skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The question is 'why did Y Combinator allow Quora to join'.

The article points out the obvious problems with Quora. However, what I don't understand with some of these large VC backed web efforts that do not make money, is, why don't they try the obvious 'run a few adverts' business model in selected regions.

They could run adverts on Quora for those folk in Australia (where advertising is generally as predominant as the U.S.) and see how many people click through the ads or ignore the site because they cannot stand the adverts. It is not rocket science.

But, instead of trying to earn some actual money, they stay on the speculative bubble. It is as if they are putting off the inevitable. If the BBC can run ads for international viewers but not licence fee paying Brits, then why cannot the likes of Quora, Pinterest or any of these other web behemoths do something similar, just run a few ads outside the home market? If it doesn't work then they can take the adverts off. It is something that can be experimented with, it is not like it would a one time 'lose virginity' thing that cannot be undone.

I personally find Quora to lack some authenticity. It is like those cults that have all the religious symbols, rituals and names yet you know they are not 'real'. (I know 'real' religions are fake, but the fakery is not immediately evident, their traditions have evolved rather than been adopted). With Stack Overflow, no matter how poor a question is, you know there is someone that needs that answer (or at least needed it once). With Quora you feel people don't ask questions 'as if their life depended on it' and there is no altruistic reason to answer anything. If you are to answer to 'puff up your profile' (as per getting points on SO or even here), then, is there any feeling that those 'points' are worth anything? Who cares!!!

I don't feel Quora have built up a body of knowledge that is worth anything. If they closed tomorrow then nobody would be stuck in their job, or left unable to do research or feel that some library had been burnt to the ground.

Looking at how Wikipedia is funded - essentially a charity with no capitalist-entity overheads like marketing - looks to me like it is extremely clever and shrewd.
FWIW, Apple has (as far as I understand, and I've been involved long enough and in a sufficiently high-profile position that I would likely have at least heard if not been targeted) never tried sued any of us and has never insulted any of us; they even are always very thorough in the credits section of their security update summaries (citing the people on the various jailbreak teams that led to the bugs being disclosed), and have often ended up hiring us (which also shows a lack of hard feelings on the other side). Most jailbreak users/developers actually seem to like Apple (I don't, btw ;P).

So, while I thereby do feel like Apple has gained something from the jailbreak community, and while I also feel like Apple's decisions are harmful to everyone in the long-term, I haven't really ever felt like Apple owed us, in particular, an "apology". The only thing I can come up with was when Steve Jobs (which I separate from Apple at least somewhat) on stage effectively equated the entire idea of alternative software markets on the iPhone as "porn stores" in a dismissive attempt to mostly insult Android (Google probably deserves even more an apology than we did in that instance ;P).
True in the sense of multiple cores, instead of just asynchronous execution on a single thread. Anyhow, it was just an example... What I'm trying to say is that we want to really explore the capabilities of the web as a platform for computing, as much as possible. Therefore we need as much flexibility, tooling, languages, you name it, as possible. I'm actually suggesting the 'C++' way of creating a platform... i.e. stuff it with as much flexibility as you possibly (reasonably) can and then let natural selection do its work. JavaScript ain't it.
Most tarsnap wrappers do not add any special functionality. You can find hundred of tarsnap cron scripts or bash wrappers, or python wrappers... But truth is that they don't add nothing special. Most people using tarsnap can roll their own personalized solution easily if they require anything more than the binary offers.
I singled out the original BSD license because it was extant and the GPL was not compatible with it. Such clauses are pretty common in the software world and give credit where credit's due; hell, Microsoft has no problem with it, why does it bind the panties of the average GPL supporter so much?

