skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
just don't plain don't want to stay in the city

I'm not so sure it is that as much as...

they get hired for research/corporate work ... actually prefer _that_ rather than working in a startup

Most of the CMU nerds want to work at the best companies for stimulating their intellectual minds. I suspect people who get accepted to CMU recognize its capacity for strengthening your inner nerd, and so those are the types who go there: people who can maximize their time thinking about difficult computer science problems.

AlphaLab, I presume the seed funding organization you refer to, is going about it all wrong. They are trying to be a copy of YCombinator, and I'll challenge them to a debate if they think otherwise. What they ought to be doing is being more open to the startup community at large to the point where all of the startups in Pittsburgh and all of the investors in Pittsburgh are in one room hobnobbing. So far I have yet to even have met anyone affiliated with AlphaLab. They had some lame happy hour kind of event at their facility once in the last few months, but I left when the director started to waste our time with a presentation which I could have (already had) absorbed via the information on their website.

I've overheard a few comments from investors here. One said something along the lines of, "AlphaLab expects you to invest a couple million in some companies who give 10 minute presentations? Get real." This tells me the adaption to the trend of angel investing isn't happening here. Another investor, when I mentioned the startups in Pittsburgh he replied, "Yeah. There are not enough."

One solution, as I mentioned, is creating the illusion of a startup scene. Just have weekly events and do what you have to that people will actually go to them. Don't waste their time. Carnegie Mellon has a Pre-college program. These are kids who end up going to UPenn, MIT, Stanford, Cornell and so on. That is, they are there because CMU is one of the best schools for computer science so why not get a sample of what it is like there. So, if incubators like AlphaLab actually helped the startup scene seem as though it exists, those Pre-college students may decide they like it and choose to go to CMU over MIT (let's say Stanford rejected them by chance) because they feel a strong sense of a startup environment.
Valve: Let Fans Fund Games Development
Now we're talking! 7 tabs = 80% cpu usage!

You might also consider lookup tables for Hamming distance (google for "counting bits").
If more than two people know about it it is not a secret any more.

Watergate would have been a lot easier to conceal than a fake moonlanding.

Including people building the set, lighting it, constructing the delay lines in order to make the transmissions simulate eme delay and so on.

You'd have to do it 'the cube' style and even then too many people would have known the truth.
what's your best one so far?
There are a lot of people in the ESR/open source crowd who never mention GNU, FSF, or RMS. MS is hardly unusual in that respect.
Or realty (buying and selling houses). At least here in the USA it's a complete racket. You simply cannot buy a house without a Realtor (TM). It's disgusting.

This is a great start-up website opportunity (like AutoTrader.com), but I've heard (anecdotally of course) that legal pitfalls abound.
On average, people produce more than they consume.

But we don't produce more than we consume of some resources that seem important to our modern way of life (water, oil, etc). And off the top of my head I can't think of any good reason why having more people would bring us closer to making things like fusion a reality (other than by increasing the need).
Touche'! You do realize that you have now given the crazies another argument to support their theories?
Share HN: I wrote an app to help my paralyzed cousin type significantly faster.
Yeah, my JS hamming distance implementation is pretty miserable. I'm no bit wizard, but I thikn I can modify the SHA1 function (before it returns the value as a hex string) and XOR the 5 vars with the hex value that they gave us, and then count the set bits. Couldn't get it working last night though so I switched over to this
You might also consider removing UTF8Encoding from SHA1 implementation, I might be wrong, but I think contest states no encoding should be used - i.e. ASCII only. If that's a care, that's a useless O(N) operation.
Carl Malamud is trying to fix these sorts of problems; perhaps you should ask him how you can help.
> But, though there are a thousand different histories that can be written about any event, some historical perspectives are more useful than others for answering particular questions.

