skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook (launch Feb 2004) was founded after Myspace (launch Aug 2003), which was founded after Friendster (2002). So there was certainly competition.

Was it 'worthy competition'? Hard to say without hindsight bias (only the winners 10 years later were 'worthy'), but I doubt Mark Zuckerberg or the Google founders felt there was no worthy competition. It seems fairly clear to me that Facebook (and Google) succeeded because they made better decisions (on average) at a gazillion small decision points, not because they had some great idea that no-one else had thought of.
That was my first impression to. Why is that impression incorrect?
Sure, some validation is important, and Kickstarter has their own incentive to ensure some baseline quality independent of regulation. Fraudsters should be prosecuted, but I hope that people aren't discouraged from launching Kickstarter initiatives because they're afraid of genuine product execution risk turning into personal criminal or civil liability.
From Bessemer's anti-portfolio:
Cowan’s college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to “these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine”. Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer’s anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?”
Interesting article. While the article paints a bleak picture of company operations, one item that sticks out in favor of the Company is that "Walgreens says its partnership with Theranos has gone smoothly overall."

Seems like there would a lot more complaints considering the number of tests conducted, and that the relationship would have been soured/severed if the results were not living up to Walgreen's satisfaction.
Indeed. This is also the kind of thing I would really like to be doing. Alas, $dayjob. :<.
DHS Watch List Outage Causes Nationwide Airport Delays
How to implement fast web data collection (and why you should even care)
Most likely she looked you up on Facebook.

When you look someone up, there's a significant chance that you will appear in their "suggested friends".
Here's a nice profile from the New Yorker in late 2014:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler

I mean "nice" as in, a good read...it's a flattering profile of Holmes -- she comes off well, as a genuinely passionate person, and even if she had stayed in school, it sounds like she would've still made a great impact.

But the article also raises concerns that seem to be corroborated by the OP:

> Clarke argues that finger-stick blood tests aren’t reliable for clinical diagnostic tests; because the blood isn’t drawn from a vein, the sample can be contaminated by lanced capillaries or damaged tissue. Holmes strongly disagrees: “We have data that show you can get a perfect correlation between a finger stick and a venipuncture for every test that we run.” When I asked for evidence, I was sent a document by Daniel P. Edlin, Theranos’s senior product manager, titled “Select Data.” It purported to show favorable results from numerous comparison tests. I asked Edlin if the tests had been conducted by an independent third party. He replied by e-mail: “The clinical tests were conducted by a combination of Theranos and external labs,” but he wouldn’t say which ones.

Um, OK. I don't know much about this testing process...but...what trade secrets are being protected by hiding the methodology and source of the comparative test results?
I couldn't disagree more. There should always be a way to make the content I'm looking at bigger in order to see it more clearly, especially for users with poor eyesight.

"responsive design" does not magically eliminate this need, and I agree with the posters saying that disabling of user-scrolling should never have even been allowed in the first place.

And that's not even touching on the fact that most "responsive" sites I've seen get it horribly wrong.
Isn't the bulk of the https traffic using RSA, not Diffie-Hellman?
This is what the results look like:

http://padlet.com/dpetersen/khmmi11wy8hz
http://padlet.com/dpetersen/r6dg1vbxmz92

I don't know how an individual could evaluate the accuracy of these results, but the same goes for a non-Theranos blood test as well.
Tutorial: Exploring Linux Kernel with Visual Studio Debugger and Code Map
A brief summary of exception handling in Swift2.0
I've always wanted to build a hobbyist steller nav system using a CCD and some open source star position comparison software. One day!
It's a great story, but not entirely true. Jews do not avoid pig for the reasons listed but simply because God said not to eat pig. That's it. No other reason.

And note there are a TON of animals Jews don't eat, not just pig. Yet people seem to focus on the pig more than any other.

This says more about them than about the Jews.
Ask HN: Benefits of a desktop system?
I have recently been contemplating on getting a Mac mini for personal use. Before then I have been using laptops.

I mentioned my desire to a friend who strongly argued for laptops, saying that you can make it like a desktop at home by adding monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc and still have it portable.

What is the HN community's opinion on the matter? I would really like to know what benefits have been perceived from just having a desktop opposed to a laptop/desktop hybrid.

* I understand that there are specs to also consider, but I'm more interested in people's personal opinions, rather than the specs. Thanks
That article cites 'shootingtracker.com' as a source, which is a known-false propaganda site, as it includes accidents with airsoft guns in their list of "mass shootings".

I have been shot by an airsoft gun. It stung a bit.

