skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've had a similar outlook for most of my life and have faced the same response. The criticism I faced for simply being realistic and pointing out flaws in the "power of positive thinking" was overwhelming and made me think there really was something wrong with me. It wasn't until I was out of the American public school system that I was able to completely distance myself from these ideas and associate only with people who were similarly realistic and grounded (not negative).
> Doing something easy proves nothing.

Depends on the audience. Joe Random Voter, seeing his cousin's internet being super fast, will carry that knowledge back to his hometown. He doesn't care how easy it was for Google, only that it's possible.
The bigger thing is the payments infrastructure. There's no easy way to monetize a WebGL game.
I paid a dinner visit to a friend at ZenPayroll and did feel a strong family culture at their dinner table. very unique culture that should be more standard in our startup community.
If I did, I'd have already sold my Facebook and Twitter shares and sprinkle words of wisdom down upon the masses. Or become a VC.

But, if I'm a company looking for vendors, I evaluate "good" vs "bad" in the context of sustainability of the org. If they don't have a path to profitability and sustainability as a company, they're bad. If they do, they still may fail. But big companies fail too. I know no one gets fired for buying Oracle, but what are you missing if you ignore Postgres?
We're excited for better service at lower prices, and if you think Google would be (or is) the only one snooping traffic, well I think you're giving a lot of trust to people like Comcast.
In the future cars will drive you. You'll pay higher insurance premiums to have the right to drive the car yourself.

Touch screens that you have to actively look at to interact with will still be distracting and therefore I cannot see how they will become a primary interface of future driving. Voice command with feedback will take over here when it is mature enough.
It could still be catastrophic. If it hit a large city, it could immediately wipe out millions of people. If it hit the ocean near the shore, it could create massive tsunamis. If it fragmented into tiny particles on impact or caused a huge firestorm, it could block out enough sunlight to cause a "nuclear winter" scenario:

"Similar climatic effects are believed to have followed large comet and asteroid impacts in the past, due to sulfate bearing rock being pulverized and lofted high into the air combined with the ignition of multiple forest firestorms, which is sometimes termed an impact winter..."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
Ask HN: Summer Internships in the Bay Area?
Who is looking for interns in the Bay Area this Summer?
Please post in the following format:

Company Name:

Company Size (number of people employed):

Company URL:

Position:

Contact Email:

Skills Needed:
We've used paychex for years. It's not great, but it's not quickbooks.

http://www.paychex.com/
Saw that reference in the linked post from Heroku in the original article.

Has anyone used this? Is it configurable, or do they just choose some reasonable defaults?
Assuming there's more than one landlord they will capture some of the value but not all of it.

E.g., they would be incentivized to raise rents $500, but then one of then could get more business by only raising it to $450 letting the employee capture $50 a month, and so on and so forth.
I've seen simulations. Parts of it are ejected far away, but other parts whiplash to the ground with great energy. Luckily, a large part of the whip may burn out in atmosphere, but there's still a large remaining portion moving at hypersonic speeds that you need to worry about.
I don't claim to be better versed in this field, but a way forward could be to do common subexpression elimination on this proof. Then, try and give names to those common subexpressions.

Finding common subexpressions in such a proof could be a separate field of research. It probably isn't a matter of looking for repeated strings.
Become a Better Public Speaker with Speaking.io
OK, if you want to get into the nitty-gritty: My company uses Cogent as an ISP, which means we were very interested in figuring out why our VPN performance became junk starting around last October. Some traceroutes and extended pings pointed the finger at the Comcast/Cogent peering point in NYC. A little Googling confirmed that we were obviously collateral damage in Netflix's ISPs ongoing disputes with the home broadband ISPs.

Since then, it's been easy to correlate poor performance on my Netflix streaming with a a 60ms+ drop across a Cogent/Comcast peering point when I ping one of my company's servers from home.

There have been several articles on tech news sites discussing this dispute[1][2]. I linked to the WSJ article because it was fresh this morning and provided a good summary of the state of play.

On the other hand, accusations of actual throttling of Netflix traffic on a broadband provider's own network have been frequent but I haven't seen definitive evidence that it's happening on Comcast or Verizon.

Personally, I'm pretty pissed that Comcast is taking my $70/month and failing to provide within a factor of 50 of advertised rates to one of the internet's most popular services. They seem to be playing chicken with Netflix and their own customers. It would rebound badly on them if they had decent competition, but franchise agreements are what they are.

I don't count "internet points" very often, but it's pretty amusing for someone with a grand total of 137 HN karma to accuse me of being a shill.

[1] http://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/verizon-that-peering-flap-about...

[2] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/verizo...
"The incoming power is so much greater than that at the surface (about 4x the best desert)"

But with 22k miles (3x earth diameter) of transmission losses.
ZenPayroll is night and day with all other payroll services. They really remove the need for an accountant at all. The software and support are both superb.