Furthermore, I'd argue that a lot of those defense mechanisms that copyleft supporters claim are necessary cause much more harm to Free Software than they do to proprietary software. The ability to use GCC for static analysis, for example, was muddied for many years by the GCC team's unwillingness to create a suitable API out of fear that it would become easier for proprietary software teams to use GCC without contributing. Meanwhile, proprietary compiler chains, like those Microsoft provided, were easily able to create those same tools because they were not driven by such fears. Additionally, you have statements from people like RMS trying to memory hole software ( http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-02/msg00895.html ) that doesn't agree with his political views. While the goals may be noble, the route the free software community has chosen to get there has devolved into stubbornness and childishness to the detriment of everyone.
"booting faster" is a desktop concern from 1990. Are there really a bunch of linux users turning on and off their computers constantly and using linux on the desktop? Is this really an actual thing? Because I'd like to introduce these people to (a) real desktop environments maintained by smart people and (b) at the very least, suspend mode.
Police do, and should take peaceful action without any police authority. Calming things down before they happen and that kind of thing. Seeing as these officers didn't know what Twitter was, it's pretty probable that someone called the police and told them that the author was picking a fight on the internet and might cause trouble.

It basically sounds like a less dramatic type of SWATing.
Young Minds in Critical Condition
Programming with Nothing (2011)
Mostly his disregard for packaging conventions and unwillingness to acomodate them. The code is usually A grade, but the odd use of the filesystem, runtime configs, daemons etc. means it will never get into any mainstream distro without heavy patching.

There's a reason why libsodium's tag line is "P(ortable|ackageable) NaCl-based crypto library".

The word of distros/packagers isn't gospel, but it counts for a lot, considering that (for better or worse) most people won't even think about using something not available as a package.
It was vastly improved with the 8.1 Update 1, but I'll grant you it was depressingly slow on Windows 8 and the 8.1 upgrade.
> Of course anything that requires a modern CPU to compute wouldn't be feasible, but the basics of it, the seed, was.

I still believe that what Hamming did in coding theory and the Reed-Solomon codes, etc., are 'basic' and new since computers.

But, you are correct that transmission error detection and correction were old needs with old solutions. E.g., there
was parity with teletypewriters and old paper tape for error detection and then retransmission for error correction. Yes, and the improvements Hamming, etc., made
for computers were not feasible before computers, but
I still believe that, while the problem was old and had
old solutions, the work of Hamming, etc. was new and 'basic'.

Yes, heap sort doesn't really work as a sorting technique
before computers, but trying to dream up heap sort is not
easy -- just for the heck of it, once I set aside reading
how heap sort worked and tried to dream up such a thing
for about two weeks and couldn't do it. Heap sort's
darned clever.
> I don't think you have read my post completely. I didn't imply anything from the usage of the word potential.

I meant my use of that word. I edited my post to make that clear. Or maybe you mean that you mentioning the my use of the word "potential" had no such interpretation (positive) of the "potential", in which case... my head hurts now.

> You still seem to miss the fact that someone can be taller as the direct result of unhealthy elements. Even illness.

By what criteria have I missed this fact? By not mentioning it, or by trying to contradict it? I said, and I quote myself since you don't seem to trust me: "Just because someone has achieved their "potential" [...], does not necessarily mean that it was good that they did so.". In that context, "bad" meant that the tallness was due to some unhealthy habits, since we were on the topic of nutrition and health and so on. Or that them being that tall was not good for them in their adult life, or both.

I am used to people assuming dishonesty in online debates. But not when I agree with them to begin with. If what you intend to do is to find some wording that betrays a (subconscious) bias towards tall people, please give it a rest and find someone else to take it out on.
People Go Bananas Over MonkeyParking
Two internships in different fields. Help me decide.
I generally lurk on HN, but I've decided to try and ask HN.