Since January 1st, 2013, Wikipedia shows six mass killings in the United States, two in China, and four in continental Europe.
This reminded me of the film Down Periscope.
There is no truth in this article, only conjecture by someone who clearly has a grudge to bear. For all we know, the author (un-named) of this article is working for Russian intelligence right now, by trying to paint Snowden as anything less than a concerned and patriotic citizen of the United States.

Everyone who works in the spy business has something to hide - and therefore, you really can't trust anyone who works in the spy business. Patriotic jingoism might work 80% of the time - but there will always be folks who can read between the lines and are unwilling to just put up with the state of affairs because some Authority told them it was so.

This article is full of authoritarian indoctrination. "Anyone who has worked in CI knows..", "as anyone who knows anything about intelligence can tell you..", "I've worked as an expert in this field for years" (and yet remain an un-named author), etc.

Be careful as you read this article, that your buttons are not being pushed. Of course, we know that the USA and Russia are engaged in an ideological war with each other - and of course, we know that there are reasons for all the secrecy.

But the fact remains that the US government, which is supposed to be democratic and representative of the desires of its people, has given itself unsavory powers that bring the world every closer to its destruction, in the name of its own 'safety'. "All countries do this", you will hear them say - "but then, what good are they?" will be the reply. And the answer is: if you're going to spy on the worlds population, unhindered and uncontrolled by anyone by your own agency, and use that power for your own wealth and survival, then, your country is no good at all.
I'm curious why you think the nature of technology is on a positive curve with regard to liberty.

Technology is a power multiplier. In the context of a graph of liberty vs time it would simply make moving that curve on the Y axis exponentially easier.

So either you disagree with that or you have some optimistic views on human nature with regards to liberty.

Add in the problem that that the less liberty there is the easier/more likely it is for more to be removed, increases in liberty are up hill, so to speak, compared to decreases as a side issue.
Sounds like the accuracy testing should be blind but isn't. Why not?

It seems like disclosing that a sample is a test is more likely to negatively affect the accuracy of the test than improve it. The need for double blind trials is normally well understood. This is not an experiment, but as a test it seems like it would benefit from at least single blind: lab is unaware - accuracy tests are mixed randomly into the genuine population of testing requests. Kind of like how the TSA is occasionally tested by inspectors who bring all sorts of weapons through.
Lttng-2.7-released
This strongly feels like a advertising material. The article makes no sense at all and the author works for an PR, digital media & advertising agency. Not sure what the end-goal is. It's not worth the attention.
If that becomes a problem, I think it is fairly easy (certainly easier than with template metaprogramming) to move the constexpr code into a separate compilation unit, and let your make handle that problem.
First, to clarify: what I meant by "your" was an entity like a standards community, not an individual, and by "often" I meant within a timeframe that makes bruteforcing parameters infeasible (which itself changes over time wrt the size of the parameters). Key rotation for example is just good practice.

Nothing that I said was wrong - nor does it contradict Colin's advice - and while simple systems are better, that's a tradeoff that should be made if you care about entities with lots of resources like e.g. the NSA. As history shows, bad parameters (or parameters that are feasibly bruteforced over a particular timeframe) are not an 'unlikely' weakness. Besides, being aware of potential vulnerabilities - especially those that you know pose real threats - and not addressing them is simply bad practice.
Not at all true... I am far sighted, since most of what I look at, including my monitors are more than a few feet away, I tend to see them fine.. my phone is the only device I really have a lot of trouble with. I run in "extra large" font mode, and set my browser zoom to 125%... even then many sites, I have trouble seeing stuff... if there's an image that isn't full width, then I likely can't make out the detail....

Not being able to zoom in to at least 2x, is a pain... if your content doesn't overflow, then sure set the minimum zoom to 1x, and the max to 2 or 3.. but disabling it altogether is just painful to experience... and many of the "suggestions" to fix mobile scaling include disabling zoom. I'm not even that old (40), but I imagine the problem is worse for people well into their 60's.

If you're using a font-size less than 12pt, you should emphatically NOT be disabling scaling... Unfortunately many sites/apps do just that, and often don't respect the usability settings in the OS (facebook on android was particularly bad, as in too small, before I uninstalled it).
Interesting that Joel Spolsky himself wondered if this might be a bad thing:
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-...
Anyone who enjoys this should absolutely watch This Is Jinsy[1], a British TV show based on essentially the same lines. It's surreal, whimsical, lo-fi, and utterly hilarious.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_is_Jinsy
"man openssl"
Reminds me of this: Make the climb like the child did - without the rope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXxw-zXRqOs

The rope makes you weak!
That would be problematic for apps like maps (which I think the street name fonts are too small, and don't scale), or photo/picture programs.
Wearing them still isn't a good idea, but clip-on ties will at least break away when they get caught rather than forcing your head into some machine...
Jack Dorsey giving up 30% of his stake in Square to help underserved communities
Yeah, facebook (when I last used it) didn't even respect the accessability settings in android (for extra large fonts). It's a problem in a lot of applications.. if your app doesn't allow you to increase the fonts to at least 12pt, you're doing it wrong... there's a reason that was the default print size since forever and a day...
Information technologies are the exception to many diminishing returns rules. This has several implications.

