skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
in Paris, nobody will help you with anything

This is absolutely untrue. My French is sub-intermediate, I've been perhaps five times, and I've never had a bad experience. Plenty of people have been super friendly and I've had great conversations with people just hanging around on the street waiting for a store to open or having a break from walking.

Perhaps the core of the problem here is that many people who visit Paris are not well traveled and have only limited empathy for the seen-it-all-before-99-times-a-day locals.

I mean, if I was busy and had a job to do, and by fate alone simply happened to be near some generic tourist attraction or other, and had whiney American/English/Russian/Chinese tourists come and ask me where the closest vegan restaurant or crossfit gym was ten times an hour like clockwork, I'd also get to the point of shrugging.

This is the same genre of people who, when you ask them where they are from, answer "America", because they're honestly unaware that it's blatantly obvious to everyone else and the interlocutor was curious about city or state.

We can put it down to cultural discontinuities. They are a blessing we should revel in them while we can, because it seems that all roads lead to generic globalized interactions in a minority of languages with increasingly unsophisticated speakers and reduced cultural appreciation.
Amazon’s Cloud Is Growing So Fast It’s Scaring Shareholders
I've traveled many places in the US with it. Clear's WiMax network is the basis for much of Sprint's connectivity so it's all over the place. It has worked in every US city I've tried it in.
Robustness could have been added as one extra constraint. I.e. the fitness function would also value the ability of the circuit to work on many instances of the FPGA.

This reminds me of Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) that tries to utilize differences in manufactured devices as a method of distinquishing unique devices. This is used for identification and authentication. There are for example PUFs that use differences in delays between logic blocks in FPGAs to generate unique responses to applied patterns/challenges.

See for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_unclonable_function
>> But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way...

Perhaps in such a civilization George Orwell's 1984 would be illegal too.

>> We could live in a post-crime society...

There is no such thing as a post-crime society. Crime is subjective. It's fine when you think about murder etc as a crime in a democratic setting where citizenry has equal rights. But, the definition of crime is never a constant - It was a crime to consume/buy/sell alcohol or drugs once, it isn't anymore (some drugs in some places). Human torture was legal once, it isn't anymore. Even now, in some places of the world, education/equal rights for women is a crime, freedom of religion is a crime. So, there is no such thing as a post-crime society. All that can be is transparency, which democracy and free press have best provided. Hidden policing/courts etc are a step backward as there is no oversight on their operation.
Yep they flat out break stuff in IE at least. Cookie saving, for instance, simply won't work if the domain contains an underscore.
Few paragraphs down they qualify that number as "transcontinental".
anyone know of a mirror? it appears down or removed.
Handling video and audio was an improvement brought mostly by computing technology vs. the Internet expanding; I'm fine with a LAN-local archive of music and video (admittedly, using flac/mp3 and bd remux and h264), and a lot of my content was ripped from physical media vs. downloaded. So the streaming services aren't terribly compelling to me.

(Pictures, too -- until the late 1990s, graphics were a pain)

USENET > RSS.

CVS for projects like FreeBSD wasn't particularly worse than GitHub.

gmail is actually inferior to mutt + own mail server in a lot of ways; it's easier to set up.

Google Earth/Maps are awesome, as is google search. Wikipedia is the kind of thing which easily could have existed in the 1990s-style Internet; FAQs were largely the same thing, just structured differently. I'd count it, but I do think a 1990-era Internet would have eventually created some kind of repository of indexed knowledge like Wikipedia.
Hah, nice tip. I was stuck on that one too...
>for ex how many know that the reader has a Javascript execution engine integrated into it?

I always treated that as a bug, not a feature, and prefer non-adobe readers even on Windows.
Stop storing passwords already
I guess that heavily depends on the province you live in. In Berlin and Stuttgart I don't recall using much cash at all.
def firstMissingPositive(A):
try:
for x in range(1, max(A)+1):
if x not in A: return x
except: return A

def firstMissingPositive(A):
try: return next(x for x in range(1, max(A)+1) if x not in A)
except: return A

Two above return:

print(firstMissingPositive([4,2,5,7,1])) # 3
print(firstMissingPositive([4,100])) # 1
print(firstMissingPositive([])) # []
print(firstMissingPositive([5])) # 1

I wasn't sure what [5] or [] were supposed to return so maybe I'm still wrong? Had never heard of this question before, thought I'd try it out.

Thanks for the reply, very informative.
>Don't know why they didn't create them as web forms/apps in the first place however.

Vendor lock-in?
There's no need to search all move sequences, because so many of them end up in the same game state (a game state is a combination of positions and orientations of arrows, with a cut off on positions because far away ones because don't affect whether there's a solution or not).

