skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hospitals and doctors are notorious for this. The never sent a bill, but think they did and since so many medical bills go into collections their default reaction is right to collections. Almost any other business would try to contact you before going to collections.

Unfortunately, the best way to handle it is work for you. First, you need to send a letter to the collection agency demanding proof of the debt. If it is an old debt, odds are they will not want to deal with this and will stop collection attempts. Know the FDCPA [1]. Any legit collection agency should already be following it, but if you start quoting it about time to call, you sent a letter so do not call again, etc... they will take notice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Debt_Collection_Practices...
To be fair the landscape of NZ was highly suitable to the filming of a Movie like the Hobbit. There were far better reasons for them to be filming there than the Dotcom case. Enough better reasons that it's reasonable to conclude the timing in the case was coincidental.

I suspect that it's also not unusual for Hollywood to sweeten the pot when they want to film somewhere with donations of various types.

The connection between the case and those films is extremely tenuous.
Again though nobody forced them to exercise. It accelerates the timeline, but it's not forcing anyone into anything more than having to make a decision.
CentOS is the gold standard of ANCIENT packages. I think they still ship Ruby 1.8.
Where I have observed overcommitting helping, it is often where the task takes longer than the request rate. Simplifying the task helps more.

Benchmark and simplify is a very good strategy.

Your IRQ observation is good. Advising people to set /proc/irq/IRQ_NUMBER/smp_affinity on Linux is a good idea. I don't know how to do this on OSX though, and I have not found a good programmatic way to discover a good setting. I suspect it might be network-card and network-driver specific, but would welcome suggestions.

Your DPDK observation is also good, however if I want that level of performance, I might get less complexity by threading TCP directly into the network interrupt.
I've been diving into Lisp over the past few months and I already find it just as easy to read and even easier to edit/navigate with a proper editor. Sometimes it gets hairy when reading mathematical operations, but that's it. Sure it's definitely possible to write hard to read code, but I don't think s-exps are necessarily more prone to this than your typical C style syntax.
Possibly? It certainly looks similar.
Learning docker was a great way for me to spend my three extra vacation days... then I discovered ottoproject.io.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but even with an early exercise (or an exercise of vested options) where the valuation matches the strike price, that employee would still have had to personally fork over the amount needed to purchase the underlying shares. In the scenario described in the article, they've still lost a substantial chunk of money if the valuation is now a fraction of the strike price.

Secondly, while capital losses can be carried forward indefinitely, you can only apply ~$3,000 per year (as a deduction, not a credit).
Home is where the cartel is
React Mark – Configurable Markdown Components in React
Yes, absolutely! We're mid-continent, and the Laurentian Divide pulls Arctic air downward over our state making it the coldest in the lower 48. Still I'll take our far greater cold sunny days to Seattle's warmer overcast days every single time, thank you.
This would be relevant only if the better opportunity was contemporaneous with the one Good accepted. As you mentioned, that opportunity was six months' gone.
Joining public or late stage pre-IPO companies, equity provides the possibility of real wealth. There is a great Wealthfront article about this -- that if you live in the bay area and have a normal nuclear family, you need equity if you hope to pay for a house, college, etc.

I've seen this in my own life and in many colleagues, friends, and people I've hired. It's not a guaranteed paycheck, but in the bay area getting a healthy equity grant is part of the standard comp package. Without luck, it can be a nice bonus. With some luck it can really move the needle. And with ISO's especially you can choose when to pay taxes on the income.

I know that outside the bay area comp packages are structured differently -- and often less lucratively.
Neat little side fact, the author of this blog has actually been doing consulting for that show :D He's even got several blog posts about it
I read something very interesting a while ago, which I'm not completely unable to find, about feminist movements rejecting, and then embracing, explicit hierachies.

The thrust of it was that without an explicit hierachy, informal hierachies in social structures always emerge. Those informal hierachies are much harder to navigate and much more likely to opress than explicit ones.
in most standard startup contracts you are forced to either exercise when leaving the startup (30-90days) or forfeit them
Learn to take a break.
Yes. Learn both.

Python is great for system development as it's on virtually every platform by default (as is Perl btw), and Node is great for server development.

Python is also good for server development, but it's not as easy to implement a functional server in Python as it is in NodeJS.

The two work together beautifully.

I would learn NodeJS first, then python using the flask or bottle frameworks (Django is very good, but also very heavy).

Cheers!
Very glad the NYTimes ran this piece. The only part they underplayed is they made it sound like the startup "stumbled." No, it sounds like it went exactly as planned. Blackberry got the acquisitions, investors got their money, execs got their bonuses, and the rank-and-file got nothing. That isn't stumbling, that's the playbook.

Tech employees need to wake up about common vs preferred shares, and that the former are worthless. They are NOT worthless because they are "lottery tickets" and most startups fail. They are worthless because they are designed, as a financial instrument, to be fake equity with no real protection from dilution and liquidation preference.

