skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did not have a positive experience with Nextdoor despite being pretty excited about the service at first. First strike was people posting spammy/pyramid scheme type sale stuff. My attempts to contact the local admins did not result in any change. More spam kept being posted.

Strike 2/3, I did not want to reveal my full name when first signing up. One day I got an email informing me that my account was deleted (not just suspended) because I did not use a real name. There was no chance for me to remedy the situation.

Too bad. Anyone know of an alternative?
I've heard of other small rocket companies using alcohol and lox as the fuel/oxidizer. Does anyone know if that is a stand-in for "real" fuels (e.g. RP-1 or H2) that they'll switch to after getting contracts or if they plan on using an alcohol-fueled engine as part of their strategy?
Living social cuts one fifth of its workforce
> Gaining potential energy really means that you've gained mass

I've never heard this before. Can you link to some further explanation? Intuitively, if anything, you'd lose mass, because you're in a place now where space is less curved than where you were before.
The code's available too: https://github.com/lvsh/keywordfinder
Not even close; here's an accounting I did covering just Western Europe just for this century as of a little over 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4970408 and the same with some discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5070201

Add e.g. Canada and "[it's] overwhelmingly a US problem" is even less true.
Other than that, all the things I've seen are marginally useful at best.

Part of it is that the FDA successfully sued 23AM from showing things like health risks.
Right, after the IPO everyone is automatically converted to common but for the history of past rounds you need to look at the charter.

The charter is publicly available from the secretary of state wherever the corporation is incorporated. It will state how many shares of each series of preferred stock is authorized. Also, if there is price-based anti-dilution protection (typical in non-seed investments), the charter will state the "original issue price" of each series (i.e. the price per share when first sold). You can check the amount actually sold in the company's SEC Form D filings (also public) and work out the historical valuation that way.

This doesn't account for things like notes converting at a discount, milestones, adjustments for down rounds, etc. But it is possible to get a rough idea of the valuation trajectory.
I was thinking more about the "close range" stuff since the OP's post mentioned kidnapping, which suggests "up close and personal" confrontation. But you have a point: if somebody just wants you dead, at any cost, it's hard to protect against a sniper, at least if they know your whereabouts.

If you want to get really paranoid, you can imagine a vector where somebody attacks by, say, intercepting your pizza delivery and adding poison to it or something. :-(
Top Places to Submit Your Product or Service
Robots are taking our white collar jobs, too
Yeah, well, I mean that is the standard DOD approach to everything.

But I don't know if that's the only solution if being economical ends up being important.

Spike strips are really good at stopping cars, especially if they're running around a track in a circle.
Debunking the 100X GPU vs. CPU myth
Terminology-wise, a video is definitely not an MVP, unless you are a company that sells videos.
This is called "salient region detection" and some current approaches (there are many) include detecting the contrast between each pixel and the global or regional average color or luminosity. Areas of high contrast are likely to be regions which are considered interesting. Once you have those regions, you would have to have a separate algorithm which maximizes the placement of a rectangle (the crop) to get the greatest coverage of "interestingness".

You could also combine this with face detection, so that a picture of someone in a bikini doesn't end up cropping just to their midsection, since going by surface area, the torso could have more high-contrast pixels than the face.

Here's one approach which has open source C++ code:
http://mmcheng.net/effisalobj/
I guess not tipping enough is linked to its previous point around rudeness. This happens to me in the city. They are usually rude, and when I tip them %10 or less, their rudeness becomes even more apparent. Meh.
Uber and other "on-demand" apps are literally the opposite of "guaranteed" job security.

There is a finite amount of job potential which you are able to compete for. That's why Uber drivers often drive for Lyft as well because they are just sitting around waiting for someone to hail them, because there is no job security past the fare you are currently picking up.

This is also reflective by the fact that you arent an employee but an independent contractor who has very little rights and no benefits.
See this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10384595
Check out a critique of the theory of disruptive innovation: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-...
https://web.archive.org/web/20141024042516/https://www.unrea...

Has the article, but the link seems to be to different content (Tappy Bird, not Citadel)
Related discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10378944
Doesn't prevent it. But since it's sub-optimal, it never happens.
I use a standing desk with multiple terminals laid out so I walk between them. I also agree that while standing you are more likely to take walking breaks or step away for a moment. I also feel like when I'm standing I'm a lot more active then when sitting.

Finally, when I sit I have a habit of slouching while standing I tend to have a much better posture even for extended times.

