not suggesting that people here are promoting that idea, just illustrating that moving in that direction might destroy a lot of value that's not as plainly seen as one's student loan balance (something I can certainly relate to...) or the national unemployment rate. Maybe I'm just being young and naive.
The most recent version of Android has Chrome as the standard.

It isn't that helpful a feature at the moment but it is looking towards the future.
Getting ahead in business with body language
Thanks! It's my own little way of supporting startups & innovation in SF :)
Amazon has been testing Amazon Locker for this, which is similar. The problems with both services are: 1) limited to boxes of the appropriate size (from the pictures of the Packstation, maybe 10-20% of my Amazon orders would not fit) and 2) You still have to go get it.

Going to go get it may not seem like a big deal. But, if you're, say, walking home with a 2 year old, or it's pouring rain and you don't have a car (I don't here in NYC), or any number of other reasons, actual home delivery can be a really nice thing to have.
Seems like Prezi has changed its mind about not paying. Prezi being a Hungarian startup made a buzz in the local media with this story and one of the leader news site reached out to them and got this reply:
"Prezi: Hibáztunk és fizetni fogunk" witch means:
"We made a mistake, we will pay"

They also said that they will release a blog post and they will change the bounty program, so mistakes like this will not happen again (hopefully)
What Walter “Clyde” Frazier can teach you about overcoming being USED and ABUSED
Cards Against Humanity’s Sales Increased During Black Friday Price Hike
Biphasic is a form of polyphasic. And if two segments are better than one, why would you think three segments are definitely worse than one?
Oh, great! Thank you very much!
This is from a few months ago. Still neat :)
You should be able to do an OM617 swap for less than $5k. Very attractive if you get a Ranger or S10 with a dead engine.
12.9-inch iPad To Reportedly Feature A 4K Display
Alternative: on substring, reference the original string through a SoftReference registered with a global ReferenceQueue. Have one global system thread poll that reference queue and to convert substrings to hard copies (requiring a reverse map from the parent to its children via WeakReference) when the parent is about to be collected.

Problem is this is still reasonably complicated (though much less so than the article). A lot of memory churn and possible OOMEs will occur at the time of GC instead of the time of substring allocation. That makes the overall system less predictable and less debuggable, as will any deferred substring reallocation.
My understanding as not a lawyer, is that there exist constitutional rights that are not listed in the constitution such as the examples will_brown listed. Those examples have court cases now establishing that 'Yes indeed these are constitutional rights', however the cases did not make them constitutional rights.

You seem to be saying that the court cases are required for any right to exist if I follow what you are saying. And that I believe is false.

My apologies if I merely did not follow what you were saying.

Edit: I believe if I am misunderstanding you others might as well so clarification might not be a bad thing.
How UPS driver caught havingreal fun in truck,
There are lots of ways to live a great life and relatively few of them involve fame and fortune.

Also there are many people who make a big difference without achieving fame and fortune. Even within the tech industry I would argue that, for example, Dennis Ritchie's contributions were far more fundamentally important than any of the people you listed, yet he never achieved the massive wealth or mainstream fame of those you've mentioned.
See my comment below for more downsides...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6836632
I think they're referring to what Java's doing:

>Last month, Java changed how it computes substrings.

... [tl;dr: previously always kept whole string, substring just stored indexes]

Java now uses a different method: always copying the substring.
For those of you that somehow missed the full story behind this, you can find it here: http://priceonomics.com/what-its-like-to-fail/

This is such a wonderful story that could warm even the coldest of hearts, and I really hope lots of people get behind this crowdtilt campaign :-)
I'm not "most used to" Xcode at all. I've been using Xcode in a hobbyist capacity for six months while I've been using IDEA professionally for four years.

Xcode simply feels like it belongs. It acts as a Mac app should act. AppCode doesn't; it's unpredictable, lacking in basic features like Counterparts, and still kicks me out to Xcode just long enough to remind me how much nicer Xcode is to work with. Code generation and refactoring is very pleasant to have but not as important as being comfortable to work in for hours at a stretch (and AppCode isn't worth the price just to employ it for a couple features for a hobby project).
An inner inconsistency of Bitcoin
With its striking price recently, Bitcoin is under hot debate among traders. You might think that people are bidding up the price thinking that bitcoin could become one of the dominant currency in the future. But from the view of a "good currency", it's not the case.
Founder here. Glad you like it.