This seems like a really good way to evaluate historical scholarship (amongst other metrics, of course, unless Mencius Moldbug and Howard Zinn happen to be our greatest living historians.)
Hah! I just generated as many hashes in a minute that I did in the hour I had it running beforehand. Good changes :)
A noteworthy sentence from the article:

> ... it’s the first time I’m aware of that a bank that has actually aligned its incentives with what’s right for the customer.

Worth thinking about.
Come on... It's not so bad.
And it's why I love CentOS/RHEL or Debian on servers.

Stability and predictability is vastly more important than having the most new-fangled of everything. Fedora or Ubuntu (non-LTS releases) are nice desktop systems, and they have all the latest fancypants stuff built right in, but I'd laugh someone out of the room if they suggested running them on a server. Arch doesn't even appear to have an official policy on lifecycle, so it's definitely not in the running.
The Turing Test is to to be indistinguishable from a human via a text interface.

The only thing I can think of that even comes close on the Internet is a search engine that attempts to answer questions according to the way you asked them (for instance, Wolfram Alpha). But even then, anyone can tell the difference between search results and a human. The Internet itself can't pass the test because the Internet is infrastructure, it's not a single entity.
Hamming distance? Lowest looks like 31, and I've seen a bunch around there, but to save on iterations it's only dumping out every 1 million comparison, or ones less than 20.

What's notable is that my average is in the mid 30s. Seems like these JS based computers higher. Not sure why this is.
ext3, sometimes VBoxSharedFS pseudo network drive under VirtualBox windows, with ext3 underlying it
It's a good point but I think what people averagely "produce" is of a different substance from that which they consume.

People consume resources that are largely non-replenishable, or at least are not replenished in a manner strictly related to the number of people. As abstractbill says, people don't produce water. Similarly, more people doesn't typically mean more food either, although it might indirectly through the increased needs of more people leading to more farmers etc.

What people "produce" is generally 'order' or increased labour output. Whether this leads to supporting more people I'm not sure.
It's not the analogy that's flawed at all. You admit that this might make that choice of who to interview less obvious, which is exactly my point.

However, if the goal of teaching is to teach students, then obviously one should try to improve their writing! Similarly, as you point out, if the goal of YC is to find useful information, then of course they should provide this additional help.

tl;dr:

Of course, most intelligent people I know would have found everything in this link perfectly obvious. In this case, you'll fail to separate people with good projects and reading comprehension from people with good projects AND good business sense.

It reminds me of applicants to our dorm (residents reviewed applications and rated them, which decided admission). It was easy to get into the dorm if you had any idea what the dorm was about. But some people just "didn't get it" and they were easy to pick out and rate poorly. (Bad application: I want to live here because I'm an architect and the architecture building) (Good application: I want to live here because I like getting naked in a kiddie pool in the middle of winter.)
To get more people excited, might be a good idea to say how many cycles each browser has contributed - make it a fight of Chrome vs Firefox vs Safari ;)
Governments are better at keeping secrets than they are popularly given credit for. As an exercise, I would like you to try to identify United States intelligence operatives.
It doesn't run with ruby 1.9 out of the box.
p.s. the Linux command is correctly spelt "df -T"
Heh, I'm not sure if it would be representative of a good benchmark, but it might be exciting to see how many hashes each browser has contributed ;)
Foreign-language placenames can ignore the reform, but many places have English names independent of the forms used by their inhabitants. <Spain, Munich, Peking> are English words, and so get reformed («Speyn, Myunik, Piykinh») no matter what the locals call them.

I wouldn't be caught dead calling Beijing "Peking".
"A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" by David Eggers. Ironic title, thoughtful and enjoyable book. Suggested.
Not running C directly, but getting about 200,000 iterations per second running through an Nvidia GPU through CUDA and the Python wrapper PyCUDA.
I'm not sure on the legalities etc. but the idea of investing in a particular project with returns sounds great - it could help align the profit motive with making a great game.

