skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In a way I do. I drink water that comes from a lake that about 1 million people poops into... On the other hand, it's a big lake.

I'm lucky in one way to live in Sweden where there is virtually unlimited fresh water (except in a few places). On the other hand, it doesn't stop people from trying to save water, for no particular reason at all, other than some general climate angst. Water is really cheap - somwhere around 1 EUR per m3, and there are no big lawns that needs water. (And if they do, and it's large, you probably have a lake or a stream within pumping distance nearby.)

It's a bit counterproductive. Old sewer pipes are clogging up because of modern toilets that use very little water, and dishwashers and washing machines should probably be set up to use ten times more water in cold pre-cycles and while rinsing, to be able to save a bit on the warm cycles.

I can add that we probably have one of the best waste treatment facilities in world, so the total volume through the system is more or less irrelevant, except some marginal costs for chemicals and pumping.

But no. EU mandates that saving water is important...

The utility companies are now forced to increase the water rates- typically the fixed component, since the total used volume- and their budget- is shrinking.
Interesting, I haven't heard of those.

That was my only concern for a standing desk really. I already walk a few miles a day, but I wanted to add more standing into my daily routine.

It's funny, after you do it long enough your body craves it.
Actually, I did fund it. I personally invested shortly after the ZP pivot :) (and it still wasn't clear they would be successful)

Nevertheless, the fact that yc invested pre-pivot only reinforces my point, as ZP wouldn't even exist had YC not taken a chance on the team and then helped them find a more promising idea.
Sam Altman Live Chat on Product Hunt
This describes many more companies than Google. If Google really is alphabetizing because they want to be more like a VC, they have a long way to go before they get anywhere close to the level Cisco has been operating at for decades.
Bernard Marr: How to Turn Any Big Data Project into a Success
The usual: it's a social problem, not a technological problem. Cryptography is the solution to almost everything that people complain about with email, but, there you go.
Granted I would say nginx, and perhaps Redis are quite exceptional that way. I use them as examples of nice, clear, clean C code.

A good programmer will make COBOL look clean and understandable. But on average, I could way C code requires a lot more discipline, knowledge, and experience to produce quality code.
Stephen Hawking's New Black-Hole Paper, Translated: An Interview with Co-Author
> Will it be ok if wealth from developed nations were transferred to poor nations, every year?

It will, and it happens; think the rich Western European countries putting money into Europe, which they pay out to the economically less developed countries in the east and south. It's what allowed Greece to not go bankrupt. There's also basic relief coming from the UN, and of course taking in Syrian refugees.

> There is a irrational fear here somehow equating wealth and evil. Not sure why people even think that way.

Because money buys power, and if, say, someone wants to build a wall to keep Mexicans or Canadians out, enough money will buy enough power to do that. Corruption. Second, the rich in the US got rich at the expense of the now nearly non-existent middle class and the poor, and the relatively rich country isn't putting its money into basic services like decent, affordable health care, basic income, or decent jobs (something above a McJob that doesn't require a university degree).

It's not the rich that are the problem, it's the fact the middle class is going extinct because of them or their businesses. It's the companies like Amazon that offer low prices due to low-paid but hard-working employees (that will soon be replaced by robots), or the food companies with dollar menus (whose employees are also being replaced by robots / computer screens). There's no real higher-level jobs becoming available for those people - also because higher-level educations have to either be paid out of pocket, or paid out of various grants (like the ones that will pay your education if you happen to be good at sports or chess or whatever).

[/rant. Probably wrong. But, perceptions]
I wouldn't say its faulty. They clearly said unique open rate is even more accurate now. The only thing that suffered was seeing multiple opens from same user. Which I feel is far less interesting
The state already taxes electricity consumption, the same way you pay state taxes per your rate of gasoline consumption.

People that drive 'green' cars are inherently rewarded with paying few taxes at the pump, because they are buying less fuel. Though they may be using the roads and travel infrastructure (which are partially funded by gas taxes) as much as 'non-green' drivers..is this fair for all? Not really, but imagine the fallout of charging Prius drivers more per gallon in order to increase their contribution to the infrastructure that they're using.

In many places, people using solar energy ARE charged more per kilowatt, for the exact scenario above--Increase their contribution to the infrastructure they're using--which is the opposite of what you proposed.

In your proposal to punish the folks that haven't jumped on the solar power band wagon--who receives the benefit$ of their 'punishments'?
I'd imagine that increasing friendliness in such a situation could easily be interpreted as mocking or patronizing (no matter how sincere you are) and in that case the hostile reaction isn't to the friendliness it's to the mis-perception of it.
So this thing was basically just the seeker head? I can see how there might be tech in they they don't want the cubans to see, but this isn't a stealth bomber. Hellfires are sold/used/shipped all over the world. The russians/chinese have surely acquired some through back channels years ago. If not purchased, then scavenged from downed drones.
I remembered reading that Tesla CTO, JB Straubel commented that he understands 90% of the processes at Tesla. If an organization is so complex that the CTO & CEO are unable to effectively understand the business processes, then that would be a problem.

