skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
C is probably the worst language to implement monads in because the type systems really lacks polymorphism, higher order functions and any sort of type-class overloading to clean up the syntax. I mean you could hypothetically pass around a record full of void function pointers to get around all this, but it would be so ugly and unintuitive that it would be silly to try and explain monads this way.
This isn't targeted at the DSLR crowd. It's meant for videographers shooting 1080p raw or 4k video. This card will only hold around 5 hours of raw 1080p video for me.
There are plenty of less expensive books available for professors who care.
Is Borges the 20th Century’s most important writer?
Thanks for the reply.

The philosophical connection between the hacker culture/ethics and anarchism was much clearer to me and many others maybe a decade ago, but now I see this losing ground.

There's a fear in people when someone calls for decentralization of power. Most other types of decentralization are obviously good in the eyes of programmers, but not this one anymore.
You could buy a Nissan Leaf, which I think the the most efficient mainstream electric, and build out a really nice solar array and charge up more than a few miles a day, but the cost of that array is going to be pretty rough. All said and done probably more than the car. That's just not feasible for most.
The media attention that drivers get through this action help signal to consumers that they are moving to a competitor. This might make me (a rider) more likely to fire up the Lyft app instead of Uber next time I need a ride.
First you have to say if you are talking about () the type or () the value. () the type is fairly close to void in meaning. () the value is fairly close to null in meaning. Thus both comparisons are accurate, which is applicable depends on which () you are referring to.

While your post is correct for () the type, if I consider () the value, your post could be transformed without loss of accuracy to:

Void is not a value either, and you cannot return it from a function. I think null is a closer match.

Value or type neither half is the whole story.
Also Emily Lakdawalla wrote up a nice article on the wheels for the Planetary Society:

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2014/0819063...
S.A. is talking about general-purpose AI (position 2 in the RFS). This means processing natural language. There is a lot of progress but it's just slow so it's almost invisible.

Also it's a very difficult field of science. Now you need to be proficient in AI, machine learning, computational linguistics, linguistic corpora research, cognitive sciences, statistics, and sometimes physics if the text changes over time. Of course, you also need to be a good programmer. This combination of skills is very rare. Thus, very slow progress.

I suggest to start with well defined practical problems. For example, no one seems to do much with user generated reviews. There is some sentiment analysis but that is just a binary text categorization problem - not even close to general purpose AI.

It would be much more interesting to show a seller a time ordered stream of clustered reviews that depict only the most representative review for each cluster. This way a seller can see how his/her fixes/changes impact user reviews. Also it would be a great source for features and bug fixes requests. This is an ideal testing bed for clustering, novelty detection, categorization and mild inference. The inference is required because of sparseness of data.

This would create a good data set for a more general purpose AI. We would have reviews and text documenting changes and improvements of a new version of a product. Now the computer could start learning the dialog between users and product developers. Then, we are just one more step from statistical inference based question-answering system. Not a brute force system like "Watson" or a hand crafted rule base system like "Siri".

[EDIT:] I was thinking more about a decision support system that can recommend product changes. But in a way that maximizes customer satisfaction and minimizes the cost of implementation. The dialogue between past changes and customer reaction would give us the surface that needs to be optimized. This would generalize well to other domains where there is a text for request and a text for response - just to name one: clinical text in healthcare (position 5 in the RFS).
Who would provide customer service, sales, marketing, user research and the other non-technical elements of the business? It's true of many companies that what they do is not very technically demanding (Amazon, Facebook, eBay, etc) but that very often means that you _can't_ replicate them by just replicating the technology - these successful companies are much more than just their software.

And anyway, I bet there is a surprising level of sophistication to eg: Uber's software
Michael, I'm currently working through the second edition - it's fantastic. I'm on chapter 5 but I'd like to switch over to the third edition. Is it worth restarting? Again thanks for such a great resource.
Yea, there is a reason why the OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics. My favorite problem with Win9x is how the dependence on DOS allowed Caldera to continue to sue MS, and adding "Microsoft Munchkins" and other attacks on top of that...
I've recently installed the Doomsday Engine (http://dengine.net/) on my Mac and have been replaying through Doom and Doom 2. I also invited a friend over so we can play some COOP and deathmatch games.

Still one of the most fun games ever.
This only works because there's a captive audience, and the publisher knows that they can get away with charging anything since the students feel they have no other choice but to buy a copy. Far more specialized textbooks with far smaller audiences are routinely available for much cheaper (e.g. http://amzn.to/1ByBDLG).

The right place to target reform would be professors. They should take a stand to write and use only open textbooks that can be freely downloaded and distributed. This is already common at the research level, but it doesn't seem as common for intro textbooks.
Well, in Java you have http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/Void.html

Not exactly first-class but useful at times.
This. Although I don't understand the argument from the driver's side. They're upset about sometimes getting trips from uberx (and apparently making more doing so), so they're going to a place that pays less per trip and per hour? Something doesn't add up there.

