skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
VR can be so much more than what Oculus and its associated acts are about. In fact, they cast a shadow over it that will probably be harmful to it in the long run.

The Oculus acquisition by Facebook is possibly the worst thing that could have happened to VR. With the Rift, Oculus had the opportunity to chart a brand new low cost platform accessible to millions, and be the next IBM/Microsoft/Apple/etc of their day. They had everything going on for them: a founder who knows the field by heart, which allowed him to act the moment he saw the curves of "state of the art" and "realistic potential for a consumer product" intersect. A lucrative vertical (gaming) in which to get their v1 out. Industry titans believing in and joining the company.

I don't know about you, but this reminds me of things like the Macintosh: the potential for brand new applications (with VR, "computer assisted design" takes on a whole new meaning). The potential to reach brand new audiences, and to make existing audiences experience thing they could have never experienced on traditional 2D screens.

But they went the acquisition route. Now they're owned by Facebook, which means that everything they do has to go through all the motions that a large company has. They can't do anything really risky, they can't say "fuck you" to the status quo (because Facebook is the status quo). What are we going to see from Oculus? Locked-in app stores. Social networking bullcrap à la second life (pro tip: we've been trying to make "social VR" a thing since the very first days of the internet, and it's always failed. The Palace (1995), Second Life (2003), etc. Every 10 years, like clockwork, someone tries it again and miserably fails. It makes for great science fiction -presumably why people are so intent on trying to make them happen in the first place- but in reality, it just doesn't work out.

What will we see from Oculus? Most likely nothing ever really revolutionary. As far as gaming goes, we'll probably see half-assed VR from Microsoft and Sony.

But as far as truly disruptive uses of VR goes? Well, it certainly won't be Oculus. Maybe someone else will pick up the torch where Palmer Luckey dropped it, but it seems like the window of opportunity has closed.
Swift is going to gain quick adoption. Why wouldn't developers move to a more modern language? The fact that you can easily integrate Swift with ObjC means it's easy to start. All the pre-release blogging is a good sign. I've gathered almost 100 links. I've got more that I'll add after my vacation. http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html
Startups may have an Agile plan til they get punched in the mouth
Excellent story, it reminded me of The Circle, where the main character does similar absentminded work but while awake and also doing other tasks.

My favorite line was:

> Looking around curiously at the other passengers, she wondered how many of them were trading in their dreams for small change.
Sure. Let's make sure only the government has guns. That always works out well, nothing bad ever happened with that.

Our democratic government has never used force illegally, violated our rights, and has never exceeded its Constitutional authority. That's why there are so many popular posts on HN lauding the US government for its benevolence.

Let me ask you, specifically, why would you want to disarm me?

Take away guns, I have knife. Take away knifes, I have fertilizer and diesel fuel. Take those away, I have propane tanks and model rocket engines. Take those away, I have beer bottles, gasoline, and rags.

Take all that away and we can't have BBQ's because no one has fuel to get there, propane to grill, beers to drink, knives to cut meat, and rags to clean up. I don't want to live in your "safe" world.

Bother, you have effect confused with cause. Guns don't cause violence. People cause violence and will use what ever tool is at their disposal to have that effect.
Utility Isn’t Enough, Social Compliments Utility to Drive App Engagement
Two things I think are missing from the list:

1. It has often been commented that the next Google will come from the company who develops a palatable version "next generation TV". Hollywood 2.0 really covers only part of this.

2. A YC generator. YC emerged as an anomaly in the VC field and became widely successful. How can its success be replicated, both for US and in other countries. This was on a 2008 list that pg posted (http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html).
please do. in the last few years, the model for seed funding seems to have moved largely to having an mvp, if for no other reason than demonstrating technical ability.
Embrace, extend, and extinguish.

Step one requires working with the industry.
These new RFS are awesome. I hope YC help accelerate a few startups that doing these type of RFS. It would be game changing. I can see allot more investor interest in YC if a non tradition YC backed company based on one of these RFC makes it big.