Of the levels I saw (up to 31), the relevant board area was never more than 20x20 and there were never more than 4 arrows. So the state space had size 16(2020 choose 4) ~= 17 billion. Of course most of those states won't be reachable from the starting state... so the actual number of states you need to explore is probably more like a million or even a thousand.

I think a program could solve all of the game's puzzles in under a second.
Here's a nice video about the UK national grid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC_ZySE_jg8
True. Cash is still the primary payment method in central Europe (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, etc).

With cash you always have the overview of how much you carry around in your wallet. Cash is also a proven anonymous payment method. ATM are available everywhere and usually free (no service fee).

On the other hand online payment (ebanking, paypal) is popular too (for online shopping).

All payment methods (incl cash) come with some hidden fees and/or operating costs. And all have advantages and disadvantages.

Let's hope that cash will survive for a long time to come.
I know right? Life on Earth isn't sustainable. The Sun will eventually blow up and destroy it. The universe isn't sustainable, either. Eventually all the stars will go out and there'll be a lukewarm nothingness...

Sustainability is such a fairy tale.
Well many people find the level of inequality in the economy surprising, but it really isn't that surprising it occurs in app stores. Even if we discount all the apps that are objectively terrible, the system very much favors apps which are already successful.

And I'm not saying that it's a bad thing. Why would you want to download some obscure game with 2 reviews over the game your friends are playing and you know is good and successful?
Answering this question correctly cannot identify people with these highly desirable and uncommon skill sets, so the expected result of using it as your only interview test is to hire the most common subset of people that can pass it.

While it's true that if you simply look at the question as having a "correct" or "incorrect" answer then you'd be right. But this question most certainly can help identify someone who has those traits if those are what you're looking for. It is true, that there is a subjective quality to this question and it's a requirement that the interviewer be a skilled judge (where a simple technical quiz can be graded with a rubric).

And if an interviewee can not manage to cover those strengths in a length, open-ended discussion about their best work, it seems unlikely that any other specific questions would be any better.

My main concern with a question like this is that by focusing on the best things a candidate has done, it's harder to get an idea of how they might deal with less optimal situations.

On further reflection, I have another objection to this interview approach. I would never work for this company because it fails my personal red-flag test of the hiring process: "Do I want to work with the worst imaginable person who could pass this interview?"

This is another fallacy, as interviews with the vast majority of companies don't do "pass/fail," they sort a list and take the best fit.
I remember reading this article a while back, and then some time later, reading another similar article, also about evolving circuits on FPGAs. (Note, by the way, that this article is only in theory evolving digital circuits: the run environment in this case is indeed analog, and the evolutionary algorithm exploited this in order to create circuits that had complex effects that would not be possible in a purely digital model!)

In the other case, the evolutionary algorithm found a long trace on the board that was to be an output from the FPGA (and so was undriven), and used it as an antenna to pick up the room's mains power and use it as a clock! I can't seem to find a reference to that one anymore, but if anyone else remembers this, I'd love to read about it again.
Yes, flat monthly fee.
LispWorks:

CL-USER 7 > + (sin 1) (cos 2)
0.4253241
The issue at hand is that claiming that only white people can be racist is itself a racist statement according to the traditional definition of racism. Even with moo's definition of racism, the statement cannot be true in states where non-whites are the majority and hold power.

Again, I am not claiming that whites face racial oppression across the US. That's silly. This is whole thread only exists because of people twisting the definition of words to suit a purpose.

The same behavior is recorded in the political histories of Ancient Greece. It's nothing new. I'm just calling it out as the political trick that it is.
I thought I expressed this in my comment, but I'm not challenging the fact that you can have a good time in Paris. That's not the issue. The issue here is people who do have a bad experience, and if that happens in what manner the city itself may contribute to it.

Your comment contains a lot of assumptions about the people visiting Paris, and since I wrote the parent, the assumptions are presumably about me as well. You are mistaken.
>But on the other hand, every app is just as free to be disregarded by a community of developers even if there is still lots of end users who need it.

The problem is not unique to open-source software.
And then blogposts and news articles written about the phenomena on marketing journals, Buzzfeed, newssites...
Hey all. I built Webhook with 2 other friends over the last 6 months. I'm mostly a designer, so understand that when asking me technical questions but here are a couple notes.

1. The name. I bought the domain over a year ago. The term wasn't as popular then. Originally the plan was to have the system auto-build after certain external hooks triggered. We still plan to do this and thought it was worthwhile using the name. It's a v1.

2. Funded through Kickstarter. We raised $40k through Kickstarter and are bootstrapped entirely. I plan on writing a blog post on the pros and cons of raising money this way.

3. We have plans to open source everything under MIT. It's three of us, so we wanted to get the product out first. We're now moving to documenting / refining the code to a level we're happy with so we can release it. It doesn't just run on a single server, so we're trying to figure out elegant ways to make it easier to install.