Non-informational technologies often don't see such trends. Where they do they often manifest network effects (telephony, railroads, autos and fuel/road/repair infrastructure), or ...

Nominally non-information goods with very high informational content benefit from Moore's Law growth. This can include very high tech manufacturing or control systems (aircraft engines), R&D and process control (pharmaceuticals), an similar goods.

Even within high-eech and information goods, where the rubber meets the road, improvements are limited and the Jevons law limits overall efficiencies. Healthcare spending has exploded over the 20th century. Life expectency gains have been modest. Aircraft and ship speeds are lower today than 40 years ago. Greater data access runs into limits of human attention, and the fact that there are only 1,440 minutes in a day. An iPhone is in some regards amazing. In others it merely replaces pen and paper, books, radio, and live performances of entertainment.

I suspect tech impacts may be greatly overstated.
> Mr. Balwani replied the next day, copying in Ms. Holmes. “I am extremely irritated and frustrated by folks with no legal background taking legal positions and interpretations on these matters,” he wrote. “This must stop.”

Wow. What a terrible response to get from company leadership. It should be completely appropriate for an employee to bring a concern to the attention of leadership based on a plain-English reading of a statute or regulation. Obviously, I don't know what kind of email the person sent, but if it was something like, "A plain English interpretation suggests that we are required to ... " then the right response is to thank them for bringing it to attention, and then engage people for an appropriate review. Every time I've dealt with a legal situation in a corporate environment, the plain English reading was ballpark a correct way to understand it, with occasionally some detailed nuances for which it was important to have legal input, but which did not radically change the situation. I've never run into a case where the required action was opposite than it seemed, or anything like that, although I'm sure surprising things come up from time to time.

I understand why they might ask people to stop discussing it, on a big company email list or something like that, but bringing it to the attention of the appropriate company leader, is exactly the right thing to do. Thank them and look into it.
Cure for cancer might accidentally have been found
Video of Tesla's Autopilot in City Driving
Modern aircraft have excellent redundancy. Commercial aircraft already typically have 3 Pitot* tubes and 3 static ports. They need unobstructed airflow and are placed accordingly. In this kind of aircraft they do cross-verify each other as well, but if they all are reading different values, there's not much to be done. Conditions were such on AF447 that they all experienced some amount of icing until the aircraft descended enough. I don't see how having one more pitot tube is the proper response.
Survivor (What's the Beef?) Summareview (Recap/Review) 31.04 – TVForBiz
Torturing Databases for Fun and Profit (2014) [video]
The other part of the NSA mandate is to help protect US secrets (commercial and military). Which is one reason why many were surprised when it seemed they'd thrown a wrench in the works wrt NIST/curve crypto -- if they'd tricked the US military and commercial interests to use a flawed curve, they'd undermined their own mandate.

As for "Allied Countries"... yeah, sure the NSA would probably be within its charter if it let China take over Britain (except of course, that that'd harm US interests too).
The Product Group Is Coming to London
Some apps are problematic, and many don't follow the accessability settings for font size, as an example... the facebook app on android is all but impossible for me to read (far sighted). Some devices don't set their dpi correctly, and are even worse since the default settings make things way too small.

If you can't display close to 12pt text in your app at least as a visability option, then there are probably quite a few people that can't use your app... lower than 10pt is almost inexcusable imho.
Any handspun crypto will likely have trivial flaws. But they might escape the NSA's notice, in the same way that a hand-rolled CAPTCHA can sometimes prevent more spam than a better-designed but widely-deployed one?
>Freedom of movement is a basic human right.

I wish people would stop making up fake rights. Your freedom to move stops at someone else's property.
Url changed from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151014121059.ht..., which points to this.
Price Tag of Bernie Sanders’s Proposals: $18 Trillion
Or worse, it knows how to update itself but those ways don't work any more.

Change is a bitch. As are proprietary and one-off updating schemes.
Please Fix the Internetz
Tell that to the guys behind the facebook app for android.. they don't respect the accessibility feature at all, and their text is too damned tiny... (haven't used it in nearly two years, since they started pushing messenger as a separate app, I don't need two battery zapping apps running all the time).
Everywhere else I write I use * except here because I want *, not italics.
Putin's lie about "Russia does not invade Crimea" (Feb 2014) was also easily falsifiable.