I had my doubts about @sama but he is pretty much on the right track and and seems to be the right person for the job. They are fighting the typical SV stereotype about not funding big ideas. Go YC keep on disrupting!
Wow, I am really bad at working with bezier curves I guess. I'm finding it really hard to simply recreate the tutorial steps by following the example strokes exactly
If Rust is widely adopted, and if this commit adds a kilobyte to every language and every library downloaded by everyone, would the fun for the author be worth it?
Definitely not in this application! But we are working on something more bitcoin centric and real time.

So stay tuned.
China’s anti-corruption drive: When is first class not first class?
I think another perspective is that credit card support is a good back compatible solution. If people are using their devices to store payment information then it's not very far fetched to imagine other types of wallets/credit replacing visa/mastercard/etc.
Absolutely. The final decision makers at other accelerators were often non-technical and (understandably) did not immediately see the value in developer tools.

Thankfully, companies like Jetbrains, Github and Light Table have made a lot of progress in demonstrating that a viable market exists here.
> What comes after programming languages?

I've been working on this for several years, though a startup seems the wrong vehicle for it. I think the description in the RFS is misguided:

"We’re interested in helping developers create better software, faster. This includes new ways to write, understand, and collaborate on code, and the next generation of tools and infrastructure for delivering software continuously and reliably."

There's a blind spot in prose like this that gets repeated all over the place in our community: it emphasizes writing over reading. I think we have to start with reading. My hypothesis is that we need to reform the representation of programs to address this use case: I download the sources for a tool I use, wanting to make a tweak. How can I orient myself and make a quick change in just one afternoon? This is hard today; it can take weeks or months to figure out the global organization of a codebase.

You can't "deliver software continuously and reliably" until you rethink its underpinnings. Before the delivery problem there's a literacy problem: we programmers prefer to write our own, or to wrap abstraction layers over the code of others, rather than first understanding what has come before.

More on my approach: http://akkartik.name/about
Will Misogyny Bring Down the Atheist Movement?
Are you kidding? It would be expected...they wouldn't pay you more.
> what is left to invent in this area to be so disruptive so that a start-up in this area makes sense? I'd love to be contradicted, but I think all important things in travel have been invented.

Not even close. Travel is sooooo god damn complicated and inaccessible to most people. Even though traveling should be popular, on a population basis basically nobody travels. This can change with better software, I'm sure of it.
The key characteristic of a funny person is that he doesn't comparmentalize fun ("this is serious business" vs "this is fun").

A humorous person can find something to make fun about and make people feel better even at a funeral -- heck even on his deathbed. I think we all have known people like that.

OSes, compilers, interpreters, editors -- all kinds of programs have had easter eggs since way before the IBM PC. Those kind of things are inherent in hacker culture (check the Hacker's dictionary for lots of examples).
Pre-NT Windows is a joy to read about.

It's like they got a bunch of CS 101 students, gave all of them one computer, and 4 months, to design an OS from scratch, but without access to a UNIX book.

The fact that it somehow survived long enough to be replaced by NT is one of the Great Computing Miracles of the 20th century.
My, what strange NOPs you have (2011)
The 50 Best Apple Watch Face and App Concepts So Far
> I thought the point of monads was that they provide a mechanism for introducing side effects gracefully into a pure language

That's roughly a description of the IO monad, which is a specific monad. The IO monad is really a degenerate case, and most monads ( List, Cont, Maybe, Writer, State, ... ) have nothing to do with effects.