Particularly for a small California business, there is no reasonable alternative I have seen, unless you feel like you have to go with one of the dinosaurs like ADP or Paychex.

I blog and Tweet about ZP somewhat frequently because it's been so refreshing: http://andrewljohnson.com/article/how-to-manage-a-micro-busi...
PS4 Sales Outpace All Previous PlayStation Launches
As does "goes missing near Earth" I don't think going missing 14 years ago equates to going missing near Earth.
It's Better To Be A Software Programmer Than A Doctor In 2014
Thank you. We configured the system to accept more file descriptors. I think our issue was caused by something else.
The Secret To Getting Rich And Changing The World Is To Have A Stupid Idea
In this case, I don't see why the proof is considered to be the output of the program, but rather the entire program itself. If you can verify the soundness of the software and hardware involved (I certainly can't, but I presume the verification has been done), why should a human need to actually read the output?
You are comparing a free service where they are up front about their plans to a pay for service which doesn't detail any plans you describe. I have to ask, do you think they would?
Crowdhoster is awesome.
Muslim leaders issue fatwa: One-way trip to Mars prohibited in Islam
Agreed. Great idea - taking what can be a complex process and making it as simple as possible.
> Sure, they got a little lucky because they connected with a domain owner that shared their vision for science.

The fact that the domain wasn't sold since 1996, even when there were better offers from domain flippers during the time, suggests that luck played a much larger role than the statement implies
An Introduction to Programming in Simula
The problems created by radiation in the Van Allen belts are vastly overstated. The funny part is, this is due in part to fake Moon landing conspiracy theorists, who use the radiation as a "supporting argument".
Of course they should. Marc Benioff tried to sell to the govt. Govt couldn't buy it. Couldn't even evaluate it.

We're talking to several universities now to find the best way to serve them. Sometimes we run into structural road blocks. One school requires a printed hard copy form be sent between departments for processing. But we're still trying to find a way to make it work. Mostly because I'm hellbent on moving companies, schools, and governments from paper to digital.
As already mentioned, it only took six hours. To make it run on a cluster or supercomnputer, you must parallelize the algorithm, which will take considerably longer time, even if it is easy. Then they likely have to apply for access, which also take time. Then it is easier to just run it on an available computer.
Back now. Cool article! Thanks
The point is not to prove anything but to shame competitors into providing good quality service. Google Fibre is not about making money, it's about driving the industry to provide faster Internet, which Google believes will lead to more ecommerce and thus more profit.
My name is Chris, also an engineer at ZenPayroll.

We're not interested in a candidate's ability to write sorting algorithms, because those aren't the kind of problems we're solving. Our technical interviews are working on a problem with an engineer. We care a hell of a lot more about how you think than regurgitating Big O notation.

We work in Ruby and CoffeeScript, but we've hired engineers without direct experience in either because we knew they could translate their ample programming knowledge. We're looking for smart people that want to do the best work of their lives. That sounds like bullshit, but we're pretty serious about that. Turns out you can hire smart, passionate people and they'll naturally do awesome things.

For a more in depth look at how we think about hiring, you can check out:

ZenPayroll Is Not Hiring Hackers
https://zenpayroll.com/blog/zenpayroll-is-not-hiring-hackers...

The Value of Cultural Interviews
https://maddo.xxx/thoughts/how-to-conduct-cultural-interview...

If you have any questions, shoot me an email. I'm chris@
Not quite. If a backend segfaults, postgres will detect it and immediately terminate all connections and exit. When it restarts, it will enter recovery mode. It does this because a segfaulted backend may have corrupted shared memory. The only way to fix that to restart in recovery mode and replay the WAL.
Up until the last month or two, Gigabit Squared was supposed to be taking over the city's fiber, which may have been keeping Google away.
It can be (and arguably should be) designed so that tension at the bottom is zero. Cut it at the base, and it would float, and maybe drift slowly.

If it's cut above that, it depends. In most scenarios, part of it would shoot out into space, the rest would whiplash around the Earth, mostly burning in the atmosphere, some of it (pretty short chunk) would hit the ground at very large velocities.
"If Google Fiber wants to prove that their model is replicable they need to deploy it at a profit in a politically hostile environment."

Well actually no they don't. They're going to prove their model is replicable and profitable, while not deploying to politically hostile environments.
A North Dakota Town Where the Rent Is Really, Really High
There are a lot of very well-expressed ideas in here, likely to resonate with people who practice things, or climb towers of abstractions.

The LessWrong culture has a related term, which I've found useful, called inferential distance: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Inferential_distance
Because they're binary files, used entirely for archival purposes. They shouldn't be changing, they shouldn't have "versions" that are anything to deal with meaningfully as far as your repository is concerned.

