skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's easier to imagine that YC can't take all of the good companies that apply if you imagine they could only pick one company out of 10,000 applying. The goal should be to build a great company using whatever resources and networks of people you have available. Not just gaining entry here.
CitizenFour: On Ed Snowden
Pending Home Sales Hold Steady in September
There was a scandal last year when it was discovered that Thomson Reuters paid the University of Michigan for early access to their market reports. http://www.cnbc.com/id/100809395 That was discovered when they traded 2 seconds before everyone else. You'd think the SEC would have known since then that this is detectable.

Old edit removed for being wrong :p
Twitter is terrible for meaningful conversation and debate. And I say that as an avid user.

Networking, sharing links, tidbits of insight, short messages, and Q&As all work really well. I've learned quite a bit from the curated articles and reports tweeted by those I follow. And if you follow the right people and engage appropriately, Twitter can open up a lot of opportunities. But anything beyond that is a waste of time, and can border damaging.

In fact, for all the good Twitter has facilitated (protests, revolutions, etc), I think it's having some negative impact. It is by far the most popular platform where individuals of all backgrounds, beliefs, and opinions congregate and interact, but it's built in a way where it is absolutely not conducive to meaningful debate, and so when the huge opinionated masses clash, the bite-sized arguments volleyed by either side are taken without context and nuance, further igniting and polarizing people. I'm seeing this happen with issues like feminism and Islam, where someone will tweet a very distilled version of a larger and more thorough opinion, it will be taken at face-value, someone will retweet it with a snarky comment, it snowballs into a food fight with enraged people retweeting/replying, and the original tweeter trying to add context but not being able to keep up with the reactionary domino effect. And because Twitter has almost become the official sounding board for many people, their tweets and reactions to those tweets contribute to their public image, reputation, and online presence, all damaged by death threats, accusations of sexism, bigotry, racism, etc, often thrown around unwarranted by people taking things out of context and who feel antagonized or polarized because of the way Twitter is structured.

And that's why I avoid tweeting about religion, politics, and databases.
There will always be a place for physical books, but that place is going to be tend to be as more of a luxury good or for items that really lend themselves to the paper medium.
Actually the cable infrastructure was built almost exclusively with private money. Most of the grants and taxpayer money were to support universal access (i.e. paying the cable companies to wire up the less profitable areas of town). They wouldn't have even needed them in the current deregulated telecom environment.

Regardless, the build-out happened almost 40 years ago, and the infrastructure that exists today is a lot more complex and would cost a lot more to deploy today. Almost all of that complexity has to do with data transmission, which is a product that was never envisioned when the cable buildout was happening.
Another point to add is Meteor's EJSON, which is a simple spec for defining how any complex, constructed or factory-made JavaScript objects should be serialized to JSON, and then deserialized back into a full JS object with behavior. Objects inserted/retrieved to/from the MongoDB or Session variables are automatically serialized/deserialized if you have made them EJSON compatible (quite easy to do, and built-in for Date and binary objects). By sharing EJSON definitions on the client and server, you have a flexible basis on which you can build an isomorphic model layer to your liking. The constructed model objects you're working with can easily be made identical (truly or superficially, depending on your needs) on both the client and server code.
" I really have to wonder why companies haven't stopped and asked themselves why what they are doing isn't working."

That's the problem. These are the conclusions they're reaching after they ask that question - which hints that they're having problems before enacting these policies, which lead to these policies. (Which will only make things worse...)
Do you do anything else besides troll Hacker News?

Holy cow!
I'm not sure about the macro-level benefits of this kind of high speed trading. Yes, there are winners and there will be losers. The common-folk won't be able to win consistently with high-speed trading strategies. But, FOREX has been like this for years already.

This made me think of the great series here:
http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_apology.html
It baffles me. Look at the cost of components for any smartphone. The cost of a full-fledged ARM SOC is, what... $20? The cost to turn any such docking station into an actual computer is basically trivial compared to the total cost. You can sync storage over the network without any need for a dock. Why on earth would anyone get a phone dock, rather than a separate machine?
The problem is the definition of mobile. Mobile seems to be more like a form factor than an operating system. If at the end I can convert a tablet into a full featured PC (i.e Microsoft Surface running Visual Studio) or I can plug a future mobile phone to a keyboard and monitor and run Microsoft Office there then there is no division between mobile, desktop PC, and web.
So they should reinvent the wheel when there are good solutions out there?

Isn't the whole point of standards to stop that sort of thing happening?