Half the problem of talking about monads is that in their full generality they're really just a description of a trivial algebraic structure that doesn't really impart much intuition. Monads just get a lot of press because they're one of the simplest examples of a structure that can't be compressed easily in terms of common experience. There's nothing I can point to in our our everyday experience and say "monad" is like this.
You'd have to replicate Silicon Valley first.
It's the last digit of the sum of the chars in the error message converted to uints. I think, I don't really speak Rust.
Speaking of which, is there still any doubt in anyone's mind that Apple Pay is the reason Apple started banning Bitcoin apps? At the time I don't think the Apple payments rumor existed, at least not in the "almost-official" sense, and I think many were skeptical that was the reason Apple was banning those apps.
Maybe it's a marketing stunt? I mean, they're in for the money, so they have to fund stuff, that pays out later. BUT they have to appease their critics, who say "all you fund is the next snapchat!!".

With this list, they can say "Oh we wanted to cure cancer, the people who wanted funding for it just got no skills!"
False choice, isn't it? I mean, the complaint isn't that the public now has sites with massive javascript and related technologies. The complaint is that it has muscled out useful sites that did not use those technologies. And it should be heavily noted that the heavy muscles that have pushed out many of these sites is not necessarily "the public."
Do you mean things like Flipboard, Circa, etc.? Not very surprising to see them absent on YC's list. Like the more recent waves of social networks, they don't offer much and just add to the noise.

Who will remember these companies in 10, 20, 50 years? Most likely no one.

Who will remember companies that solve problems related to healthcare, energy, food allocation? A lot more people.

There's much to like about this list. It's ambitious in a tangible and actionable way. YCombinator realizes that if we don't want there to be a second bubble burst in Silicon Valley, we need to reach escape velocity and leave the social networks and iPhone news apps behind. That's a solid trajectory for them to take.
Paket: Package manager for .NET and Mono
Ditto 'the enterprise'.
It is useful to distinguish between first- and second-order concerns. The first-order concern for any application platform is ubiquity - market penetration. JavaScript wins that one, by a lot.

Literally every other concern, including language concerns, is second-order, negligible - and ultimately addressable.
Show HN: Deploy your websites to a Amazon Cloudfront/S3 using dropbox
Show HN: Game Smarts – Share your sports smarts
The Spectrum of Electronic Communication Immediacy
> On a practical level, what is the best solution for a US citizen, living in the US to store personal data in the "cloud" with regard to government spying?

Encrypt it before it leaves your systems. Then they would need a warrant and for practical reasons would need to inform you before they could get at it.

No cloud vendor is really safe. The pipes between your residence and the cloud is tapped, so the data being outside of the US is irrelevant if you cannot get it from A to B.
Self-driving cars may change the model from "everyone needs one" to Uber-esque "there's a shared fleet, one shows up when you ask" model.
Sure it is. Not only for this IQ and longevity thing, but for a myriad of health benefits[1]

The sun has made life possible in this planet and our body has evolved to use it for its own benefit.

[1] http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/
How about a "Classifying@Home" (similar to Folding@Home) - you wear an EEG helmet while you sleep to offload "unused" brain cycles to classify words for science! :)
Selling to governments is very difficult and time consuming. The company I work for has spent over a year now trying to get approved to sell our software to the NYC schools (not land a sale, just get approved to try to land sales), and it looks like we may have hit a dead end.
Appreciate your comment, but the act of starting the business is not what I was referring to. Obviously the cost of running a small startup is effectively zero for all practical purposes.

I'm talking about the VC/accelerator-backed startups that gain traction and mindshare, solely because of "permission" (otherwise stated "a nod") from VC's or accelerators, when other, better products may exist. The very fact that this program largely eliminates/discriminates against an entire swath of entrepreneurs who DONT want to move to Silicon Valley is closer to my point.
Wow, a whole kilobyte! OMG.

There are many valid reasons why this should be removed, but binary size is not one of them.
You're completely right. Sorry, I should have been clearer. My conception of the "modern city" is very biased by the cities I've personally experienced, which are all US cities with the exception of Moscow (which I would rank as the most livable city I've ever personally lived in, due to its public transportation infrastructure and general density).
I'm been working on providing a service to recommend manga. The only other existing alternatives are myanimelist and mangaupdates and I feel my project has a greater potential to be more comprehensive, up to date, and personalized.

http://mangarecs.herokuapp.com

explanation and writeup:

first writeup: https://www.reddit.com/r/manga/comments/2eejdt/rmanga_heres_...

second writeup: https://www.reddit.com/r/manga/comments/2fhlfl/rmanga_mangar...