They should be in flat storage somewhere, with some directory or file name scheme that makes sense based on your version numbers / builds / what have you. Backed up, (ideally) with hashes that verify that they're the same file they once were.
I would be interested to see why you claim that the FCT was proven by an automated reasoner. My understanding is that Haken and Appel created techniques to create unavoidable configurations, and techniques to prove that a given configuration is reducable. They then programmed a computer to find an unavoidable set of reducable configurations.

In Haken and Appel's proof there was no automated reasoning.

Similarly in this case. The theorem claims that for every C there is an N such that a sequence of length at least N has a sub-configuration of discrepancy at least C. In this case the researchers created a program to show that in a sequence of length at least 1161 there is always a sub-sequence of discrepancy of at least 2.

To the best of my understanding there is no automated reasoning, so I would be interested to see why you claim otherwise.
They're not perfect, but launch loops solve many of the problems of straight up and down space elevators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop
Those submissions never got traction or comments, why link them?
and now we're into questions about homoiconicity. I think I see why Lisp was so popular in AI research.
Wow, maybe next time try and keep from commenting on a situation you know nothing about.
No mention of stash? One of my most used features. Maybe just for teams though. Great starting point for git, nice job.
"Wikipedia-sized"
Is it really? They say in the article that the text of Wikipedia is a 10GB download, but that has to be compressed (and compression on plaintext, which comprises most of Wikipedia, is extremely efficient). I'm guessing (but have no proof) that their 13GB file was raw data.

A minor thing, but comparisons like this always drive me nuts. Just say "13GB proof too big for humans to check." Then there's no confusion.</sillyrant>
Suburbs of DC (at least NOVA) has a decent number of places that have FiOS.
Also the cable situation isn't that bad if you have Cox rather than Time Warner.

But the dominating factor of what determines where people live in the suburbs seems to be schools more so than internet. Google fiber here would be more of a novelty.
Yeah, not to judge a book by it's cover, but everything about "The Secret" screams new-agey superstitious bullshit (redundant?). Positive psychology does seem to have some common sense things going for it (ie, if you think something is impossible, it probably is, for you), but there are better books out there (cf "The Happiness Advantage" by Shawn Achor; he also did a TED talk that sums up some of the themes nicely: http://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_bet...)
I'm very confident that $500 was not meant to even remotely cover the rent. It's just a small stipend to help.
Famous last words. After seeing several SF startups implode, I'll never make the mistake of taking under market pay. I would much rather choose how my compensation gets spent rather than an employer make that decision for me.

It's easy to get lured into the excitement of working in a "start-up culture" but you will recognize the red flags after one has sucked you dry without adding much to your finances.
Wow, thank you Jarred. We're obviously huge fans, and hoping to carry on the Selfstarter mission as far as possible :)
.o files are executable code.. they are just not a native file executable (elf, coff, mach-o) = headers + .o files
Project Thor has got to be one of the most appropriately named projects ever.
Lucky them. Since the late 1990's, the internet speed at my parent's house in Alabama has gone from 38.8kbps to... 38.8kbps. The house is in the sticks, in a bowl, served by ancient, poorly maintained telephone and cable lines.

The future has been here for decades (see South Korea, or much of Europe, or...), it's just very unevenly distributed.
All the other telecoms have far worse privacy records than Google does. Who were the original companies implicated in illegal NSA wiretapping? Verizon, AT&T, and Bell South. [1] What happened to the CEO of the one company that refused, Qwest? He went to jail on trumped-up insider trading charges. [2]

[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-ns...

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30...
Any modern CPU has dedicated hardware for encryption. And a huge number of storage devices have it too - either storage arrays (which perhaps Google aren't using) or standard hard disks, especially SSDs.
NYC is already quite full of fiber. It's just not accessible to residential customers. Some of the world's major internet exchanges are in NYC, as are any number of datacenters. Most large office buildings in NYC should have a fiber connection from one of the commercial providers.
It doesn't have to be "far far out". It can be closer, but heavier. A big rock.
The First Day of Soylent News (stats and thoughts)
Snake Complaints cartoon
Which bitcoin rulings have not involved people that were handling dollars?

(Serious question; most of the regulatory activity I've seen has been pointing out to people accepting dollars that they are money transmitters)
This is like complaining that you need to write an application essay to get into college. "But I'm not going to be a writer..."

If the company is awesome, just suck it up for a day. Once you join you can try to change the interviewing process.

I think the thing most people don't realize is that these traditional "interviewing" techniques (like whiteboard coding) are just what gets you in the door. Your real interview starts on day 1, and if you don't perform at the real task, you'll be asked to leave.

