skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was beautiful. I'd love to read more about how exactly the visuals were generated. This is a lot more than spheres rendered w/ NASA photo textures.
I'm going to take issue with the given trivial example. So you've got this:

int robert_age = 32;
int annalouise_age = 25;
int bob_age = 250;
int dorothy_age = 56;

And it's supposed to be easier to tell that bob_age is out of place because all of the numbers are in a column. Technically, that's so, but I don't think this is a good way to set things up in any modern programming language.

If you're defining as separate variables four different things, all of the same type but all typed as individual variables of a basic type, then you already have a problem, long before you decide how to align them. If they're that similar that you can easily notice that kind of inconsistency, then those numbers ought to be in some kind of data structure - an array, or they should all be objects or something holding the name and the age. Exactly how to set that up varies by the language and the problem domain, but I can't think of any language where there isn't a better way to do it than that

Meanwhile, things that actually should be separate integer definitions like that don't have any direct connection to each other, and so you can't trivially tell that something is wrong by looking at a column of numbers.
Not a chance. To check my email in the past, I would have had to find a desktop. Now, I pull out my phone. No matter how slow the connection is, it's still going to be orders of magnitude faster than a desktop in many situations.

We've gotten so accustomed to having ubiquitous access, people have forgotten it wasn't always there.
There is Foundation implementation based on CoreFoundation: https://github.com/apportable/Foundation
Have you considered using data from SDR's? There are a lot of ($20-30) DTV sticks that are capable of tuning 400-500mhz...
This is fun! I feel like it is also good practice for logic programming too. Combine the regexes and put one or all possible solutions into each cell of the matrix :)
The standard of living the US achieved circa 1968 / 1974, is unlikely to ever be matched again anywhere on earth by a large nation. The minimum wage at the time was equivalent to roughly $35-40,000 per year today.

The highest (adjusted for inflation) minimum wage in the US was in 1968 and comes out to $10.71/hr in 2013 dollars [1]. That's about $21,500 per year.

Where did you get the $35-40K number?

[1]http://money.cnn.com/interactive/economy/minimum-wage-since-...
In the same genre, I watch this when I need a touch of inspiration. They're quotations from The Pale Blue Dot, again with the Sagan voiceover.

http://vimeo.com/2822787

Often we forget how far we've come, and how far we have to go. It's easy to get bogged down in the minutiae of regular life. When I listen to Carl Sagan sometimes I feel like I've glimpsed a bigger perspective.
I hate NYT Krugman too, but this was excellent:
- http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm
He's also not relying on his own judgment of people's character:

"My wife and Y Combinator cofounder Jessica is one of those rare people who have x-ray vision for character. Being married to her is like standing next to an airport baggage scanner. She came to the startup world from investment banking, she has always been struck both by how consistently successful startup founders turn out to be good people, and how consistently bad people fail as startup founders."

So he's not judging the character of these founders based upon how nice they are to him, but based on Jessica's purported "x-ray vision" for character, which presumably can't be easily fooled by the usual deference seen in the founder/investor relationship. I don't know. But I think the evidence he has access to is a lot greater in extent than the evidence you or I have access to.
Why Enid Blyton's greatest creation was herself
"Sequences of numbers generated by addition in formal groups and new primality and factorization tests", by the Chudnovsky brothers [1].

This paper is incredibly ahead of its time. While elliptic curves in cryptography are usually attributed to Hendrik Lenstra for destructive purposes (ECM factorization), and Koblitz and Miller for constructive purposes in 1985, this paper contains almost everything relevant to practical curve-based cryptography long before everyone else. Highlights include:

- Hessian, Jacobian quartic, and Jacobian intersection curves, and derivation of respective fast addition and doubling formulas; they also comment on the value of unified addition formulas for simplicity.

- The "Montgomery" ladder for "x-only" Jacobian intersections: Peter Montgomery was directly influenced by this paper to produce his curves, and it is easy to see the resemblance.