I guess one measure for YC and the funded companies, is when major mistakes get repeated because the solution is not communicated to startups requesting advice.
This is probably the most elegant solution to a PGP signature.

> this seems like it should be a standard and basic part of all email programs now

I can't speak with authority on this, but it feels like this would be adding overhead to something that doesn't necessarily need it. Email is supposed(!) to be relatively simple. I can think of many cases where you would definitely want to have PKI integrated into your emails, but I can think of just as many cases where it's unnecessary overhead in email clients as a standard. However, I admit that I could be wrong.
The same reason basically all other email is not authenticated with GPG: it is a usability nightmare. Even many technically apt people find it too much of a headache. It has no chance of universal adoption in the C suite, and without that kind of adoption, it can't help to prevent things like this.
IBM bought "Blekko" (semantic search engine) a few months ago to build a knowledge base (for Watson AI) and took them offline. (similar to Microsoft that bought "Powerset" for Bing and Cortana AI a few years ago)
A month from going broke, an app launches a hail mary that goes viral
"Adulthood isn't about you, it's about your relationship to others."

Love it!
http://www.joyent.com
and if you really wanna shit yourself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash

"The two 3-4 megaton[a] MK. 39 nuclear bombs separated from the gyrating aircraft as it broke up between 1,000 and 2,000 feet (300 and 610 m). Five of the six arming mechanisms on one of the bombs activated, causing it to execute many of the steps needed to arm itself, such as charging the firing capacitors and, critically, deployment of a 100-foot-diameter (30 m) retard parachute. The parachute allowed that bomb to hit the ground with little damage."
I'm in a similar boat as your. My Mom put it the best a few years ago: "Son, I may be in my 60s, but my mind is always in my late 20s."

You do toggle between different ages, wearing different adult hats depending on situations and people dealt on hands. But everyone's baseline mind is in their late 20s.

At least, that's what I gather from talking to people. :)
Off the top of my head: approximately $1 million for land, $1 million for building, $1 million for working capital of which only about $30~50k is COGS. Some of the working capital is machines and other improvements; more than you would expect is salaries for employees for the first few months.

(n.b. Some of this is fronted by McDonalds, some by the franchisee. McDonalds has an interesting model where they insist on the franchisee being a tenant of theirs, at least domestically -- this turns them into one of the largest commercial real estate options in the world.)
>In my opinion, companies like Google build one hit after another,

There is a huge difference though. Google has the resources and network to push things towards success. There are so many different reasons why a startup may fail, but Google is able to avoid many of these issues because they are google. Not a good comparison IMO.
I think the more fundamental problem is that the program is trying to minimize error where error is defined as deviation in color from the original image. This means objects that can be many different colors but are always strong and saturated average to a brown, as you said. And as you said, for those types of objects, it's best to pick a random color and make it bright and saturated. The best way to have it do that is to redefine error as some metric of how "realistic" the picture looks vs the original. For example, a picture of a car recolored to look bright blue looks similarly "realistic" to the human eye as the original picture where the car is bright red. The deviation in color is high, but it still looks "good", so the error should be low. I have no idea how this metric would be calculated without humans evaluating the output manually, though.
>You can't just turn the other cheek on everything.

On an unrelated note, here's a interesting note on "turning the other cheek"

http://dharmagates.org/other_cheek.html
I lost my entire paycheck.
What about people suffering from any mental illness that would seriously hamper their ability to take responsibilities or reach financial independence ? I am thinking of non episodic depression, phobias preventing doing anything that is performance related, etc.

There comes a time when they are alone in front of the mirror and yet will be unable to act upon it because of circumstances outside their immediate control.

Maybe it's a bit far fetched and is an edge case though.
Not to critique the legitimacy of the work your interviewee, but I can't imagine another time this would be relevant on HN.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3971
Isn't this the wrong problem? It lets you enter X dollars, then it simulates if you played $1 on X numbers of sequential drawings... which would have terrible odds.
Wouldn't it be better to simulate X numbers on Y draws, which would lead you to know the number of times/people would have to play to win.

I don't think probability is communicative, is it?

EDIT: It would also be neat to simulate the number of winners you would have to share the prize with, based on numbers entered in the form from users.
subsea engineering.
The Chinese Room Argument
Unfortunately in the US, the lack of good health insurance options in spite of Affordable Care Act (ACA) means that even after paying the penalty for opting out of soul-crushing health tracking, it is probably still cheaper to work for a company for a company-subsidized health plan than to pay for it all oneself :(.
Funnily I've been working on MLOC-sized C++ projects and almost never had a problem with lookup rules. On rare occasions where it was a problem, it was a compile-time problem and easily resolved.