Please read it and help out if you can.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZgN8Ckw-f72xeRyL5XXjQ9DowkmxQ1VN0wJlPsvIh6U/edit
> too bad this guy plans on releasing it commercial instead of open-source

I'm curious: do you have an alternative suggestion for what would have allowed him to spend as long as he did working on this challenging piece of software? People often make these "too bad he didn't do this work for free" comments on HN, but I feel like it turns more into "too bad this person wasn't already well-off enough that he was able to donate his time and effort to working on this for free". This is why I went to the trouble of building Cydia into a market in the first place: to help support and encourage long-term development.
You couldn't be any more wrong. The average user has no idea that she is using Linux. The number of people using a Linux system that reboots frequently enough to be noticed is zero.
This incident was mentioned in NPR's latest Planet Money: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/05/09/310447054/episode-...
Decisions are more reversible than you think: Sandi Lin, CEO at Skilljar
High-Ho, The Derry-O, The Farmer And The Drone
To protect your readers' privacy.
Steam prints money because it's essentially the App Store for a sizable percentage of PC games. It's probably very lucrative. We have no way to really tell (given that the deals they make on revenue split are not public, and they are a private company), but EA has been trying really hard to push Origin as a comparable App Store, so it must be a money spigot.
From the description:

> Video [here]. Photos are [here].

Sorry for the nitpicking, but I think you should avoid "here" links and use descriptive link names instead. (http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/noClickHere)
I feel like making a much smaller power inverter would be worth a hell of a lot more than $1M.
Isn't this the type of thing a place like Bell Labs would, or Google X should, be on top of? And not fruitlessly rehashing the space elevator idea?
Clickable: http://mymoneysofar.com/index.html

Note that the www version doesn't work.
"WATCH THIS SPACE FOR MORE DETAILS SOON."

No, I'm not going to keep refreshing this page every day to check for updates.
"x" is not always something which can be easily or fully explained in one to four words. And anything over four (short) words is typically getting too cumbersome as a variable name.
Someone needs to port a tiling window manager to iOS or Android. On a platform where screen space and user interactions are at a premium, it seems you'd want to minimize the amount of window resizing actions and maximize the usable screen space.

I use XMonad (http://xmonad.org/) on my desktop and love it. My Android tablet (a Nexus 10) is big enough that it needs something like this; would be great to have two or even three windows open at a time.
I think it's pretty safe to assume that all their own game revenue is dwarfed by the 30% steam cut they take on the sales of everyone else's games.
For a person calling themselves "Universal Knowledge Allah" he seemed to lack any.
Not entirely irrelevant. Sociopath risk is real.
A power inverter is to go from DC (battery/solar source) to AC.

Dart is just a power adaptor.

Edit: Parent has been deleted, but the question was whether Dart (a Kickstarter project to make a small power adaptor) could apply.
Please tell more about how you learned and practice echolocation.
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.37...
I wasn't thinking of that sort of Oracle.
Indeed, here was the link:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/215201435/dart-the-worl...
It's a lot like if they had written "We'll post more updates soon.", only you managed to get annoyed at it.
here's the poster in question: https://twitter.com/MichaelAbberton/status/46329913991721369...

for context for non UK folk, the guy posting the story is a green (left of the center, strong environmental politics), and UKIP who are the current talk de jour in the UK are a rightwing nationalist party who are more acceptable in the UK than just blatantly supporting the BNP.

Oh, and if the police got involved, to be frank, assuming it happened like op said, that's absolute bullshit and basically intimidation. Considering the reach that tweet/poster image has had, I wouldn't be surprised if someone with connections within UKIP had pulled some strings to get the police to visit this guy.
Can you please point me to any real-world Haskell program that is purely functional? I am interested in seeing what a program without I/O looks like.
This is a great resource but not perfect. Is there anything
we can do to alert the curators to problems with the
collection? For example, Walter Shewart's paper on the
"Nature and Origins of Standards of Quality" appears on
pages 1 through 22 of Volume 37, Issue 1, January 1958, but
pages 4 through 15 are missing.

