skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're disadvantaged because of your race, then it's racism.

It's important to be clear: the outcome is racist even when no individual is being racist. You can't be reductionist about this, you can't decompose the company into its individual employees and give any of them individually the blame for racist hiring outcomes. It's an emergent phenomenon: it is the company as a whole that is racist and the company as a whole that is at fault.
I think you really shortchanged the section on transportation by only focusing on personal transportation. The real opportunities are in commercial transportation and logistics. The US spends more on truck logistics every year than the market cap of the top 5 global car manufacturers combined. And the trucking industry is only 50% of the total logistics contribution to US GDP. Even a mildly successful startup in a tiny niche of logistics could result in a wildly profitable company.
Very interesting! I wonder how they will record a transaction - they said they weren't going to keep any information, but they'll need to keep a ledger somewhere of all transactions that occur on their phones.
Xkcd: Pixels
Thanks! No new projects/demos/prototypes yet beyond the links at the bottom of http://akkartik.name/about, but I have a half-baked project in the works. Let's chat more offline; I sent you an email.
Agreed. I think it might be more accurate to say that Docker containers have a philosophy toward individual applications within a container.

But those applications could have multiple executables, services, processes, etc...
Police Shoot Man Who Exposed Tech Wage-Fixing Scandal
If you only care about OS X, bpf(4) provides a very similar but nicer API for intercepting and sending raw packets.
You could even go zero-copy without the hell that is Linux's 3 differently broken AF_PACKET mechanisms.
I made a small example program[0] which just intercepts all packets and prints out statistics. The pthread stuff is only there to asynchroniusly handle signals without having to check every syscall for EINTR.
Makes it possible to get statistics at run time by pressing control+T, however.

[0] https://github.com/thasenpusch/bpf-example/blob/master/main....
Isn't the corollary that I have to do a bunch more on the implementation side because the library being exported is the bare minimal?
Not long ago a brilliant inventor, Dean Kamen, created a startup that tried to solve this. The product received considerable hype before launch. When Steve Jobs saw a prototype, he reportedly said: "This will change the way cities are designed."

The final product -- Segway -- didn't, though. I'm not sure anyone is willing to try again soon.
I try to put myself in the mind of someone who works in a language in which type notions like ( t : * -> * ) and ( a -> t b ) are completely inexpressible I can see how it can be hard to wrap your head around monads. I think a lot of the communication problem about monads is fundamentally a problem that higher types and parametric polymorphism are just not part of the general programmer knowledge and there's no reference point to understand the signatures.
Ask HN: Submit request to FCC to treat ISPs as common carriers
FCC public comment deadline is this Monday, Sept 15th.

Please do this--It's not ok for Comcast to provide crap service at sky-high prices anymore. Same with TWC, AT&T, CenturyLink and others. Make the FCC treat them like utilities!

1. Go to http://fcc.gov/comments

2. Click on 14-28, the third item (not 14-57)

3. Fill out the form, add the Comment “ I want internet service providers classified as Common Carriers. “

4. Click Confirm

5. You're done!

6. Tell your friends and family to do that too. ISPs shouldn't get a free ride anymore.

Hurry--there's not much time left on this
How to hire engineering talent in LA?
My partner and I founded our startup in June. Since launch, we've already been through outsourced labor in India, and localized contractors through oDesk, and it's just not meeting our expectations. We realize to grow successfully we need to get some real amazing engineering talent as full time & offer equity and potential co-founder status. The struggle is we're based in LA, and talent is hard to come-by. Most candidates are either working for the Snapchats and Factuals of the world, or they're doing their own thing & just freelancing.

Any tips / tricks on how to attract and find good engineers & developers? We really need to move on this as we're hindering our development.