Writing sorting algorithms is like tuning a guitar. It's true there exist people who are good at tuning but actually terrible at playing (ie: good at puzzles, but lousy programmers).

But there are few, if any, amazing guitarists who can't quickly tune an instrument. It's a signal.
"Factoring the problem out of the car to run in a smartphone or tablet itself also has its own frustrating problems, because when you're designing an automotive computer system, you can't predict what kind of technology and standards will be available or popular by the time it ships."

Would you mind to elaborate on this statement?

To me it seems like moving control over some functions within the car, for example music or calling, might make more sense to do on the phone specifically because of the phone's fast upgrade cycle and tie-ins to one's personal information cloud.
Hitchhiking through a war zone
Countering your counter point: while you're busy answering support calls and working through bugs that weren't caught in functional tests, I'll be delighting customers with software that works and sleeping better at night in a less stressful work environment because we've done everything we can to ensure our software is as good as it can be.

I actually thought the same way you do until just recently. Once you get into the flow of writing unit tests, you'd be surprised how little time it takes, and how effective TDD can be. It helps me stay focused, and structure programs better. I can't say if it actually has slowed my development time at all, when you take into account fixing bugs found in functional testing.
article doesn't seem to mention it, but i wonder if the previous owner took some equity or options in the venture.
The First Accredited Tuition-Free University is Approved
This reasoning is based on false circumstances. SF has a landlord's market, so they have no reason to shave the price for more business, but they have ample reason to raise the price to extract as much value out of the property.
I'm the CEO of ZenPayroll and we're excited to share this news with everyone. Funding is an enabler, not a destination, and we're eager to use these resources to serve our customers.

As some quick history, the company is a little over two years old and we were a part of the YC W12 batch. My co-founders and I started the company because we had felt the pain of using existing solutions at our previous startups. We also have family members running small businesses, and we had been exposed first-hand to the frustration of doing payroll manually (which is still how many companies in the US do payroll).

We felt that modern software could make this complex process much simpler. It's been fourteen months since our launch and we're proud to be processing hundreds of millions of dollars in payroll, and serving countless small businesses across the country. I remind the team often that building a great company is a marathon, not a sprint, and we're still at the early stage of our journey. We have much more to do!

During this interview with the WSJ, I talked at length with Debbie about some team programs we put in place. People are the foundation of any great company and the ZenPayroll team is the entire reason we've been able to do what we've done over the past two years.

I wanted to clarify some of the programs she wrote about:

(1) Housing stipend -- the main driver of this perk is actually the desire to have folks live near the office. We would offer this type of program regardless of where our office is located (even if it was in a lower cost area) because we see a big benefit to folks not having to commute. We realize that not everyone can live nearby, and several of our teammates actually live on the Peninsula, East Bay, or other parts of SF. Our inspiration for this perk was the housing stipend Facebook provided it's employees early on, when they were located in downtown Palo Alto.

(2) Flight at one-year anniversary -- it’s easy in startup life to become caught up in the day to day. We’ve always found it rewarding to travel because it gives everyone perspective, and taking a step back can help people better understand what’s important to them, which makes them a better teammate as well. We put the two-year expiration in place as a specific restriction so teammates have to do a trip during that year. They don’t have to go of course, but we do everything we can to encourage them to do it.

(3) Workation -- similar to #2 above, we’ve found that changing our environment helps us think about things differently. Many other startups do similar types of retreats, and we’ve really enjoyed going away as a team for 5-6 days and working on smaller cross-functional projects that can be completed during the workation. It’s also a team bonding event, and yes, many folks in the office like to cook breakfast. :)
At least for SLC there is already _Some_ fiber around the city: http://www.utopianet.org/

Much like Provo, I think google saw that utopia already had some infrastructure in place and wanted to swoop it up.

So while people are asking, why not this x,y,z city perhaps it's due to infrastructure not already being in place.
Verizon had started selling off it's Fiber installs before 2009 (which I still scratch my head at). While they may not be directly related, I'm sure it didn't hurt the negotiation.

Edit:
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPoint_Communications
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Communications
uh. there is a use for semicolons. just use semicolons as they were intended. i don't think the medium nor the age matters. and if you don't know how to use them, then either look it up or don't use them, please.
Because sometimes older submissions end up getting some discussion, even when more recent submissions have more comments.
I live near DC... shit! I wanted Google Fiber just for the awesome TV. DirecTV is incredibly awful. Hopefully they can expand to even more cities in the future.
Personally, I tend to agree with your second paragraph. I would much rather hear "Run! Run!" than "We can still make the bus!"
Well:

1. http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/sinn_fein_front/41042306/5708... . I hope you know what 1488 means

2. Many jews were beaten on Kiev streets during "peaceful protests"(no coverage in worldwide media, only in local UA news)