The most insulting aspect of common shares is that engineers get talked into pay cuts on the premise that they get these options, essentially being asked to invest a portion of their potential compensation into the company, but are then told they don't deserve to be given real equity because they aren't "real" investors.

I understand that from a founder's perspective, asking someone to give you millions of dollars is significantly more challenging than asking someone to take a 30% pay cut, so it's easy to give strong preference to the former. But, supposedly and debatably, it's also difficult to recruit talent, and it's going to be significantly more difficult as employees increasingly realize that Common ISO's aren't "lottery tickets" they are "toilet paper". So either startups are going to have to re-invent these equity packages, or the talent will flock away from the VC companies and towards companies that can pay salary. Of course, the VCs have a huge playbook to flood the market with more talent to (taking $100 mil taxpayer money to fund the same bootcamps they invest in to work for the same companies they hire via Obama's tech talent shortage program, for example), so who knows.
I didn't say it was credible or important, just that it's not a scam. There's a huge range in between those two extremes.

Here's an earlier comment about this research:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10497100
Build an API in Swift :p Then learn some good React/React-Native to display something simple in a iOS/android native app powered by the swift API.

Also, building an MVP in under a week and seeing how far some simple online marketing can take it is always fun.
The only people who refer to it as parens hell seem to be non-lispers. As I understand it m-exps were never implemented because people don't really want them. I definitely prefer s-exps over them.
Can you blame them?

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befreiungsausschuss_S%C3%BCdti...

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ein_Tirol
OK, the piece really isn't about how pre-Julian calendars defined the seasons or how and when they may have gone off the rails. It's an argument for why [1] meteorological seasons, starting a few weeks before the solstices/equinoxes, is the way to go, and [2] even if you are adamant about strictly astronomical seasons, beginning them on cross-quarter days makes more sense than the system we use now. One system used over 2,000 years ago doesn't figure into it.
An introduction to differential dataflow, part 2
I was surprised to read that "Google has struggled to create such network effects with both Hangouts and Messenger." At my university, all the student groups that I have worked on use Google docs, Messenger, and Hangouts to coordinate. We don't use Messenger a lot, only when we are online working on a document together, but we do use Hangouts weekly. For us, Google is for group productivity (sort of like Slack), but I couldn't see using Google Messenger for communicating with friends or asking questions to a chat bot. I wonder who their target audience is for this new product. Any ideas?
Clojure, ClojureScript, and Om + Emacs/Vim
Swift and Go would be the two things I learned. Or I'd work on a side project for residual income.
Really the type of farming you need is permaculture and forest gardening, and implementing these literally everywhere that humans live. That is, in my opinion, the best type of farming that is also sustainable. "Organic" farming is still just as bad for the environment and soil as regular farming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_gardening
Homicide is a good proxy for the overall level of violent crime, because it is well-tracked and its definition is consistent between countries.
Some companies sell part of your stocks (on your tax level) to pay tax in your country as soon as the options vest without your say.
A couple of friends of mine and I have agreed to go through the first few lectures of this still super-relevant and foundational machine learning class:

http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/CoursePage.php?...

Why not join us with Swift implementations of some of the discussed algorithms? Simultaneously, you could also experiment with some of the cool, puristic functional programming libraries recently coming up for Swift. Check out awesome-swift:

https://github.com/matteocrippa/awesome-swift

In any case server side application of machine-learning has its drawbacks in terms of privacy, reality of losing internet connectivity, etc.

Hit me up on twitter or github if you are interested.

Have fun and happy holidays (don't forget to relax) :)
Great word, but lose the "en": fremdschämen
Show HN: Ultimate Werewolf Slack Bot
Ah ok. It was unclear from the UI that old logs are archived.

The example you linked is much better thanks.
Script CoreCLR from Node.js Using Edge.js
The wider the gap between the exercise price and the fair market value the more AMT you will owe on the shares when you exercise. By making a speculative investment -- by exercising early -- you will owe minimal AMT at exercise time and more capital gains later when you sell.

There are very real tax advantages to exercising early.
Idris (http://www.idris-lang.org/).

Edwin Brady is working on a book that you can access via the Manning Publications MEAP program (https://www.manning.com/books/type-driven-development-with-i...).
> Hierarchical systems do NOT scale well.

Ahem. Ever hear of DNS?
Happy Transistor Day
‘Computation’ error at Washington prisons let 3,200 offenders out early
The Government sees the Internet as a treat to the Government itself... this is not about terrorism.
Televisions might be a good addition. I might be biased, because I am in the market for a new TV. But It also fits into your concept of tech gadgets. And would be sortable nicely by screen size and price.
I think you're missing the point. Consumers don't care, until some listicle website or advertising firm points out that Amazon/Apple short you on your mp3s by not even offering 128kbps all the way through.

