skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fellow new yorker here, I'll contribute my 2c:

The hypertrophic city is undoubtedly going to have advantages that suburbs and traditional cities don't (he touched on some of the disadvantages, so I won't repeat them here). The sheer scale ends up being a good thing and a bad thing.

As a random example, if you're really into wingsuit flying you can easily find a sizable group of people who are similarly interested (and then you can arrange trips, etc.) That's much harder (sometimes even just impossible) to do at smaller scales (traditional cities) or smaller densities (the suburbs). Finding a good social cohort obviously has a noticeable impact on quality of life.

I also heavily disagree with his assessment that mass transit discourages walking. The very nature of mass transit is that one must walk to specified stations, and it wouldn't shock me to learn that New Yorkers walk a few miles every day even with arguably the best mass transit system in America. Cities with mass transit systems regularly appear on lists of America's fittest cities (e.g. Seattle, SF).

It seems silly to be arguing that traditional cities are a panacea to all problems when they obviously carry their own drawbacks.
Going hungry for a while to afford a new tool that increases you productivity is a wise investment.
Show HN: StaticReview – An extendable framework for version control hooks
Portrayed by the author as taciturn and evangelical, Lt Com. Karlsven, a farm boy who joined the Navy, went on to become a teacher and pastor working with children. The rear admiral, identity unknown to the readers, commanded four months prior to the Cuban missile blockade, the height of the cold war, and a time when the nation's military credibly believed nuclear war was imminent. Kirby's beautifully written accounting of his own internal struggles with identity, faith and authority is a delight to read for its prose. But, still arrogant as he thought he only once was, the author finds fault with everything except himself. Karlsven deserves better than Kirby's depiction ( http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/47643008/ )
I wrote about this last year. Somewhat similar.
http://prosehe.tumblr.com/post/64853725968/our-blind-faith-i...
In my opinion, the hardest question really is when should you throw in the towel?

There certainly are a lot of zombie companies out there with founders toiling away on "bad" ideas with seemingly no hope of success, burning precious opportunity cost with each passing week, month and year.

At the same time, one hears again and again that the successful founders are the ones who don't give up. That success comes from facing down those doubts, shaking the despair and finding a way to keep going even when it feels everyone around you thinks you are going to fail.

I don't have an answer other than to say that for anyone it is a very personal, gut-wrenching decision. If it is no longer worth it to you, then that is your call and I don't think anyone else -- especially someone who hasn't entered the same arena -- should think any less of you for it. Most startups fail after all.

And, I think that is likely close to the answer to the question. The right time to quit is when you no longer believe in the idea, or in your ability it make it succeed, or even that the idea is superior to other opportunities which might be available to you.

I'm not speaking as someone who has had huge success, but as someone who has faced setbacks and doubts, has come close to running out of money multiple times, but has somehow managed to get past those challenges and has become a bit more comfortable riding this crazy roller coaster.

What I've found is that the drive to "find a way", that survival instinct to keep going because you believe at your core in what you are doing -- that triggers creative thinking. And when you open your eyes and look around you see there are resources and people willing to help you that you didn't see before. You see new paths that were not visible before. At least that's been the case every time in my experience. Once you get past the doubt and are determined to find a way, then you find it. I suppose, until the last time, when you don't...

Ben Horowitz described it as "focusing on the road, not on the wall"[1] and that rings very true to me. You can only see the opportunities around you when are able to stop focusing on the wall (impending doom).

I don't believe founders should be guilted into chasing ideas they no longer themselves believe in. There are certainly cases where quitting is going to be the right call.

But human psychology is such that you will want to "flee the danger" and you will see certain doom when there may very well be a way out.

My two cents (if it is worth even that) is to never decide to quit out of fear.

Don't quit because you doubt your chances.

The time to quit is when you no longer believe that what you are working on is what you really should be working on.

[1] What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology -- http://www.bhorowitz.com/what_s_the_most_difficult_ceo_skill...

EDIT: fixed typo
I found this comment very insightful. It may not fit everybody's worldview, but that's no reason to downvote, right?
Segment.io (YC S11) is hiring back-end engineers
It might not be an accurate comparison to consider how language has been lost in the past 10,000 years to predict how much will be lost in the next 10,000. Surely nowadays we leave behind many more artifacts than before, and our literacy rate is much higher. Of course there is always the possibility of a catastrophic event, but even in that case it seems unlikely that future humans won't be able to reconstruct most of the English language, unless the event is so catastrophic that digging up nuclear waste is the least of your worries.
And so does the National Review: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/379018/let-states-deci...
No. Small technicality here.

How comfortable you are has a real effect on how you perform.