- The idea of working in genus 2, and formulas for genus 2 Kummer surface doubling. Hyperelliptic curve cryptography was only later proposed by Koblitz in 1987. Almost 3 decades later, Kummer surfaces are now the fastest way to do scalar multiplication on beefy hardware.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01968858869...
It has been on my list of books to read since I saw it on the Incidental Economist blog years ago. Thanks for giving me the push I needed to read it.
I don't think you even need to think of it on the level of genes (because most of the time, chromosomes are inherited whole (barring crossing over)). So you'd just be picking the best combinations of random selection of chromosomes contributed by the parents.

It's like being able to roll 100 times and picking the best one in D&D character creation. The improvement might not be able to be done infinitely, but could at least get us to everyone having IQ 130, which would mean a reduction in all the problems associated with lower IQ. (Crime, poverty, lack of educational achievement, bad health)

i.e. a father has two variants of chromosome 6, one good and one great. Why not make sure that his kids just "by chance" get the great one? There will be lots of tradeoffs, but it'd always be better to occasionally step in and make a choice than to always accept randomness.
His point is that your cute little text entry boxes with buttons don't work in those situations.
This issue was extensively discussed here a few hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8674342
> Banks should sue towns for making roads that bank robbers drive on.

Please don't associate the violent deprivation of property with voluntary exchange violating state frameworks to promote intellectual publication. It is disingenuous to the argument and hurts arguments on both sides of "piracy is bad". If a company is an enabler of violence and actively work to intentionally promote it, of course they should be liable for their behavior.
When will it be acceptable to be a Nazi sympathiser? It's been 80 years now. We know that being a Roman or Viking sympathiser is acceptable 1500 years later. There must be a cutoff time beyond which we think it's not real people anymore.
I'm at the start of a long career and trying to save sacrificially. I know if i over-save i still have it if i need it, but so far every dollar i have put into savings has been on a one-way trip!

I wonder and worry about how to save up for later in life, and who knows what the political landscape will look like then. In my country inflation has been 2.16% on average during the years I've been alive.

Where can I store my money in a way that I know it will be there later whn I need it?

(I'm a little nervous about the bank, one time I had a court order against my bank account so it was drained, and I was beingpaid by cheque, but even when I took my paycheque to the bank to deposit it, until that debt was paid off i couldnt even take out enough for groceries. I want something that cant be taken away at a whim without recourse. I negotiated a deal with the collection agency for a repayment schedule, but they still drained my account 2-3 times after our agreement just because. Oops!)
The best thing about this article is the comments. Here is my favorite comment...

> This page... 95 external javascript requests, 8 different style sheets (all of which are filled with vestigial gunk accumulated over time), 10 different background images. There's 150 lines of commented-out ASCII graphics in the leader... probably more graphics gunk than content. And the javascript is all at the top, killing page rendering. Web pages have become wastelands full of bloat.
Just to bring up something I've been thinking about, Rust would have a lower impedance mismatch with Swift interfaces - memory safe APIs, with a more C-like method syntax, more strongly typed in general (optionals, generics...), more functional (although AFAIK there aren't currently many Swift-specific APIs, as opposed to Objective-C ports), and so on. Its binary module system also matches Rust somewhat better than Objective-C's basically #include based system. Unfortunately, Swift's runtime, aside from being more complicated than Objective-C's, is completely undocumented (and closed-source), so it would take a good bit of reverse engineering to create a bridge.
What I've noticed personally is a lot of sites using absolutely horrible, broken mobile frameworks that seem to be designed with the singular goal of frustrating and annoying the user. I can only imagine the dollar amount sunk into these awful mobile experiences, no doubt implemented by some clueless middle manager scrambling for a "mobile strategy". I literally have seen websites instruct me to "rotate your device" so that I can be shown an ad, only to be rewarded with a completely broken and unresponsive layout afterward.
Well, it's not quite fair to call it a "quote by Sagan".
> If you’re an employee working for salary, it’s going to be hard to reach that level of independence. ... You can try to radically lower your financial burn rate, but few Americans have taken that step.