Or imagine Amazon goes with pure VBR, then Apple makes an ad claiming their sound quality is "better" because their bitrate never dips below 128kbps. It's bullshit, but how is an average consumer suppose to figure this out? They'll probably err on the side of caution and buy the CBR version since, "it can't be any worse than the VBR one, but I don't lose bits and it's the same price!"

The whole article was talking about streaming vs. downloading. Streaming is _fine_ and Netflix will probably get away with their compression, but will Amazon/Apple be able to do that with downloads? He doesn't think so. People are fine with Spotify/Pandora because there is no perceived ownership of the songs they're streaming. People who actually buy and download audio or video, they have money in the game so they want "the best" and any loss of that is viewed as Amazon/Apple screwing them over.
If you've ever tried to dive into the NumPy build process you'd see why. It's unbelievably complicated... not that they really could do it better given that they are compiling about a billion scientific libraries and support alternatives and optimizations (like MKL).
The problem here is that "the possibility of real wealth" is not "real wealth". Not being dead provides "the possibility of real wealth" to approximately the same degree as the equity offered to anyone past double digit employee count. Even before that it's only factor unity above the baseline of "not yet dead"
> Seriously, if a position interests you, apply. There have been plenty of ITAR exceptions.

No there haven't. Don't get his hopes up.
This is such a shame.

I wonder what the founding fathers would think of mandatory full-body scans. They seemed uncomfortable with blanket drag-net searches -- they did give us the fourth amendment after all.

For me, it's an affront to the core principles of our republic. The founding fathers had access to just as invasive methods as we have today, and they opted to restrict the government from applying them to the public without direct court oversight.

And I don't buy the argument that flights are somehow special. There is this opinion that they deserve more scrutiny than buses or trains or automobile travel. The truth is, of course, that flying is not significantly different from any other mode of transportation. There is no argument for the TSA that could not be applied to a bus, car, train, or any other form of transportation.

I wonder if we're just a terrorist attack away from the TSA in Bart stations. Perhaps one day we'll have body scanners at bus stops, or ferry terminals. At what point, I wonder, does it begin to cause the courts Fourth-amendment concerns?
> and there's an extradition treaty.

Only for the crimes they've attached/stretched in order to extradite, because what sane country is going to let you extradite over copyright infringement?
>I've never had a medical bill sent to collections, but I did have a (thankfully small) student loan sent while I was diligently paying the other loans because the mail was going to the wrong address. However, I can say from that experience that I could not pay my school at that point. The collector owned the bill. They had paid the school for it, so the school had already gotten its money.
But there's no HIPPA violation in sending a medical bill to collections, and making false accusations like that to get out of paying a legitimate bill (or getting a legitimately delinquent account removed from your credit report) is slimy at best.

One of the accepted methods here goes as follows:
Pay the Doctor's Office.
Send a letter saying you refuse them to share any information about the service provided.
Challenge the debt collector through the credit reporting agency.
Collector will then try to get the doctor's office to confirm the debt, which they no longer have a compelling reason to.
CA drops it off your report because collector can no longer confirm it.

Works almost all the time. There is no false HIPAA accusation here.

>B. Are you referring to items at collections? Then yes and no. Collection agencies will usually offer Pay-For-Delete if you ask for it in writing, in which case you pay the item and it's removed from your report altogether. You still end up having to pay the bill. The alternative (if it's a valid delinquency) is to let it sit for 7 years until it falls off.

Collection agencies do not like to pay-for-delete. They'll say they're legally bound to report exactly as it happened (also a lie). They will fight you on it if your debt isn't significantly large enough that they're making enough profit for it to be worth it. You can get them to do it, it will just take time and negotiating.

>A. This is only possible by virtue of having little to no actual credit history. If you're in your 30's with a mortgage, paid off student loans and paid off vehicles, you're not going to make massive positive changes to your report in a year without major negative items falling off.

I had 12 delinquencies removed. They were of varying difficulty, all different collectors. Some were easy, some very, very hard. One in particular I had to go so far as to pull phone records from years ago. Any negative item falling off your report is huge. Even one small $100 delinquency hurts you a ton, regardless of your history.

The only thing I didn't deal with was credit card debt. I hear its a lot harder to get late payments removed, but I've never tackled it.
"More fit" only makes sense with regards to the pressure. I.e. the bacteria may survive antibiotics, but that may come at the expense of general pathogenicity.

The fact that the gene is not already widespread suggests that in the absence of the selective pressure of the antibiotic it has other effects that decrease fitness in a typical environment.
Ask HN: Comment notification services?
I was using http://hnnotify.com/ to get notifications when someone replies to my comments but it looks like this service is no longer available. Do you know another similar service?
I don't understand where Wordpress hatred comes from. If my primary goal is a writing platform that allows me to concentrate on the content of the blog rather then blog technicalities, wordpress is fine..
"Clearly, the Federation are the metaphoric U.S. of A."

