skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can already order pizza and flowers and plane tickets myself. However, if you could handle requests like:

Call Comcast for me and have them configure my Cisco
DPC3939B for bridge mode

Go stand in line at the post office and retrieve
my package with tracking #xxxxxxxx

My iPhone's screen is cracked. Take it to the mall
and get somebody to fix or replace it, whichever's
cheaper.

Bring me some Mongolian BBQ with the following
specifications.

... I can see this whole "magic" concept going places. :)
this adds a voice interface to all apps/services that do the fulfillment on the back end.

now you can safely order food to be delivered when driving home. or laundry pickup, or whatever.

"siri, text magic, i want a large pepperoni pizza delivered to my home in 1 hour."
I guess step one is figuring out what this is. Apparently I'm out of the loop, because I have no idea how one earns achievements.
+1 no giant full-width+full-height responsive image

Okay this looks really interesting! And with no full-width+full-height responsive image, I can proceed... it's something different, something not exactly 100% what you would expect...

So intriguing... so what, dear MagicMan, is it? Would you kindly answer dear Sir, because I'm uncertain, and curiously in need of an answer before I text myself down the rabbit hole...

IT JUST LOOKS SO INTERESTING!!! ;-)
The User Experience of Language Design
Have fun and travel.

By having a part time job in .Net you are already so far ahead of at least most of the people who were in my graduating cohort. If coding is fun for you then you can do that, if its not as fun as going to parties or traveling, do that instead. Unfortunately, unless you work absolutely stupidly hard, you will end up at the same type of companies regardless of how much work you put into your resume.

Contributing to Open Source and having a top notch github/stack overflow profile are so overrated. It is really annoying that some companies keep asking for them. In the real world every single piece of code you write is kept under lock and key, and i'm sure thats going to be the case at the places you are applying for.
I deleted my tweets about it, b/c really it's no the mode. We won't have it.
->
But brass rings of history, history's dustbin for OBL. Thought nothing of it at the time (who could?). But then a later terrorist, the same response from politicians: let us forget these people. Same w/ crimes, publicize the victims, not the doers. But it fails since people are violent and like to learn about the violent.
Certainly not. In fact during the Female Founders Conference today Jessica mentioned that there's someone in the current batch who's in their late 60's.

Assuming you don't squander your early years starting older has some advantages. When you're older you've likely built some domain expertise, have a better idea of what you want from life, and can support yourself better.

For example, I started in my late 20's. By that time I'd saved a lot of money, built steady passive income, was married (wife's career keeps her busy), and didn't have any kids. Since most other areas of my life were taken care (especially financial) of I could pour myself into my startup without worrying about raising money or runway.

That said, remember that wanting to feel "the excitement of a start-up" is the wrong reason to join or start one. Before quitting your job I'd highly recommend just starting a side project and do it for at least 6 months before making any major decisions. It's very unglamorous and odds are you won't even launch a product, which is fine. Better to learn that now than after you quit your job because 35 isn't too old to start a startup but it is too old to be unemployed.
Bash: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/builtins/echo...

ZSH: http://sourceforge.net/p/zsh/code/ci/a4ff8e69570cbdb8e7d5bf1...
"A recent autopsy study reported on 314 African American and 211 Caucasian (sic) men aged 20–80 years who died of trauma in Detroit, USA. Microscopic evaluation in each case was based on 10–14 whole-mount step sections that were 2–3 mm thick.4 This study demonstrated a high prevalence of prostate cancer that increased progressively with advancing age and was similar at all ages in African American compared with Caucasian men (around 10%, 30%, 40%, 45%, 70% and 80% in the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th decades, respectively). When this ubiquity of microscopic prostate cancer is placed in the context of lifetime risks of clinical or fatal prostate cancer (about 10% and 3%, respectively for a man aged 50 years in the USA),5 these data indicate that local or distal progression of early cancer is far from inevitable within a man's lifetime. Put another way, only a minority of prostate tumours are highly aggressive and life-threatening, while the majority are slow-growing and indolent."
> The first time you use Magic, we'll ask for your credit card info, your address, etc.

