skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Where can one find a mentor?
I've started a collaborative effort with a few of my high school friends. We are all currently in college, with no plans of dropping out. We are all interested in starting our own company in the near future. So for now, we are working together on our side projects which have commercial value. (Which we probably would have never finished on our own) Our viewpoint is that if the product does take off, we can then quickly capitalize on it, and if it doesn't, we have a basis for a good portfolio.

So currently we are "practicing" how to collaborate (we are spread all over the world), talk to customers, and develop.

I was wondering if there was anywhere/anyone we could go, to help us make better decisions.
Spaceengine – explore the galaxy
"a free space simulation program that lets you explore the universe in three dimensions, from planet Earth to the most distant galaxies."

I always liked the idea to explore the universe virtually and being able to land seamlessly on planets. This was really something i hoped come to Star Citizen or Elite Dangerous. But seems there are already some nice indie Sim Engines out there.
HTML5 Video and the End of Plugins
Wow, no, it was meant as praise! He's sly, clever, witty... just what I like.

If you have seen the play, you'll see what I meant about the deliberate misuse of the phrase. Most people without a classical education misunderstand and misuse the phrase (and have for centuries) which Stopard slyly twisted for comic effect. (OK, it's snobbish, but really, any domain-intensive joke is snobbish to people who aren't fluent in the domain. You can make such a joke without mocking the people who don't get it.)

The point is to highlight in an amusing way the way memes mutate.

For example the book "The Ugly American" made a really important point about foreign aid, anticommunism etc...but people read the title and used the phrase completely backwards. OK, the new meaning also makes sense but completely misses the important point made by the book.

Or people who use the phrase "the third world" and don't realize it's a French Revolution reference. Which causes them to make useful retroformations like "the second world" which sound ontologically bizarre but actually perfectly sensible if you can forget where the term came from.

And speaking of "et in Arcadia ego"...well let's say that only the misunderstood interpretation adds an undercurrent of humor to HN story from yesterday (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-arcadia-i... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8707913 ).

Speaking of snobbishness and reverse snobbishness: liking puns about group theory, lambda calculus, or loop optimization doesn't preclude liking puns in dead languages about ancient philosophers. Or vice versa. The Two Cultures are alive and well but it doesn't mean anyone is compelled to live that way.
The sad reality is that even if you read a book a week or a book every few days, you would never be able to read the top X books. Life is about choices; you will have to choose.

You already know who you are. Focus on relationships and finding out about who people are.

An old adage: people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Meditation will help you. If you don't already do it - volunteer your time and skills. Especially to teach those who might not be as confident as you.

Good luck!
As many people in Portland, Ore., left work to return home on Friday evening, Uber, the ride-hailing start-up, began offering rides in that city for the first time, despite loud protests from local officials who have deemed the service illegal.
"proprietary format specifications"? This is Sony Pictures, what sort of "proprietary format specification" would you get from Adam Sandler movies?
The article talked a lot about the leftist/statist hatred of suburbs, but never gave the real reason why. Suburbs aren't dense enough and humans are the scourge of the planet.
Why is this here? What's the relevance?

For those who don't know, Derrida was a French postmodern intellectual charlatan with absolutely no redeeming qualities.

A good example of what one should strive not to become.
This is a particularly disgusting instance of Germanophobia. I guess that tens of millions of people use the German language every day makes you uncomfortable, as well?
You definitely uncovered genuine niche market. Does it scale? I.e. do you offer franchising opportunities for horse farms?
That's something different -- share buybacks are the same as dividend payments.
The "Third World" is a Cold War, not French Revolution reference. There may have been a use of the term in the context of the French Revolution, but the use that has evolved into a reference to less-developed countries mutated from a term for nonaligned countries in the Cold War which was detached from any similar term that may have been used in the context of the French Revolution.
Portland Oregon does something similar on a much smaller scale. To prevent the sewage system from being overwhelmed in periods of heavy rain, they've installed "swales" and stormwater planters [1] that redirect the water into the ground. I've walked around in the rain and the difference is remarkable--typical curb drains would be overflowing with water, while the drains near the swales and planters would be dry.

[1] http://www.oregonmetro.gov/sites/default/files/rain_gardens_...
Get hired by  blockchain and make 2500$/month. Here’s how you do it
> a giant background image

why would you do this
I am not talking about mmap() vs write() here. That is just ordinary propaganda. There is a lot of powerful ideas at work there. The two that I know about:

1) Compiling config file into an .so object.

