skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just wanted to second this: I don't think we know enough about how safe these things are. It's very different to have something like graphene packaged up in a computer chip vs. free-floating in the air. I also have no idea if common, off-the-shelf respirators are effective at blocking such small particles.

Also worth bearing in mind is that, I believe, wherever you make one form of carbon you'll probably end up making other forms too, e.g. buckyballs (C60) and carbon nanotubes have both been found in soot. So even if graphene is safe, I have no idea if this process will produce other potentially unsafe things too. A friend is actually working on looking at the effect carbon nanotubes have on lung epithelial cells, so I know there's interest there.

That said, I imagine you'd find all these products in a standard wood fire too, but then I recall reading that smoke from wood fires is as bad or worse for you as cigarette smoke so perhaps that's little comfort...

Note: I am not a doctor and not an expert in this field either.
> Tech M&A is often detached from that traditional process. A $19 billion valuation for WhatsApp didn't fall out of some Morgan Stanley analyst's spreadsheet. It's CEO-driven. It's a result of what Mark Zuckerberg thought it would take to buy the company.

Really? I'd think it's a result of what the post-Morgan Stanley analysts who are now working at FB thought it would take to buy the company, not Zuck's whims.

And it's a price that is unique to FB. You can't take a private equity price and assume it has anything to do with the publicly traded value of a company at all.
Now that is pretty damn cool. Will help at work when marketing people do not copy paste email/article and just put screenshot of it and if you want to quite something from that picture...
I joined.
The OS X Update Seed offered for download is 10.9.3 (13D45a).
Both language semantics and language best practices are pretty similar in Python and Go, and I am sure this helps a lot. Transliterating to something like Java would be hard because their interfaces work differently enough from duck typing to force a lot of refactoring. And switching to something even more different, like Haskell or Clojure, would just make transliteration impossible.
That's an excellent point. I wish I could think of an alternative that would be an improvement, though. The "benevolent, incorruptible dictator" is kind of a cliche in the political science world I think.
@antimatter15, i have a project that does client-side image analysis and decompses document structures. it looks like your OCR code would be a great replacement for the server-side Tesseract ocr i currently use :)

here's what the project does now with js + web workers:

http://i.imgur.com/QvXSkY2.png

processing time is < 1500ms in Chrome and < 2000ms in FF

the code is open source, though using it isnt yet polished. i'm working slowly on a blog post series to detail how to use the lib(s). https://github.com/leeoniya/pXY.js

a walkthrough of the base lib is here: http://o-0.me/pXY/
I'm confused. What part of working for a year and saving up $100k ruins your chances of starting a company? Am I reading too much between the lines, or do I also need long hair and a full beard like Wozniak?

37signals started that way, for what it's worth. Not by living with their parents, of course; by bootstrapping a consultancy.

PlentyOfFish started that way.

Braintree started that way.

Come to think of it, so did Github.

And didn't Mailchimp bootstrap, too?

I think maybe the impedance mismatch here is that you assume I'm saying companies need to raise more than 120k to start. They don't, if they start out profitable. But that's not the normal YC startup strategy: those companies depend on the ability to run for a year, maybe many years, before generating profits. Against that strategy, 120k is not very meaningful. Which is why 'pg and now 'sama are always at pains to point out that people shouldn't apply "for the money".
Couldn't agree more. I'd love to explore this further.
I wonder how or if docker relates to their provisioning of containers for .net tasks.
Cars aren't a new thing. Given that the rift is the first VR rig with the potential of gaining mainstream traction, the story of the invention of its core tech is notable.
Kolmogorov complexity as a measure of randomness / information content has problems in my opinion: http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/7
"even if you're using something like Angular and a "single-page" type architecture; you pay a huge price in flexibility for it" Can you elaborate more on that statement? I use angular/golang api and rails/angular both often.
Hopefully these beta builds will be ineligible to write AppStore reviews or leave ratings, especially if this is ever extended to iOS. It was quite sad (and no doubt frustrating for developers) to see apps rated 1 star because "GARBAGE! DOESN'T WORK IN IOS7!!!!1" before iOS was even GM.
Do an erase and install using OSX Recovery. The built in partition should download a released version of the OS and not a beta version.
Ironically, the "Active Record" concept originated in statically-typed languages -- look at the Java example code in the PEAA book, which looks much like the Go example code here.
How about bashing the bing banks fueled real-estate boom instead?
Way cool! I am impressed.
No. I was suggesting that, now that they've been booted out of Russia and retooled around an exclusively online presence which lacks any firsthand information about events in Russia and has therefore degenerated into a useless ideological exercise, they don't care very much whether their old website is navigable or indeed even working.