In any case, these rules do not fall under what I'd call "junior-level" C++ programmer as the OP wrote.
Abacus adds up to number joy in Japan
> they are constrained on what they can build by the availability of specific kinds of engineers in their organization

Can you give any details/examples of what these 'specific kinds of engineers' are?
Weird article.

It talks about why toilet-to-tap is technically feasible, but not (specifically) why we "need" to adopt it, let alone whether it's inevitable. In Perth, or anywhere else. (Yes, it mentions general factors. But at no point does it make a logical case to support what it says in its headline).

BTW, a prediction: in the same way that corporations have strenuously (and in some cases, successfully) lobbied for prohibitions on labeling GMO-derived foods as such, or rGBH-derived milk as such -- one day we'll equal if not more energy put into efforts against against labeling toilet-derived drinking water as... exactly what it is.

And I'm sure one day, these efforts will ultimately succeed, also.
When you own a tarp.
Seems weird to me that with their billions of dollars the DoD doesn't operate a shipping network ferrying equipment back and forth that contractors can use.
I'm sorry, but not having find control over scrolling is really annoying.
The limit to greater financial literacy isn't in the lack of availability of short "tip lists" like this. It's in the willingness of people to research, learn, and change behaviors.

It doesn't help that you'd be lucky to encounter any financial literacy education in public schools (in the US).
Very cool! I guess I'll be remapping /dev/null this April 1st.

btw, that sleek scrolling plugin blocks two finger gestures (page back, forward) on my macbook :(
Getting an internal server error
I live in the middle. For quickie little projects like my NMEA protocol converter, the Arduino tools & IDE are fine, if barely adequate as the project has grown.

However, I have another project where Atmel Studio is a better choice. So I import all the Arduino libraries I need (there's a plugin that can do this automatically, but it's buggy), and then just build it as a regular C++ project but I get "free" use of the libraries without the crappy Arduino IDE.

The nice thing about Arduino is it's so popular that the economies of scale let me buy hardware cheaper than I could build it myself and pretty much all the libraries I need are already written. Although I have had to debug a few of them!! The bad thing is their terrible interface that's really made for tiny programs only.
Agreed, I want to play where I can put as much money into it for each drawing, and then it simulates that, not one ticket one drawing.

I'm not doing this in reality (I spent $2 for a pool, woo), but I'm curious to see it simulated.
Or accidentally shipping "helicopter batteries" aka fuses for Minuteman nuclear missile warheads to Taiwan: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/world/asia/25cnd-military....
Is this an article or an attempt to harvest paycheck information?
can you reversely try to guess how much other people earn?
This is a fascinating sentence:

While the large jackpot prize may be tempting, it's extremely hard to have that one ticket in 292 million.

I think my favorite part is that extremely hard isn't a very accurate description of how unlikely it is.
This is what a PE (Private Equity) Firm basically does from my understanding.

They are a company, that buys, (hopefully) improves, and then sells companies. For example, a PE Firm might have some expertise in mining. They hear about a company that builds some sort of mining technology. They've done pretty well so far but they've really leveled out. The PE Firm decides to buy them, install a new CEO, revise some business practices to help cut costs, and now as the same business they bought but with a better bottom-line. They then sell it.

What you're describing is like an earlier stage PE firm.
Equity crowdfunding is now "live," or getting there. This will bring more money in at the seed stage. I wonder how this will affect the larger ecosystem?

Seems like we might see a shift away from a few "unicorns" to an ecosystem with more smaller to medium sized companies trying more things. That's probably good, and is probably more likely to produce more Googles and Facebooks than betting the entire farm on a few dozen over-inflated ventures.

Of course the future is also likely to be more geographically diverse. Silicon Valley might no longer just be in Silicon Valley. That's also a good thing.
This works really well for software support too.

I have some technology related courses out and I sometimes get people who ask questions in extremely passive-aggressive ways or just have a terrible attitude.

I just bombard them with optimism and treat them in the best way I can. Most of the time they will do a full 180 and become very reasonable, sometimes even apologize.
Well I read that wrong at first glance.
Those questions are very old. You may think the anthropic principle is sufficient here: complex systems seem to rely on an entropy gradient (no life exists in an uniformly chaotic or static state). Ludwig Boltzmann made this argument in the 19th century [1].

However, the argument can apparently be extended to the conclusion that, in a probabilistic sense, your consciousness is just a sliver of a random fluctuation of a near-maximal entropy state. Feynman argued[2] that this shows we do not arise from a random fluctuation, because (even though we're conscious), when we look far away the universe looks highly organized.