I tried contacting Alcatel-Lucent about this some time ago
without success.
C++ can be compiled to Javascript that runs at reasonable speeds (not just toy applications, either). See:

https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki

And yep, I was right. Web workers do make use of multiple cores, and there's at least one parallel programming library that takes advantage of it:

http://adambom.github.io/parallel.js/
You won't have to. Once there's new information, you can bet it'll be on HN again. (And probably TechCrunch.)
Alright, something that is almost my day job. I can make you one as small as you want. How many microamps do you need?
I don't mind the feature itself, but gotta love the confusing info coming from Mozilla's people over this, over the course of the last few days.

Open isn't always good when it comes to your PR.
Apparently there are services that will track web page changes for you. Who knew?

http://www.changedetection.com/
Thank you! I noticed that the www version doesn't work but I don't know why.
Take the Raven job, nobody will care that you didn't work at Amazon when you talk with passion about what you did over the summer at Raven.
You don't talk about rational during valuations of startups. It's all paper money and you put a number that pleases both of the parties. For example, you can give your friend $100 bill to start a company for leaf blowing and ask him to sign an agreement that you own 10th millionth of his company. What you just did in nutshell is value his company as a billion dollar business. This would just keep snowballing in next series rounds until Facebook is forced to buys it to protect its turf or they IPO it. After the exit, your company would falter and eventually evaporate because everybody is out the door after cashing out. Loosers are be "real" investors (i.e pension companies aka "your 401K"). I'm realizing the startups are game of eventual transfer of money from pension funds and 401Ks to smart aggressive get-rich-now personality types, at least 90% of the time.
The one that isn't amazon.

Honestly I dont think anyone here can decide for you. Its something you need to decide yourself.

You may get some anecdotes here but mostly all you'll get is personal preferences.

My advice flip a coin. If your happy with the result you know which one you want to really do, if you're unhappy, you still know which one you really want to do.
Well, it's not clear whether Google is buying the rights to the product with their $1MM, or if they're just offering the prize to spur innovation.
Like you, I suck at remembering my dreams, which is a big problem for those wanting to experience lucid dreaming.

http://reddit.com/r/luciddreaming has lots of information about this. I think lucid dreaming must be very refreshing...
Is this what apple uses?
Be, while not Unix at heart did have a bash based CLI.
You can use the metaphor. But call the thing what the hell it is, in straightforward language.

The problem with this trope is that it makes technology (and science) seem both much more complicated than it is, and, as I've noted, obscures the reality, both in the specific tools used, how they're used, and what they accomplish.

Conducting virus and scam investigations from within a fresh VM is hardly news (a co-worker of mine would do this for filing HR and other corporate reports over MSIE-only interfaces, noting that by the end of the 15-20 minute session his VM was already compromised...). And some bright kid reading the story might actually get some ideas as to how she could better protect herself and/or get into this online forensics and investigations thing.

And the argument that news reportage has to protect the ignorant from their own ignorance by not accidentally un-ignoranting them is ... tired.
I believe[1] that the head tracking qualifies it as holographic. That light field stuff looks super interesting...

1. http://doc-ok.org/?p=337
So, first off, I want to point out that I think we are largely in agreement, as I certainly would not be bothered with your suggestion were it implemented: the key thing is that people are charged for their usage in some manner as opposed to expecting a flat rate to cover "lots and lots of bandwidth".

However, you are also stating that simply charging people by the byte is incapable of having a similar effect--that your modification is the "only way" to gain a benefit. I was showing that because there is already a difference in the price during peak vs. non-peak times you don't need that modification.

I also argue (generally in this thread, though not in that comment as it had not seemed like it was needed; now it does) that even as per byte billing has almost the same overall result (again, due to peak capacity being inherently lower than peak desired load) it has a key benefit of being a cost remotely capable of being predicted: charging people based on a constantly-fluctuating idea of "how much bandwidth are other people using" is a price fluctuation that can't be effectively predicted until after you are accruing the cost: it requires users to not only predict their usage, but keep track "these four hours are the Superbowl, so everything is going to cost more".

