skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trying to reason about the brain like it's a computer is a very common thing for computer scientists to do. Unfortunately, it's also mostly fallacious (since for a whole host of reasons, neurons don't work like integrated circuits), and simplistic analogies like cerebellum = GPU are probably not going to give much insight into what's really going on. I'm not saying "the brain is beyond human comprehension" or anything silly like that, just that you have to approach it from a biochemical context.
> I think all important things in travel have been invented.

In decades, if not years, you will look back and laugh at yourself for this.
The tragicomic part is that they got out a big roll of duct tape to kludge things together for Windows 95 and then legacy compatibility meant that all of the great work David Cutler's team was doing on NT was buried under the generally much worse Win32 API. Docs from the two worlds are either “Here's a well designed API which reflects what we learned from things which were hard on VMS and Unix” or “An intern tossed this together over a weekend before a beta deadline and since Office and Quicken used it, we have to support it for eternity”.

Thus did multiple generations of sysadmin have to learn to delete files with "CON:" in the name or deal with file paths longer than 255 bytes…
It's a fantastic list; I'd like to comment on how some of the problems are already solved (outside the U.S.) or not cast properly.

> Healthcare in the United States is badly broken. We are getting close to spending 20% of our GDP on healthcare; this is unsustainable.

That's mostly a policy problem, not a technology problem. Countries with single-payer healthcare spend massively less on it per % of GDP than the United States with its pro-profit healthcare system, and American doctors and healthcare corporations end up being fabulously more rich than in those countries. (And they still have private healthcare, like in Sweden, which competes with public healthcare organizations.) The other reason healthcare costs are getting higher is that people are getting older and thus more sick. That's a generational bump, there's very little we can do about that. Not that I'm opposing the types of ideas YC is after in this sector (preventative medicine and better sensing/monitoring), just that the premise is wrong that it's a technological problem.

> At some point, we are going to have problems with food and water availability.

That's because we dedicate most of our water and land resources to feeding cattle that we then eat. Innovations that will have the most impact in that sector will involve weaning people from animal products. Stuff like Beyond Eggs and lab-grown meat.

> It’s not a secret that saving money is hard, and that people tend to be bad at doing it. The personal savings rate has largely been falling since the early 80s.

Sure, some super-low-cost index funds would help, but the main problem here is two-fold: 1) real incomes are stagnant, due to government policies favouring corporations and 2) government/pension funds are much better at providing good ROI on investment than individuals can. Once again policy change is much more likely to have a massive impact than trying to improve the individual worker's investment returns. Collect retirement contributions at the source, and have the best investors in the country manage them. Without taking a profit for themselves. It's done elsewhere.
By productivity, I certainly did not intend to imply volume! Perhaps impact would have been better. Although I'll leave aside the philosophical question of historical inevitability vs. singular genius :)

Do you think that there is a widespread failure by the scientific community to identify and support superstars?
I'm kind of wondering why we haven't seen any notable (unless I've missed something) languages with full unification escape from academia into wider use since Prolog -- I know on the academic side there is Oz, which is a very interesting language, but I don't get the impression that its seen much, if any, use in industry.
Many people with reduced mobility (e.g. my grandmothers) can't ride them, though. There's space for alternatives.
Wow, great games! Just clicked to check it out and found myself playing for 30 minutes. Great sound and game design, very immersive experience.
> I don't think this will allow solving the halting problem, its been mathematically proved to be impossible to solve [1].

Yes, this is my point: the proposed super-optimiser would, it seems to me, en passant be solving the halting problem, which means that it can't actually exist (or, at least, can't actually satisfy the stated guarantee).

> Nothing prevents a turing complete program from entering an infinite loop. A GUI program for example is terminated only when the user decides to, which is impossible to predict.

On the level of the lambda-calculus, this is reflected in the corresponding term's having no normal form, in which case the algorithm described (which relies on reducing everything to a normal form) cannot do anything with it.
Damn, I could use some advice there. Right now I have a system which uses rsync to backup some files. It takes about 8 hours to go over 7+ million files (~3.5TB). I'd love to speed up this. I should mention that copy is done over curlftpfs :(.
Because by living in the public and being a well known person you are inviting expectations. If you don't want to continually let people down because you don't like the pressure of finishing things then don't let them down. You can't have your cake and eat it to. You can't say "here's this cool thing I'm working on, watch me work 24/7" and "bored with this, sorry".
Its not the cost, its the power usage. The 1080p LG G2 had incredible battery life, while the G3 (according to all the reviews) with 2K screen was a big step backward in battery life.
Homotopical Patch Theory
Where is the demand – in the 4.7“ or the 5.5” regime?
85% of .GOV domains are DNSSEC-signed

Which is funny because the US Congress passed a law mandating DNSSEC for .gov domains. Not to mention the many outages, plus non-deployments, where domains CNAME to a non-DNSSEC CDN.