It works mostly as a simple Grunt JS (node) project. We use firebase as a data store and talk to everything through a single page cms.html ember app. That means the actual CMS is realtime, which makes it fun when multiple people are in the CMS as the same time. It also means that we can update the entire CMS by deploying JS files, which makes maintenance on our end pretty easy. "Bug is fixed, just refresh".

We use websockets locally for installing / generating files on the fly through browser actions. Once deployed, we watch for saves and rebuild the sites through remote servers. Search is handled through a hosted Elastic search instance. The goal was to remove as much of the local setup as possible and offload it to us. That means that it only works when you're connected to the Internet. Image resizes can be called at the template layer at will.

We made it after loving working with things like Jekyll and Cactus but hated that we couldn't use it for sites where there needed to be non-coding editors. Even with all the moving parts, it deploys dumb static sites, because we wanted reliability and speed. Also, having worked on complicated Django projects for the last decade I just wanted something that was a relatively one line install.

If you have any questions or suggestions please let me know.
Unfortunately this goes so far that (like in my case) you ask someone for directions, they don't know it and still show you some way ;)
The Center for Open Science poses itself as something similar to what you describe. http://centerforopenscience.org/

I believe they call themselves more of the Github of Science for scientific collaboration. Adding hooks to 'push' the tasks and 'checkout' the findings could be maybe extensible on their platform.
It's a bit sad that such big players are fighting for such a small, incremental step. The number of successful founders facing immigration problems sounds like it would be orders of magnitude smaller than the number of potential foreign employees. Is my intuition wrong there?

I also fear that a "win" here will allow legislators to push off further reform (e.g. "we just did something") instead of serve as a meaningful stepping stone.
Show HN: Swiftgive – free, easy mobile fundraising and tipping
We believe the world deserves a simpler, more convenient way to pay, so we created a free, mobile-friendly money transfer service using Square Cash and QR codes.

This was born out of necessity. We never have cash. Why would we? We shop online at Amazon. We pay for food and drinks with credit cards. We settle up with friends using electronic fund transfers. But there are so many times that cash would be handy, like tipping the local band playing at dinner or donating a few dollars to the grassroots organization set up outside the grocery store. As techies, we think the answer is for fundraisers and people working for tips to post a QR code that people can scan to donate. It’s passive like a tip jar, but it scales a lot better.

What do you think? We’d love feedback.
The one who owns the customer wins
That may be true, but remember; founders are much important to YC's bottom line than the employees that those founders who become successful may or may not hire later.
No, Paris is objectively bad for this - even French tourists from other regions will say so. Even Parisians will say so. That said, it is an error to attribute it to any racial characteristics, as French people outside of Paris (and to a lesser extent Marseille) are absolutely lovely and welcoming.

It's more a case of the stress of living in a big city, and in that respect mirrors the reputations that New York and London have in their own country (it always makes me chuckle to hear Americans complaining about how abrupt New Yorkers are, as a non-American I consider the baseline of friendliness of Americans to be so high that even the lower than average New Yorker still rates high on the friendliness scale in a global sense).
I see that I am getting down voted for my sentiments, so perhaps I should better explain my experience.

I programmed an app that was featured in several publications including the Washington Post and coverage by one of the writers for the Guardian. These favorable reviews led to a handful of sales. If this were a web app, these valuable links would have given my product a real boost.

With the app store, there's almost no way for a third party to influence the discovery of your app. Everything is sold through the app store and Apple holds all the keys to the kingdom. Who knows what mysterious process they use to select their favorites, but if they don't select yours, that's pretty much it. No recourse. The web, on the other hand is much more open and many different people can influence and contribute to a developers success.
Not at all. I was making no positive logical argument.
Merely pointing out the flaw in the one I responded to.

To put it plainly, the post I responded to made the claim: "Linus was nice when he posted it to the GCC list; therefore everything is fine." This argument doesn't hinge on the GCC guys having thick skin but rather on the apparent unlikeliness of their seeing the more offensive messages in the kernel list.

Further, even if we take into account the 'thick skin' argument, it does not excuse the behavior-- bad behavior is bad even if the affected party doesn't think so. This is why often times the State will prosecute domestic violence cases even when the affected spouse/partner does not wish to do so.
ServiBlue Limitada
There is a difference between passion and going-broke/burning out-because-the-site is exploding in popularity. The first can be fun, the second is work, and much of that work is probably not fun (sharding etc.) and not the creator's real passion.

At that point, the passion has to become a business because, well, that is where the effort is going to have to go. Maintaining it as a passion project is not longer sustainable and you have to choose.
>>Too much media/computer use isn't good for your brain

I was really interested in the article until this popped up. What a gross generalization.
I don't blame you after that, I apologise on behalf of the decent 99% of Mancunians. Maybe it's 90% +
The app store that came with iOS6 totally destroyed the income of developers on iOS. Many developers pointed out the problems, many left the platform. With iOS7 apple plainly ignored the problem. With iOS8 some changes are coming which might help.