Etc? Really?
Think about the Army. MOSes in 25 series and 35Q and 35T would be interesting to you. All computer stuff. 35Q would have you doing pentesting. Go talk to a recruiter if you're not older than 35.

Source: I am in the Army. It's not nearly as bad as you'd think.
Yes, that's where the garlic is.

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrs...
> He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him.

It must get really tiring, carrying such a heavy chip on the shoulder. How is anybody supposed to know she's Jewish? If they did know and modified their behavior accordingly, they might end up being called bigoted. Is there any way to win this one in Richards's book?

"Could be inferred as offensive to me" -- wow. Again, how is anybody supposed to know what could offend you? If this is the standard for offense, it looks like the only winning move in communication is not to do any at all.

I'd feel worse about dredging this up so many months later, but Richards is active on Twitter lately arguing about it, so I'm not really opening old wounds. Maybe she has a legitimate beef about the exact timeline and chain of cause and effect as reported in the article, but righting that would really not make her look significantly better IMO. She dug her hole deeper in this new interview (at least the way it's presented to us), regardless of small errors it may have about the post.

P.S. Even if this is their fault for offending her with the joke, it doesn't follow that it's right for people to lose jobs over it. The article seems to suggest she intended that ("... people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes, I did.") Her justification for this disproportionate response is some mishmash of the offense, race, gender, and that the offender wasn't mentally retarded (seriously.)

"No one would have known he got fired until he complained... Maybe he’s to blame for complaining that he got fired." I can agree that it probably would have not turned so ugly if this fact hadn't come out. But this is not a card Richards can play without hypocrisy, IMO. They both experienced something negative in relative private, that provoked an emotional response that led them to post publicly about, that caused the "righteous pitchfork mobs" to react. If Richards had the right to tweet about the joke, "Hank" had the right to post his own negative aftermath on Hacker News. She found out the sword of righteous crusading on the internet cuts both ways, but does not admit her part in it.

Also, to be clear, I in no way condone the threats to Adria Richards and have mixed feelings about her losing her job.
She was a "developer evangelist" which is really more of a people-person type of job. I feel the same way about her as about the other woman that Ronson wrote about: they didn't deserve to be mobbed, but considering that their job was effective communication I'm not surprised they'd find it hard to find work after demonstrating terrible skills at communicating.
> It is nice to have a single complication target now.

I'm not sure if this was a typo or intentional but I like it.
The other thing technology lets you do is specialize, which includes specialization in technologies of distribution, allocation, search, and fulfilment.
Take quote from the Wire, use on HN. Still quite the arbitrage! :)
Hehe I went in fully expecting GNU to have managed making something as simple as echo.c relatively complex and with inconceivable options. Was not disappointed. They probably even managed to include a GNUism or two.
Its also refreshing that afore mentioned good copy got right to the point and told us what they do. No silly vaguenesses about a coming awesome product that they never really describe and then some email sign-up so that they can notify you when they actually have something to sell you.

Just what they can do for me right now. Hat's off. Good luck.
slightly overkill on the coloring ;)
Who do I talk to about adding Lugg to the list of services? http://lu.gg
It's amazing what's possible on old hardware. My favorite example is probably the remake of the wonderful second reality demo. The original was released in 1993 for the PC (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA). And then there's the C64 version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gbnlho7w3U) which was released 1997.
Looking at the history of echo.c in the freebsd tree[1] is pretty interesting too. Seems before this [2] commit (apparently fixes for performance with many arguments) it was pretty simple.

[1]: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/bin/echo/echo...

