skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
very nice. One tangential question, the example svg maps are not created in the browser. How are these typically created?

When I make SVGs they are typically either plots made with a plotting tool, or paths created from tracing or done purely by hand.
In my opinion, the best way to consume the news is weekly or even monthly. Give the journalists time to digest and process the news, figure out what's important, and time to write well thought out articles and summary.

I like the Economist for that -- there's a 2 page "world news" digest section in every issue. Some weeks that's all I read. But when I have more time there are also in depth, well written, well edited and unabashedly opinionated articles in the rest of the issue. (I really hate the fake neutrality in most journalism)

What would be really nice would be something similar for national and local news.
Ask HN: Would anyone like to be interviewed / run an interview?
Hi HN,

I'm one of the founders of http://taaalk.co/, a platform for observable conversations about interesting things and between interesting people.

Here's an example of a Taaalk between myself and, Stipe Engineer, Robert Heaton about how to play chess (he's very good!):

http://taaalk.co/taaalk/chess/robert-heaton-josh-summers.html

*

We're looking for some interesting folk to interview - and HN is full of interesting folk! So please get in touch if you'd like to be asked questions about your life or what you do.

We'd love to hear from anyone with solid life adventures, experience of starting a company, being a VC, raising money from a VC, growing something, someone who knows the stresses of creating anything, or what it's like to be a developer in today's market.

If you fancy trying out the platform yourself and running a conversation / interview that would be great too.

*

Please take a look and tell us your thoughts.

Email's can be sent to hi[at]taaalk.co, or you can just comment below - we'll be here all day.
Maybe this is encouragement from the game to build alternative transport options like light rail, trams, move jobs closer to residential districts or establish suburbs to lower city population, tax cars more, build bike lanes, build more sidewalks, etc. In real life, there's not usually a solution for traffic. If you build out more streets, people are incentivized to drive more. I'd love this game to be this realistic. Its shouldn't reward this kind of simplistic gamer "solve the puzzle" mentality if the puzzle should rightfully be unsolvable.
Interesting. We'll get that fixed.
Had no idea that it existed. All the best for your next venture!

OT: Does HN employ any licensing on the content? I checked FAQ/Guidelines. Couldn't find anything about HN content. So anyone can create something like OP or would it require special permission from YC?

Also can this idea extended for Reddit subs?
That actually sounds quite realistic to me. Part of traffic management is dealing with, and trying to predict, stupidity.
Hopefully more busses, any busses, will cut down on traffic in SF.
You're oversimplifying this.

Take characters like 今 or 骨. Whether the C/J/K variants are the "same characters" or not is semantic, but philosophy aside they are written differently in each language. That is to say, if you are localizing an app into a CJK language, your app would not be working correctly if it displayed Japanese text with a Chinese 今, or vice versa. If you showed it to a user you'd get a bug report.

But such characters have only one codepoint, so unless you have language metadata for your text, you can't render it correctly (which is half of was so bad about the pre-unicode days!).

(Note: Unicode later added "variation selectors", which as far as I know solve the problems mentioned above. I don't know why the aren't in widespread use, or perhaps they are and I'm misunderstanding something.)
What happens when you just download FasteR? Does it work for a limited period and then stop working, will it ask me for a license each time I start it?

Also, why would I pay €399 for FasteR while its main competitor is more mature and completely free? Aside from Excel add-in, the two other reasons I've found are in the comments here: "graphical user interface for selected packages/functions, support for multiple monitors". Am I missing something?
They did very well. When you and everyone around you grow up using Microsoft's OS and office suite and then you start your own business, you will choose to run Windows and MS Office in your company - and since you want it to be a legitimate operation, you will buy the software.

And then there are various ways to pass the bill for your software further - e.g. to the taxpayer, if you're a government organization or a company funded by EU grant (I used to intern at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory; I'm pretty sure Microsoft makes a boatload of money on the licenses for all those thousands of Windows machines that run there).

It's a brilliant strategy. Adobe uses it too (Photoshop is so trivial to crack that it must be intentional).
Even if 1.2 billion seems a lot, that's still a small fraction of a world's population. So every choice of a universal language would force majority of a world to learn new one. So that's why I think winning popularity contest is a poor argument and we shouldn't look at that and focus on things like simplicity (which I don't find in English), speed of learning, consistency, expressiveness etc. I'd be happy to use Lojban (it's easier for machines too, I guess) or any other invented language. If I had to pick one from popular ones, I'd like Spanish more than English.

I was asking what are your specific usecases, which forbid you to treat UTF-8 string as a black box blob of bytes? If dealing with international code, you'd rather want to use predefined functions. If you want to limit yourself to ASCII, just do it and simply don't touch bytes >= 0x80.