Apple did it. They had better undo it if they don't want their iOS devices to be nothing but ad display machines or in app purchase tricks.
European 'traditional' cities don't burn down all the time. They just have smaller engines, and because they are less sprawling, the fire truck come from a closer place and can afford to negotiate the streets a little bit slower.
every app being open source (or rather Free Software, which is usually the case)

Virtually every open source application is also Free Software, and vice-versa. The most common licenses (GPL, BSD, MIT, Apache, etc) fit both definitions.
You might be experiencing selection bias? I suspect that petty criminals tend to target perceived outsiders over locals - they are less canny and it is easier to avoid empathizing with your victim.
Boundaries: Gary Bernhardt, SCNA 2012 Talk
Ask HN: Which screen for programming?
Hello HN!

I'm currently considering upgrading my display. What are you using currently? (and at what price point?)
good attorneys are actually doing all the things discussed in this article for the O1
The amount of low-hanging fruit available is at least partially dependent on how tall you are.
Ask HN: What are the essential components of your front-end workflow?
Whether it's for ongoing work, or starting a new project, what are tools that have become indispensable components of your workflow?
The O1A visa is definitely the right visa for startup founders. I think that with a little hair-twisting and a good attorney, the current criteria for the visa can be twisted to cover most startup founders who have some kind of a track record.

I am by no means someone special in any way, compared to things that many other HNers have done. But I have now received an O1A visa successfully, twice.

I think the bigger problem with having that visa (or an H1B) is that it makes the prospect of quitting incredibly daunting. Each time you change your job, you have to leave the country, apply anew, risk being denied, and spend another 10k on legal & filing fees.
Dany Levy: What it feels like to cash out, then watch your company die
I'm not sure I understand what the point of that list is, Drax is the UK's largest coal-fired power station, of course it emits the most CO2! Were it replaced by two power stations of exactly half the capacity it wouldn't be in the list anymore, yet the end result would be the same.
You melt the glass in controlled manner and let it to fuse together. As far as the process goes it is mostly similar to how lab technicians in chemistry labs build custom glassware, but with much smaller dimensions and better control

In practical terms you use ridiculously expensive computer controlled portable machine that just does it without much of manual intervention. It is done by such automatic splicers almost since fiber optics are used for practical applications. There were manual (mostly mechanical) splicers that are not too hard to use (it certainly requires less skill than above mentioned laboratory glassware), but it's more economical to just automate the task.

The problem is that even almost perfect splice incurs significant additional signal loss, so for long cable runs you do want to do smallest number of splices (and connectors, which are orders of magnitude worse) as possible.
NZ National Grid Current Loading
There most definitely is low hanging fruit. If you had the benefit of perfect hindsight from 20 or 30 years in the future, almost certainly there are things you could create today and be wildly successful with.

However, none of us have the benefit of perfect hindsight from the future. We have to actually figure out what to do for ourselves, the hard way. And once your development skills get to a certain point, figuring out what to do is much harder than figuring out how to do it, generally.

And so that makes that low hanging fruit not all that easy to get to after all, which is your point I guess! But still, the article gives a useful angle to think of these things from, I think.
Any way to tie into Keybase (https://keybase.io/)? They already have my public key and several identities.

An interesting direction would be to build an open Rapportive. Index and associate everyone you can think of and make the information searchable. E.g, John Doe == facebook.com/johndoe == linkedin.com/profiles/john.doe == twitter.com/johndoe == www.jdoe.com
I like the idea of linking a work via to a person who has been able to raise money. I mean, why the hell would you not want that person to stay in the US?

One concern might be the ability to game the system, but I think with the right parameters that could be minimized.
...and the number of patents/patent trolls waiting in the wings.
There's literally a single person who adjusts the whole power grid according to second-by-second fluctuations in power which result from half the nation boiling water for tea after the most popular TV shows finish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slDAvewWfrA
> I've never had a bad experience.

Last month, I was there, I made the mistake of being there with a man of colour, he was thrust violently against the wall and frisked until a Blonde lady asked what they thought they were doing. They quickly said OK and left, no apology, no explanation.

Sure in my home town of London stop and search happens all the time, but the problem is with Paris it is romantacised to something far more than it is. This makes people all the more disappointed. In London that kind of behavior by police would be considered unacceptable. I would have demanded badge numbers and made a formal complaint.

Now this is just one anecdote, and in my many trips to Paris, that's not happened before, but Paris is marketed, idealised so heavily, you don't expect it.

To me that is the problem. Expectation management.
Make It Pretty