How you present yourself is someone else's problem. If it is a problem for someone else then they are affecting how you perform.
Lies. Python and Ruby are older/as old as Java.
I'm not sure that going back to the exact sort of city we had pre-modernity is quite viable or desirable -- but I do think (or rather, hope) that something more "human-scale" is in our future, even if it isn't exactly this.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that self-driving cars are the catalyst. Car services -> Lower car ownership & drastically reduced need for colocated parking -> More easily hidden away infrastructure -> More livable cities.
My new apt is next to Balitmore Penn Station. I can be at BWI within 20 minutes of walking out my front door, and from there anywhere in the country. Yeah, the TSA is oppressive, but there's actually very little actual power other than not letting you board the plane. Cops have real power, and they exercise it over drivers. You know how much you hate getting bossed around by TSA agents? Car ownership is like that, except every day.

Then there is the danger: I got hit by an oil truck merging into my lane. Nearly got run off the road by another truck going through Baltimore Harbor Tunnel (asshole didn't realize until the last minute one of the tunnels was closed). Nearly got killed by a tire falling off a big rig while on the highway. Nearly got killed fishtailing on an icy bridge in New York. That's just the last 18 months. On my commute to Philly I see some poor asshole crashed by the side of the road several times a month. In a year, I've never walked by a murder scene in "dangerous" Philly. I've almost certainly passed by more than one fatal accident in that time.

Car ownership brings your average middle class white American into contact with two things they normally don't have to deal with: death and police oppression.

PS: On the issue of 16 year olds having cars--that's absolutely terrifying. What blows my mind is that I seem alone in finding it terrifying. People worry about their kids in the city, but at least you can buy your way out of that danger. How often do you hear of an upper middle class white or asian kid getting shot in Chicago? Meanwhile, about a dozen teenagers die in car accidents every year in the upper middle class white/asian suburban county where I grew up.
Well, it's entirely possible - probable, even - that Oculus are selling the DK2 at a loss right now (which isn't unheard of at all for development hardware.
There is a good reason for the wide street in Chicago or Detroit and that is snow. Or more precisely snow removal.

Those ideas may work well in a mild climate but who wants to trod down a narrow street every day through two feet of snow?
Or through downtown Phoenix when its 115 degrees last week?
Don't try to rationalize it. There are plenty of jobs that incorporate high responsibilities in dangerous environments. Most of them work perfectly fine without the disregard for humans, the submission and the stupidity. Respect has to go both ways, not only upwards in the chain of command.
Windows was the standard desktop operating system in corporates, and it was a real advantage that developers could develop locally on windows and then deploy on a Sun/IBM/HP server.

This is a pretty big factor, that it's actually portable. Develop on Windows workstations, deploy to either Windows or UNIX servers without changing anything. Thats just not possible with C/C++. Difficult to even do with Ruby or Python.

Also, the class-based OOP design and interfaces make it easy for many programmers to work on little compartmentalized parts of the same massive system. And of course it lacks the dangerous features of a language like C++. Everything is an object with attributes and methods, and the objects can have a hierarchy. It's an abstraction that's pretty easy to understand conceptually without much CS knowledge, and it's easy to model business processes with it, so managers like it.
This is a tool I developed after struggling with an increasingly large bash script for my pre-commit hook.

The focus is on enabling others to easily develop their own checks/reviews.

I'll be looking at adding Mercurial and SVN support in the near future.

Would love to hear any feedback you might have.
>> Chicago is over two centuries old, and has street widths that rival those of any modern highway

Chicago wasn't incorporated as a city until 1837. It was the 10th biggest city in the US two decades later, but still, it's much younger than the east coast big cities.
I landed at a large bank in 2000 just as J2EE was exploding onto the scene. Looking back it was the app servers that mattered more than the language (though the language made the app servers possible).

BEA Weblogic was particularly popular. Its text (later XML) based configuration made it easy to get going (more so than IBM's competing WebSphere, where somebody had been too clever and used entity beans for config, so you needed to work with a DBA just to get started).

Weblogic also came with really good samples and examples, which covered pretty much all of the useful areas of the J2EE frameworks. Just about every app that made it to production started out with the sample code and got modified until it was doing what was needed.

There were of course other app servers. Cold Fusion had a loyal following for a while, but never escaped out of web apps and into line of business apps.