And what is a character? Do you mean graphemes or codepoints? Or something else? Few years before I was thinking like you – that calculating length is a useful feature. But most often when you think about your usecase, you realise either that you don't need length or you need some other kind of length: like monospace-width, rendered-width or some kind of entropy-based amount of information. Twitter is the only case I know, where you want to really count "characters". And I find it really silly: eg. Japanese tweet vs. English tweet.
I remember back in the days when people tried to justify the MBP prices by using some ambiguous "build-quality" only Macs had, but you couldn't get with Dells or Lenovos.

Yeah. Not convinced.
Is this the beginning of the end for IE?
I have an audio-drivers-die-on-sleep issue in Windows that they claim they have a patch for but it doesn't work. They didn't design in a brightness control that was able to turn the laptop screen entirely off and Windows can't compensate without 2 (!) pieces of 3rd party software and a line of glue code to get them to talk to each other. The trackpad is horrible and interacts poorly with Windows 8 (menus popping open uninvited). Sometimes the computer boots without the ability to recognize USB, although rebooting has always fixed this issue.

I'm not sure whether or not this all falls under your definition of "support," but it was enough to send me back to the macbook that the dell was supposed to replace.

Also, this was 3 years ago. Maybe they've gotten better.
Dane here. The stereotype here is that Swedish people, much like the British, never say directly what they mean, are very polite, politically correct and generally much more orderly and conflict averse than us. My own experience with interacting with Swedes confirms this, as much as such things can be confirmed.

Linus is of course from the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, and I don't know if it translates. But anyways, like others I find it a little weird that you speak of a singular European stereotype. It's not something I can understand at all, really, but I suppose yours is an outsider's perspective.
Funny, I had read this quote attributed to Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord by Hans Magnus Enzensberger.
Make sure you validate your React props
> Often we tend to focus too much on intelligence and
> too little on integrity.

Maybe because integrity is virtually impossible to objectively evaluate for a candidate who you've got limited time to assess (aside from some extreme examples perhaps).

I guess you could incorporate some sort of formal integrity test [1] into your hiring process but my impression is that those are costly and controversial. Do companies actually use them...?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_integrity_testing
Microsoft ROM Will Migrate Users on Android to Windows 10 OS
Sign into Firebase with Facebook Using Ionic Framework
I read Prospect here in the UK for that.
PHP7: More strict (but only if you want it to be)
Building an experimental UI design tool
That video helped a lot. I was getting hopelessly lost with the image. In one part the object is moving in still or slow air where the resistance isn't enough to nullify the gain gained at the higher speed upper layer if I'm understanding this correctly.

And finally learned the difference between airspeed vs. groundspeed :D
You are conflating voting with spoiling the paper (or voting NOTA).
Interestingly, many countries took measures to prevent people from doing this (e.g. using voting machines).
The current proposed hack to encourage them to use all the lanes is this: https://i.imgur.com/F8eKjp5.jpg -- periodic narrowing of the lanes so those that don't need to turn stay in the middle.
And these aren't just developers. They're also *statisticians".
Core.Typed is directly inspired by typed racket :)
I've been running an experiment for the past several months to outsource relevant news curation.

It's super simple and super passive. Basically I only read news brought to my attention organically; social media, word on the street which I later look up, etc.

Thus far I haven't missed anything of genuine humanity-shaking importance, my emotional state has improved, and I have much more time for reading, hacking, and all other aspects of my life.

It resonates with the "millennials consume news differently" piece submitted elsewhere on HN actually.
duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219672
Elon Musk: human drivers are 'too dangerous'
We haven't been improving on drivers, though. Twenty years ago, humans as a group were as bad as they are today and as they will be in another twenty years. Or thirty or fifty. You can add seatbelts and rear parking cameras, and you can legislate against texting while driving, but you can't legislate away tired or distracted drivers, or just plain unskilled drivers. As a group, the only way we improve is through demographic shift. But autonomous cars get better, as a whole, and consistently, and rapidly.

Maybe autonomous cars will be at the 50th percentile in five years, but they're only as good as the bottom 10% of drivers, well, we'd still be better off with those 10% of drivers switching--which would lead to infrastructure to improve it. (I think more importantly, social understanding/recognition of them. The hard problems presented in Dr. Leonard's video posted on this thread aren't peds stepping in front of them, but cops gesturing and unprotected left turns across traffic where you need to make eye contact.)

Finding the bottom 10% sounds hard, because, yes, a lot of bad drivers think they're good drivers, but I think the majority of us know we suck. For many, their insurance companies know too.
The sign up process didn't ask me where I was from and/or what I was interested in. For general world news with a reasonable frequency and good digests I've got The Economist. It's the national, local and specialist news that I'm missing.
"R is slow" refers to the main implementation of the language --- to code written in R --- and is completely fair. The packages you're talking about are mostly written in C or C++ with nice R interfaces. So R as a statistical package or R from a user's perspective is often quite fast, but that's because it is relatively easy to interface with C and C++.