I'd like to say I'm not sure how you reached such an erroneous conclusion, but that wouldn't be true. I'm pretty sure that that occurred because you are proceeding from the assumption that I'm sitting in a windowless room in a Moscow office building, earning thirty-some bucks' worth of rubles a day by sitting in front of a computer typing what my FSB manager tells me to type. As I said before, you're welcome to that assumption if it pleases you to adopt it, but it's not particularly conversant with reality, not that I expect you to take my word for that.
Having a functioning prototype that is good enough to sell is a massive hedge against failure. Even if the company flops, the tech is going to be worth _something_ substantial. This is in contrast to a device that exists on paper only: concepts are useful, and engineering has value, but without an physical device there are a lot of reality checks left.

It's the hardware equivalent of ideas are cheap, but implementations are where real value lies.
Huh? 120k isn't enough to pay a developer (fully loaded, including expenses). I'm not sure what the cost of the Hyperloop has to do with this.
Asteroid impact risks are underappreciated
The author said this about CEOs coming up with a valuation:

When the UMaster does care, the deal is just a made up number that he pulls out of his, er, pocket.

Clearly he was implying pulling a number out of his ass which, as you know, is code for just making something up.

When someone accuses the CEO of a company as "just making things up" I see that as a lack of understanding of what information the CEO is using in their evaluation, and more importantly a lack of respect for the process at all.

That is how I reasoned to my, admittedly harsh, characterization of the author.
The OCR code is an Emscripten port of the GPL-licensed Ocrad program. I published it on Github a few months ago, http://antimatter15.github.io/ocrad.js/demo.html

But in my experience, the recognition quality isn't good enough to replace Tesseract if you have that capability.
Sorry, the sentence really is a bit off.

The point I was trying to make was essentially that it seems logical to me that a higher crime rate can be connected to substantial inequalities in terms of opportunities / wealth.
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Awesome. How does this affect page performance?
Sadly, the lesson some people learned is not that they were part of something FUBAR. Rather, it's more like "get in earlier next time and hand off to some other sucker before reality sets in"
I think what OP meant was if there was a difference in the content of the beta programs.
I refuse to run any software that's not hipstergraphically secure.
A decent portion of the bureaucracy is scar tissue from the antitrust case. Another big chunk (at least in Windows-land) is the commitment to backwards compatibility over new functionality. The third chunk was compliance with governmental requirements for purchasing by the federal government. There's things like "any software the feds buy must have Foo", and that's a really big deal for Microsoft, who set up a whole group to ensure that everything has Foo.

It was pretty painful. A feature I was involved with got nixed by the Compliance team due to concerns around backwards compatibility. They had no incentive to say Yes, either, since that would mean more work for them.
They're not asking for anything in return.
Agreed. It isn't surprising that a minimum wage worker would have trouble affording 40th percentile housing (the basis for the pricing data).
I refer everyone to this thread - https://plus.google.com/u/0/+jwildeboer/posts/Tuw81zXqtcC

"Suggesting to call the fork LibreSSL or LibreTLS just to offend everyone. trololo﻿"

And it was so.
iTunes can do that -- and it was added specifically for classical music. It's even called Groupping.

Another nice feature it has, is that it lets you handle albums with various artists as one entity, that is, you can set those tracks as "part of a compilation".
Kolmogorov Complexity - it's a bit silly
In my experience things like PGO and LTO matter most in very large projects. Of course it depends on the codebase, but in general that's what I've seen.

In very large projects, fully optimizing all the code is often unneeded, and bad because fully optimized code is larger (inlining, unrolled loops, etc.). PGO lets you find what actually needs to be optimized, and you can keep the rest compact to improve load times. Vice versa, PGO can tell you what code is run immediately on load so you can order it so that happens faster, etc.

Similarly, LTO is most useful in large projects where it is not obvious to the compiler how to optimize across compilation unit boundaries - as in a small enough project, either there are few such boundaries or it is easy to manually optimize for them.
Inflated Tech valuations are the least of our economy's problems. This article is riding the wave of anti-tech sentiment in an otherwise stagnant, slow-to-recover economy. It's click-baiting and we're all reinforcing this sort of thing by being agitated by it/drawn to it.

Add up all the "bloated" Tech Valuations and you don't get anywhere close to the 1 Trillion+ we're looking at in outstanding student loans and the effects the bubble bursting might have on creditors and debtors alike.

I'd enumerate other much more dangerous threats to our economy, but I just read on Secret that someone is about to acquire my company for 5B.
Many anarchists are also ok with contract enforcement
Any suggestions/comments/questions are welcome :)
Google now selling Nest Thermostat on Google Play
> I'm particularly interested in your opinions on tagging. Can you explain what most software gets wrong about tagging?