If there was a factual claim here, I have to believe that they'd be sharing their numbers. It would be trivial for them to show a decrease in earnings (they can easily calculate gas and wear-and-tear) in the before-and-after earnings. The fact that that isn't happening makes me believe this is similar to the protests last year in SF. From the reports back then, it ended up being mostly drivers who had been banned from the uber platform who were trying to be reinstated (although that's not what they claimed).
rust is a pretty cool development for embedded systems design where robustness and integrity is essential
Detroit’s LevelEleven Revs Sales Motivation
>That's mostly a policy problem, not a technology problem.

Yep. You're not going to fix a problem caused by privatization with more privatization.

Also, a lot of this prevention can be tied back to diets, not a lack of sensors.
How to Get Interviewed by Popular Blogs (Even If You're Not a Big Shot)
What sort of work are you doing at Twitter? Does Twitter use Haskell?
Xibalba is just amazing, and you owe me 1 hour.
I agree on readability as a prime area for improvement. Thats one of the things I tried to tackle in Obvious (http://retromocha.com/obvious/) but readability is a human/social/communication problem.

Programming as it is now is a 2 way communication mechanism, we are writing code for other humans to understand, but for a machine to translate into what we intend for the machine to execute.

So, your point of making code a better human to human communication mechanism is absolutely correct.

What I really wonder about is what set of tools could exist that could solve whole sets of low level problems that we are specifying now that we shouldn't. Sort of like, right now we have blueprints and so on, and then humans look at those and build a house. Yet, with 3-D printed houses, you feed a set of materials and specifications into a machine, and you get a house built for you.

What is the programming equivalent that would allow us to "3-D print" software, so to speak? For physical things, it seems to be the combination of 3-D CAD systems, 3-D printers, and maybe some thought about how things need to be designed to fit this approach.

I have no idea exactly, but I could see a future where instead of paying people to hand craft all the code, that a series of features, modules, structure, etc. are specified, and the software is just "built". There would be more effort in the specification, but less on the build.
Ask HN: Has anyone ever tried building an OS that doesn't use files?
Since the beginning of computer time, all computer systems have been based on the idea of a "computer file". OSX, Linux, Windows, and every other OS has been based on the system of files and folders and filenames and crap like that. I'm not too versed in computer history. Has anyone ever tried making a computer system that does not use files?

In my opinion, referring to the data that computers deal with as "files" made sense in 1954 when every large company had a "paper file system", but in 2014, I think its time to come up with a new system that better mirrors how we use computers.

I'm working on a project I'm calling "Library Transfer Protocol", which is aiming to replace the concept of "file" and replacing it with 'Library item'. Basically, in 2014 computer usage more closely mirrors the workflow of an author (revisions, publishing, etc), rather than an employee filling up a file cabinet for internal use (thank to the facebook and the like)

Before I get too into this project, I'd like to know if anyone has ever tried doing something like this before.
I work for Flywheel, a (much smaller) competitor in the same space.

Customers like you describe certainly exist, and may be the majority, but mercenary customers who switch services are a large subset of the total. For example, we don't surge, and a substantial number of our customers report that they only use us when Uber and Lyft are surging.

There's also a time-frame issue here. The number of users who check different services with every ride is low. The number of users who check different services when their primary service is surging is higher. The number of users who are open to occasionally checking out other services if they hear good things is higher yet.

Cost-insensitive users who have Uber brand loyalty may be a large rump population for Uber -- they were the original adopters of the service. But their growth has been in cost-conscious people, and they've been in deep competition for those people, in a price war. Those passengers are a large enough share of their user base that they can't do without them.
I hear you. I like taking photos. I like seeing my photos. I hate post-processing and organizing. It sounds like you're like me in that you wanted to go from taking the photo to "finished product" with as little in between as possible.

A rangefinder (start with a Bessa, not a Leica, if you want a RF) and slide film did wonders. I take the photos and I'm deliberate about it. I mail it off to a lab and a few days later I get back mounted slides. I can toss the bad ones, throw the good ones into a projector and I'm enjoying my photos. Beautiful, wall-size photos glowing in my face.

I love Provia, others consider it too cold, especially in shadows. A cheap filter compensates or try other film. Velvia is a bit more special purpose but when used right, it's just wonderful.

Many people think that post-processing photos only became a thing with digital photography. That's certainly not the case. If you were in a dark room, you were editing your photos by burning and dodging (ever wonder why Adobe picked those icons in Photoshop?). Here are some examples: https://fstoppers.com/post-production/how-photos-were-edited...