34% of .NL domains

That's because it's common for .nl domain owners to essentially be paid to run DNSSEC. That's how bad it is.

I note that you don't run DNSSEC yourself.

http://dnsviz.net/d/danyork.com/dnssec/
Yes! This is what drives me the most crazy about rust:

fn foo<<W<>W>G<>GGW>>>F<<D>F>>A>(bar: AJK<<<DUoSJK><<>S>>>){
...
}

Okay, I'm probably being a jackass, but I find Scala's use of [] for nested type annotations to be much easier to parse.
It's amusing because fewer drivers online will trigger multiplier, thus increasing their pay.
There are a few different web frameworks (someone mentioned Phoenix for Elixir; Chicago Boss is Rails-like in Erlang) you could make use of.

Less of an ecosystem depends on what you're doing; if there's a real challenging component that a Ruby library makes easy, and no compelling Erlang/Elixir equivalent, yeah, that's a major consideration, but I suspect it happens less often than you think (I've never had a situation in Erlang/Elixir where I could reasonably expect a library and not found a decent, if not ideal, one).

The time to ramp up certainly would count as a downside, but I also find I work surprisingly fast in Erlang (not really used Elixir professionally), enough to where I find it more pleasurable, and easier to debug, than I did Ruby.

For specific use cases where you'd -really- benefit writing Erlang/Elixir; the Erlang language and VM was built to be fault-tolerant. All the design considerations were for that. Talk of scaling is possible because having a sane distribution and concurrency model fell naturally out of a need for fault tolerance, being able to isolate execution paths from each other and resume them individually, etc. Scaling is what makes it 'cool' right now, but it's not where the real benefit to a webapp writer is initially, fault tolerance and concurrency are. Each request can be handled concurrently, while being isolated from all the rest, and a failure in one will generally have no effect on any of the others. That is awesome.

So, what are your requirements? Is one of them "we need maximal uptime"? Erlang/Elixir becomes a contender then. And if there's ever an expectation of it needing to scale, it suddenly becomes a serious consideration. And if you want real time server pushes, Erlang/Elixir websocket support > Ruby's, as others have indicated. And if the library functionality you need is equally well supported in both languages (or an equitable tradeoff between a couple different ones), and you can justify the time it would take to learn the language, or have already put in the time to get comfortable with it...
It's a different kind of neuron altogether.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purkinje_cell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum_granule_cell
Morte means "death" in Latin and also in my native language (Portuguese).
I thought the whole point of Uber and Lyft was that didn't have to be full-time occupations.
For the 6+, why couldn't they use a 1600x900 screen at 2x and be done with it? That'd be 800x450 points and 330 dpi, nice and easy. Rendering at 3x and then down sampling to 1920x1080 seems like a lot of useless busy work for absolutely no gain.
The Mystery of Apple Watch’s Battery Life
quick comments (from s.b. who has been recently learning D and cuda C++)

- Most important, and nota bene: I liked it!

- this seems to be targeted as a crossover guide for experienced c/java/C++/C# family devs, but written a little below that level (whereas tutorial would be for people that have some programming experience in any language

- top level summaries before you launch into litany of language features: what is the object model, are there entities that can be inherited, how do interfaces/traits/mixins? how does allocation/initialization/destruction/cleanup typically work?

- Needs to note conventions ("_" in file/directory names, 4 space soft tabs) vs things enforced by compiler/tooling

- needs inline references/footnotes/bibliography for H-M type inference, FP style pattern matching, i.e. the "new" FP concepts for people without haskell/ocaml/scala experience
It's arguable, but operator overloading should only be used (if at all) when there is conceptual symmetry between the standard and overloaded usage (eg, adding two datetime objects with '+').

I can't think of any way that taking the modulo of two strings logically results in interpolation. If anything, it should do something like return the original string with all instances of the argument removed. It's just simpler to not support it at all and use the standard .format() method.

There's also the fact that it's deprecated, of course. :)
This is pretty great, makes me want to write Rust more.
Google Ending Trust for SHA-1 SSL Sites, Affecting 85% of All Secured Websites
100% chance of success vs. something much lower than that. Building hardware is hard enough. Jumping through the medical regulations is something else.
Have any previous RFSes been filled? Have any been successful?
They actually already have startups working on cancer, like Bikanta (YC S14).
My suggestion is to use "side effects" -- it seems to me that most people have an intuitive understanding of that term.

... but I may be wrong about that.
Determining the success or failure of the Apple Watch
For someone who has been coding in Rails for years but hasn't ever done the testing side of things, would you recommend working through your book or looking at other resources to get up to speed?
Anybody who knows me knows that I'm not a Microsoft fan... I'm an old-school "open source" guy who thinks of M$ as the "Evil Empire" and that Gates/Borg picture is still kinda how I picture gates.