TY
The bigger question may be why do we even still have "textbooks," at least in their traditional form? Are textbooks the optimal way to learn given all the technology we have today? I'm sure there are quite a few start-ups working on this problem.
New speech recognition and TTS languages and voices on Nuance’s NDEV Mobile
I have a side project I started in college for this: http://textbooksplease.com

The big problem I'm facing right now is how to subvert universities requiring super specific and customized versions of their textbooks. I think the solution is a crowdsourced list of textbook alternatives (ie: "your university says you need Biology Harvard Custom Edition, but that book is the same as Biology minus chapters 6 and 11. You can get the generic edition for $11").

That's really just a bandaid, though. A real solution would look something like https://www.boundless.com/ or Khan Academy.
Chegg is doing this big time and they are already IPOd.
Show HN: Make your own Apple Watch UI product mocks
I initially thought you were writing brainfuck
Threw together this platform using an open source project in less than ten minutes a few days ago.

Stats:
65 Startups
57 Registered Users
1500+ pageviews per day
5000+ twitter followers (with help from existing accounts)

Any feedback, feature requests, advice etc. would be helpful.

Thanks!
Not on 64 bit Windows, but for 32 bit, you'd probably be correct.
Someone will still need to manage the fleet of self driving cars. Who is going to fill them with gas, do routine maintenance, clean them after some drunk dude puked all over the back seat, etc?
Swatch inventor: Swiss watch industry missed the smartwatch boat
I didn't say quantum computing magically reduced anything. You've set up a strawman and proceeded to beat it with a hammer. I said that quantum computers can solve previously-intractable problems.

We don't know what steps are necessary to reach AI, so we don't know what is or isn't a necessary step. Vision is a tiny part of cognition, as evidenced by the fact that there are fish which have no vision (or at least no human-like vision) since they live in absence of light. Yet they are alive: they reproduce, they seek food, they think, they do all of the things a living creature does, except see light.
This is like asking "I need to commute to work, what car should I drive?."

There are many factors at play with creating and running a SaaS-based business, and often technology plays a minor role. Even less important is how fast your chosen backend runs.

By the time you run into a technical scaling problem where you are stuck with a less-than-optimal solution, you've already solved much, much harder problems like finding customers, scaling a team, raising money, etc.

So decide how big your org will get, look at the skill sets of developers available in your local area, and partner with someone that has experience with both. Then let them make the decision on the tech and trust them.

Then you can focus your energy and attention on what's really important for your new business.
Did anyone else read that as Windows 95's new Start menu?
It doesn't matter what your situation is, it's the same with any investor. If you have strong traction or a strong track record, you will get investment, be it YC or someone else, no matter if you're a parent or not. Of course you have to have a scalable startup.
I would consider your Mendeleev quotation as an example of a different, though also quite fascinating phenomenon. What is being discussed in the above article relates to processing sensory input during sleep. The Mendeleeev anecdote is related to memory consolidation/restructuring that occurs during sleep and can cause insight (ie "a mental restructuring that leads to a sudden gain of explicit knowledge allowing qualitatively changed behaviour"[0]), independent of sensory input during sleep. Your Mendeleev reference reminds of a fascinating study[0] that examines the capability of sleep to yield insight because they also reference the Mendeleev anecdote in their introduction. I highly recommend reading the article. It's short, easy to understand, and demonstrates the importance of sleep for problem solving.

[0] Original paywalled source: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v427/n6972/full/nature0... free-to-access copy: https://www.msu.edu/course/psy/401/Readings/WK9.PresentA.Wag...
They finally disabled NTVDM by default in Win8.
Repost from last week's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8281857 . For background notes on implementing the cartoon, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8281857 .
Stallion, a easy-to-use Python Package Manager interface with command-line tool
How to prepare for the end of Windows Server 2003
MIT 6.849 Geometric Folding Algorithms, Fall 2012 lecture videos
Off-topic, but Do you have a timeline for getting into the Boston market, or a suggestion of an app out here? Taxi dispatch is terrible in this city. I was a consistent flywheel customer in SF and loved it.
Hey Max - Agreed - low cost index funds are a dime a dozen. Even "hot" startups like WealthFront / Betterment are a waste of money - you can spend a minute on the site, get their recommendation, hop over to Vanguard and carry it out yourself (and save thousands). Just send yourself a reminder to rebalance once a year and you're done. The biggest driver in building wealth, from our experience and that of working at Guide Financial, is using behavioral finance to automatically accumulate more assets over time - makes orders of magnitudes bigger impact than low costs/tax harvesting/etc
One of the best resources for indie games with intriguing plots/stories and/or novel mechanics that I've found is Kill Screen[0]. They regularly feature and write about non-traditional or non-mainstream games that push the edges of design, creativity, and emotion in gameplay.