Nevertheless he lied about it and his ratings in Russia did not even suffer from it.
Interesting. I don't know enough about the economics to comment, but I will say that it doesn't have to be all or nothing, and there is a path to a borderless world, which involves something like introducing a process whereby another nation can apply to become another state of the USA. Call it state-level immigration.

So, the USA has serious issues, but it still does the really important things well which is a fair vote, and the total freedom of speech and religion. With these two tools in tact, all the other tools can be recreated as needed, according to the times. A member state would get a probation period and then two senate members, some house reps, and a full vote in federal elections. Meanwhile, they'd have to adopt state-level law consistent with US federal law.

The devil is in the details, of course. But maybe if and when software eats the legal system, such a process might be more likely.

(Of course, I have to wonder what is up with Puerto Rico and so many other odd American territories in legal limbo).
Windows 10 Servicing Branches and Delivery of Updates
Summary: Hackers send grandmother phishing mail. Grandmother enter her email address and password. Hackers go into house of Grandmother. Hackers change settings on router and and television of grandmother.
Quit your corporate job, do something different (www.waxidea.com)
Pinterest as Social Media Marketing Strategy
Double-tap zoom is meant to be "smart" about what it zooms to, automatically. So if you're looking at a page with multiple regions and double tap one of them it will try to zoom to show you that region. I use this far more than pinch-to-zoom.
Anecdata: I'm a physician, and get tests done for myself and my family at the Theranos place in Palo Alto, for around $5/test (vs $50 for other labs), and I have no concern about the accuracy of the tests. This abstract discusses some of the possible reasons for variation in test results:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10887452
Of course, none of this proves that the tests are reliable (consistent) and accurate, just that there are several explanations for unexpected and unrepeatable values in a given patient.
And before Dropbox there was rsync and HN laughed at why anyone would pay for it. And before the iPod there was the Nomad and Slashdot laughed at why its hard drive was so small and didn't have wifi. And before the iPhone there was the Blackberry and who would take that seriously, Blackberry already owns that market!

First-mover isn't all that matters.
I think the question meant literally both, always.
Since the article is about a political issue, he is referring to political borders, not private ones. E.g. he's talking about letting Mexicans come into the US, not into your home.
Except some smart people like Keith Rabois would disagree.
That won't work for all the people who'll suffer car sickness when they spend time focusing on their phone while in a vehicle. Intermittent messaging is OK for most people but have you tried reading a book as a passenger? We might find that most people have to look out the windows so often that they can't get much productive work done.
How a US Army strategist thinks about football
It's just called Z. Which is a name that is impossible to search because of the IBM Z.
Cool.. as a side note... 10k lines in that file, is it maintained like that? I know modularizing and things like browserify have an overhead, it just seems excessively large for a single source file (was scrolling up to the top, so that I could star the project to look at later).

I'm not trying to attack or being negative here... just a bit surprised.
I'm going to attempt to answer you in the best way that I can, however, I would like to post a disclaimer: Credit Card processing is an incredibly shady/grey business with several companies fighting for a fraction of a basis point per transactions.

The big 4, as you put it, have very little to do with the actual processing of credit cards. They are the "finish" line of a consumers transaction. In between a consumer and the credit card company, there will be a terminal/pos vendor, a data vendor, a gateway, and a processor. Every single one of those folks takes a cut. In addition, all of those companies are part of larger conglomerates.

So, if you go to your favorite burger/salad/sushi/coffee place, their system will take your credit card, will have another company (like Datawire) create a secure connection to a gateway (lets say First Data) and then hand it off to the processor (BAMS), who will then process your credit cards but not fund them. Once the batch is processed, then the credit card companies will fund your account.

So Square is trying to "disrupt" this business, and create their own connection. However, it's not in AMEX/VISA/MC/Discover's best interests to deal with them. In addition, BAMS (Bank of America Merchant Services), Payment Tech (Chase), and AMEX run processors as a subsidiary, and then gateways (First Data) are parts of their conglomerate. First Data is part of BAMS, WorldPay is joined NCR/VISA/MC and VisaWorld is Visa/MC/Discover.

This is outside the "large" players like Heartland that process a tremendous amount of information.

Square is successful because the "pie" is huge, and growing every day. More and more people are using mobile payment and plastic vs Cash. With increased competition, basis points are king. ONE basis points on 3,000,000,000 in transactions is only 300,000. So for a company to bring in 1,000,000 they would have to essentially process a trillion dollars based on a single basis point commission.

I can go on and on about this giving you exact figures and numbers but I hope I've earned enough "trust" for you to believe me that sometimes letting go of 17% of your total revenue will actually bring you more cash.

Think of it like a bar that fired the bartender who gave away all those drinks. Yes, less people and less money in the drawer but more profit =D