[2]: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commit/cbf5708f4336b824b8...
They can do this in New York as well, they get 95% of their water from gravity fed sources - so much that they have to install periodic pressure-breaks as the water comes down from mountains to avoid too much pressure in the system.
I'm curious how they are scaling on the financials side. I'm assuming they are paying for the things ordered off of their personal CC's and with the sudden spike in requests and the long delay of getting money back into their account, I wonder how far they will go.

A blog post after all of it cools down would be a fun read. :)
So I ordered a pizza last night(not through your service) and I had to call them after an hour because it didn't arrive and they misplaced the order. How would you handle such a situation?
Presumably there are things they would like to talk about that are not interesting to others. For instance, maybe childbirth and pregnancy are something they care about. Honestly, maybe some things that are not as important to non-founders and men.

It's just a different forum. The same way we don't discuss mountain climbing on debian-dev. Anyway, that said, that's not why I considered down modding. It's because this argument plays out each time and it's annoying. It's another vi v. Emacs. So let's try to get something even slightly more novel out of this.
Which other talents do you have?

I would also ask myself the following questions:

Do you really wan't a job (employed by a company), or you just need one?

Have you thought that maybe your talents are not appreciated in the corporate world?

One must consider that the recruitment system is broken, or do we really believe that with a written one page document and a brief phone call, we can screen people and dimension their whole personality?

I have asked these questions myself because I relate to your situation. My advice: Just be productive every day, and this means to create things that you think might be useful to somebody.

And yes, not everyone has the ability to speak the language of the corporate world. Just try to find the people you can work with best. Maybe you're best suited to be an entrepreneur or a workshop guy building stuff and experimenting.

Also, a new family is not a small thing, it changes many things in our lives, it unbalances us in many ways, certainly in the economic one. But don't despair because this too is a great thing that is already pushing you to your limits and thus providing the opportunity to improve yourself.

Consider this your life quest.
Reminds me of this:
https://twitter.com/Steve_Yegge/status/372156022913122304
Yup, love that show.

"Shit is just business, String. Buy for a dollar, sell for two. That’s all it need be."

Proposition Joe
why? Do you lack imagination?
We can do some of these things, and a lot of stuff like this. give it a shot. :)
We can't do everything in Canada but we can definitely do some things. Try us.
Show HN: Crushing Our Crowdfunding Campaign (The Love Game)
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/a-game-for-falling-in-love/x/571421

This project got it's start on HackerNews a little over a month ago and has gone on to be featured by TechCrunch, Forbes, ABC, CBS, even "Liked" by Mark Zuckerberg..

The Love Game™ app is now a print BOOK in the Amazon store as well as a card game we are fundraising for on indiegogo.

We were at about 60% of our goal this AM, and then indiegogo featured us in their daily email and the backers have been pouring in since. We are now at 143% of our goal and they keep coming.

Thinking for any HACKERNEWS backers I'll host a private ~1-2 hour google hangout, break down the entire story from idea to posting on hacker news, to the crazy press, to the physical product, to the book, etc. and answer any questions people have and help you all in anyway I can. If you back the project, just let me know you want the HACKERNEWS deal.

Thanks again for the inspiration and support!

Links...

The Love Game™ - Card Game Crowdfund:
http://bit.ly/thelovegame

The Love Game™ - Book:
http://bit.ly/lovegamebook

Forbes:
http://bit.ly/lovegameforbes

TechCrunch:
http://bit.ly/lovegametc

Original HN Post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8869305

The Original Love Game App:
LoveActualized.com

With Deep Love & Infinite Gratitude,
Anthony David Adams
Future Developments in Power Electronics
We do exactly what you would do if you're being completely proactive...just behind the scenes so you don't have to worry about it. We call the pizza place, call the driver, deal with the annoyance. You just relax and wait for your pizza.
This could totally be automated, text recognition handles the easy cases where ordering can be done via the internet, the rest is handled by humans.