First up, tagging is such a personal preference, from the highest level things like which fields to fill in (e.g. Album Artist), to small differences (e.g. do tracknumbers have a leading 0?), but also technical differences and compatibility choices (e.g. which tagging format? for MP3 you can have any of APE1, APE2, ID3v1 or ID3v2.{2,3,4})

Next these different tagging formats are in no way uniform:
APE2 and vorbiscomments are a string map with some generally agreed upon conventions,
ID3v1 has very limited fields,
ID3v2 is extremely over specified with a tag for everything in practice this just seems to mean that every program gets them wrong somewhere.
There are several other formats too...

Next, the tagging systems are very tricky to locate and modify: they all have various forms of headers, footers, padding, and odd storage formats.
e.g. flac/vorbiscomments keep swapping back and forth betweeen little and big endien.
This is made mode complex by the various fighting container formats that have their own escaping, rules etc on top e.g. Ogg, MPEG, Matroska....

To make things even harder, things aren't even correct without context. To take the duration issue from the article, VBR MP3 has no way to calculate duration without completely parsing the files: this takes too long for most files (reading the whole file into memory just to get the length???? no way!) so there's all sorts of heuristics and weird headers (e.g. Xing)
I forgot about that ... Factor impresses me a lot for there's so much packed in it. one man effort it seems ... even more impressive.
People Don't Like Google Glass Because It Makes Them Seem Weak
I find the HTML templating options for Golang particularly painful, is the subtext there.

(I like Golang a lot; we did the bulk of microcorruption.com in it. But the web front end, which is a tiny amount of code, that's a Rails app.)
The hardest and easiest way to be a better coder
Are these ordered by post time? I've always wanted that option on HN :)
If you don't already know how to roll back an entire disk image or OS from a backup, you probably shouldn't install the beta.

It won't be that different anyway. You'll get the opportunity to check for resolved bugs, and report new ones. If that doesn't interest you, there's no benefit.
Amazon and the Future of the Superhero
As someone who downvoted you, and then saw the request for explanation, here's mine:

I downvoted you because rhetoric, however commonly held, isn't worth the discussion space, in my opinion.

Further, I disagree with the implication that all capitalist endeavors would just be highway robbers, if not for those pesky laws. Even those who suggest that Wal-Mart is definitively evil for paying minimum wage doesn't tend to hold the belief that all economic exchange is similarly evil, nor are all companies nefariously motivated.

Yes, successful business owners like to maximize value, but for every person trying to sneak in a hidden surcharge, or lobby Congress for favors, there's another person who runs the minimum amount of ads on his website because he doesn't want it to feel dirty, or who is contributing to open source, because he likes giving back.
Binary package “julia” in ubuntu trusty
I'd love to! As a starting point, I'd recommend John Resig, Jeff Atwood and Simon Peyton Jones. These are some of my favorite programmers who write about being developers. I think they do a wonderful job of describing the process and using metaphors to illustrate concepts.

There are hundreds of thousands of articles, books and sayings about code and being a programmer. When an author thinks beyond himself (and doesn't quote himself), he has exciting opportunities to draw from this pool of knowledge.
Having to import my mp3 collection into MPD has always turned me off.

Why is that not a substantive criticism in your view?
Building cycle.travel's bike directions with Open Source Routing Machine
Agreed entirely, but leaving the beta program isn't the same thing as removing the beta.
Personal attacks, such as your repeated insinuation that a fellow user is a propagandist, are not allowed on Hacker News. Please do not do this again.

It's dismaying that the commenter most attempting to contribute substantive discussion to this thread would be treated like this. If you want to talk about things that HN is disappointingly "not free from ... apparently", such accusations belong at the top of the list.

(My comment does not endorse aaronem's arguments, only his right not to be treated uncivilly on this site.)
"a standard deal which almost everybody gets"

Worked for Henry Ford.
Ask HN: How much to pay for tax return if we have no revenue?
Hi everyone,<p>We were newly formed in Nov 2013 (Deleware C corp), and currently have no revenue and only have food expenses. How much should we expect to pay a CPA to handle the 2013 tax return filing, anyone or service recommended?
Yea, It does matter. As to 401's and pensions; I hope pension managers are getting out of tech stocks like Facebook, and Twitter--just until the bubble bursts. I hope
some of the Bubble Boys who make billions on naive, greedy,
and professional hedge fund managers help out the millions
of Americans who will be close to homeless when it does burst? Do I hold them
accountable--kind of--just because of quantitative easing.
And the Bubble Boys must know they really don't have the
companies they claim. I know I just use FB for posting, and
never used my real name. I did reserve my real name because
I thought one day it might be useful, but never use the
site like FB thinks I do.
super cool, how did u manage the physics
Tesla driver completes 12,000 mile cross-country journey
Can someone explain what the difference is between before and now? Is it that before you could only spend $17k until you raised your next round but now you get it all at once?
Thanks for the feedback (and others) on stash. Right now we're down to choosing between Stash and a couple others, and it seems to be the best choice for the team.