And I think BizSpark is a great program. IF you are interested in running on the MS platform, or want to integrate with MS "stuff" you can't beat it. Enrollment is simple and painless, it lasts for 3 years, etc. It's one of the things that I'll happily "give the devil his due" for.

There I said something positive about Microsoft. Now I guess I need to go click some rosary beads and say 3 "Our Stallmans" and 5 "Hail Raymonds". :-)
Strategy game, management, upgrades, zombies
God I miss Doom. To me, the pinnacle of FPS games.

Pick an episode, pick a difficulty, and literally 3 seconds later you've blasted somebody in the face. And the music. Phenomenal. Why is everything orchestral now?

It was a game. Not a semi-interactive movie. You could play it for 30 minutes or 3 hours, didn't matter. Dozens of enemies on screen, shooting you, insane fun.

What did we arrive at? Overly-dramatic, Michael-Bay-inspired "Saving private Ryan"-wannabe's with "realism" and "grit" and a 50 minute intro, with 5-minute levels, separated by 5-minute cut-scenes....ugh.

I would, immediately, pay $60 for a game like Doom, with retouched graphics, Fast-paced, fast-moving, maze-like levels you have to actually explore, with secrets (yes, I know it's not realistic) and just dozens of baddies you can blast to smithereens. And when you die, get this - you respawn in 3 seconds or less. No dying animation, no "Loading..." screen.

$60, right now.
> what comes after programming languages

Isn't this like asking what comes after spoken language? Arguably the answer is nothing because language is what structured thought is.
The Apple Pay race is a marathon, not a sprint
My attempt was not to share the actual data, but to allude that the data is readily available showing that "phablet" as a market segment is growing.

Can't put my hands on the exact article and corresponding chart, but from memory the segment has grown from around 4-5% area to closer to 10%. Again not exact numbers, but until I find the post that's all I got.

Consumers have had both "regular" and "large" phones to choose from and they're choosing larger and larger displays.

These are not the posts I'm specifically remembering, but do have helpful insight:

http://www.businessinsider.com/there-will-be-four-times-more...

http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/third-smart-phones-shipped-q...
In fact, there's no clear way to even define AI,

It's easy to define, but the term has been stolen by people wanting more media attention for less work.

AI is just "what we are" without all the squishy parts. AI ("hard" AI, AGI) is a fully thinking, doing, feeling software system implemented in non-biology.

I've suspected that AI is fundamentally impossible to implement on a Von Neumann architecture.

Balderdash. We haven't discovered any computation problem that our universal computing architecture can't compute because... universal. It's not "universal \ things-that-can-generate-thoughts." Universal simulation machines can simulate things... universally. Now, we may not have the software architecture discovered yet, but it's certainly doable given our current hardware.
I would assume that Apple rightly considers bitcoin a triviality at this point and of course the two are completely unrelated. There was good reason to consider removing the apps (used for illegal txns). And bitcoin wallets have been reinstated.
http://www.file4life.org/ - a CLI program for file backups, written in Haskell.

After trying a few existing solutions over the years, I decided to build my own to keep track of the various copies of emails, pictures etc. that are spread across my computers and external drives.

The approach is:

- append information to a single metadata file, recording where a file was seen, what priority it was given etc.

- when starting, load all the information, building efficient in-memory data structures

- allow backups into any dir in a transparent format

It avoids the need of a dedicated server, treats existing copies of a file as de facto backups and is suitable for heterogeneous storages.

I have only compiled and tested it for Linux (Debian wheezy, AMD64), but it should build on other POSIX systems which have the Haskell platform installed. It's currently in beta and I have a long TO-DO list, but I've been using it for a few weeks now and it's been doing its job keeping track of over 200k unique files.

Feedback would be really welcome. I set up no issue-tracking interface yet, but you can contact me at the email address reported on the website and I'll be happy to help.
How to Battle Obstacles to Success – DesignRive
If what you are building has a credibility and validity engine built into it (versus just crowdsourced upvoting), this could be a valuable tool for gamblers and fantasy sports fans.

What was interesting to me was that I thought this was where higher level players could share insights on the general sport strategy.

For example, I would love to know how football teams identify the "Mike" and how defenses and offenses are read for audibles.

I've heard people say pocket passers read defenses from the outside in and running quarterbacks read from the inside out.

If I was a defensive coordinator, it would be good to know what an expert does in each of those situations.
This language really interests me, but I would like to know some real world applications that are being used for it. While I may enjoy writing it as a hobby, could this be something that I utilized in production as well?
Cool project, I think this might be a possible replacement for IFTTT for example depending on the ease of building plugins, but would be good to have that kind of automation under your own control.
Tech Interns Create Smart Bike Helmet
Is there anything anout Apple Pay that prevents the underlying banking infrastructure to be replaced with another model while keeping the same experience?