So many people are quick to dismiss living well within one's means as a way to financial independence. Here's the link to the facts again:

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...

TL;DR: Live on 35% of your after tax income and you're retired in 10 years. Get it down to 25% and you retire in 7.
Extensively discussed in the last few days:

https://hn.algolia.io/#!/story/past_week/prefix/0/shortage%2...
Weekly blog updates from the top 1000 most followed GitHubbers
Aggression is a war crime. There is no chance of a meaningful legal battle; the US has veto power in the UN and exempts itself from the world court.

(for example, the US was found guilty over Nicaragua and basically just ignored it)
Black Friday 1983: What to get for the hacker on your list
Show HN: Acts_as_liked
Millennials Might Be 'Generation Twin.' Is That a Bad Thing?
It's the bloat. I loaded the Wired page linked above with Firefox network logging enabled. Things start out reasonably, with multiple images loading in parallel. Then there's a request to "http://api-us-east.zqtk.net/conde-nast?callback=gotSegmentDa... which takes 932ms. A lot of stuff waits for that to complete. Then about 30 images load, all with content irrelevant to the article. Another 1.2 seconds are required to load some Facebook stuff. Then Disqus starts to load, requiring about 3 seconds. So it takes about 6 seconds to load the page over a reasonably fast DSL connection.

This is with Ghostery blocking 23 (!) trackers and ad services. With Ghostery re-enabled, it takes 56 seconds before page load is completed, and over 6MB of stuff has been loaded via 266 HTTP requests.

That's why the web is slowing down. Any questions?
Show HN: Software is eating real estate commissions
Hi, I'm a long time lurker and an infrequent contributor on HN. When I bought my first house, I was shocked to learn that the seller has to pay a 6% commission to agents, its 1-2% in other countries. This sounded outrageously high to me. I believe there is a huge opportunity in connecting sellers to buyers directly and that we don't really need agents. The app I built is an experiment to see if the idea is valid (I and my cofounder are convinced that it is) and if we can build a business around it. I know the kind of resistance I'll encounter, but I firmly believe this can be done.

Your comments are appreciated!
Excerpt from the Science of Interstellar
Tock taking on OpenTable
I apologize to passers-by for how pedantic this is about to get...

First, I don't care how it was coined. I care how I use it now. No modern speaker of language uses all words as they were first used. We use them as they're understood.

Second, while Web 2.0 was coined in obscurity to mean what you describe, it rose to popularity with the understanding of social features[1].

"Social features" simply mean that users can connect to one another and/or generate the value of the site. YouTube is an example of Web 2.0 because it wasn't a publishing platform for established companies as much as a video-sharing platform, where user-generated content was first-class content.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0#Web_2.0
of course is natural to write, given the proper emacs plugin.
Tock – New Restaurant Ticketing from Alinea
Nice observation. They got that name, of course, because the stars are fixed but the planets "wander" among them.
The selection in Ashkenazi was not done in the same way proposed here - filtering took whole lifetimes. In this system, you compress the whole "live 50 years and have slightly more / fewer children" step into one procedure.

This one is equivalent to picking the best one of 50 naturally occurring children, and raising them alone, every generation.

If Michael Jordan he had 50 children with a similarly elite mother, most of them would regress to the mean - but the best one could conceivably be near his level. If he had only one kid, it's very likely that the kid would regress significantly.