> What does 1+ user mean if not unlimited?

There's no limit to the number of Pro users that can work together with the same data sources.

> Also, row limits are not listed in the top tier, making me think that they are either unlimited, or that the go until they break due to a technical limitation somewhere after 5k rows.

Enterprise deployments can customize the row limits (default is 5K). There's no technical limit on the server side though some browsers slow down at very large limits. Using Chrome we've had no issue with 50K+ rows. It doesn't come up in real world use cases though as people dealing with more than a couple K rows usually want the data exported (which we support separately) vs just scrolling through a result set.
Questions starting with the word curious are often interpreted as an attack? I'd better stop my habit of beginning every question with that word...
Microsoft.com has many "Known compatibility issues" with IE
Evolution of a binary search implementation for line-sorted text files
Just because you're complaining doesn't mean you feel entitled. If someone is rude to me and I complain about it, and I expressing that I feel entitled to have non-rude interactions with this person? If I post a negative book review am I feeling entitled to a good book?
True, but in terms of performance, the only measure that I would have liked to been judged on during my kid's first few months would be survival.
One major exception: distribution. You can also grow big off the backs of other companies. In the tech world, this has become fairly common in the advertising space. Retargeting companies, for example, can grow quickly by signing up only a few large e-commerce sites.

It's worth noting that in this scenario you often don't see regular monthly growth. Instead you get huge spikes when new customers/partners are on-boarded.
This is a great article, but really only applies to a small subset of companies for whom organic growth is the only way to grow huge.

An abbreviated list of counterarguments:

Epic, CenturyLink, NBC, Waste Management, Honda, Vanguard.
Hanging up on Callbacks: Generators in ECMAScript 6
Just some notes:

- The Pro version excites me much more than Pencil by Fiftythree, discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6761297, because it provides pressure sensitivity and a fine tip, both of which Pencil lacks;

- It's touted to contain over 4000 levels of pressure recognition, while the most advanced version of Wacom tablets only has 2048 levels (http://www.wacom.com/en/us/creative/cintiq-22-hd-touch);

- It's also got tilt recognition, which I believe is also a first among iPad styli.
Not true for marketing-oriented companies that grew huge by having a really good salesforce and managing to become the go-to name in slow, bureaucratic markets such as governments.
The browser shouldn't be dictating how the web works. It's the creator's job to manage the complexity of presentation, you can't just push that responsibility onto your tech stack. The domain and expected use cases for web apps is just too broad for any browser to be making decisions like this.
He explicitly excludes monopolies, like TW and Comcast.
smh... mountains out of molehills.
I don't think they'll ever move away from Java. I don't think Minecraft requires something quite on the scale of a complete rewrite, but perhaps starting from scratch and pasting in bits and pieces of the original to save time would help things.

They are working on rewriting substantial portions of the codebase, but unfortunatley Notch didn't hand it off to the most skilled maintainers and they aren't making things much better.
Well you got me there.
No, it creates an additional editor area that can have any number of files open in it. You drag files between the areas or open the same file in multiple areas.

You can continue splitting any area vertically or horizontally to create a configuration that fits your working style or the code you're currently writing.
> "You can still be censored if your internet access is cut, or you have no way to publish your message."

Hence censorship resisting, not censorship defeating.

Stenography is potentially useful if partial but monitored and censored communication channels remain open. See: The Great Firewall of China, or the postal system in prisons. Some data gets through, but data that they don't like does not. If the data is concealed, you can get it through.

Beyond just stenography, in the Soviet Union and beyond, some writers and artists would use allegory to criticize political figures or the state, enabling them to make points that would otherwise be censored. They could have shut down all film and book production, defeating this technique, but as long as some artistic works were allowed this channel remained open.
What about E911 and GPS Data? A "black box" at least?
Had the exact same thing happen except my bill was only for $1800 after insurance.

The kicker was that when I called the insurance company to ask about the cost they told me that it was unknowable in advance because they have rates negotiated with each hospital individually. When I asked if there was any way to estimate my out of pocket expense of if there was any cap they told me no.

So, there's literally no way to know what it's going to cost, at least with blue cross, because the rates are negotiated on a per facility basis and not public.

