skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, I'm a frequent flyer, though not to the level of Ben (though I did once go LGA-ORD-DEL-ORD-LAX-JFK without leaving the airport in Delhi to get to Executive Platinum on AA).

Typically what Ben is doing is flying fares where the cost of the fare is lower than the equivalent value in miles, or where he can game the very complex rules associated with a frequent flyer ticket to add on a free leg or free flight.

So, for example, for my honeymooon I was able to snag round-trip tickets in business class from NYC to the Maldives. Once I had those tickets, I worked the frequent flyer system to move the dates around and add on a stop in Tokyo in First class for a couple of days for about $10 in extra taxes and fees - total retail cost of the tickets was close to $30k, our total cost was <$250. In terms of frequent flyer mojo, this doesn't even count as journeyman-level skills.

On top of that you have all of the points he's getting for using various branded credit cards, maximizing bonuses, giveaway offers, etc.

The only way I'm aware of to get FF points when you are flying on an award flight is when you get hit with IRROPS (irregular operations, usually due to weather and mechanical issues), and at the airport they rebook your award ticket to be a revenue ticket at no cost. It's something the airlines have discouraged their agents to do for obvious reasons, and they've tried to make it easier to rebook award tickets, but
still if you're a top-tier elite, there's 50 people that need rebooking behind you, and you're on an award ticket, decent chance the computer will spit out a revenue ticket to replace the award ticket that is no longer valid.
Fine advice. I write for a living, and two of my most popular posts ever were fleeting little creations that I dashed off in 45 minutes because something caught my eye.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130611180041-59549-the-no-1...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/02/19/he-wante...

You never know what will break through the clutter.
According to FAQ on the website, no bias as such.
What specifically should they do?
No bias, but it generally is harder to build a successful company as a solo founder (though totally possible! Dropbox, Zenefits, Instacart all started with solo founders). If you're applying alone, tell us how you plan to overcome the solo hurdles of being alone / managing everything to do, and if you plan to bring someone in soon, let us know.
Surprised that this shows up as only Important in Windows Update on Windows 7. That's the same level of importance as given to update to Windows 10 nagware.
I'd like to read it - post the link here when you're done!
One of the biggest things I've learned from being around YC community is that most successful ideas start out as small but end up being very large. I would encourage you to think bigger about the fundamental problems you're solving and then how you can turn solving the immediate problem into something really big down the line. Hope this helps!
> Is there some technical barrier for not enabling zoom?

“Safari on iOS displays webpages at a scale that works for most web content originally designed for the desktop. If these default settings don’t work for your webpages, it is highly recommended that you change the settings by configuring the viewport. You especially need to configure the viewport if you are designing webpages specifically for iOS.”

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/AppleA...

Zooming is enabled by default on Mobile Safari as a feature to help mobile users navigate sites not designed for mobile.

Apple intentionally added many different ways to control the viewport, including the ability to disable zoom.

“Setting the viewport width should be the first task when designing web applications for iOS to avoid the user zooming in before using your application.”

So it very much sounds like Apple has added this functionality as a usability feature to help mobile users navigate sites designed without regard to their specific hardware, Apply strongly recommends setting the viewport specifically for the pages you design with iOS in mind. Also note, when looking through Apple's documentation that they refer to the gesture as 'zooming' and the feature in Mobile Safari as 'user scaling.
Palindromic Place Names
Yes this is similar to the self replicating probe problem (one solution to the SETI problem is to launch probes that replicate). That probes start having the same problems as the creating intelligent entity has. Either the probes can't replicate fast enough or decide to stop replicating/exploring for whatever reasons and there are just not enough/fast enough probes.
> has support for flow

I've used both Typescript and Flow. In my experience, Typescript is far superior to Flow.

In terms of the sorts of errors they catch, they're about the same. In practice, Flow caught essentially no real errors that Typescript did not, and vice versa. (This is based on my workflow, YMMV obviously.)

However, Typescript is installable through NPM and runs as a basic Node module that reads files and parses text when you call it. Flow is written in OCaml, which means it's not available through NPM. This means either installing a separate binary (if one exists for your system) or installing an OCaml compiler so you can compile it from source. Afterwards, Flow uses a client-server setup, which makes it really annoying to run in a headless and automated environment. It's also surprisingly slow; it took a full ten seconds to typecheck a small project the first time. Supposedly the server makes it faster to do repeated checks, but honestly, the Typescript compiler is fast enough that this seems like a solution in search of a problem.

Also, Flow would keep getting confused and insisted on typechecking my node_modules. This was a problem because one of my imports had a third-level dependency with syntax error in an unused test, which meant that my entire Flow typecheck would fail. I couldn't add it to the [ignore] section of my ~/.flowconfig, because then Flow would literally pretend the file didn't exist, and then the project wouldn't compile due to missing imports!