At a simpler level, if you want to avoid all of the middle work, there's Fuji Instax. You lose control over DoF, exposure, etc. But you go from taking a photo to having it in your hands in seconds. I got one because I wanted printed snapshots, but couldn't even bring myself to just quickly print a photo, I'd spend too much time messing around.

Want more control? Large format camera with Fuji instant film (that's something that won't be around much longer, but there's the New55 kickstarter). Get a camera with movements and you'll have more control over your photography than you ever could have with an SLR.
Wit.ai team here. We've been thinking about it actually, and webhooks as well. Stay tuned!
That 'Cost per Transistor Cycle' graph is pretty spectacular.
yep it is messy like that even at corps, but thankfully once you deliver on a few good projects & show you are reliable they will often let you rip up a codebase & re-format the project as you'd like (perhaps while phasing out the previous iteration) rather than inheriting a codebase that you feel is..... beneath you (for lack of a less pompous phrase) :D

it's cool, it lets you keep to some level of personal standards once you have management's trust (took me about a year & a half i think? to be able to oppose a conservative architectural recommendation & win)
> I doubt Apple will make any money off of transactions, can someone prove me wrong?

It was reported by Bloomberg: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-10/apple-said-to-reap-... (basically, in exchange for assuming some of the fraud risk).
Actually, you can do a bit more than that if you specialize. It'll still be ugly, but it might help people grasp what's going on.
http://fortune.com/2014/09/11/uber-vs-lyft-the-credit-cards-... I don't know. The numbers appear to disagree. That just shows a sample of their growth in the US, but according to reports the bulk of their growth is internationally. They are likely orders of magnitude larger than their closest competition and growing rapidly. Real money is going through that system. If they can find a way to leverage that user base and become a full-on logistics company they're probably undervalued.
There's a history of buzzfeed and other link-farm sites writing inflammatory posts based on TMC forum posts. Many posters don't want their content stolen that way, so they put on those notices.
I you can tune the speed when the disks are in use; I usually bump it to around 60MB/s as long as there isn't a live database on the disk; the default is something insanely slow, and it impacts read/writes almost as much as the higher value.
Looks like others in those branches of the thread have replies to those materials. Other thread-goers should read those branches of the discussion to craft their own informed opinions.
That's extremely unlikely. How is kill rate defined?
Next Flappy Bird – fling
> Edit 2: a different solution

See "megacopy" in my top level comment.
"Containers isolate and encapsulate your application workloads from the host system. Think of a container as an OS within your host OS in which you can install and run applications, and for all practical purposes behaves like an virtual machine. Containers decouple your applications from the host OS."

Wrong wrong wrong. Containers do not encapsulate (in the security sense). You can get some security by layering SELinux underneath, but you're still wide open to a range of kernel exploits. A container is not "an OS within [an] OS". Containers do not "for all practical purposes behave like a VM" since you can't run another kernel, BSD, Windows, etc on them. Containers do not decouple your app from the host OS, you are very much dependent on features compiled into your host kernel. Subtle userspace<->kernel ABI regressions will cause you days of debugging (I've been there several times).

"[VMs] .. at a performance penalty and without the same flexibility"

After boot, there's almost no difference in performance. Boot time is a huge factor, but don't confuse the two.

Containers have their place, are useful and very fast to provision, when you understand and accept their limitations (as many do), but don't spread nonsense like this.
Ok then, in that case it's sincere concern about the well-being of it's citizens. Some of the things you mention are laudable (unemployment insurance) while other are questionable, nanny-state measures (protect children from bad influences), and other don't seem to be working (hate speech is rampant in Germany). I don't think protecting citizens against bad e-mail service counts as a critical protection measure, it rather falls into the nanny-state measures category and comes across as technologically backwards.
> Countries with single-payer healthcare spend massively less on it per % of GDP than the United States with its pro-profit healthcare system

Countries with universal coverage through other-than-single-payer systems do this, too. (every OECD country other than Mexico and the US has universal coverage -- but not all of them through single-payer -- and every OECD country spends massively less per GDP, let alone per capita, on healthcare than the US does; to the extent that many of those that do have public single-payer universal systems pay less in GDP for that than the US does considering public costs in the US alone, without considering the slightly-higher private costs in the US.)
Or maybe the strike is closer to what happened last year in SF, where a bunch of drivers who were banned from the uber system because of low quality scores protested for other reasons. Something doesn't add up with the strike anyway (the threat to leave Uber because some trips might be on uberx, but to go to lyft where all their trips would be at that level and they'd make less doesn't make sense). The fact that the strike is still going forward makes it pretty clear it's not about having to make more money per hour by doing uberx trips.
May I ask what you make per hour?
Energy generation, transmission, storage and consumption technologies are the opportunity of our lifetime and it is great to see Energy as #1 on this list (though there might not be a correlation between rank and YC weighted importance).