(This comes up often, and I'm not sure why I'm compelled to reply today, but there it is.)
The Colossal Order team, in my opinion was very lucky! There were three games -
1. SimCity 4 with the statistical simulation model, big maps (region-wise) and plenty of features.
2. SimCity 5 with a pure agent-based simulation model (it had flaws though, especially traffic), but again the series pioneered a new way of creating games in this genre. And,
3. Cities XL having a HUGE map, few unique features like bus routing, etc and amazing graphics!

All these games had flaws in their respective models but worked well nonetheless. SimCity 5 is a success IMO; for venturing into a much realistic simulation that you could connect with. Though we all love to complain about the map size.

Cities: Skylines had the advantage of picking up the good pieces of each of these games! On the other hand, the last good game was SimCity 4 in 2003, more than a decade! We badly needed Cities: Skylines.

It's also very elating to see the support the team is giving to us! The Map Editor, the Asset Editor, the water dynamics, a mixture of agent and other simulation models (as they call it - "complex"). Though this game has its own share of flaws, they're quite tiny; except for the traffic (which is being fixed)!
Pardon a possibly dumb question, but what are kinds of data are considered "demographic" in your specific case? Can you give some examples?
God no this is terrible advice! Never compromise on your principals and especially never with a woman you intend to marry.

Coffee from a coffee shop isn't a scam because I'm paying for the accessibility, not the item itself.
haha good point..

actually my friend and i are applying this summer batch of yc with an alternative to student debt financing of university... student equity.. from the student side it helps in 2 ways 1. taxes high income earners more, low income earners less (remember when you start uni you don't know for sure which group you will be in) 2. allows you to transfer future income from your middle-age when your income is higher to when you have just graduated (and income is lower)..

debt in comparison punishes procrastination of payment with interest payments.. it would be great to get your feedback if you have teh chance.. we've posted our draft of our yc application here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224487 thanks!
I did it with d3.js and topojson, then I used the resulting svg image on the website. You can find the code here https://github.com/riccardoscalco/textures/blob/gh-pages/map...
Yes, but he calls the jet "The Indefensible" :).

Someone of his position shouldn't be waiting in line and taking off shoes at the airport every time he needs a meeting. He owns dozens of companies.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewstibbe/2011/09/22/warren-...
There's also an interesting article in The Atlantic regarding the "endless stream" of news. Alexis C. Madrigal makes a very interesting point regarding the stock (what stays) and the flow (what keeps you entertained rather than informed).

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/2013-t...
Articles submitted to HN remain the copyright of the people who wrote them, not of YC. (HN Monthly has been scrupulous in observing copyrights.)

Comments on HN, ditto, although YC has an implicit license to (at a minimum) display them.
Great landing page, I'm sure conversion rate is good. But the visuals don't make me want to stay, even with the mini-tutorial its a little annoying.

Crowd-sourced fact checks are an interesting idea, I'm not sure it works for news. You need to be fast and thorough, which is hard.

I'd love to have reliable background information for long-running issues, like the Ukraine crisis. Maybe this will be easier, as the value can accumulate over a longer time period.

I wish you good luck, we need better news!
I wonder why more people don't build tools with cross platform in mind in this time and age.
You can't really conclude that from this - you submitted three different products at three different times to three different groups of PH users.

There's data you can use to measure the effectiveness and strength of your company - conversion rates to users and customers, revenue etc. Are you monitoring stuff like that?
I think in practice that's more of a way to "include the father in the process" than genuinely have him offload a task from the mother. I think for many if not most couples, it's almost as much work as breastfeeding and bottle feeding combined.
According to Wikipedia, this is being coordinated by the Ideographic Rapporteur Group, and "the working members of the IRG are either appointed by member governments, or are invited experts from other countries. IRG members include Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taipei Computer Association, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Vietnam and United States."

So this criticism of English speakers seems pretty unfounded! And his concerns about unification is being driven by a diverse group of experts in a variety of countries - so not sure why the concern?
To be clear: you will be working in Paris and you must have the legal right to do so
> But that convenience doesn't come without a cost; our computers will be more vulnerable than ever to malware attacks, from hackers and surveillance agencies alike.

Cut the crap. USB is just as vulnerable as it always was. The only thing that changed with USB-C was practicality and convenience.
I really like this. I too am sick of seeing stuff promoted in everyday media which is clearly fabricated.

Admission. I think I up-voted some comments by accident. It's not obvious what that large up arrow does (now that I say it out-loud I think it's probably pretty obvious!) and there's no way to undo the operation. Sorry.