All in all, I'm sure there's some way to set up flow without running into any of the above issues, but it definitely was way more work to set up (compared to a simple 'npm install'), and for seemingly no benefit whatsoever.
bootstrap. Then worry about VC money if and when you think you are ready to try to become a billion dollar company
What qualities do you look for in founders? Is it the same set of qualities you look for in the normal YC application? A little bit more relaxed? A little bit more strict?
Earlier post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9917334
What possible other reason could they have had to negotiate?
That's a pretty unusual axiom that most people don't subscribe to, and it's orthogonal to disagreements over justifications for involuntary taxes.
>Would censorship legislation prevent you from doing so, if you really wanted to?

Would murder legislation prevent you from killing someone if you really wanted to? No? Then I guess there's no point in making murder illegal.

Legislation makes it clear what is sanctioned. It doesn't prevent crime. It defines crime.

>[...] unwanted information disclosure [...]

Legislation is how you say what information disclosure is unwanted. Without it, there is no basis for handling information disclosure at all.
No catch. We believe it's incredibly important to keep growing the number of startups throughout the world -- they're the largest drivers of innovation and change.
I wonder what will be the long-term affects of all that high-altitude radiation exposure. I guess we'll have to check back in with him in 20 years.
I don't see any major reason why Rust couldnt be used for a new "real" OS. The "stdlib doesn't report failure on allocation" stuff isn't really relevant; it's not like people use libc malloc in the Linux kernel. Lack of intrinsic exposure on stable doesn't matter, people will just use the nightlies. Intrusive lists are useful, but they don't require that much unsafe code. Likely / unlikely will be in the nightlies any day now. Performance is already on par with C++ if you care enough; removing drop zeroing will help, though. Only big thing I see missing is unsafe unions.

(If you're arguing that drivers will still need some inline assembly, well, yeah. But the assembly required for hardware interop is pretty straightforward, at least compared to code written in assembly for performance).
The effort involved in means testing, including verification, would be extremely taxing for an organization the size of YC and doubly so in relation to the size of the money involved. I have to suspect they never seriously considered it because it'd be so impractical, and there would be inevitable abuse (each layer of complexity makes such things worse, for YC simplicity has always been integral).
If I were to list all the great bands/music I discovered on Grooveshark, and all the music from my childhood that I rediscovered, I would surely run into some kind of comment length limit here.

RIP man, your work touched lives.
Massive layoffs rumored for Qualcomm
Nitpick: LibreSSL is a fork/cleanup of OpenSSL, not a rewrite.
I agree. I think state actors obviously have much stronger technical capabilities and can operate with impunity, but a motivated actor can certainly achieve nefarious ends in most cases. Especially against a large public website where the attack surface is massive and the potential of a breach would provide a wealth of privileged information that would provide substantial motivation.
It's the same. Read this: http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html
Grooveshark co-founder Josh Greenberg found dead at 28
In fairness to GP, GGP isn't using vim, he just seems to have picked up on or imagined a meme that "Real Programmers use vi or emacs".

Which, yes, is a bit daft.
Actually I was referring to the part about Wyoming only having "2 reps and 1 senator".
What Is a Psychological Contract?
That's not really how such statistics are useful.
Means testing adds a lot of bureaucratic overhead, especially if it's international, and it could dissuade some marginal people from engaging if they have to produce a bunch of documentation.
Ed is a visual line editor, and if that's a GUI then we can stop talking about PARC and just agree that Brainfuck is as good as Python via Turing Completeness while we're at it.

If it's the turtles all the way down, any blinking light becomes a GUI, for what is a pixel?
While I appreciate your insightful comment very much, I don't see how it addresses the concern of the parent comment. (i.e. that the name "CFML" is already taken and thus may have the potential of confusion)
Because VS still is 32-bit[1] program.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/n3fyEos.png
Same thing happened to me. I also saw that a tree came through a building. I was just surprised that the building had collision detection :)

Cool demo though
This reminds me of Guy Steele's 1998 talk "Growing a Language" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0). It's really worth watching.
Even if you're extremely charitable in all of those cases President Obama also started and defined the rules for what is essentially illegal drone warfare against citizens, not enemy combatants, in other countries. That's not even counting the pandora's box he opened by killing American citizens by drone without any sort of due process. To me those two simple facts far outweigh anything else he's done, both domestically and internationally.

If you had told me in 2008 that Obama would be signing extrajudicial death-by-drone warrants every Tuesday morning I would have laughed. But, here we are...
I don't see how it does anything of the sort. Using Linode may expose you to additional attacks (I'm not quite sure what you're referring to), but if running OpenBSD daemons with OpenBSD's protections leaves your server less vulnerable to direct attack than alternatives on Linux, this is a significant improvement.
The Top 5 Things Burglars Steal from Homes
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9917442
Study suggests “social jetlag” could lead to weight gain
We'd like you to submit just one idea for this. Choose the one you think is most promising.
"Lori Greenberg, his mother, said Monday he had no health problems and she was told by police who investigated Sunday night that there was no evidence of foul play, injuries or drugs."