I get that you may feel that someone is just appropriating your work rather than doing their own but if your aim is to build a standard then reusing things is probably going to be part of doing that.
"Make this "opt-in"" is a statement, not a procedure. How, and why? Would the cons outwheigh the pros?
I think the worst thing is when the support requests start arriving in [insert language here] and you cannot reply to them.

Localising like this might get you more downloads in a foreign market but you are potentially burning bridges with customers because you cannot give them the support you give your english speaking customers.
"Localize your app" is a serious overstatement for what's covered by this article. To actually localize an app, automation is not an option, nor is just getting your keywords and descriptions done.

If your target audience is international but you can reasonably expect them to speak your language but to search in their native tongue, OK, this makes sense. But that's a large target for a small segment.

Localization is a process that involves your translator understanding your product, the terms it uses, the context in which it uses them, and how those terms can be transitioned into their target language. That's a far cry from keywords and descriptions, and it matters in many cases. Those cases never stop at $300.

It's often worth doing (this is totally dependent on your goals, though) but in the case that it's worth doing for you, it's also worth deciding whether you want to actually do it or whether just making sure people find your app is OK or whether you want them to be able to use it in their native language. Huge difference.
> seeing mozilla move in this direction while talking about how much they respect everyone's privacy is a strategic stumble indeed.

Yup. I'm as heartbroken as I can be with a company.

A "hand-washing" attitude towards privacy from Google, Facebook or a telco is expectable. But from Mozilla? This saddens me, way more than the support of DRM in the web.
Speaking of localization, this article is a fascinating look into the complexities of localizing the game "Papers, please": http://dukope.tumblr.com/post/83177288060/localizing-papers-...
Both of these problems can be designed around from a UX perspective:

1) As a user is scrolling, you can use PushState to update the URL to provide actual linkable pages. It does make re-clicking that link in the future odd though because that page's results are now at the top of the screen so scrolling up doesn't really make sense, but it at least provides the ability to deep link.

2) Sites like Pinterest solve this by opening an item's details page on click in an overlay above the infinite grid. That way when you close it (or click back in your browser) the modal just gets dismissed and you're right where you left off in the infinite scroll.
th0br0, thanks for the feedback! Trying to write as little as possible while giving enough information. Refer to my reply to xaviel.
For any amount of time less than it would take a human being to make a decision and take action, it doesn't really matter the latency. Even if the website and newsfeed release were guaranteed simultaneous, the mom & pop investor typically doesn't have a computerized trading strategy, let alone one running in a colocation facility with a single switch hop between them and the exchanges.
Free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, share research sources
Modafinil, while a bit more expensive than caffeine in pill form, is easily available online without a prescription.
This whole little teapot tempest may be a people problem, but many of the issues brought up in the article - removal of context, selective re-tweets, general nastiness - are Twitter problems.
I'll give you points for tenacity, but Android was never intended to be used on desktop computers. The link you give is just a hobby project, nothing more.

And since we're being pedantic here, let's talk about definitions. A mobile operating system is one that has been designed primarily for devices intended to be carried on one's person, such as a phone or tablet. A desktop operating system is one that has been designed primarily for devices that are large enough to be stationary during use (e.g., workstations). Both form factors have unique requirements and capabilities, and need vastly different user interfaces.

Further, you seem to be arguing that the kernel (and only the kernel) is what defines an operating system. If that's the case, then Android can only properly be described as a fork of Linux, not Linux itself.
Actually, they did.
‘Wasting Time on the Internet’ Is Now an Ivy League Class
Before everyone gets all hot and bothered:

(a) The SEC feed can be subscribed to by anyone.

(b) Whether the delay was 0 or 100 seconds, the computer consuming the feed will always be faster than a human.

(c) The details of the study are murky and unknown. In particular, the data collection aspect is suspect given it sounds like the researchers received third party data not directly collected by themselves. How were the timestamps handled? Were various caching issues properly accounted for? (The SEC website is served up via Akamai, for example).

Anyway, it's great a populist topic these days. Evil HFT always beating you to the punch, etc. But in reality, it doesn't matter because they are always faster than you. I suggest you read this post by well known finance/trading blogger Kid Dynamite: http://kiddynamitesworld.com/someone-will-always-have-the-da...
OSHbot Will Save You from Having to Ask for Help in a Hardware Store
Coastermelt Part 1: Hacking Blu-ray Firmware [video]
There are people I do know on Twitter but do not converse with them on there. I email, text, or IM them. Always use the best tools that are available...
Digital art marketplace Curioos raises $1.9M from NY investors
A very interesting article indeed. Thanks for sharing :)
It was a great interview. Andy has the enviable position of having successfully delivered many medical devices through the regulatory process, which makes him very valuable to Google- momentum, to get biomedical projects to the point where they are deployed at scale, is a rare thing.