Are there plans to add a frontend to it?
I'm willing to give Spartana a chance, as long as they release it as open source and i will be able to run on linux without wine.
Many thanks for the good words! I am happy you like it.
It seems like San Francisco is one of the few places where you can have a company completely fail, only to see it revamp its product in a way that it will probably completely fail again.

While I can't speak for San Francisco's bus system, everything about this product video screams to me that the solution that is being provided here does not actually solve a problem other than "I am white, privileged, and want to ride on a fancy looking bus where I can buy a Vita Coco. I also want to pay as much as $6 per ride, which is egregiously more expensive than something that amounts to little more than public transit needs to be."

This whole thing is basically the epitome of the tech bubble and offers little to nothing of real value.
The link to Twitter at the end seems a bit ironic since Twitter offers all the things he's criticizing, except without the promise of any substance.
So should they stop advertising, and take down YouTube?
High quality diamonds look grayer/silvery under bright light, whereas CZ produces rainbows. I own both, and it's easy to tell the difference if you're, say, outdoors in the summer, or under full-spectrum lighting. Moissanite is closer, but moissanite still has more of a "rainbow" look, and is often yellowish.

If a friend of mine was showing off her engagement ring and it was refracting a little rainbow on her finger in the sun (like this http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/CZ_brilli...) I obviously wouldn't say anything, but come on. Getting a CZ engagement ring is going to lead to an awkward situation at some point.
Wow. "You're holding it wrong", eh?

You though they learned quickly enough that this isn't a popular response. It's like they want to keep on propagating the memes.

That's pretty bad.
"This is interesting, but I guess I'm wondering how it really differs to buying a brand new car. The moment you drive it outside the car dealer you've lost money."

A: Nowhere near as much, and B: That's what I was referring to with the "vendor guarantee"... the reason why your car loses its value when you drive it off the lot is obviously not that the car changes meaningfully, but that in the somewhat scammy world of used cars you will not be able to establish to anyone that your car really is brand new anymore, so you take a hit based on the fact that you do not have a reputation that says "I am $CAR Dealership XYZ and I stake my name on the fact this really is a brand new $CAR straight from the factory".

(Incidentally, to some extent, note that when people suggest that the solution is to always buy used, they often aren't taking that into account properly in their zeal to make their point. You're paying less precisely because the odds of you being scammed just went up. If you are, for instance, someone very likely to be able to detect scams, by all means, go collect your "knowledge premium" from the market and buy used. But if you are not such a person, think twice. I don't mean "never do it"... I just mean, think twice. I have family that was taken for a ride by buying used when they "couldn't afford" new... well, it turns out they couldn't afford "scammy used" either....)

Yes, that is one solution to the conundrum, buy at actual market value. In the longterm that's an unstable solution... if rings lose their signaling value entirely (see other comments), then the eventual stable solution is not to buy them at all. However, in the meantime, what the eventual stable solution 50 years from now will be isn't actionable today, so by all means buy something that impresses your friends and pocket the difference. My wife and I went a different route and bought a nice ring with two Tanzenite stones in it for, IIRC, on the order of $250 1999-dollars, and I still think it looks pretty nice. Tanzenite is a bit soft but we've had no problems, and I think it's beautiful but the jewelry community seems to think it isn't worth much. We were happy to come to arrangements with them on that matter. This is another way to hack the process, since people aren't consciously thinking all the way through this it can suffice to present a token similar to a "diamond ring" but that did not require the useless investment.
How to Make Smart Tradeoffs When Developing Software Products
then the premise of the article is inherently flawed :(
I also just returned from a search for licensing information. It's a bit peculiar, since it's not quite like HN produced the content. HN aggregated the content.

Perhaps to do this completely honestly, one would need to check the licensing of each individual article. Since undoubtedly it is not clear for every article, I wonder what the "default" set of assumptions for an article posted on the internet is.
Really, this pseudo-scientific fear mongering is upvoted here?
> If you're living within a corrupt, self-serving political system (we are), then naturally the only people who run for office will be products of that system. If a candidate who genuinely wants to change the status quo somehow manages to slip in, they will be prevented from achieving anything meaningful once inside.

If these politicians are as corrupt and self-serving as you say, then it actually becomes quite easy to enact meaningful change. All we need to do is coalesce around important issues and threaten to vote politicians out of office if they don't bend to our will. Schwartz himself was one of the individuals who rallied broad segments of the population to mobilize and defeat the passage of the deeply unpopular, industry backed legislation that was SOPA by implicitly threatening to punish politicians who voted in favor of it.

I think people assume that because their vote doesn't cout, their voice doesn't count. Even if you don't vote you can still donate money to opposing political causes (or threaten to), write your congressmen, protest, rally public support, and call out your elected officials publicly. If enough people do this it is possible to elicit change without stepping foot inside a voting booth.