I guess this could be solved by having a live "surge pricing" indicator in your status bar next to the network icon, but that requires infrastructure to traverse that across NATs that we don't have currently. One more point on that: it would also be valuable to do this kind of minute fluctuation with relation to power, but we don't: we just bill at best a difference for "typically peak" vs. "typically non-peak", even if some days are fundamentally more energy-intensive than others (as in addition to it being a weekday someone scheduled a massive lights show across the entire city or something).

That is why I still feel like I responded to what you said: while I did not in any way attempt to address whether your model was more or less "accurate" (I have yet to decide whether that is really the case, but it certainly doesn't sound wrong or anything), I was only trying to show that it was not by any means "necessary".
ChangeDetection – Know when any web page changes
I don't think the ads were the problem. The language that bothered me was the phrase "user-enhancing" when describing ads. Call a spade a spade
Thanks, no, I didn't. I'm just picking on a specific and tired element of the writing.

The story is intrinsically interesting, but the style gets in the way.
Exactly. Please use the proper term: traction ninjas.
Exhausting - it can be, you wake up in the dream and eventually get tired and fall asleep again (I once fell asleep in a puddle, in which I proceeded to drown).
No it doesn't. It just means that money has been spent needlessly on something that should it ever actually end up in court will just be a colossal waste of time and money for everyone concerned. Merely being issued a patent doesn't prove if the patent is worth a damn, there was a patent issued for a method of swinging on a swing http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US6368227
Well, his/her salary as a violinist. Not mentioning any other jobs the person had.
Legal Pot in the US Is Crippling Mexican Cartels?
Exactly: https://twitter.com/TheBitcoinimist/status/46561086993872076...
A better title for Hacker News would be the BBC subtitle "Modern Indo-European languages like English originated in Turkey 9,000 years ago". That includes the language family name (though of course the super-family of Indo-European and its cousins originated elsewhere).
RedSocks, An interesting vision on Malware trend in Q1 2014
Technically speaking, it's only on SS7 networks where this is a problem to implement. It's basically just playing an arbitrary media file, which is trivial in VoIP.

The interesting thing is that the original SS7 code did not have an arbitrary case programmed for the ring back tone; that is to say the original network infrastructure did not support on-demand changes to ring backs or to pull an arbitrary media file at the time of call. The solution was a box intermediating the call to stream musical media before connecting to the actual intended voice call media.

Telecom, why do stuff in softwhere when you can just add another box?
"And this would be some heuristic which orders people in an unambiguous way, so only one person is attempting to exit at a given moment."

Given how badly people behave at four-way stop signs (where there's an unambiguous ordering algorithm that most drivers seem to ignore), I don't think there's much hope for a heuristic ordering working well for panicked crowds at emergency exits.
It's unlcear if they are being practical or cynical, but this let's everyone "use their imagination" when doing valuations. TLDR: "No data" is better than "bad data"...That is the strategy.
Rob Landley doesn't seems to be too excited about it
http://www.landley.net/notes.html#31-03-2014
Good. Mozilla needs more revenue sources, and the new tab page is one of the least obtrusive places to put ads I can think of.
That's the relevant question

"I want a small inverter" ok, what are the specs? Maybe they need 1000v / 1ma (probably not, still...)
I wonder if, with the right septuagenarian judge, this constitutes unauthorized access to a protected computer system?
I mean that there is no description on how these projections are even created.

A child would recognize a cube since we naturally see 2d projections of 3d objects as it is. Likewise a 2 dimensional being could recognize a 1d projection of a 2d object (looking at the 2d object on it's side.) But would a 3d object projected to 1 dimension make any sense?
DNS.. add a cname
Lucene isn't really a database, though.
I think that teaching programming doesn't necesseraly make you enjoy programming. Just like with any topic, the first step is to make people sufficently interested in a subject to have them be willing to spend some time doing boring stuff.
At that time, computers weren't as ubiquitous as they are now.
The Essential Nancy Lynch