While a bad back isn't death inducing (usually), we should consider all the benefits of standing over sitting, not just the fact that you may or may not die.
Thanks. We don't have an all-in-one download, you have to install Python or R separately. But if you already have them, it should just work if they are in your PATH, and that path is setup by .bash_profile? Did you install the required R packages? Do you have IPython (not just Python)? We can probably better debug this by email or as a github issue than in this forum.
I feel like this article was a bit weak. I agree that IMO Stripe is better but the reasons given where the bare minimum.

- Easy Signup

- Easy to use and Understand API

- Checkout widget written in JS for a drop in solution to payments

- Reasonable fees

- A stripe library for pretty much any language

- Supports Apple Pay and Bit Coin (pretty early on too)

The list goes on and I'm sure some of my points cross over to others but Stripe pretty much has it all.
Regarding how they look: am I the only one that thinks wind turbines can be beautiful? I would consider this a beautiful landscape: http://c1cleantechnicacom.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/2011...
He's a total outlier since he had two very well documented issues that occurred in his life that affected him profoundly - and I can't blame him for feeling the way he did after either.

The first was at 9 months after bieng born, he got a bad case of the hives and was isolated from his family, with no visitors. This time is the most important time for newborns to bond with their parents and he was deprived of this. His treatments lasted over 8 months which affected him profoundly:

"His mother wrote in March 1943, "Baby home from hospital and is healthy but quite unresponsive after his experience"

The other was a psychology experiment he participated in while at Harvard which people believe fueled his anti-science views:

During Kaczynski’s sophomore year at Harvard, in 1959, he was recruited for a psychological experiment that, unbeknownst to him, would last three years. The experiment involved psychological torment and humiliation, a story I include in my book Mind Wars: Brain Research and the Military in the 21st Century.

The Harvard study aimed at psychic deconstruction by humiliating undergraduates and thereby causing them to experience severe stress

source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/impromptu-man/201205/ha...

The Atlantic had a good story on the experiment as well: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard-...
Only on HackerNews is Apple and Intel labeled patent trolls.
This accountable argument is stone-old. You'll find it in an intro AI book. Of course only when implemented in lisp, so it needs be an older book.

It's the typical argument against neural nets, because they cannot explain their chain of reasoning, and so you are not able to train it to right way, or do not train into the wrong direction. when something goes wrong you got a problem.

Old AI had the same problem, that's why they added the chain to the backtracking to give better answers, and you are able to introspect answers.
I Play Hearthstone, League of Legends, Diablo 3, Path of Exile and CSGO
Have you considered using PLSA (Probabilistic latent semantic analysis)? Effectively, this method does very similiar thing as you aim to do - it chooses a set of words that represen a topic of a document.
Hmm, I'm not sure if I agree.

In certain Asian households it is expected that you take your shoes off, if you know this, and still stomp around the household in your shoes, would you say there was no justification for the owner of the household to be rude or snarky?

You might be able to argue that the enlightened person might say "I don't know what has happened to this person today, or why they're doing this, and I will try to find out their story before assuming they're just being an uncultured ass", but there is certainly justification, especially when it comes to the fact that these people are earning their livelihoods in this way and the tips are an essential part of that.
Good point, but personally I am thinking about the future of clustered data analysis, and this seems to be a JVM world and Scala seems to be the language of choice. Flink / Storm / Spark etc.
Eventually displaying HTTP as insecure is, in fact, the plan for Chromium:

https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/marking-http...
All I'm asking for is that they link to the patent (if it's a patent case) or the study (if it's a report on a study).

Have a look at this story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34520631

That has an inline hyperlink to a previous story. It has a list at the end of the article to other articles about the same topic. And it also has a related Internet links.

So a link to the patent could be:

_The patent, filed in 1998_

Or it could be listed in related Internet information.

Most people aren't going to use it, but it saves time for everyone who does use it. And for medical studies it's probably important to get people into the habit of trying to read and understand them.
Linux kernel is completely different since there is little or no network effect.
I've seen some of this, too. I "founded" the Nextdoor community for my neighborhood and stayed a lead after that. A lot of the success depends on the nurturing and moderation the leads do, and if they decline to actively participate, well, what you described is likely to happen.
They're struggling because they typically hire young, professionally immature employees that treat any new process as an encroachment on their fiefdom. When I worked there getting anything done across departments required buy in from the executive team that had to force people to do their jobs.

The zappos comparison doesn't really work anymore. They dropped free 2-3 day shipping because they were losing so much money and phone support has gone downhill.
> People like to believe that they have "big problems" and that they need large scale solutions.

People like to believe that they will have big problems and will need large scale solutions, and often make the call to plan accordingly. Decision-making for this sort of thing is a tightrope walk across a bunch of unknowables affecting a bunch of trade-offs.
"In he-said, she-said sexual assault cases, critics of affirmative consent say the policy puts an unfair burden of proof on the accused."