Really? I thought the Federation was the metaphoric United Nations? For example, from https://web.archive.org/web/20110718082040/http://woodygoula... :

> “Roddenberry admits there are hidden covert messages in the show. There’s an anti-war message, with the United Federation of Planets as an ideal United Nations.

"On several occasions, the fact that the Federation uses no money is mentioned. Either, in the 24th century, humankind, and in fact most of the galaxy, has regressed to a barter system"

Anthropologist David Graeber, in "Debt: The First 5000 Years", argues that "debt and credit historically appeared before money, which itself appeared before barter. This is the opposite of the narrative given in standard economics texts dating back to Adam Smith." (Quoting Wikipedia.)

While I have not the background to know if this is correct, I don't think Adam Smith had that background either. Graeber's view does help interpret the non-monetary social systems that appear in a company or other large organization. I think it's a good caution that a phrase like 'regressed to a barter system' may be too simplistic to be meaningful.

"a slightly worrying situation when Deanna is able to trace all of the descendants of a re-animated 20th century cryogenically preserved woman on the Enterprise computer. It seems as though starships are equipped with data files (including addresses and photos?!?) for every citizen on Earth. Worried? You should be"

It's worrisome that the 24th century equivalent of Facebook, and or Mormon geneologists, have data caches in every starship? Should the good citizens of Iceland be worried about the Íslendingabók?
Your irrelevant SCOTUS comment aside, we need to make sure we're comparing apples to oranges.

From the article:

> the judge ruled that Encore’s lawsuit to collect the debt was separate from Ms. Thompson’s case accusing the company of violating the law.

Disregarding the fact that the original judge should not have awarded a debt that was past SOL, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that Encore taking action to collect a debt it purchased is a separate legal question from a claim that Encore is violating the law. I'm not saying they are related of course, but I have a feeling the arbitration agreement is pretty clear that if you want to sue Encore you have to use arbitration.
Consultation: Private Hire Regulations Review (London)
ML, Haskell, Idris, or Prolog.

Because these languages will challenge your problem solving abilities and should improve your overall skill in writing code in any language.

If market feasibility is really your thing, then Clojure or Scala for similar reasons.

It look some deep investigation in Haskell for me to get fairly dangerous with Scala. (There are weird type system gotchas in Scala that can seem insurmountable at first which Haskell does a better job of encapsulating.)
A Patient Is Sued, and His Mental Health Diagnosis Becomes Public
Actually, McDonald's caused a small typhoid outbreak in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, about thirty years ago. An employee who prepared salads was a carrier for typhoid, contracted in her(?) native country.
It is precisely the protections of preferred stock that led to the overvaluation in the first place. http://recode.net/2015/05/10/heres-one-thing-all-the-billion...

As a common stock holder, you should know that you'll be the last one paid, if at all, because few companies can meet unicorn expectations.
Potential energy is not energy that you can give to a payload unless you want to have it fall 100km back to earth.
> makes it difficult to have multiple personas on the web.

Google is already moving in that direction, often requiring phone number verification to make full use of an account.
> techno-monopolist's wet dream

Digital imperialism is the next step up from techno-monopolist.
Or at the very least learn something new that is not directly related to work.
Audiophiles have and will say that regardless, since all of the discussed options are lossy. (I'm not ignoring Apple's lossless codec, just don't think it's relevant for this conversation)
My Code Ended Up Running an Oil Rig. These Are the 5 Things I Learned
Yeah, I had an 80 column terminal for my C64 or dialing into PC BBSes, but it was really difficult to read. It also used a custom font on a bitmap display such to cram 80 characters on the screen. I don't remember what it was called, but probably was downloaded from a random BBS. I pretty much never used it, because of the ugliness of it.

But, the 128 80 column mode was entirely usable (it was at 640x200 or 640x400 interlaced, so it was quite legible, and comparable to PC displays of the time). So, I was able to use PC BBSes comfortably from the 128, but not from the 64. I'd be happier, if more software took advantage of the 128. There aren't even any music trackers for the 128, that I can find.
Recurrent Neural Networks. They're so cool. Used in everything from creating chat bots to describing pictures to machine translation. Bengio and Goodfellow have a preprint book available https://goodfeli.github.io/dlbook/
or node?
The need for semicolons is easy to understand. It's required if you have operators that can be both binary and unary. Look at the following in non-semicoloned C:

a + b
*c - d

is it one or two expressions?
I would bet money that Amazon ran into this same
conundrum with the unconstrained VBR mode of the
LAME MP3 encoder which they use.

Lame has always had a way to set minimum and maximum bounds on the VBR bit rates. I would bet that Amazon has at least one employee who knows this. I used to use this a lot with a hardware player that couldn't handle VBR above 224 kbps.