There's definitely been some changes since then, so a third writeup is in the works. I know this project isn't very polished or professional, but it's something that I've wanted to work on for a long time and I feel that it solves a very niche problem in an interesting way.
I thought that the big issue with the current system is that every transaction uses the whole set of identifiable info (name, cc number, exp date, etc). Credit cards with chips solve the issue, but in US it would take costly upgrades across the whole ecosystem.

Apple Pay comes as a layer on top the existing system, bringing primarily the same level of security as the chip-based cards.

Of course, it is a solution that assumes you have an iPhone 6, which is not a cheap and accessible thing for everybody, and that the merchant has the reader. The large/high-end merchants will have no issues moving to NFC payments and it will make Apple Pay a viable solution.
By some reasoning we're already past it, in the middle of it, it's just around the corner or it will never appear. It's a totally meaningless question without first defining what the singularity actually is. The world we live in today is already very far removed from the one that I was born in but the linkages are still there to be followed.

To know how far the singularity is 'off' is by definition impossible, it means that you have knowledge of which linkages are required to get to the point that you won't be able to predict the ones after that.

After all when the singularity is here the world we will end up in will have no relationship to the one we are in today.

For the record, I think we will see a period of accelerated progress and then we will either fuck up or things will slow down again, I don't believe there will be a runaway event.
If Rust is widely adopted, it'll save megabytes per executable compared to go or a nodejs tool with all its copies of all its modules.

Really, the scale of efficiency delta between various things used on computers today is vast, and it's hard to say whether something like this "easter egg" is really significant. A few years ago I knew of a linux distro called "slitaz" that was a 30mb ISO, and it had x windows and a minimal window manager and a barebones browser and such.
They took VC money to get Dk1 out and prep Dk2. Then
Facebook came knocking and they were forced to sell so the
VCs could get their ROI. No one wanted to do it, least of all the top man.
I've written a program that attempts to deal with the given situation gracefully: instead of using a hash table, it creates a temporary file with a list of inode/device/path entries, then sorts this according to inode/device, then uses the sorted list to perform the copying/hardlinking. The idea is that sorting should work well with much lower RAM requirements than the size of the file to be sorted (due to data locality, unless the random accesses with the hash, it will be able to work with big chunks, at least when done right (a bit hand-wavy, I know, this is called an "online algorithm" and I remember Knuth having written about those, haven't had the chance to recheck yet); the program is using the system sort command, which is hopefully implementing this well already).

The program stupidly calls "cp" right now for every individual file copy (not the hard linking), just to get the script done quickly, it's easy to replace that with something that saves the fork/exec overhead; even so, it might be faster than the swapping hash table if the swap is on a spinning disk. Also read the notes in the --help text. I.e. this is a work in progress as a basis to test the idea, it will be easy to round off the corners if there's interest.

https://github.com/pflanze/megacopy

PS. the idea of this is to make copying work well with the given situation on a single machine, unless the approach taken by the dcp program mentioned by fintler which seems to rely on a cluster of machines.

There may also be some more discussion about this on the mailing list: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2014-09/msg00013...
This guy in the video is so French!
Cool little hack tho, I like those kind of Raspberry hacks!
Does anyone read the actual articles anymore?

A study by Harvard University shows online complaints rise every time a new version is released. Researchers discovered that Google searches for phrases such as ‘iPhone slow’ spike whenever a more expensive type of the device goes on sale.

In contrast, they found there were no such patterns for rival products such as the Samsung Galaxy.