0 http://killscreendaily.com/
Come on... ping was obviously chosen as a ludicrously simple example. You'd never containerize ping. But you could imagine some simple user application that would be easily deployed as a container, but that would be horrible overkill to wrap in a virtual machine.

You're right that once you've hit rack levels of virtualization, you've already hit the management overhead requirements to use VMs.

In my mind, it isn't about processing or IO overhead. It's about the overhead for management. It's a trade-off. Some applications are better managed as whole systems (VMs), whereas others are more building block-ish and probably better as containers. The two technologies are pretty complimentary.
Pics or It Didn't Happen: The New Crisis of Connected Cameras
nice idea!

did you consider expanding this into a single page with inter-textual headers, instead of having to click to read each one? would love to speed-surf this :)
I have stated this previously to the AGI community and think that the way to go is that QA recommendation engines will be the first killer app for AGI. Not recommendation like the ones you see now with the "others who bought...", but ones that look more like "concierge" QA services.

From what I understand from speaking with Selmer Bringsjord, Bloomberg has an outstanding internal QA system, so there is progress, the trouble is that it's all behind corporate firewalls.

There was a silly little online game that came out a few years ago called Akinator [1] that would "guess" a public personality and did so by "learning" based on user inputs - very naiive implementation of CTL but gets the gist of how you can implement a mock AI to get damn good results.

If you did a little delphi to stack the initial deck of results, say for a car buying QA recommendation service, I think you could have a pretty powerful tool that could be replicated across services.

[1]http://en.akinator.com/
It is not credible that a bunch of CS 101 students could have implemented Windows, given the market constraints it was operating under, in 4 months.

16-bit Windows was a compromise; trying to maximize compatibility with DOS, to the point of supporting exiting back out to it, preserving TSRs and other state, in a severely memory constrained environment.

You shouldn't be wondering how it survived, because survival wasn't its remarkable achievement. You should be asking why it was better than DOS, which is what it was competing with, and what it had to live beside and stay compatible with. And why OS/2 didn't succeed.
That looks like a lot of fun, thanks for posting!
Worth a look:

irmin, http://openmirage.org/blog/introducing-irmin

plan9, https://www.cs.unm.edu/~fastos/05meeting/PLAN9NOTDEADYET.pdf
Do you understand what a stipulation is? Nacchio acknowledged the trades I posted from the indictment. Your argument seems to depend on recognizing a dispute where none exists.
No, I didn't mean like Flipboard or Circa. I also wouldn't expect much support for these kinds of things.

I meant companies that are trying to change how news is consumed and produced, not those that prettify how it is presented for final consumption.

PG outlined the problem pretty clearly in 2008[0]. Perhaps you believe the news industry is healthy and functioning in delivering accurate current events to world citizens as it is. I do not believe that that is the case.

I was thinking of companies like Grasswire or non-profits like Ushahidi and Standby Task Force for this category. I'm sure there are others changing this space significantly.