The nature of biomedicine and the regulatory process means that the people who are most likely to succeed have big ambitions, work hard, are very smart, and wise, and large ability to ignore the fact something appears impossible.

I was skeptical this will truly revolutionze discovery and treatment of cancer, but I suspect it will at least push the needle a bit- in cancer, many late stage drugs are valued for extending life by a few months. A few months-- at hundreds of thousands of dollar costs! It's great that X has committed to funding this, and populating it with lots of talented engineers and I hope they make a positive impact with a limited budget.
agree completely--it's one thing to do this sort of thing (it's probably legal, etc.), but to do it while claiming to be fighting for user privacy is really galling to me.
Seconding this. I've had this discussion a number of times and even when people initially reject the "relation" definition, if you push them with the Socratic Method eventually they get to a point where they see it really is the only good way to define functions, regardless of how "laymen unfriendly" relations seem.

The 'machine' "definition" perpetuates as an idiom, with teachers who don't know any better teaching it so their students don't know any better, and it does great damage to math education.
If you know that someone else has an edge, you can plan for it and you know how much risk you're taking on. The stock market is heavily regulated to reduce risk in trading. The scandal isn't necessarily that some people get the info early (although that plays better in the news), but that it's a secret.
Nice, that tool looks like something more startups could use when translating their products. Have you built it yourself?
> "Make this "opt-in"" is a statement, not a procedure. How, and why?

I don't really care about the procedure; Snailmail, if need be. Convenience is not a valid argument for breaking privacy.

> Would the cons outwheigh the pros?

The answer to this is dependent on one's stance. As you may imagine, from where I stand, they do (clearly). I can't see any "logistical inconvenience" justify breaking privacy by default.
Ask HN: Who are the most inspiring people you know or are aware of?
I am trying to put together a list of really inspiring people in all different types of fields. I recognise there are 1000s and 1000s of inspiring people out there but just wondered who inspires you?
Here is the working paper [1] if anyone is more interested in the details. The gist of it is that there are two ways to get insider transaction reports from EDGAR. One way is to scrape the EDGAR website (polling), the other is to sign up for a push service [2] where the filings are sent to you as soon as they hit EDGAR. You have to pay for the latter service. The paper calls the scraping solution "public" even though both solutions are open to the public (though you have to pay for the push service). According to the paper, it turns out (maybe not so shockingly) that the push service is better than the scraping/polling solution about half the time. The paper is written by economists and not technologists, and so there is no mention of CDNs or web caches a.k.a. the types of things most developers would suspect as being the most obvious source of the discrepancy.

1. http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/SECDissemin...

2. http://www.sec.gov/info/edgar/ednews/dissemin.htm

edit: There is a WSJ article suggesting the price for the push feed is around $1500 / month.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/fast-traders-are-getting-data...
Sun with Java and Java applets wanted to be that. Maybe Flash and Flew dreamed of that too.

Browsers were said to render the OS irrelevant and in a way Chromebooks come close to that.

We were also supposed to not owned & store any software locally and rent & download everything. Office Online, Creative clood are there.

But things are rarely that radical and the web was there and opened. I prefer desktop apps (and I'm a web developer !) but how can you beat the ability to login to any of your web tool from any computer ?
How do you feel that privacy is being violated by scanning SSIDs and pinning those SSIDs to GPS coordinates? I believe JackC's point is that there isn't a privacy concern here. The consumer's router is blasting out the SSID for everyone to hear, just like if you were standing on your roof shouting, or had a poster on the outside of your house. There's nothing wrong with those things being recorded, what makes SSIDs different?
Yeah, I'm not sure why it should be assumed the web works the same as a dedicated feed. If I refresh a webpage that has "realtime" market data, I still had to wait for HTTP(S), the web server, network latency, my web browser, etc. to render the number. If I had a dedicated line and realtime API I would undoubtedly get the number relatively faster than anyone getting it from scraping a web page.
Being terse is not a good thing. Being succinct is.
These new functionalities you speak of in the future like finding what items are in stock nearby are all more of an information gathering exercise rather that technological. We could do all that you talk about now but it would require a massive unified collaboration with shop owners for example to adhere so a common data interchange standard.