Professor Sendhil Mullainathan said: The results are, to say the least, striking’. However, he warned that the perception of a phone ‘slowing down’ may be purely psychological.

The study bases itself solely on results of Google searches. (also, that's the kind of research some professors are spending their time on these days? wow.)
Oh man, this is like when I realized I could just go BUY cookies for myself whenever I wanted. What a cool, personalized piece!
Developer here, please share your feedback and ask questions if any :)
I was recently trying to write my own TCP stack to solidify my networking knowledge, similar to Julia Evans's efforts [1]. I got frustrated working with raw sockets on my mac, because they don't provide the same level of control as raw sockets on linux [2]. Is pcap a better level of abstraction that is cross-platform? I don't really care about windows, but it would be nice to work on linux and osx.

[1] http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/08/12/what-happens-if-you-write-a-t...

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6878603/strange-raw-socke...
My first app written in Ember.js.

I've always wanted a place you could go to get short pieces of information about teams in a specific matchup so this is my attempt at creating that.

I would love to hear your feedback. Thanks!
Hands-On Review: Nikon D810

"During these low-light tests I also had the chance to work with both the conventional RAW file size, which yielded approximately 77MB files" http://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/photography/hands-review...

Which seems odd as 36.3MP * 14bits / pixel ~= 63.5 MB though it does say it can save both raw a JPEG at the same time which may make up the difference. That or it's saving 17 bits / pixel.

77MB * 5pictures a second = 23GB / min.
This is the sort of thing that Square Cash provides, correct? Send money directly from one checking account to another through your debit card.
Having a mechanical engineer drive the design of a battery pack isn't necessarily a bad thing, IMO it's the sensible route for a mass-market car made by a mass-market company.

Modern high volume, quality focused manufacturing will often prioritize ease of assembly over elegance in design. Fewer, simpler steps make for fewer defects and greater product consistency. It's the whole "lean manufacturing" ideal at play, done right it will lower costs and improve quality to a point that you can splurge on a little engineering elegance such as a small-volume hybrid model capable of being assembled on the same line as your high-volume offerings. Tesla doesn't have to worry about this for now as they compete in a high-margin segment of the industry and they are trying to set a benchmark of excellence that will create demand for their products.

A real world example I've seen in person is the Nissan Leaf. The battery is designed to be as safe as possible for handling by a line worker and that allows Nissan to produce the Leaf at the exact same time as plain vanilla Altimas are rolling down the line. If you ever take a tour of their Smyrna, TN plant you'll see 1 line with a 9 or 10 Altimas interspersed with a Leaf every once in a while. It's smart engineering at a production-level viewpoint as a "worse" battery allows an entirely different product to be produced with minimal production overhead.
I think most people see themselves as persons and not as companies and imo a person is better of living in Europe than in the US.
"People are buying" and "higher rates" isn't really proper data. Also, phablets are somewhat new, so increasing at higher rates is normal.

What I wanted to know is roughly how much are the bigger smartphones being sold, against the regular-sized ones. The most recent Apple smartphones are big, both, while the "regular-sized" ones are from last year or before. Does the data supports this decision - "forgetting" about the "regular-size" and launching only bigger ones?
Google’s Calico inks first deal with 2M for neurodegeneration
"Erlang has pattern matching, while Prolog has unification."

Ah, yes. My first reaction to seeing pattern matching in ML: "Hey, this is literally half of unification."
It's actually obvious really. He says that Apple Pay is an added layer on top of the:

credit company -> bank/merchant account -> seller -> user

pipeline.

Instead of that he proposes we cut the credit card companies (and their fees), and have payments directly from our bank accounts.

Instead of our payments going through the credit card company, banks would have to be networked between them and with the next-gen payment system, so that we can buy from a store / seller regardless of the specific bank we have an account in.
You may find some catharsis in this essay I wrote many years ago... Why the DMV Website Sucks: http://wademeredith.com/2011/05/why-the-dmv-website-sucks/