This is my problem with 'affirmative consent'. Anyone that feels regretful the next day can then go ahead and say they were raped.

Even if they had oral consent, it will be one word against another. Will we now need a written contract before having sex? Because this seems like what is eventually going to happen to avoid a criminal court case.
Yes. I can't imagine living life worrying about something like that.
For some of us, standing is necessary for back pain etc. So its more complicated.
Thank you so much for sharing.
I'm surprised Nickel-iron batteries[0] aren't used for this type of grid-scale storage. They are extremely time and cycle-durable: 20-50 years, almost immune to repeated deep discharges, relatively cheap and simple to produce. Cons: they need a bit of maintenance (not a big deal at grid scale), and have a less-than-stellar efficiency.

The problem with compressed air is that the Ideal-gas law [1] actively works against you to reduce efficiency, assuming it will be kept at ambient temperature. Inserting energy by compressing gas heats it up, which increases the pressure of the gas in the tank, which makes you work harder to put more gas in. Extracting energy cools the gas down, which reduces the pressure of the gas, which reduces the amount of energy you can extract from it. You can mitigate these issues by carefully controlling the temperature of the gas (more energy) or having a much much bigger tank so a single cycle only thermally cycles by a small amount (more $$).

Another option I hadn't considered until now is to let it heat up -- and insulate it to let it stay hot. It will cycle in both pressure and temperature on a nearly daily basis so you may not lose all that much energy in heat. But I doubt this is an original idea.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas_law
"Let's not turn this into a debate on BLANK, instead let's talk about my pet theory BLANK".

Seems like that's the only constant after any sort of horrific tragedy. It becomes grist in the mill for people to push their pre-existing agendas.

For some it has been a push for greater gun control. For others it has been a push for greater funding and understanding of mental health. For others, you blame media attention.

Personally, I view these events as "side-effects" of our society. And we're basically loathe to examine it too deeply as it can call into question some deeply held parts of American culture.
Censys is a search engine for the hosts and networks that compose the Internet
Their failure rate has dropped quite a bit so far in 2015, so it looks like they've made changes to correct their previous poor failure rate. Still a long way to go to become the front-runner, but they're going in the right direction at least.
I am sure this is way far too late for most people on HN, but there is some useful advice that tends to work.

Usually, the most popular people can pick on a wide range of people and don't focus on any one person. It is the people in the lower middle that have fewer targets below them that get really mean. As strange as this sounds moving slightly up the hierarchy, but not to high is the best way to avoid lots of negative attention from any one person. Granted, this assumes there is nothing specifically unusual about someone.

PS: Sorry, if this comes off as victim baiting, but thinking of high school as a pack of chimps works surprisingly well.
'Connectome fingerprinting' to assess fluid intelligence, confirm identity
I don't have anything public, but I have been exploring strategies for gluing together different tech in order to accomplish our goals. Latest stack has been:

- wget / wpull / heretrix to produce .warcs across a single domain
- have a filewatcher on a folder to process .warc into text and then push it into elasticsearch with relevant metadata
- flask search frontend for querying / results

Happy to share my learnings elsewhere. (I pinged you on email)
This would make me anxious. I remember reading about someone who learned from 23andMe that they had a terminal disease or something like that, and it drastically altered their life. I'd rather just live in ignorance.
The visual cortex is one of the largest and most powerful cortices in the human brain.

But it may be that vision's supposed to work in conjunction with the other senses.

I think visual explanations work well for very simple visuals. As soon as higher order factors need to be factored-in, visual explanations are only sensible to the highly trained expert (think Feynman diagrams).

Nice essay, nevertheless. A lot of time and work went into it, and I can appreciate that.
I have some insights on this. I took Building Virtual World from CMU that is taught by Jesse and other faculties but the structure is the same.

They don't give credit on how many all-nighters you took to build something or how hard you tried. Instead they value how "complete" your product is. Students (myself included) tend to build something pretty ambitious in relatively small amount of time and ended up making a prototype that kind of works/don't.
They want you to learn that you need to estimate better and deliver something simple/complete and not something that is ambitious/complex that is not quite working.

You can imagine I got a B in that class :P
Seeing all the things you can cut away from a process. It has taught me a lot about user experiences in a big corp context as well.
How to silently control a mobile phone from 16 Feet Away
Yep. The visualization tricks in this article are for building understanding of basic ideas in probability theory and information theory.

In most real situations, they wouldn't be very practical. As you note, the core trick in this essay only works for 2 or 3 variables, assumes they're discrete, and doesn't scale to the variables having lots of values or really improbable values.