2) Using innovative priority queue (heap) implementation: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327

Varnish userbase is the best proof for its quality though.
I didn't have the same reaction, but I get the reference. Quoting Wikipedia:

>The term Übermensch was used frequently by Hitler and the Nazi regime to describe their idea of a biologically superior Aryan or Germanic master race;[13] a form of Nietzsche's Übermensch became a philosophical foundation for the National Socialist ideas. Their conception of the Übermensch, however, was racial in nature.[14][15] The Nazi notion of the master race also spawned the idea of "inferior humans" (Untermenschen) which could be dominated and enslaved; this term does not originate with Nietzsche.
Howdy - so at the time of the ledger fork, the Foundation was running all 5 of the validating nodes and there were other parties not associated with us that were running non-validating nodes.

We do not have the ability nor do we want the ability to control other people's nodes.

Since Stellar only launched 4 months ago, the number nodes in the network was still small. In the future, when the network is on the new consensus system and able to run safely in a truly decentralized, then it would be up to individual nodes to decide what to do.

Hope that clarifies things.
Rather than working with city officials and lawmakers, they're just ignoring them and doing whatever the hell they want. That is thuggish behavior.
That's kind of saying you don't like bikinis because of [1]...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads
Yes, we all understand that resources are limited
So what happens if you put the "disk file" on tmpfs?

Personally, I have more than enough RAM now and I no longer need virtual memory. I do not need a "disk" or other secondary storage in order to retrieve and consume data.

I consider virtual memory a relic from an earlier era of limited computing resources, like "user accounts" designed for an era of time-limited use of prohibitively expensive, shared computers.

We now all have our own _personal_ computers and GB's of RAM, but we still have use kernels with builtin solutions designed to address issues of scarce, expensive, shared computers and scarce, expensive RAM.
It seems to me that this article is conflating two issues that aren't necessarily related in a kind of strange way:

First, the understandable misfortune of the naming conflict, which appears to go beyond just the calling issue (for example the listed suing of the wrong party).

Second, it uses this as a strange segue way to criticize Uber for not having phone support. Now if you believe that Uber should have phone support that's fine -- but its kind of unrelated to this person's troubles. By that I mean, had she happened to not name her company uber, then this wouldn't all of a sudden make their lack of phone support OK right? So if what you want to do is say Uber should have phone support, then this seems like a really strange primary point.

As an aside -- their email support has always been stellar to me, and I actually have the opposite complaint of other companies: I'd PAY to be able to get a prompt < 1 hour email reply from comcast vs. the "intimate interaction" of wanting to break my table when I'm on the phone with a real life person from their team.
I don't want to see my neighbor's kids coming home in a box with a flag on it.

Sure, the elite starting these wars for profit are bastards.

But, let's protect the people we ask to protect us. Sometimes, other people do start the fights, and we still need a military unless we want to be run (eventually) by somebody else with a better military.

Work to change who is picking our fights for us, but don't begrudge the people doing the fighting some help.
I don't think the core of a good developer has changed much since the early 90s. You still want people whose skill-set is T-shaped... You want them to go deep on at least a few domains, but you want them to have broad experience in lots of them.

I think Michael's point was that a senior developer might have a very different idea of what constitutes "deep" to a junior developer.

By the standards of a 20 year industry veteran, a six month project they worked on three years ago using language X might not even make X worth mentioning unless it was specifically asked for, next to the half-dozen languages they already show where they have 5+ years of experience including shipping multiple projects in each one.

By the standards of a junior 2 years out of school, a six month project working in language X last year might make it one of their top two languages and get presented as "expert-level" understanding. These are the people who tend to list fifteen programming languages, because they used each of those languages for about five minutes on a toy project during their CS course.
"Lonely Woman" is one of the most iconic and haunting melodies in jazz.

I'm glad that the interview explains where its title came from. Though, I'd always assumed it must have come from a much darker place.

Also, this quote is a gem:

OC: I had a niece who died in February of this year and I went to her funeral, and when I saw her in her coffin, someone had put a pair of glasses on her. I had wanted to call one of my pieces She was sleeping, dead, and wearing glasses in her coffin. And then I changed the idea and called it "Blind Date."
Waking Up on Pluto's Doorstep: New Horizons Comes Out of Hibernation
They often have similar effects but no, they are not[1].

This notwithstanding, you stated unequivocally that "share prices are not something you can 'grow'" when it is evident that companies have a number of tools at their disposal that can be used quite effectively to manipulate share price, especially over shorter periods of time and in certain kinds of markets.

[1] http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2014/09/stock-buybacks-t...
Cached version to those who cannot access the resource:

https://web.archive.org/web/20141206170332/https://www.gmo.c...
I am not exactly sure what the lesson is here. It's just another negative piece about the impersonal and cutthroat business practices of Uber. Yet in spite of all the negative press the company is valued at $40 billion and continues to grow. In the presence of alternatives like Lyft and even just regular cabs which are almost always cheaper than Uber why do people continue to use Uber?
A few years ago I wrote a genetic algorithm to solve a travelling salesman problem - it was a ton of fun - I need to port it to JS one day.