Hey anything is better than SVN which is what we use now!
This says a lot about the alternatives YC says it's really competing with - the other things people who could build great startups would otherwise be doing.

$17k is what two engineering students might have made at a summer internship in Boston in 2005.

$120k is now what two entry-level engineers might make in six months in the Valley.
It all depends on what you need. EncFS appears to be enough for what I need it for, encrypting files that I want to be a little more private than not at all on cloud storage. I personally wouldn't put sensitive information through it, but then again, I wouldn't put my sensitive information on a cloud provider either.

On top of that, what other per-file cross platform encryption options are there?
Legally speaking, couldn't AOL have created some kind of TOS which required people to only connect to the servers with their own clients?

Sure, people would still ignore the TOS, but a big company like Microsoft would comply or risk a lawsuit.
Anonymous to your friends, not anonymous to the service or law enforcement. There should be a word for this... maybe "pseudoanonymous"?
Joxa: A functional lisp on the Erlang VM
Unless you have some evidence that CPI is a lie, it's important to mention that the idea that increasing the money supply must lead to inflation is completely counterfactual. We have massively increased the money supply. Inflation is still too low, rather than too high.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi
The eternal question I always have is: if you make machines that print money, why would you sell them?

There are several plausible answers, but it's still interesting to think about.

(Although in this case, the answer may be "they don't make machines that print money and they sell them anyway")
I guess I didn't mean for it to be misleading, but I wrote the example like I did on purpose to show that in OCaml, the arguments are curried by default... that there is no need to have the `fun` keyword 3 times.

The misleading part was probably naming the first function "uncurried"... the point of the example was to show that they were both curried.

I'll try to make this more clear in my post. Thanks.
What we need is a form of anonymous / pseudo-anonymous reputation brokerage. Tokens that identify not a person, but how trusted or how well liked that token has been used. You control your tokens, what networks, where they are used. An older token is worth more to you, and to others that see it. The values associated to a token varies depending on the tokens around it. Upvotes, downvotes, activities, flags from the various places where the token is uses contributes to the values attached to the tokens. It's a fuzzy concept at the moment, but I think as these new generation of applications grow, one that we may see evolve.
Obviously any accounting like this is open to debate but, for the most part, I tried to judge by the spirit of the prediction and was generous if the exact mechanism was a little bit off.

* automeals: It's less about the specific items that can be cooked and more about the proliferation of single-purpose kitchen devices and the general trend towards easier cooking. Stuff like microwave bacon cookers, slap chops, pasta cooking containers and other infomercialware

* Life expectancy hasn't quite hit 85 but it's close enough to count. And while education and healthy eating has contributed to it, undoubtably as well, so has pacemakers and dialysis machines.

* Birth control: I agree with you but I still think this is directionally right. We have more birth control today than 50 years ago, even if it isn't the main thrust right now.

* Satellites: The mechanism may be wrong but we can, indeed, direct dial any place on earth right now.

* Lucky few: I interpreted this to mean the elimination of "good blue collar jobs" and the bifurcation of society into the educated few with "good" jobs and the underclass working commodity service jobs.
How a single, brilliant page can boost your conversions by 150-300%
The author also implemented Lua and Prolog on BEAM (the Erlang VM)
Why don't professors make students sign IP agreements before bringing them in on research?
Well, that's a whole lot of repeated assertion, and I respect the effort, but you're not making a great case for yourself.

It would help if you read my comments more carefully. The one you just replied to was particularly simple. Almost the only thing it says is that being a part of YC improves the odds. But the 120k isn't what's doing that.
Almost every important company I know anything about seems to have a "hidden" founder or vital mentor figure who gets left out of the story. Is it just greed (for money or personal fame) or is there some kind of legal reasoning why they can't even mention the other people in the story?
I use Handbrake and I also wrote a bash script that uses ffMpeg and ffMpeg2Theora and some other items to produce mp4, webm, ogv and flv fallback.
I don't usually see my name mentioned on the Internet, but I did not invent PivotTables. I essentially was the only full-time developer of PivotTables in Excel 97, and after that release, about 50% of the PivotTable code was written by me.
About "Just Write, Dammit"
That's the same seed offered on the paid side.
The new part is that it doesn't require a membership to the Mac Dev Program, but is open to everyone with a free Apple Account.
Maybe.

I have a roommate in SF. He's freelancing, I'm working at a company. He's making more cash than I am, but I'm working on building a company (as an employee) that's shipped multiple iterations of a category-leading product, raised $XX million in VC, and hired almost 100 people.

I'm not disputing that a good freelancer can clear $120k net of taxes and living expenses, just that that's the best path to take, if the end goal is to be an entrepreneur.