There are visualization techniques which are useful in the real world, at least some of the time -- a lot of my blog explores this in the context of neural networks -- but that wasn't my goal in this article.
Netflix Misses U.S. Subscriber Growth Targets, Stock Plummets
Ask HN: Does YC Still Look at Applicant Comment Histories?
Settle a bet for me, YC partners.

A long time ago, Paul Graham suggested that one of the things YC looked at in applications was the applicant's comment history.

I thought that was a weird thing to say then, but it sounds even crazier today, knowing how many more applications YC gets, how much bigger the batches are, and how little time you have to review each application.

I bet Felix Gallo on Twitter that YC no longer looks at HN comment histories. Hasn't in awhile. Nobody has time. There's no easy productive way to evaluate them anyways.

I lose the bet if a YC partner chimes in and says that comment histories are (still) part of how YC considers applications. But if a YC partner settles the bet either way, I'll pay up; the money goes to Partners in Health.
Good read. Interesting ideas.
The crafty engineer was Charles Steinmetz, and the business owner balking at the invoice was Henry Ford [1]. EDIT: Maybe not so true after all [2].

I had never heard of Maston Space Systems. It's amazing they were able to compete with such massive names in Boeing, and Lockheed.

[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinm...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10389203
I dont think shifting your weight around really counts as movement
and the name of the company in the episode is Smart Shopper, and a quick google search appears to the website to be https://www.vitalssmartshopper.com. Unfortunately their list of U.S. states doesn't include where I live.
Awesome, thanks! This should be fairly easy to wrap for Python I think.
According to this ridiculous article I was "a natural step" from being a school shooter in my teenager years, and so are million others. The juvenile grouping of "jocks and nerds" is not enough for the author, who makes no effort in trying to understand the killera, instead he dwells into generalizations and sheer prejudice. If the title didn't hint you into what sort of article it would be.
> standing without moving the body.

But this is also hard to do unless you're John Carmack giving a talk.
Apocryphal: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp

...but it was told at a MIT commencement address: http://web.mit.edu/president/communications/com99.html
I tried installing Facebook Lite in the Google Play store but it says "This item isn't available in your country". I live in the US.
Ask HN: Do registrars sell searches?
I've been searching for a particular address frequently over the past couple of weeks on what I consider to be a reputable registrar and to my surprise the primary domain I've been considering was snapped up 3 days ago by a squatter.

Does anyone have any insight into this, ways to avoid it? If it wasn't my registar who looked at my search and sold it, who could it have been? It seems too much of a coincidence.
This was presented at SSTIC 2015.

paper (in french): https://www.sstic.org/media/SSTIC2015/SSTIC-actes/injection_...
video (in french): http://static.sstic.org/videos2015/SSTIC_2015-06-03_P09_AGRE...
HN readers meet for coffee in SF?
Where:
22 Battery St, San Francisco, CA 94104
(Near intersection of Market and Battery.)

When:
1pm this Friday, Oct 16.

I'll be there if at least one person replies that they'll also be there.

If this location or time doesn't work for you, please propose another.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=A%20tale%20of%20software%20mai...
I can pretty much guarantee the city will find a way to screw this up, one way or another. There is a pile of money behind the monopolies called medallions. Those owners expect their monopoly enforced, or why bother? Clearly going into debt to buy a newish card to get better Uber rates is a better economic decision than going into debt to buy a medallion which doesn't directly do jack squat for you. So the city in turn will want its cut somehow: it'll be a tax, or a fee, or both, probably multiple fees.

A while ago the city found income taxes weren't enough, and the state and feds didn't give them enough, so there's a separate NYC income tax. And then that wasn't enough so if you're a small business there's a separate unincorporated business tax. It's not enough to just add a new line or worksheet to compute this tax, it's a whole separate form, a whole separate set of duplicative questions, a separate mailing address, a separate check. And then that wasn't enough so they created the MCTMT income tax, which again is a separate form, separate mailing address, and its own check.

The tax amount isn't as costly as the additional bureaucracy generated at both ends of the equation. Raise the rate? Nah. Add a new line for computation? Nah. They want completely separate offices, forms, addresses, and their own check.

Oh and each one of those wants separate estimated income tax payments made 4x per year. It's just insane.
I'm talking about using slack as a member of various groups, with very different focuses. The fact that it is centralized means I don't need to have Yet Another Server I have to remember the address to, the username, the password, etc, and enter in on my desktop, my laptop, my mobile, etc. Plus, if one of those decentralized instances has a mobile app, chances are, I'd have to put in configuration info there for each and every service. Self-hosted communications services quickly become a pain in the ass when you end up needing to deal with more than a couple, and sometimes centralizing things a bit is an actual benefit.