Also, of course there are negatives to high IQ but most of the time, this selection method wouldn't be done for that level. Two people of IQ 100 would be able to reliably have children of IQ 115, and those kids would have happier, longer, healthier lives, with no increased risks. [see the scottish IQ study; iq at age 11 was linked to a lifetime of better outcomes]

That is the real benefit of this technology - to give people the option of gradually bringing out the best of what's already inside themselves. I don't want to be forced to give my kids a random selection of my genes - I want to exercise some control. And of course there could be problems - perhaps +IQ genes might lie next to other, undetected bad genes. But that's random, and we're already completely subject to it.
I quit: Miseries of an Uber driver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_401

Both pilots became so preoccupied with a burnt-out landing gear indicator light that they didn't notice the autopilot had become disengaged, and crashed into the Florida Everglades.
What’s Next For Firefox?
Err maybe I'm misunderstanding this but the pricing says 80% royalty? That means they take 80% of your profits if you sell a book authored in this tool? Is this normal in the book world?

Edit: I think I misread, the writer probably gets 80% royalty.
https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_started

Short version: Open a Vanguard account and invest >=15% of your salary in the appropriate target date fund for the year you want to retire.

P.S. Where possible, become a millionaire in Google's IPO.
Other than earth? I might like to visit there, but I don't
want to live there!

But with the realities, as you outlined,
of visiting, really I wouldn't want to do that, either.

Mars? Okay, send a lot of robots. Let the robots
get a good base going. Let the robots mine Mars
to get fuel for return trips. Let the robots
come and go until it all seems highly reliable.
Go to the trouble to get enough mass for cosmic
ray protection. Let some high risk takers go
and return. Then, maybe, maybe, maybe I'd
consider a visit! But that whole scenario
is not nearly realistic at all soon.
Martian sunset at 1:50 is based on an actual photo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_rover#mediaviewer/File:Ma...

See also gallery here: http://www.erikwernquist.com/wanderers/gallery.html
How to develop Android aplication .
I want to develop an app but I don't know where to start from I tried making it once but I couldn't make it I know c,c++ help me what I should do to make an awesome app.
That's okay, I imagine some people don't browse HN history. It's also pretty damn cool.
When I was a kid I had the Space Shuttle Operator's Manual

http://www.amazon.com/Shuttle-Operators-Manual-Revised-Editi...

which was pretty awesome (it wasn't used for crew training, it's a popularization of what's involved in operating a Shuttle). It also takes you through a pretty substantial number of control switches and indicators, even while simplifying things.

I wonder if there's a way to compare the complexity of the body of knowledge that jet pilots have mastered (this explanation doesn't even go into aerodynamics or flying skills, or the purpose or physics of some of the systems it alludes to, or rules and procedures, or abbreviations or jargon) to what doctors know about bodies, pathology, diagnosis, and medical interventions.
> Think about working for equity vs. salary

It's really common for people to drastically overestimate the value of startup equity, or to just not understand the basic mechanics of it at all. In my experience people look at the face value of their options and are pretty clueless about how taxes (or even their strike price!) affect what they might actually wind up with.
You're not the first person to have this idea. Be sure to look at the various FSBO marketplaces that have failed to disrupt the industry in the past, and try to understand why they failed so you can at least avoid making the same mistakes.
Has anyone tried to store/diff/share code as ASTs...

This is such an interesting idea I had to respond. To point out that it could go well beyond formatting, to variable and function names as well. With an AST-aware editor, I could even have multiple "views" on the same code; e.g., a crunched version with abbreviated names for a high-level view, personally styled library calls, curried functions, all sorts of things.

It wouldn't require too much bookkeeping to track that sort of information per-programmer. I think it's a fascinating idea. I haven't looked into the implementation of syntax highlighting in current editors; I wonder if the infrastructure is already part-way there.
It's important to know that this essay uses "Agile" in an overly broad term that diminishes the importance of other methodologies by denying their existence.

Quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development_process#Ap... :

> Common methodologies include waterfall, prototyping, iterative and incremental development, spiral development, rapid application development, extreme programming and agile methodology

To help understand the context, I'm a RAD practitioner, and dislike how certain aspects have been labeled first as an XP response to waterfall and then as an Agile response to waterfall - even though these aspects of RAD were already decades old.