Then.. what the hell happened?

I don't want to play conspiracy too hard here -- could be she's hiding some health issues? but given the recording industry's links with aggressive legislation (TPP, piracy laws), this makes me wonder:

"Several record companies had sued the online music streaming service over copyright violations."
Do Burglars Typically Disarm Security Cameras?
TL;DR:

This piece is an exploration -- explicit/intentional or not -- of how countercultural, SF, and neo-pagan concepts like transhumanism, post-humanism, superhumans, sci-fi concepts, and visionary futurism have been co-opted for economic and political power by a certain segment of Silicon Valley and its wider diaspora.
In Chinese, the word computer translates directly as electric brain. In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a microscope a small-watcher. In Lakota, horse is literally dog of wonder. These neologisms demonstrate the cumulative quality of language, in which we use the known to describe the unknown.

I think most people would be better served by learning to use the etymology information in a good dictionary than by using the oral equivalent of Brainfuck.

“What is a car?” Lang mused recently via phone from her home in Toronto. “You might say that a car is a space that's used for movement,” she proposed. “That would be tomo tawa. If you’re struck by a car though, it might be a hard object that’s hitting me. That’s kiwen utala.”

A language that doesn't offer any sort of empirical consistency doesn't strike me as adaptive. Rather, this seems like an attempt to recapture the lost imaginative potential of early childhood by limiting oneself to the limited vocabulary of a toddler.
Let me repeat: Quasar has the ability to do time-slice scheduling just like Erlang. However, that has proven useless in practice because, unlike Erlang, we have access to kernel scheduling, so we turned that off (I think the relevant code is still there -- it's about ten lines). Switching off that feature was completely backed by evidence, and caused zero harm.

> Certainly it violates the programmer intuition invariant that she can just write programs, if she has to occasionally check on a JMX MBean to find out if the framework has pooped on the bed.

That is easily solvable by having Quasar automatically migrate a thread from being scheduled in user-space to being scheduled by the kernel. However, even that cool feature doesn't justify itself, because things work great as they are. The programmer doesn't need to check JMX occasionally. The behavior is immediately detected in testing and reported as a warning. Simple and effective. Note that all this works even if this behavior occurs in native code, which is more than Erlang does. Threads that are less suitable for user-mode scheduling must be few, and they are very easy to recognize.

Doing any of that automatically may be cool, but has no real value. We might do that at some point, but it's not a high priority.

> as all preemption requires slicing time: that's literally what it means.

No, it means that the scheduler has the ability to deschedule the thread when it wishes[1]. We have this ability, we just no longer use it on time-slices (we easily can, it's just not helpful in the least).

> On the kernel scheduling piece, your argument doesn't make any sense to me. Hardware support is only tangentially to do with high thread context switching costs; and it is frequently the case that many actors can fit into cache, where many threads cannot.

All you say is true, yet none of it matters in practice when it comes to time-slice preemption. Only a handful of threads can enjoy that form of scheduling anyway, whether they take 10MB or 10 bytes of RAM.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preemption_(computing)#Preempt...
Sad. Grooveshark always allowed me to find stuff I had a hard time finding otherwise. Good memories with my son when he was between one and two dancing in our little apartment living room to music from grooveshark. Condolences to family and friends. I don't know him, but he made something that has a part of several really good memories.
You gotta hand it to them, their factories in China & their designers in California make a damn fine machine.
Coin Card Teardown
Yes! Though we'd hope that you'd make significant enough progress during the 8-weeks that you'd want to continue working full time on your startup.
User agent overrides for top Japanese Sites
http://fellowship.ycombinator.com/faq/

"Can a single person apply for funding?

Yes, but the odds of being accepted are lower. A startup is too much work for one person."

I'm pretty sure you don't mean it is "too much work" for success to be a possible outcome, but that's what your copy says at the moment.
The Upside of Being Boring
With the other 8+ 10/10 CVEs adobe announced today, they're not exactly covering themselves in glory here...
You can use jsxtyper to generate TypeScript interfaces: https://github.com/fuselabs/jsxtyper
He gets the content using wget and then posts directly using POST...
A Keyboard Isn’t a Detail
The earth is getting louder. 150 years ago, we'd have had almost zero light pollution. Nowadays you can't even see stars when you go outside.

Not only are there more lights, we are getting more efficient at producing energy to power them.
> wait, you're saying that you accumulate FF points when you are flying on a ticket that you got by redeeming FF points?