Generation - Solar & Wind

Transmission - Distributed Grid

Storage - Batteries

Consumption - Electric Vehicles

> We believe economics will dominate - new sources must be cheaper than old ones, without subsidies, and be able to scale to global demand.

The world uses a huge amount of energy and it is vital that any technology is 1.cost competitive and can 2.scale on a globally. These are no small feats, but like Airbnb the assets already exist, but our access to them does not. This is a distribution and financing problem, not a creating new technology problem.
All science news releases go through JPL:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/news/whatsnew/

But a science planning blog gets posted here: http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/

Also nytimes has a nice tracker. No science, but select raw images: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/space/mars-curios...
An important trend is the API-ification of everything. As more and more businesses are accessible with a web API, the Internet becomes more and more powerful.

I'd like to invite people to try the early release of Empire API, which is one API for every enterprise SaaS:

http://empiredata.co

Empire is an API for accessing enterprise SaaS services such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Google Apps, etc. It provides a uniform, database-like interface to every service that it supports. Empire makes it easy to integrate data from multiple enterprise services into your own enterprise app.

You can click Login to create an account, and we'll send you an API key. Or you can just sign up for the mailing list.
Uber and Lyft causing more dick-ishness on the roads?
To be fair: the case described here is two magnitudes larger in both directions than your use case.

And the critical aspect from a performance perspective was where the hash table became too large to fit into memory. Performance of all sorts goes pear-shaped when that happens.

rsync is pretty incredible, but, well, quantity has a quality all its own, and the scale involved here (plus the possible in-process disk failure) likely wasn't helping much.
That's an option. I think for me personally the implication that the number is somehow pluralized is more potentially confusing than the idea that it is irrational, but YMMV.
IPOs are sales problems, which require high touch interaction and networking. They are also dangerous to get wrong which is why companies pay high fees to do them.

Remember too that Google got burnt by trying to avoid the sales process entirely.
A third and important viewpoint is academia. In that realm, you'll often hear people give the definition: "AI is search," which would encompass reasoning algorithms, knowledge bases and ontologies like the Semantic Web. Deep Blue and Watson come to mind as the best examples of AI as reasoning through search.
The Singularity Mindset
You can sort of get the idea of what the mainstream games were back in the day by looking at what games were advertized in gaming magazines.

Take for example the issue of computer & video games from january 1991, right after the release of commander keen.
https://archive.org/stream/Computer_Video_Games_Issue_098_19...

What were the ads? The untouchables, michael jackson's moonwalker, ghouls 'n ghosts, what's the score? (Microprose soccer game), f29 retaliator, ...

The games we remember most fondly aren't the mainstream games of their time, they're the ones that we kept playing long enough in order not to forget about them.
http://fortune.com/2014/09/11/uber-vs-lyft-the-credit-cards-... It doesn't look like a lot of competition honestly. That probably paints Lyft in the best possible light too because it just takes into account US only trips (100% of Lyft's business and only a fraction of Uber's). But even then, that's only competition for the uberx market. These drivers are black car drivers, where uber has no competition at all.
> Who would provide customer service, sales, marketing, user research and the other non-technical elements of the business?

Do you need any of those things? How much does Craigslist spend on marketing and sales?

Operate as a non-profit, compete only on price, and let drivers spread the word themselves. Imagine if at the end of the ride, your Uber driver told you, "Hey, next time call me with the CheapRides app and it'll cost you 20% less, and I'll make more."
How's that going to scale with memory? In-memory hash tables were the downfall of cp here.
> I note that you don't run DNSSEC yourself.

Actually, I do run DNSSEC on most of my domains, but for that particular one, danyork.com, I unfortunately lost DNSSEC support when I needed to switch the name servers to CloudFlare to be able to essentially have a CNAME at the apex (using what CloudFlare calls their "flattening" service).

Longer story... but the good news (for me) is that CloudFlare has publicly said they will be providing DNSSEC signing for their CDN by the end of 2014... so in theory I should be back to having that domain signed within the next few months.

FYI, CloudFlare's slides from the ICANN presentation where they talked about this are at: http://t.co/34sAH1FVLB
Everyone in this thread keeps bringing up the same argument about these catagories: "The problem is not something amenable to a startup company."

Isn't that the point of these requests? To inspire new and innovative ways of addressing a small (or, a chance at a larger) piece of these huge problem spaces?

It doesn't matter if you don't think these are realistic requests. YC is just trying put out an image that it wants to invest in historically "hard" market startups.

(As an aside, I'd say that bikes are not a 99% solution until the majority of people aren't afraid of riding them around cars.)
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