The user confirmation makes sure the automation didn't screw something up, and if the user doesn't responds positively to a certain threshold then humans take over. The threshold can be dynamic depending on accuracy of text recognition.
Best app? No app.
They aren't paying with the products they buy online with their customers CC though. That's what I was getting at. Since they don't have access to their customers CC on the websites they're purchasing these services/items from they are having to pay with it and then get reimbursed essentially with their "convenience fee" on top.
We also handle things that WunWun doesn't, like booking plane tickets, making reservations, paying bills, etc.
Simplicity at its best. Quite stark and simple landing page. Simple service. Seems like no gimmicks. I would say I am looking forward to give it a try!
I'm obviously way behind the times here, but... what the heck have they done to Javascript?!

Anyway... the worst case run-time of any algorithm I think is size-squared -- you have to look at every square. If you ever touch the same square twice, since the state of each square is constant, you have a loop. Therefore, either you use a bitmap to see if you've been there before, or just check if a move counter is greater than size-squared.

If someone spent an hour discussing this problem in an interview, even if it seemed intelligible, honestly I doubt I would want to pursue it further.
Show HN: CORSProxy replacement
I imagine if this thing sticks around, they'll eventually be able to automate simple things like the pizza ordering and whatnot. I imagine it could call back to a human in case of issues, such as:

Requester: "I want two pepperoni pizzas, one with extra cheese."

AI Response: "I can have 3 pizzas, two pepperoni, and one cheese (with extra cheese), delivered from Dominos for $24.15"

Requester: "No, I wanted two pepperoni pizzas, with extra cheese on one of them"

Human steps in after the "no" is detected: "Sorry, I misunderstood your request, I can get two pepperoni pizzas with extra cheese on one of them for $16.50 from Dominos"

Requester: "Yes, thanks."

======

It'll just be a matter of time as the automation spreads to less and less mundane topics.
The users put a card on file with Stripe. Is there a way to use that info through Stripe to make a payment to the vendor? (and a separate charge to Magic for the service fee, maybe?)

I assume bitcoin is going through Stripe as well, though if not, that money could come to Magic more quickly. The problem then is that the vendors likely don't accept bitcoin...
The font on the new page much better.
I'm not entirely sure what Alex meant there, but I think his comment there was that the only way to be able to make use of this (at least until user namespace support lands in Docker) is for the user to have effective root on the system. So even if the sandboxing works, it's being done at a cost of requiring that, outside the sandbox, the users have an easy and passwordless way to gain root. This not only gives apps way more power than they had in the event of a sandbox escape mechanism (like the X11 socket), it also gives every unsandboxed app on the system way more power.

It's kind of like the general distaste for setuid binaries. If you have a correctly-written setuid binary, then you can use it to sandbox a process by, say, running it in a chroot. But if it's not correctly written, you have problems on your hands that far outweigh the problem you were originally trying to solve. So a random desktop app that ships with a setuid helper binary is going to be seen with suspicion. (Chrome is the only one I can think of that ships one, but they probably employ the people most qualified to write a bug-free setuid app, and they're getting rid of it in favor of user namespaces anyway.)

Of course, for the average developer desktop, processes probably have fifteen ways to gain passwordless root anyway. I certainly set sudo to nopasswd for convenience. :) So on a developer desktop, it's a nifty hack, although it doesn't gain you security against a malicious app/exploit. But as a general-purpose sandboxing approach, it's a bad tradeoff to make.
Realized what you meant and deleted and revised my comment. In any case, I can't imagine their personal credit cards handling any actual volume, not to mention the fraud protection issues with orders for deliveries all over the country.
This reminds me of an opinion that I have which I've been looking for an opportunity to flesh out and share. Despite all of the research and engineering that's gone into the user interface (and "experience") of smartphones, text messaging as an interface has one massive advantage: the perceived cost of sending a text is miniscule in comparison to other operations. I don't have units, but it's probably an order of magnitude lower in any reasonable ones.

Maybe I'm projecting onto "the general public" when I make this generalization, but performing operations on a smartphone (aside from call/text) are oft accompanied by the very real risk of squandering your time away. Especially when a browser is involved.