Ive also thought about making an algorithm that would breed JS programs to solve basic tasks - sort an array of input or find the longest consecutive group of numbers. Maybe one day I'll find the time.
Martial arts are 1) interval training in disguise and 2) strength endurance training in disguise.

Kata practicing is an exercise in explosive power over long period (several minutes), thus strength endurance training.

All MA training I attended interspersed action with rest. Thus interval training.
Three features of successful CEO and founder teams
2014 version was in September. See https://toool.nl/LockCon and https://blackbag.toool.nl/?p=2485 for a report.
Demography Is Rewriting Our Economic Destiny
As a native speaker, it sounds nothing but cheesy or big-headed to me in a company name but if your connotation makes you afraid you should stay away from using some italian prepositions as well.
This could be effectively read in tandem with Bryan Caplan's book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/0465...
Canadian Law Enforcement Dropping ISP Subscriber Cases
The argument that US nuclear power projects face the same regulatory challenges as "every other industry" is completely untenable. There is an entire regulatory body (the NRC) charged with managing regulations for that one particular method of power generation. This fact alone is enough to refute it.

There is also an argument that the "regulatory ratcheting" from the NRC is due to political pressure rather than engineering principles[0].

Finally it is hard to read former chairman Gregory Jaczko's recent comments about Fukushima and not conclude that the NRC was, and quite possibly still is, actively opposing the nuclear industry with an ultimate goal of shutting it down[1].

[0] http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html

[1] http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-ex-nuclear-chief-fukushima...
I'm a bit disappointed -- surely there must be something juicier in this trove than bog-standard corporate bitching and admissions that their worst talent is, uh, the worst.

To be honest, these emails actually paint a fairly good picture of Sony: they know they're saddled with crap, they know they are not executing as well as they should, and they're even trying to increase their original output and reduce formulaic content. Some of the material even looks uninformed: MIB3 might not have made a profit but that's likely because of "hollywood accounting", most of that money probably ended up at Sony subsidiaries anyway; $600m revenue couldn't disappear even in Will Smith's deep pockets.

I'm actually more inclined to cut them some slack now, than I was when the silly North-Korean movie was announced.
So Vidra is going to break shit. I guess that is what he means by vertical integration. You throw a venerable magazine vertically downwards into the shithole. We are the 100,000 (subscribers) who matter apparently, so cancel your TNR and let's move on. How's that for breaking shit?
Write it all down.

What do you need to do? What do you want to do? What things don't really matter to you?

Organize it on paper or whatever medium makes sense. I like OneNote and Trello. I've found its one of the easiest ways to remove those thoughts from the back of my mind is to put them someplace actionable and consistent. A stream of consciousness todo list isn't very productive.

With regards to instapaper or readability, either:

a) Treat it as a bookmarking service, not a read-later service. Then reference it when a topic comes of importance to what you wrote down above or you're just bored.

b) Clear out all 800 articles and start over, possibly being more selective or auto-clearing them monthly.

These are both things the brain does naturally, pruning through attention and focus and long-term storage for future reference :)

EDIT: Formatting
Actually, it's turning out to be this generation's TFX, which was supposed to do all the missions of the F-22 and F-35 except V/STOL. It was eventually reduced to one plane, the F-111: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-111_Aardvar... See The Strategy of Technology for many more details: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/Strat.html
> A language that is brief and concise gives you fewer opportunities to make mistakes

I don't think that's necessarily true. Look at brainfuck!

But in all seriousness, dynamically typed languages could be categorized as "more expressive" than statically typed languages, and generally allow for cleaner interfaces, but turns static-typing compile-time errors into dynamic run-time errors. What's worse is that your tests might not cover the specific conditions that cause it. So, while you might consider C++ less expressive and concise than Python, at least you'll never try to take the square root of a string.

The ease of writing bug-free code and debugging depends on a lot of factors. How well designed is the interface/API? How structured is the code? How good are the available tools? It's not what language you use, but /how/ you use it.
No. Doctors do not follow the field.

Most doctors I know still advise not eating after 6pm, while it has been shown to be either worthless or even plain ineffective.
Show HN: Uncoverly – The best, most unique products on Etsy
If she hadn't named her company über, then we wouldn't have the convenient source of data about people who want to call. Since that data exists, it seems reasonable to write an article about it, and briefly explain at the top how it came to be that we have so many people trying to reach Uber instead reaching the same phone.
I can say with high confidence that I've probably written more XSLT then any of the commentators here ... respect completely their right to hate/love/ignore any tech, but many of the comments here are based on very little fact.