Laurent Bossavit makes the point quite nicely in http://www.infoq.com/articles/bossavit-agile-ten-years-on :

> How much: the Agile movement has succeeded in overturning many previous orthodoxies. It cannot entirely be credited with the demise of Waterfall; this was already well under way at the time of Boehm's Spiral model, introduced in the late 1980's.

The author of this essay actually knows that it's not "waterfall" vs. "Agile", as seen in https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=d84dff2a-c5cd-463... which is a recommender applet for Spiral, Prototyping, Agile, and Waterfall; which makes the newer essay's simplistic and ahistorical contrast of "agile vs. waterfall" all the more irksome.
Just anecdote, based on experience but if you're in the market size the OP's product is geared towards, asset and operational management often have considerable overlap.
Why funny? biology is coding. 1,0 or A,T,G,C - all the same :-)

Get your genome compiler here: http://genomecompiler.com
Coincidentally, shuffling was the subject of this week's puzzle on "Interview Cake": https://www.interviewcake.com/question/shuffle
Loved the car engine one too! His interview [1] has details on tools and processes used.

[1]: http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/animagraffs-education-a...
You're not thinking clearly here. If violent deprivation of property is worse than voluntary exchange violating state IP frameworks (this seems like an easy sell to me) then banks have a better case for liability against road-builders who enable bank robbers to transport themselves to and from the bank than music publishers do against ISPs who enable music listeners to share songs with each other.

Your sentence

> If a company is an enabler of violence and actively work to intentionally promote it, of course they should be liable for their behavior.

doesn't respond to anything in the parent comment you're allegedly replying to. No one is saying, or thinking, that road builders work to promote robbery by road users. What they are saying, correctly, is that road builders are enablers of violence that otherwise wouldn't occur (ever heard of "highwaymen"?). They're also enablers of more useful, fruitful, and desirable phenomena.
I'm of the opinion that the stock markets are now inherently unstable, and they will continue to crash every 7-10 years. I'm expecting a market crash somewhere between 2015 and 2017. Most of my money is in cash, but I do hold a few select stocks like AAPL, GOOG and TSLA.

I also believe that the stock market is a game, not an investment vehicle. The nature of the market has transformed every since the day trader, quants and HFT have entered the markets. As long as you understand this, then putting money in the markets is fine. If you don't want to be a part of the game, then regular people should buy bonds (not bond funds, but actual bonds that pay interest).

My opinion is that Wall Street has shifted focus since the 80s to trying to convince people to dump their money, all their money, into mutual funds. Then these massive fund managers take their 1-3% in various fees and just move money back and forth. I don't trust Vanguard any more than I trust any of these other large mutual fund companies, and I happen to know a lot of people that work at various asset management companies in the Bay Area. They print money without ever beating the SP500, instead they try to change the equation by claiming they beat the SP500 on a risk-weighted basis, etc. The entire thing is a sham, and as the OP remarked, why do the mutual fund managers have yachts but none of the clients do? It's because they make their money from the hundreds of billions of dollars they skim off the top of their customer funds.
As far as I can tell the only advantage rST has over markdown is that it's better defined. I rarely find that I prefer the rST syntax to markdown.
I agree. It's easy for Matt Cutts to say that you should take more equity, because he has only seen massive success. I've been in the Bay Area exactly as long as he has, and I've had 1 company out of 6 where my options actually made me money. The rest were all worthless.
The Guy Who Proved You Parked Legally
Hedonic adaptation is the devil. You'd hope/intuit that spending more resources would make you happier, but that's just not the way it works. That said, you can use knowledge of this quirk of human psychology to make you richer and more secure compared to your higher-consuming self, not sacrificing any long term contentment or satisfaction to do it. Here's a more in-depth review of the topic[1].

[1] http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/22/what-is-hedonic-ad...
Good luck to you! I hope to stumble across this in the future and see you doing great things :)