Not really a free market for sure.
I was under the impression that undetectable steganography was extremely difficult. If commonplace steganography was widespread, no doubt they'd write analyzers to determine what things might be hiding data. On top of that, if steganography becomes widespread, it's likely the protocol will be a common one adopted by plenty of people. At that point, it reduces to encryption, does it not?
They also control the rate at how their own employees get phished, especially if they want the employees to report any suspicious attempts. Constant barrages from outsiders will make the employees stop reporting.
BufferBox
Yes, this article seems to live within the silicon valley echo chamber.
It is very primitive steg. This will not survive antisteg tools. Look at the *encode.py
I'm sure (paying) customers will be totally fine with Prezi's source code being available to anyone that want to try to hack the site.
When I bought my kindle, looking for hidden gotchas was simply not part of my calculation. I expected I was buying a device...if there was a popup during the checkout process that said this product is ad support, I absolutely would not have bought it.

Interesting. I bought mine from Amazon.com and it was quite clear that I had a choice of ad-supported or, for a higher price, ad-free. All of this info was on the product page, and it never felt like anything was hidden.

I think this page is pretty typical: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CU0NSCU/ref=kin_comp_dk_...

There's a clear choice of "With Special Offers" and "Without Special Offers" with a link to a popup that explains what this means.

If you bough yours from a different site or if the Amazon page did not indicate these options then I can understand feeling cheated.

I also had planned on rooting my device (at least to the extent that I could replace the ads with my own images) but I was never able to accomplish that. For me it ended up to be not a big deal, but I knew from the description of the product I was buying an ad-supported device in the first place.

Ultimately I think we may be of different minds about what we consider acceptable consumer/merchant relationship.

Well, since I agreed to the Kindle deal I'm OK with it. Amazon.com was quite upfront about what they were selling. I would not be OK if there was nothing to indicate I would be seeing ads.

This is something that annoys me with Tivo. I don't recall that they were as clear when I ordered the service that in addition to an annual fee I would also have to look at stupid banner ads on assorted screens. Also, as far as I know, there is no way to opt out of this (such as by paying more, as with the Kindle).
Putting low and high res graphics in the same image sprite
*corporate

IE is not integrated with Active Directory.

IE settings can be controlled through group policies, and there are policies that can be applied to IE that MS bundles with Windows Server.

Firefox and Chrome can be controlled in a similar manner through group policy by downloading the administrative templates from the respective organizations.

On chrome you are not "hosed". All of the bookmarks are stored in a single file aptly named "bookmarks", just move the file to the new computer. Done.

Firefox also stores your bookmarks in a single file. Just replace the file on the new computer and you're done.

Surely copying a single file can't be more of a pain than copying many individual files.

Nobody uses ActiveX on the web anymore, due to it's IE-only nature. Sure, websites still exist, but they have become rarer over the past half-decade.

With your example: if you have a user that can't figure out how to click on a different browser icon on their desktop, this is nothing more than a user training issue.. or if you are that adamant that Chrome is a serious problem for you, just use group policy to prevent your users from installing it.

I manage several thousand users, most use chrome, some use firefox, and internet explorer is also there for people that aren't familiar with other browsers, or need to access special (poorly designed) websites. All browsers are managed with group policy and bookmarks are managed with ease.

User complaints are at zero because so far everyone has been able to tell the difference between the icons.
The drag and drop works but it's a bit weird. You have to drag the tab into the other editor window, not on the tab bar.
Here are a few reasons why they probably chose to write an iOS app:

-Apple is known for rejecting apps that mimic the functionality of the website (even the mobile version)

-The lead developer is probably more comfortable using Obj-C than web technologies

-The business is designed specifically for mobile users. Services like Luna already exist; they're trying to tap into a different demographic

-As such, iOS development is cheaper than both iOS and Android
JSON is a data format. HTML is a markup language. You don't store data as HTML, because it's not intended to store data, only presentational markup.
So if something kicked in at 75% stack usage (via a guard page?) and forced analysis, wouldn't that work? It'd be like the plethora of JVM options now: another configurable switch.
If anyone else is having symbol resolution / syntax highlighter problems with their Play 2.x / Scala / SBT project after upgrading: be sure to File -> Invalidate Caches / Restart...

http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/SCL-6337
http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/SCL-6338

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/cleaning-system-cache....
Good life lesson: don't be a dick.
Software Engineering: The Next 50 Years
Show HN: I made an HN for mobile health
He probably meant a private mailing box (PMB) rather than an actual PO Box.
Those bootstrap buttons look so tacky
Basic HTTP Authentication With Forms