An interesting extension would be a similar approach to additional features/content for existing products, although I'm not sure how you judge the returns of this stuff beyond combining it in expansion/content packs.
There's even a name for it: black hole SEO.
Valerie Plame
Submitter here. My cousin has not been doing too well for the past few months and so I put this project aside for now. However, a friend suggested that there might be many others who could benefit from such a tool or its derivatives.

This isn't a startup and I honestly don't want to treat it like a business. However, I do think it qualifies as a hack because of how it works. It uses Google Suggest in addition to a dictionary to try to guess the next word that the user is going to type. If you type WHERE, the next word is most probably going to be IS, THE, or DID. If you then select IS, the next word after WHERE IS will probably be THE or MY. KType uses this and a few such principles to make smarter, better guesses. It is not perfect but I intended to make it extremely smart and customized per user. When I was actively working on this, I had 100 ideas per day on how it could basically read the user's mind and suggest words and phrases most effectively.

My family and I looked at many existing systems for making typing easier but there wasn't anything out there so I decided to roll our own. As of right now, I don't know where to go with this because of my cousin's uncertain health condition. I would love to hear from medical and text hackers about developing this further.

Note: Currently I use Google Suggest localized for India so many of the suggestions may seem weird to non-Indian users. However, it's a simple change in URL to get localized suggestions for any country thanks to Google. Also, I wrote it for 1280x1024 resolution but it can be resized for most screen sizes.
Do you guys remember when Buzz Aldrin punched the guy who was doubting the Lunar Landing? (It's mentioned in the article)

Here's a video:

http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/news/2009/7/20/remember_the_...
Sleep is more flexible in the short-term than you may think.
That was my first thought :)
When i saw this question this is what i thought also. I was a tad unsure but when i put my application through in the next month or so i was going to discuss a general system known to everyone and how I was able to conduct myself to ensure that the system worked towards my advantage.

I guess with your comments above paul, it is something along those lines that you are looking for.

Thanks for clarification, oh and the initial question for that matter :)
How Are Companies Using BackType’s (YC S08) API?
This has great applications for mobile devices as well.
I was going to say "taxes" ....
Are you aware of the dasher program? Because if you are not you really need to take a look at it.

It can let someone who is fully paralyzed, with just eye movement, type at a very good speed. And it works for less paralyzed people too (it has configurable modes).

I don't know why it's not more frequently used, but it should be - it's much better than most other typing software used in these cases.

Edit: I just noticed you listed it on the page.

Edit2: And I see everyone else told me that too.
Oops, thanks! (Can't edit the post anymore.)
Machine Dreams
Man that was a good connection.

Truth hurts.

That should teach him to respect his elders and betters.
Yeah, me too. Some folks doing them early, and the rest waiting till the last minute.
The absence of evidence theory never fails.
This is the first thing listed in the "KType is not" section:

"KType is not a text-entry system for average users like T9 and Dasher."
Well, we won't need fusion for some time; at current wealth-creation rates, fission and solar can keep us well-supplied for a century or more, even without off-planet resources, which are fairly easily available. Water for human needs is not actually very scarce; it's just slightly more expensive than we'd prefer in some locations. Even current oil prices are speeding development of alternatives, and there is a lot of shale oil to help us transition from cheap oil to cheap solar or cheap fission. France has gotten most of its electricity from nuclear fission for decades, and exports power, so it's no longer a question of feasibility -- we know exactly how to solve our energy needs for several (current) lifetimes, and it will cost about what the Iraq war already cost to switch.