No, that's typically not how it works.
I confess! ;) No, seriously, I'm parroting what was said by the developers on the group some time ago. My understanding at the time was that core allocation library is part of std, so if you get rid of std (which is what you'd do writing OS - things like printing on the screen have no place in kernel) you'd have to recreate this. But I never bothered to dig deeper since OS development is not what I want to use Rust for.

My feeling though is that you need to be able to allocate memory to write code in Rust (duh!) and memory allocation is something that OS provides. So if you write OS in Rust... you get the idea. My understanding of Rust isn't deep enough to state whether you'd have to reimplement internals of Arc, Box and what not or you'd just have to provide something they piggy back on. But there's an explicit assumption in most of the code that you can allocate memory (in a thread safe fashion no less) which isn't there if you have no OS underneath.
Given that the font hinting system is turing complete, and that font ligature substitution is a bizarre regular expression system [2], my only surprise is that we haven't found more holes in font renderers. Given many of the features aren't used in regular fonts, maybe it's time we pared down font rendering to something a bit more sensible.

[2] http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/131
while this comment is ridiculously ignorant and knee-jerk on the surface almost everyone under 30 subscribes to this even if they don't state it publicly or even believe it themselves.
OK, so you're suggesting that we not enable a "usability feature" because Apple's guidelines suggest that there are alternative ways to specify the correct viewport?

I get the design angle, and I don't disagree that setting the correct viewport is a good idea, but you shouldn't assume that good design and correctly setting the viewport will work for everybody. The fact remains that the zoom gesture is critical on mobile, and disabling it does not help anybody use your site.

On responsive sites, the idea behind them is that the site does its best guess of being responsive based on the size of the viewport. However, sometimes it doesn't work out, sometimes the websites behavior isn't as intended, sometimes the designer didn't test with my exact device, size, eyesight, etc. It is nice in those cases that I can make up for the site not being designed for my mobile by using the zoom feature as intended.
In the end we can only do the best we can with the information available to us. This is a warning to make sure you have the most accurate information possible instead of digging your head in the sand and hoping your blissful ignorance is like a blind squirrel finding a nut once in a while.

Statistics cant prove anything! Thats his point. Dont be so confident that your mind is too closed to explore other possibilities.

Scientific method can only eliminate possibilities and show you the most probable option. It is by no means proof. But thats a bad reason to not consider competing hypothesis instead of just trying to confirm an existing bias.

Your point about incubator success is different. Those statistics are exactly the ones we want to avoid. Success or failure of a startup in an incubator is not diagnostic evidence as i can think of a dozen other hypothesis to explain those results. Its like a doctor saying you have strep because you have fever. Since fever is consistent with other diagnosis it has no diagnostic value beyond the point of saying you are sick.
What about a situation where one cofounder is willing to go full-time with this YC Fellowship but the other would only work part time? How does that work out?
They have been. There was a talk from the city council about making EZPass and a toll a requirement to drive below 60th street in Manhattan but that's political suicide so it didn't go anywhere.
I think it's trying to say that Ashely Madison is used mostly by promiscuous people, and by nature of them being promiscuous, they have had lots of partners and thus know lots of people. Since there are 37 million people involved, it's a good chance that you know someone affected by this hack.
Certainly they could be improved. Swift and MirageOS are great examples. IBM's mainframes and AS/400 line are good examples given they adapted them to most useful, popular technologies + still backward compatible. Remember, though, that backward compatibility constrains the biggest and oldest systems in ways that prevent architectural improvements. All the biggest companies lining Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP's pockets would have to throw away their apps that they can't even rebuild. Not happening.

So, our best bet is that small to midsized firms with more flexibility keep adopting these technologies. That's fuels investment into them to get them eventually at a level like Microsoft and Oracle. That enterprises have switched to service model helps in that they keep some services on old tech but implement some on newer, better stuff (ex Python at BofA). So, these trends are what we have to bank on.

One thing, though: better get it right the first time as your newer, better tech will eventually be a legacy tech someone else is maintaining. It's why I focus on readability, interfaces, and type safety for maintenance concerns a lot more now in tech.
Yeah but Chrome has skia which is a built from scratch ui lib. So IE and maybe firefox.
YC funds startups. Startups to us are companies designed to grow fast. Read this if you haven't: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

It's OK to be working on something that's hard to imagine how it would grow to be a really big thing, that's how most ideas start out. (Apple made hobbyist computers, Google was another search engine of 1000 -- how big of a deal could they have thought these would become?). It's important to be open-minded to the pathways of how your idea could become something big as it keeps growing though, and it's good to stop and think about those ideas every once in awhile.
My statement on the 60/40 work/life balance was a conclusion based on my own bias, which I forgot to specify.

Thank you for your feedback! You are correct that the best hires tend to pursue employment that complements their "spare time activities".
Is it true only for primes? Is there a case for which the rule holds but p isn't prime?