There is something elegant about the interface of a dumb phone, especially a flip phone: You pull it out of your pocket, whip it open, type your text, send it. And then crucially, you flip it closed and stop thinking about it. This is the key. You're using it when you're using it, and you're not when you're not.

Even grander generalization and possibly controversial opinion: I hope that consumer technology begins to cater more to those of us who wish to use technology in this way - as a tool that you pull out of your pocket and promptly put away upon achieving your ends.
This is interesting but dated at this point. There are some interesting (and some dubious) trial results and better models as well, speaking as someone who wrote one of them. It's still a matter of some controversy whether PSA screening protocols lead to unacceptable overdiagnoses and treatment.
As cool as the technology behind this is, I'm going to be that guy that is very glad the soundtracks from classic SNES games sound the way they do vs. how this demo sounded.

I guess the point of this is more about how to push the SNES hardware to its limits in ways never done -- and again, that's super cool. But give me the likes of Chrono Trigger, FFIV/VI, and Super Castlevania IV over this any day.
Actually, we are building web-first. We believe we'll be able to optimize enough locally by caching files in a bundle and intercepting requests PhoneGap style. We've already tried it, but here's the web (non-cached) version:

http://qbixstaging.com/Groups

Built with http://platform.qbix.com
You said you created it a few days ago. Do you happen to have many helping hands to handle the deluge of messages you will be getting? Coz first impression is going to be the last impression.
How was your experience with offerletter.io? My package is kind of good already. Will offerletter.io help it push further up?
Can you share what kind of strategies you have applied to negotiate more?
I am in India and I want to send a gift to my friend in the US. Possible?
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/09/speed-a...

"Chetan Sharma counted the total active SMS user base is now up to 5.9 Billion humans or 91% of all mobile phone owners, in May of 2012. So SMS is nearly 6 times larger by reach than Facebook. SMS is 3 times bigger than TV and has 2.5 times more reach than email. As less people place voice calls from their mobile phones than send SMS text messages, this is the most used telecommunication method - and most used digital media - on the planet. Yes, humble little SMS."

Open Standard -> broker -> Walled Gardens?
you could have a feature on the front page that takes 3 stories from the new feed an displays them at the bottom of the front page for users that are above some "wisdom karma threshold" similar to the downvote threshold. if you want to provide some checks and balances to the 3 stories you could include one that is flagkilled but is not distinguished as such to the user and see what the user does with that story.

You can also have stories with more text behind them as an indicator of quality. While long stories could be gamed, I think it's a decently helpful metric of quality as most spammers are lazy enough not to write a long article. not a perfect metric but something to consider.
The first step is just to have backend software make a first pass at the texts and make suggestions to the rep. As it get better, it increases the throughput for the human rep. Like most automation, it becomes about making a human more productive, and that's a lot easier to accomplish.
Looks like Plan 9 and FreeBSD are the only ones to correctly handle write errors. The others just silently ignore them. I guess the moral is "Don't rely on echo to save important data."

Also, the comment…

/* This utility may NOT do getopt(3) option parsing. */

… which appears in two of them certainly cries out for an explanation. Was it true in NetBSD? Is it still true? Will people call us names if we do?

Update: bash does not handle errors. zsh might, it checks the result of fclose() or if stdout, fflush(). I'm not sure that is sufficient after ignoring all the fwrite() and fputc() errors. Plus it's in an 850 line function and my monitor is only 20" tall, so I'm not following all of it.

Update2: asveikau is correct. The only ones to attempt error handling miss short reads. FreeBSD also misses EAGAIN/EINTR handling. Plan9 doesn't need that, but its man page explicitly states that short writes should be considered errors by the caller.

I guess it's official. The unix read/write system calls are too complicated to be used by experts in the operating system. (I've rather thought that for some time now.)
I just entered some repo, and there was this delete button... So I clicked and it worked. Oops.