Basically, there are no particular shortages of anything that will necessarily be critical; the main thing we need to do to get over the hill we can see coming up is to stop braking so hard on the downslope of this hill. :)
yup we host lots of stuff on aws, why is that an issue?
I'm sure it'd be a lot faster if they made a Java Applet or JavaFX version. Is there a reason they didn't? They could always fall back to Javascript if Java wasn't installed.
Separate Stop and Refresh buttons prevent the mistake of clicking Stop right at the moment a page finished loading, causing it to refresh instead. This can be a problem if you clicked stop because the page was loading too slow so you just wanted to look at what had already downloaded, but you end up discarding all of that progress to redownload the page.
Dasher was the first app we tried but it did not work for him because it requires a very high level of steadiness. My cousin's hand and eye is not steady enough. Plus you still have to type all the letters to spell any word. KType is not a replacement for Dasher but rather works at another layer (TCP vs HTTP) as it has more to do with guessing full words than typing individual letters.
Either my hamming distance algo sucks, or my entropy pool rules. Lowest has been 28
When you think about it, this is actually totally useless. It is much easier to just generate a puzzle on the fly and not require the user to have a paper copy of it.

But I bought it anyway, because the point isn't to solve Sudoku puzzles, it's to show off how nifty this program is. Which is easily worth a buck.
Fantastic! 10 tabs open in Safari 4 @1ms using < 1core of my 2.66GHz Core2Dueo. Cheers and good luck!

(I second, or third, the browser-war idea.)
Redfin.com is working to make this a little better, and is already profitable.
I don't think that's true. I think people underestimate the difficulty of keeping conspiracies secret - and I think the difficulty increases exponentially with each new person who is a part of it.

One of the US's most precious secrets of the 20th century was how to develop nuclear weapons. There are theories that the atomic bomb was invented once, during the Manhattan project, and all subsequent countries learned how to do it through espionage - including the Soviet Union. If we couldn't keep that secret - a known secret, but still a secret - I doubt we could keep something as public as the moon landings secret.

Also, as a counter to your premise, consider acting. Good acting is hard. When faking something, it's difficult to be conscious of all of the things that you would do where you actually doing it.
Burnout also seems to be a function of age. I'm nearly 45; I don't have the stamina I did at 35, let alone 25. Nor do I have quite the same degree of mental agility. What I've got now that I didn't have back then is experience -- the aphorism "work smarter, not harder" springs to mind.

Also: why work hard? Do you live to work, or work to live? That's a value judgement only you can make for yourself; but when you stop to think about it, try to separate out your personal feelings from the prevailing herd wisdom (which is that of course you must live to work, and anything else is somehow subversive). You've only got the one shot at life: are you sure you're using it wisely?
I wouldn't install an app to help you out.

I wouldn't leave it running if you killed my processor.

But you made it painless, so you get at least a few hours of runtime on me @ 1ms.
Hackerotica: Erotic Stories for Geeks and Hackers
Ha, you want lifecycle? Arch (and its father, Gentoo) doesn't just not have an official policy -- the whole point of the distro is to not even have versions or freezes, much less support them.

Every Gentoo and Arch install is a special snowflake, with whatever the latest stable versions were when a package was last updated. Rolling releases are awesome -- the software doesn't have to ship in a goddamn box!

RHEL + Debian are constantly backporting and patching so much crap onto their 'frozen' versions of upstream software. For them 'stable' means that you get the pain of updates without any visible features, with the added annoyance of hacked-in patches from people who didn't write the software.
That's one very cool hack man, something to be proud of.

There are large bodies of text such as wikipedia and others that you can download, maybe you could use them to aid your prediction ?

It would also make the application work when offline.
3D videos on YouTube
1% daily? I don't care how revolutionary techcrunch thinks this is; that number means they are nothing more than a gussied-up payday loan operation -- the vultures of the financial industry food chain.

As usual, the people using this service will end up being those least able to afford it. (e.g.: If you're financially stable enough to have access to one, you can use a credit card to meet the same needs. Many don't start charging interest at all until after 30 days, Wonga's maximum term.)
"As abstractbill says, people don't produce water."

People can easily produce water in the same sense that they "consume" water (since consumption in this case merely means to pollute a little bit, and cleaning water only requires energy and physical plant).