[0]-http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html (item 3)
I can't be the only one who enjoys indie and AAA games. I'd love for both to continue existing.
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2012-03/msg00049.html

Search for "Here's a nickel"

[edit: clearer source than the text around the patch: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/libgcc/soft-fp...]
Direct debit is the UK name for what I think are generally called Automated Bank Drafts (edit: automated clearing house/ach) in the US. (Apols if different in canada, not at all familiar with that jurisdiction.) fundamental problem with DD for POS is that if set up on the same day it's not pulled for a while, and can take up to a week to arrive - it's typically used for paying utilities and the like, regular bills sort of thing, or subscriptions (although that's changing now).
As with Uber & AirBnb this seems to be trend of moving the people providing the actual service from employees to independent contractors. Its a situation where both the consumer and the contractors are less protected and taken care of.

I find this a step backwards; but it remains to be seen if this is just a harbinger of change or just a passing fad.
Jeremy Paxman on open-plan offices
I'm really glad to see AR on the list, we are excited to be at the inflection point of that medium.
Software patents are crumbling, thanks to the Supreme Court
True, media attention is important but I wonder if the protest will make it onto more mainstream channels and not just the tech news/blogosphere.

Local papers in Dallas have been doing quite a bit of coverage as Uber and Lyft taken on the politically connected taxi industry here. I don't know if intra-service fighting would get as much attention.

Maybe some HNers in the Long Island area will chime in.
I've set off cans of gasoline (Disclaimer: I was teenager and thus stupid).

I am not terrified to drive a car with that technology.
Nope. I would never pay $100k to Google as a startup, because there are more efficient ways to deploy that money.

I would, however, consider taking $100k in free hosting from google as a startup because making it free eliminates the cost consideration in hosting choices.

It's not keeping us out of the gate, it just that it reinforces the redefinition of startup to be "Silicon Valley VC type".

EG: 37 Signals would never have qualified, but they were a startup.
Uhh, there are two places with 3D printers locally, aside from a demo I've never seen them be used. I'm not even sure how I myself would utilise them as I'd need to know first off that something I needed was available as a 3D printer plan and then assuming that it is that it is cheaper than the mass produced alternative (hint: it almost always isn't, 3D printing is super expensive for simple plastic components).

Plus you're renting retail space and hiring staff but competing with companies like i.materialise, sculpteo, and so on, who can operate out of more inexpensive real estate and get the economies of scale, see Amazon. They also manage to bring together both the manufacturing and helping you find the things you wish to manufacture to begin with (which is a big problem with just setting up a 3D printer and hoping people will use it for "something").

It is a tiny market that is difficult to leverage. Far from a "surefire" anything, more likely to just accelerate their likely inevitable demise.

Let's not even talk about the huge limitations of 3D printing. It has come a long way, but realistically a lot of plastic items cannot be produced via a 3D printer because the resulting products are too fragile.
Crappy formatted instructions--sorry!

1. Go to http://fcc.gov/comments

2. Click on 14-28, the third item (not 14-57)

3. Fill out the form, add the Comment “ I want internet service providers classified as Common Carriers. “

4. Click Confirm

5. You're done!

6. Tell your friends and family to do that too. ISPs shouldn't get a free ride anymore.
How Sharing, RoboCars, and 3D Printing Can Reinvent Industrial Detroit
Ping is actually an excellent candidate for virtualization/containers/SELinux since it has to run as root. A bug in ping could mean a carefully crafted response could lead to a remote exploit. There are obviously also a number of local exploits that take advantage of setuid binaries like ping: http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2014-2851
No, I can't remember ever seeing something like that before. If enough people want it I'll do it but right now it doesn't seem to be getting much attention. Not sure why.
Interesting link, but I still feel AI hasn't had much success: Do we really have much more today that A* search, neural nets with backpropagation, and HMMs/SVM/etc, which were all developed in the 1960s? The successes of AI that I see (eg OCR/speech recognition and Chess/Jeopardy) use these same old algorithms with only marginal improvements and more CPU. There have been no new major techniques or insights. I'm not an expert though, correct me if I'm wrong.
That has got to be one of the most awesome mission statements I've read in a long time. Clear, directed, actionable, all good things.