A credit card is just a token that represents an intermediary that both sides trust to handle the payment. Apple Pay simply abstracts that and improves the user experience, while reducing the leakage of informaition to incidental observers.
I find it a little disturbing how many people are commenting saying that Notch shouldn't be wasting his time on such pursuits or that he should really be focusing on something new and big.

You don't become great by doing big things, you become great by doing little things and fooling around and starting projects and then abandoning them when you've gotten everything out of them you want to get. Then, when the big things find you, you will be ready.

I would expect a site called Hacker News to understand this. That most of those comments are at the bottom of the page indicates that many do.
I almost hope that Lyft is orchestrating all of this behind the scenes.

It would be such an Uber-move.
The indictment contains stipulated facts, which I took pains to pull out. You've ignored that, and instead chosen to beat up a straw man: the idea that I give credence to everything in the indictment, and that my argument depends on the reader believing the prosecutors.
It's an image-search site. We have the core product (searches) about 99% finished. We're mostly trying to make the frontend as responsive and intuitive as we want it to be.

I want to work on it with my partner a little bit more before we get outside technical help. I'll keep you in mind, though.
Don't worry. I'm bankrupt on those, too.
Couldn't agree more. Protecting wildlife is like protecting nature's most valuable works of art, and it's a real tragedy that they have become so marginalized in our anthropocentric system. It would be fascinating to focus on solving problems that go beyond our own species. One of the main issues is the economics of biodiversity — how do you put a price on the preservation of an ecosystem or a species? It's certainly not a straightforward answer, but it's a question that's well-worth thinking about.
A few more areas (lots of overlap):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies
I'm also surprised at this one.

The software fulfillment process has a lot of issues.

We are stuck in a local maxima and jumping the chasm to the next maxima with ideas like "what comes after programming languages" is really really hard.

Sadly, one of the biggest hurdles is self preservation because software developers don't want "software development accessible to the widest part of our society". I hate to say it, but there are Luddites among us.

So, I tend to agree that a startup is the wrong vehicle for this.

> I think we have to start with reading.

I agree with this point. People understand things differently. There should be multiple ways for people to read and understand software programs. Unfortunately, there is only one major way now and that is with source code.

I do think that tools like IFTTT are moving us towards more accessibility but it is a small step.

I like what you are working. Keep the conversation going.
While I've always felt a strong attraction to YCombinator (especially the cameraderie that comes from being a part of it) and been very inspired to apply, I can't help but feel that I am in a phase of life that's simply not a good fit for YC, or at least the narrative that's pushed.

I'm no longer a mid 20-something that can live on Ramen and 16 hour days. I'm married and have a young child.

Are there YC founders in this phase of life that were able to make it work in YC? What did you do differently? Is YC interested in working with these kinds of founders? (it's certainly a different kind of "Diversity")
Made a News Service for Tech Elites Because TechCrunch ‘Is a Joke’
Genuine question: Megabytes compared to Go? Why?
The overstated it by using the wrong metric: proceeds, not profits. The facts of the case, which demonstrate Nacchio selling out of his position in his own company based on private information unavailable to his common shareholders, remain (so far as I can see) unimpeached.

Why are you defending this person?
This is the key issue. I often hear people outside of the payments industry suggesting that interchange is broken, and I explain time and again that the amount of money they think is in play is not correct. Take a look at http://www.cardfellow.com/blog/credit-card-processing-fees/

If you look through that, you'll see that the typical fees assessed by Visa and Mastercard are on the order of 25 basis points (a quarter of a percent). The rest of that 2-3% is going to price transaction risk (in both directions). No matter what you do in technology, if you're not talking about a better risk management system, the most you're going to be able to reduce interchange is about a quarter of a percent. It may not be obvious if you don't understand finances, but Apple is actually targeting the risk issue.
Aging, Diet, Workout and Inflammation – Overview
The value is in the network of riders and drivers not in the software. The big value for the drivers comes when you can minimize the time gaps between rides, and for riders to be able to get pickups down.

Lyft was actually the first mover on the the UberX product category, Uber was only doing premium service when Lyft started growing.

Ultimately this market is a race to the smallest commissions possible. There are costs involved like credit card processing, insurance, operations, etc. I could see commissions going down to 5%.
Mozilla is writing Servo, a parallel browser engine: https://github.com/servo/servo

There's a group of game developers writing Piston: http://www.piston.rs/
Isn't that an interpretation refuted by the source material I just provided?
This could be used for American Football as well, to determine if a hit was forceful enough to cause a concussion.
The backend rails are intended to be agnostic. Sure, Apple's front-end (secure store, touch id, etc) is unique, but the same tokenization process that Apple Pay will use will be available to Google and others.