If you use prices as a proxy for measurements of how much we have available, it's clear that the vast majority of the resources we use are, in practical terms, more plentiful now than a century ago, and given that we can see how to switch to more plentiful resources still, I don't see that trend stopping for at least a century or two, at current rates. Even if our technology didn't improve fundamentally past what we know how to do now, we'd have at least a century before we had to go get more resources elsewhere, and we already know how to do that (though we'll need a lot more engineering to actually do it, of course). Meanwhile, the more people there are, the more engineers and innovators there are. If we don't get hit by an asteroid or literally destroy ourselves, the future is pretty damn bright. :)
Someone on Twitter claimed this entry has already got the 0:

http://twitter.com/rikfaith/statuses/2743945177

I have no way to check. True or not?
You write that dasher is for the average person. I've only played with it, but the authors claim it's specifically for paralyzed people. I guess the claims don't live up to reality, it's quite disappointing.
The most striking thing about this list is just how many more startups have been funded by YC than by any competitor. There are almost as many YC companies as the rest put together (especially considering all the unlaunched YC companies missing from the list).
Twitter Generates $48 Million of Media Coverage in a Month
Check out the picture of the rope memory used to store the ROM:

http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/a...

Each ROM word is a wire. If the wire goes through the first magnetic core, its first bit is a one; if it skips the core, its first bit is zero, and so on. Each of the 36,000 words of ROM needed to be threaded through these cores by hand. Amazing.

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

(I imagine it was chosen because it's much more resilient to cosmic rays flipping a bit. But it's pretty much impossible to alter the program without creating the whole thing from scratch. The ultimate spaghetti code!)
Very cool. Feature requests:

- Accept keyboard input. Some users might find it easier to press a key rather than use a mouse or even a touch screen. It would enable support for stuff like this: http://www.usm.edu/ids/tlc/images/hw-ikeys.jpg

- Feature a big "copy text" button so that the user might be able to use your service and paste said text somewhere else on the web.
Difficult security updates are useless
I had originally planned on making this an offline app but scrapped that when I realized it would lose the ability to do real-time Google Suggest (or similar searches via Yahoo/Bing/Twitter). Search engines have a huge database that I can use to help with suggestions.

Even if I make an app for iPhone/iTouch, most users can still access the web and make use of Google Suggest so the effort to go through 20GB of Wikipedia/DBPedia/Freebase data and implement my own intelligent search didn't seem worth it.
I think the biggest contributor to this maybe the fact that no one else has done it even until today. No one is even close to doing it again. 40 years later with technology leaps and bounds better than back when it was done.
Or maybe it is technology that is holding us back. The idea that not everything is perfect and we can't run a mission till everything is.
How many repeat applications do you see? I am interested in applying and, likely, re-applying while I work on the idea.

Is this common? Does it clutter the application process to see previously rejected applications again and again?
17 chrome tabs@1ms ~95%
Those should be very easy to implement. Thanks!
Oh, I was under the impression no other company existed in his eyes ;)
Nice idea, but in practice this could never work at scale.

A hundred, a thousand, a million stakeholders in a project?
They'd have near-zero say in the direction of the project and essentially no recourse if the developer went off the rails.
I don't know how wide spread it is in MS, but I've heard conspicuous rival-brand avoidance before. For example, references to "the company named after a fruit", rather than, "Apple".
This is not a bad theory. However, with visual saccades an efferent copy of the motor command (the desire to move the eyes, the head or the body) is sent to visual areas. This is what allows to world to appear stable even though the eyes, head or body are moving. This is in contrast with passive observation of cuts in a movie, especially when the cuts are not expected or cannot otherwise be predicted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efference_copy#von_Helmholtz
The word "obsolete" has implications, so if he doesn't want to imply those things, he should pick a different word.
I would suggest that governments are not as good at keeping secrets as they are popularly given credit for. The atomic bomb secrets were exposed to foreign governments multiple times, and the Apollo project involved considerably more people under far more scrutiny.