* first bugbear - XSLT is not an implementation of lisp (or insert lang here), we shouldn't care if it implements said language well or not

* XSLT is extremely well (saxon) implemented in some processors and poorly in others ... unsure what that has to do with the language itself.

* XSLT has more implementations then a lot of other popular languages (Ruby, Perl, python come to mind), that doesn't make it better (or worst) then those languages ... its just a fact.

* there are no security vulnerabilities in the design of XSLT that I am aware about (well, there are, and most certainly are in implementations, but at that level I can call out issues with every language and its processor(s)) ... stating it is insecure by design is rubbish

* anyone using XSLT v1.0 should know that there has been, for years, an XSLT v2.0 production ready version in the form of saxon-ce (w/ appropriate open source license) ... I can't explain why folks insist on using XLST v1.0, some are doing so cause they can't migrate to XSLT v2.0, many of them are unaware of new options.

I can understand why folks find XSLT hard, or hurts their brain or makes them want to cringe at the mention of an angle bracket ... teaching basic programming idioms is hard for most people, learning fp principles is even more of a bender (esp if you come from OO world) ... XSLT template matching is a powerful mechanism which allows one to perform transformations with a succinct set of matching rules ... but yes it is verbose and like many languages, XSLT has its ugly points to the language.

If you are allergic to angle brackets, then any language that uses them is going to be anathema to them, but every person I've known who have learned XSLT became a better programmer for it. Thats my own personally biased single data point observed 'fact'.
“This document is currently being used in production at several large sites,
but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to
permit of healing, and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory
reinspires all the original horror.”

Sounds like J2EE.
This is absolutely correct.

"Cracker" is a very specific term that relates to those who hack static files, by breaking encryption, etc. A cracker might discover a back-door, but if they exploit it to access a running server, that's not cracking, that's hacking.

Hacker is a general term which can apply to white-hat hackers and black-hat hackers alike. It means anyone that breaks things apart to see how they work, then puts them back together in a way that does something they weren't designed to do. That could mean getting Mario to run on a Ti-83+, or getting root on someone else's server.

Unfortunately, while we have the words cracker and phreaker for particular subsets of hacking, the subset that tends to get itself a lot of negative publicity by hacking into computers doesn't have any special name associated with it.

As a hacker (in the HN sense), I don't have a problem with this. The meaning is always pretty clear from the context. All it means is if you say "I'm a hacker" to someone, you better be prepared to explain what you mean. But if you say that, you're setting yourself up for a pretty geeky conversation anyway, which many won't appreciate.

Hackers that hack into computers aren't necessarily all black hat either. It's perhaps less common nowadays, but a lot of hackers just do it to see if they can, or to see what they can find on networks, simply out of curiosity. The latter is the defining characteristic of all hackers.
Maybe extend the offer to other kinds of poop? There was a man which had some experiences with this niche: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist's_Shit
> I suspect it will take massive disgruntlement to fuel an equally massive lawsuit in order to get any of them to change.

As I noted, there are already lawsuits targeting some of these startups and there are prominent class action attorneys who have publicly stated that they're eying some of the startups that haven't yet been sued.

To file a class action, plaintiff's counsel needs as little as one lead plaintiff. If and when class certification occurs, plaintiff's counsel represents all members of the certified class. Members of the class who don't wish to be a part of the class must opt out. In other words, you do not need "massive disgruntlement" to have an attractive class action. Even the largest of class actions frequently have just a handful of named plaintiffs.

Note that there are practical reasons class action attorneys have not rushed to sue all of these companies. One of them: with their rapid growth, the number of potentially misclassified independent contractors is increasing quickly. Given the applicable statutes of limitations, patience can be rewarded with a larger class and damages that span a greater period of time.
In truth, I had the same reaction and I expect the downvoters are unacquainted with the associations to Nietzsche's concept of ubermench and its appropriation by the Nazi's as well as the phrase in the German national anthem "Deutschland uber alles" which was mistranslated intentionally by the allies for propaganda purposes (per Wikipedia: German grammar is sufficiently precise to distinguish "über alles" i.e. above everything (for me), from "über allen", meaning "above everyone else". The latter misleading translation was purposely chosen by the Allies during the First World War for propaganda purposes.)

Anyway, because of those associations, my view of Uber the company is that it has chosen to market itself for those better than the unwashed masses, the rabble, the hoi polloi. This may of course have not been their intent with their marketing, but that, FWIW, is where I go unconsciously when I hear the name.