The move of J2EE and accompanying app serves from web to line of business (starting in the back office) was mostly down to productivity and skills. The main alternative was generally C++, which was viewed as harder to do and harder to hire for. There were of course many arguments over performance, but eventually the JVM got plenty fast enough and people learned to avoid the 'Bitter Java' anti patterns.
The #1 mistake in Agile Project Management
The syscall package varies by platform, and TCGETS, for instance, is defined for Linux-

http://golang.org/src/pkg/syscall/types_linux.go

-but not for Darwin-

http://golang.org/src/pkg/syscall/types_darwin.go

So it seems somewhat Linux tied.
A product that comes with support necessarily implies that when something goes wrong, the product can be blamed and the vendor can be leaned on for "support" to fix it. So while the support aspect itself may not be about blame it is bundled into that line of thought.
I think that the statement "My suspicion is that this is simply the PR industry at work, hired by companies that sell work attire." is complete unfounded bullshit.

There are many studies that show habits are an integral part of being human. I like the 'elephant and rider' metaphor. You have a finite amount of rider time each day to control your elephant. Every time you make a decision or exercise a bit of self control, you use up some rider. Habits drive the elephant too, but don't cost any rider time. If you are working with your habits, you get the elephant to do what you want for free. If you are working against your habits, it costs even more rider time just to do the basics.

So if you are someone that has a habit of wearing sweatpants and a tshirt all day, forcing yourself into business casual clothes costs rider and reduces your potential productivity for that day.

On the other hand, if your habit is to wear work clothes, then getting up in the morning and dressing as if you are going to an office isn't costing you anything. In fact it's probably putting you in the state of mind that you are 'now at work'.

For me personally, 'getting dressed for work' generally means jeans, comfortable shoes, and a button down shirt. Some days a tshirt. If I'm working from home - even on a Saturday for my own sideprojects (as I did today), I get 'dressed for work'. I wake up, take a shower, shave, have breakfast, make the same coffee as a work day, wear the same clothes as a work day, and then go get shit done. Arguably I would expend less physical energy rolling out of bed and sitting in front of my computer, but I would never ever be in the right state of mind.
> What warning signs do naturally occuring underground deposits of radioactive or highly poisonous minerals have?

They're usually not anywhere near as concentrated.

> A hundred thousand abandoned apartmentment buildings will kill more explorers than such a buried waste storage facility.

They wouldn't be around after 10k years, whereas a secure waste facility would be.
Ask HN: Can MOOCs replace textbooks?
Many a times the professor taking the course gives a set of recommended books for the course itself. Do you think if there is a platform that helps students taking MOOCs with customized textbooks related to the course, it will be beneficial to them?
It was interesting to read this with another HN post in mind from a month ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7965077, a Wired article about the observation that increased road capacity paradoxically does nothing to decrease congestion as people just use the roads more. Road building has a coercive effect in that many of its costs are born by everyone, and there is no way to opt out of those costs if you live in the city. Everything is more diffuse and less pedestrian friendly and moving about the city is more expensive. If you opt out of car ownership, you bear the expenses without enjoying the dividends. People who can't afford to drive suffer a sort of regressive tax. They do not drive but nevertheless live in a sprawling city built for cars with dangerous roads, ungainly parking lots, sprawling commercial districts, and inadequate public transportation.

Roads are terrific for creating distance to separate rich from poor. Those with means can hunker down in their gated community in the suburbs with a spacious private back yard and drive their air conditioned SUV to the parking garage downtown without even suffering a whiff of the common people on the street.

Walkways and public transportation democratize the city. Everyone enjoys the fruit of public investment, and everyone rubs shoulders on the subway or railcar. Common areas create a public forum where an inclusive community can form. The streets and sidewalks and alleys are used by everyone, not just those who cannot afford to drive past them. So it is in everyone's interest to make the city streets a safe and healthy place to be.
I admire your stance on this.

I too would do the same if drafted for national service. I'd rather sit in a prison than fight because someone told me to. I'd defend my country at the border but nothing more. If I don't have that choice I'd rather not fight.

In the UK, we have a nut job politician[1] who recently tried to bring national service back. There are several crackheads trying to roll this back in periodically sponsored by the likes of Help the Heroes, Clarkson, Daily Mail, The Sun and a rather moronic populous. It's all propaganda driven by the armed forces themselves and utterly sickening to watch service glorified like it is.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Hollobone
It takes ~2 weeks to make your shirt and another 1/2 week for delivery.

Just checked on your order, and it should be finished by the 6th and hopefully get to you by the 8th (may be the following Monday though).
And both could as well not exist at all as far as adoption was concerned. Nobody used Python before around '97, and nobody used Ruby before 2000. Well, some did, but very small amounts of "some".
> still arrogant as he thought he only once was, the author finds fault with everything except himself

He did find fault in himself. He clearly described himself in a flawed disposition while he was working brainlessly on weapons of mass destruction.
I was really glad to see states starting to do something about this, but this should really be changed at the federal level. It's less bad for you than alcohol and cigarettes. The war on it is just so costly and absurd on so many levels.
It isn't surprising. There are lots of reasons why people are unwilling to put their "primary" HN account at risk when they want to say something which can be used against them (or simply down voted into oblivion). When I worked at Google I was very careful about what I said outside of Google, there is very little the company doesn't know about its employees. Being a trouble maker always looked bad on your calibration scores and that translates into real money.