FWIW I think you are exactly right, it made me sad that Google expected people to be 'useless' for anywhere from 6 to 9 months of their early employment as they tried to get their head around the code base and tools. Having the ability to eliminate that spin up time would probably triple their productivity numbers.
That wouldn't particularly change under the system that I'm proposing, idt. (on the back of a fag packet admittedly)- legal protection and the payments mechanism aren't intrinsically linked - most of the consumer protection with cc came long after the cards had been introduced. If you had an overall limit then the thief couldn't go over that, and a similar mechanism could/would exist - it'd probably be a product differentiation, in fact.
Note the Harvard study is from 2010. The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) passed in 2010, started going into effect in 2014, and bans lifetime caps on health insurance payouts. The intent was to address exactly that problem--medical bankruptcies.

So the big policy change the parent asks for has already happened, and the U.S. will gain universal insurance coverage over the next couple years.

If we want to see healthcare costs drop in cost beyond that policy change, it's almost certainly going to need to be driven by technology in some way.
Seems like an interesting technical problem. Does anyone know a good way to record many TV or radio stations at once, either for storage or realtime processing?
And then of course, since you can not stop the hydrogen from leaking, you have to make sure that the storage for the hydrogen storage is sufficiently secure.

Can't keep the car in the garage.
It seems like driverless trucks are likely to come to market as a precursor to mass consumer adoption. Trucking as we know it will be deeply changed.
Files are a shorthand for "documents". Don't be so hung up on terminology.

First, look into history more--there are several non-hierarchical (read: flat) file systems out there.

Second, while the workflow might mirror authoring more closely (which I think is horsehit, but that's neither here nor there) the artifacts of that process are what matter. Existing notions of a "file" map very cleanly onto the storage and organization of such artifacts.

There is an argument to be made for having better querying capabilities or permissions or whatever, but what is to be gained from throwing a commonly-accepted idiom away?
In a way it is. Accelerators have become two things: Pitch training camps and old-boys networks. The focus seems to be all about polishing a pitch, and faking stats for whatever part of your business needs to be faked to show traction of some kind, so that you can pitch to the old-boy network on demo day, get some money and go to work for the accelerators backers partners.

Startups long ago stopped being about building innovative business, and about VCs employing a bunch of kids to work really long hours on bad terms to make the VCs rich.

I think it is a legitimate criticism-- not ad hominem-- to say the Bay Area model has produced a bunch of soulless startups. Though of course some do follow this path and still retain their souls.
The government is not so much concerned about desire to "fix" things as people's desire to politically organize in ways they don't control, hence the perhaps more surprising aspect of the earlier post: they're less keen on individuals organizing rallies in support of a leader than they are on those individuals voicing a personal criticism of that individual.

Reading on what demonstrations of popular support for specific figures within a notionally unified establishment became during the Cultural Revolution is helpful in understanding the present leadership's paranoia here.
WebRick is only meant for development mode, not production.

Another choice (which we use) is Unicorn[1], though I have become a huge fan of Puma lately.

[1] http://unicorn.bogomips.org/
It could also improve the value proposition for lower tier accelerators that might have a mentor network but lack the resources to support the infrastructure requirements of the most promising participants. If implemented properly, it should improve the visibility of regional players.
It's clearly a harbinger of change. The cost of hiring a cleaning service is X+Y, where X is labor and Y is overhead (including insurance, etc). Customers seem to be demonstrating that they are willing to take some risks in order to get services with reduced Y, and workers are demonstrating that they are willing to take some risks in return for money and flexibility.

The only way this is a passing fad is if customer or employee risk aversion suddenly drastically increases. I don't see any compelling reason why it would.
For anyone else that wasn't sure, AGI means "artificial general intelligence".
Kevin Rose Launches And Explains His New App: Tiiny
With the exception that you don't learn about the OS glue that's used behind the scenes by libpcap. Working with the sockets themselves will get you more intimate with the systems you're programming for versus just the protocols. (For embedded systems without libpcap this may be a requirement)