I think the challenges are of a more political nature than technological.
Presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAMEVMO4IRY
My experience with that tactic has been that if every seat is full (e.g. Saturday at 11 am in a university town), and a paying customer with no seat complains there are obviously non-paying students reading books clearly not from B$N, then they'll ask the person least likely to fuss to move.
Uhm, it's not a secret at all. It's called the SEC Edgar Public Dissemination Service. It's right there on their website with instructions on how to subscribe along with specifications and contact information. There is no conspiracy here.

https://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml

http://www.sec.gov/info/edgar/ednews/dissemin.htm
> As for politics and sanctions against Russia - this is quite different subject, almost completely unrelated.

Considering the funding for these missions comes from the U.S. Congress, the matters seem pretty tightly coupled.

It was sure a topic of conversation when Elon Musk and Michael Gass (ULA CEO) testified before congress:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_azyt1JhI0
Hah I thought I was alone in that regard.

I usually write two versions of it once I start learning a language. I'll write my first iteration with minimal exposure to the language then try and come back later and make it more idiomatic after I've spent some more time with the language.

I've done this with Go, JavaScript, Python, and C so far. Most of my iteration 1's start off with a Java flavor, my second iteration in python was pretty impressive with regards to how many fewer lines I had to use compared to the non-idiomatic version.
'Ambition' Beautifully Blends Science, Art and Fantasy
I understand the sentiment but really feel like it falls when looking at the actual situation. It's checking on things that are broadcast outside of your own property, and even offering a way to opt out. It's like transmitting radio waves from your property and asking that no one listens. You have a control over the distribution method or whether or not it even exists.
you don't call getImageData to extract a texture data. You load the image, make a texture of it, and then apply all postprocessing effects with a WebGL shader.
What Does a Product Manager Do at HubSpot
Interactive ftp is a shell, for file transfer operations.
Kind of ironic that the embedded Vimeo video in the article is Flash.
Deflation is only a scary thing because people have adapted to inflation, and that has shaped the last 100 years or so of financial history in this country.

It used to be that prices went up, then down, then back up again, then back down again, etc on a time-scale of a couple of years. Maybe spanning a range of 4x or so. Because everyone knew that's how things went, they arranged their affairs to cope and things weren't amazing, but a year or two of deflation didn't destroy the world.

What we have now are huge asset bubbles that are popping and people at the Fed are trying to reflate and/or at least slow the collapse down. The problem isn't that deflation might happen; it's that there were years and years of asset prices going to more and more unreasonable levels that no sane person would pay.

How do you clean the slate and get asset prices back to levels that might make sense from a fundamentals perspective instead of a risk-on, risk-off perspective? The only thing I can think of is to let them fall to levels where people would be willing to buy them again. It's either that or a 20 year inflationary slog to slowly reprice them in real terms.

In other words, at 4% inflation over 20 years if a price doesn't change in nominal terms it'll lose 55% of its value in real terms. That roughly approximates it dropping in value 50% in say 6 months nominally, because in 6 months nominal terms are unlikely to diverge from real terms by more than a few percent.

Which would you rather have? 20 year of Japan or the Great Depression, or a fairly swift realignment of the economy to the new realities? Either way the assets have to get repriced once everyone realized that they were priced horribly, horribly incorrectly.
If it were known, it wouldn't be news that two independent studies discovered it.

Edit: the second link says "Being forwarded all public filings acquired and accepted by EDGAR at the same time as filings are sent to the SEC from EDGAR". It does not say "several seconds early."
Hanno from Mozilla here. Marvin reached out to us about a month back and we have been slow to respond. He just got an email back a week ago. So I think this is still going to happen, but no concrete timeline yet.
I agree completely, but none of that changes the nature of C nor the code written in it. If you want to change the API like this, more power to you, but don't then say that existing code still compiles fine.
Honest feedback: I don't see what problem this is solving; I don't see a real problem that I can identify with, or at least not one worth solving. That said, I'm one person, and I may be in the minority for not having a problem this solves.

When embarking on a new product idea, I pitch the problem to all kinds of different people first, before I even pitch my proposed solution. This allows me to see if the problem I think exists resonates with others, how people think about the problem, and whether or not it's something they actually care about. This sets the best foundation for proposing a solution and how to go about pitching or selling it to people.
Thomson Reuters is a data broker, their clients were doing the trading.

The elite clients paid for access to a conference call 5 minutes ahead of the public announcement of the data.

The super duper elite clients paid for access to an electronic feed that provided the data 2 seconds before that conference call began.