So when folks want to contribute to the conversation in some way (either to support, attack, or deflect it seems) but don't want to do so openly, the new accounts come out. One motivation for having a 24 hr waiting period on posting is to mitigate that, but sometimes folks do bring good data under an extra layer of anonymity.
I suppose you'd have to know a bit about the aliens, and about their plants. But humans in the future ought to know at least a little about humans and about trees :-).
It could be a different tree, or the person might just have moved closer to it (the radioactive stuff isn't there anymore, which supports this reading). But I think you could create some more unambiguously unidirectional sequence; perhaps something falling or breaking?
"Theia, baseball of God" sounds like a good title :-)
Thanks! Jump to 40' for the "warning the future" chapter: http://youtu.be/y4sqFyCHcbg?t=39m53s
(In Australia) there's conflict between VERY cheap clothing vs "work conditions".

How much more would you pay? 10% 20%?
It's a point release. I like Scala too but there's really nothing in the 2.11.2 release that's newsworthy or that needs much discussion.
No white paper or blog post explaining the behind-the-scenes stuff (kept proprietary for now, but we may write something later).

Yes, the Kinect would probably be more accurate (it was one of our original ideas), but it wouldn't have made a very good business. No one would have been able to easily use it in his home (not many people own a Kinect, 3rd party apps for xbox aren't big and when I have seen a Kinect, it doesn't capture your whole body).

We found that our accuracy is more than sufficient for shirts (we've shipped a bunch already and gotten overwhelmingly positive feedback). Accuracy is just 1 aspect of a great looking shirt though; style is also really important, and we've spent a long time refining that as well.
MOOCs are not textbooks
Nobody said that white people are oppressed. There is some kind of communication breakdown going on because you keep accusing myself and other individuals of claiming that we as white men are afraid of being oppressed. No one under my comment you responded to said that, so please stop acting like we did.
Yep, I just read that as Elvis with Sean Connery's accent... Nice work though.
On the one hand, this resonates with me... the last time I was doing a round of interviewing (being interviewed at several companies), one person asked this question -- and it was the one point when I really "lit up" and really enjoyed being interviewed.

On the other hand, I wonder if it really produces results that are any better. At least, with a quiz, you can give it to current employees who work great, and discover the quiz turns out to be worthless. (As the author described.)

But with a open-ended question inviting open-ended answers, how can you tell if it's really working? Of the many coworkers I've had before, I can think of one who certainly would have aced the question -- a programmer through and through -- but who was fired after a few months due to poor work ethic and sloppiness. Because while he had enthusiasm for programming, he had no time for "standards" or "teams" or "business needs" -- things like commenting code, communicating well with others, following through on commitments, etc.

So I wonder if the author is going to discover, after a few more months, that there are a few more questions than just this 1 question that also matter just as much...
As a member of the E2E team, is it possible to provide some insight into the state of the project? Is there any kind of estimate as to when it might appear on the chrome store?
What I find so disturbing about this article is that the kid enlisted in the military for no other purpose than to get food and shelter. Wow.

I enlisted in the Navy and I had a very clear objective: get some structure in my life and grow up, go to college maybe, and generally be of some use to society. I'm actually thankful to the Navy for giving me some very solid lessons early in life but I'm ashamed to admit I didn't see it then like I see it now. I was lucky to find the Navy.

I guess you are who you are. He was a street person. He should have stayed one.
I've just received mine and I was surprised how perfect the fit was.

Of course, it should be expected considering the measurement process and everything, but when you receive a box from someone you have never met and the shirt inside happens to be made exactly for you, it still feels special :)
I'll admit, I was one of the most skeptical people trying it out. I thought that there's no way an app would be able to properly measure me by simply twirling once. I went through the process because it was super quick and I liked how I could customize my shirt the way I liked it. Words cannot express my astonishment when I received the package in the mail. The shirt fit so nicely and the quality was incredible. I wore it that same night, and then again the next day. Def worth trying out, especially if you dislike shopping like I do.
Neat animation effect as your scroll down the page. Is it using SVG to animate the morph from star to cannabis leaf?
You don't think the chain of command respects those under it?

I like how people who have never served have such solid opinions of what it's like to live in that environment.
Show HN: We Got Your Back