Note that those arguments make a bunch of assumptions that may not be valid in our universe, and may not make cosmological sense (entropy is not well defined cosmologically).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

[2] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/12/29/...
Look at an economic chart pre and post New Deal. Not only did FDR's policies help the US recover from the depression, it set the framework for the strongest economic growth of the US' history (pre-1930s growth was much slower than it has been post 1945).

Furthermore, your source is as partisan as they come. 'Austrian' economics exists pretty much only on the internet. Mainstream economics has progressed since 1930.
> Then I thought about it, who has more experience with these scammers than the accountant that screwed up?

On the other hand, sometimes people fall for scams because they are extremely gullible and they never learn. e.g. http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=36572169
To be useful, it doesn't have to be perfect. It can have humans provide it with reference photos, select colors for different parts, or look at several different versions of the same image and decide which one looks best.
Why would you call out "no common core"? It sounds like your kid's school is likely well in line with, or exceeds, the Common Core.

More and more it seems like people don't know what the "Common Core" even is. It's just becoming shorthand for whatever someone doesn't think they like about math pedagogy.

In short, the Common Core is a set of standards for math proficiency. It does not dictate any particular way of teaching math.
The babies who nap in sub-zero temperatures (2013)
I don’t think this is a new trend: https://web.archive.org/web/20151126183335/https://www.jwz.o...
The v0.7 release binary for OS X appears to be missing.

edit: fixed, thanks!
Paul are you concerned that by only funding companies that can hit the ball out of the park that you are biasing the sort of businesses that the smart founders are creating? Assuming smart founders know what sort of businesses will get VC funded then only the second tier founders will build businesses that not going for a moonshot. This is obviously going to bias the final outcome.

Do you think that if a business like YC were to commit to funding "safe" options that good founders would create safe businesses that could achieve returns in aggregate that would rival the high risk / high failure model?
If it is, it is going to be skewed. I just put in $292,201,338 (the 1 in .... odds for the jackpot).
Y'know a lot of the best, most robust and mature software out there is a generation old... Maybe that's just how long it takes to get large scale software right.
And for that do you get a scalable app on managed servers with a wildcard SSL cert, backups, analytics, email, and a managed PostgreSQL instance?

I'm not a Heroku user, so I can't vouch for their service one way or the other, but they do provide a lot of value-add. The time it takes to set up and maintain those services by hand is not free. Unless you yourself are in the business of providing a service platform so that you can generate economies of scale, the time you would spend over the course of a year in maintaining backups and software updates and addressing zero-day security issues for your $10/month Linode would quickly add up to the $3000/year the Heroku services cost. And that's all assuming that you already understand all the sysadmin-level details that, let's face it, most developers don't have the time to keep up with. And honestly a full-time sysadmin can't keep up with everything for every subsystem. There's just too much.

The more I think about it, the better value Heroku appears to be.
Even if I would have braked I would have hit the little guy. So I just swerved to the other side of the road. If it had been packed with cars I would have probably killed him, there was absolutely no way the car was going to stop in time. Very bad experience. I got out very fast to scoop the little man+bike out of traffic and hand him back to his mom, we were both shaking like leafs. They're so quick.
Yes, it absolutely is. Buy two tickets, your chances double. This is the "don't play the lottery, dummy" for dummies, which is good advice for people that think they have anything more than an infinitesimal chance of winning, and/or pour more than five bucks into a single play.
Spent $115,698
Won $10,598
Win/loss $-105,100
Balance $0

ROI: ~10%
The comment on the site where some people play when it's a high payout more for wanting to participate in the cultural event (i.e. go see Star Wars in theaters) than the expectation that they'll win makes a lot of sense.

I think that's mainly why I get a few tickets sometimes when it gets super high, even though I know my chances of winning are significantly worse and my chances of winning at all are almost nothing.
From a prospective employer's point of view, for the most part, they will only care whether you can deliver. If those side gigs are going to be a distraction and I'm not getting any value from you, then it's not a good situation.

You need to convince them that you won't be distracted and you will still be able to deliver efficiently. You can also tell them that your side gigs help you learn new skills, which in turn, can be applied to your day job.
Poker players and literature do this all the time, much to my annoyment. "It's really hard to make a flush" ... no, it's really easy just not very likely.
Could you get away with allowing folks to manually paste in the HTML of their own linkedin page, or perhaps upload a PDF version of their linked in page?

Are you scraping the page for input params? Would it be possible to just expose an API (or web forms that point there) to let folks put in those parameters manually?
Off topic but that leaning exlamation point made me feel a huge boost of nostalgia. Probably for the mid to late nineties when Yahoo was pretty awesome.
Wrongheaded view of the world?

When doing science, is it inappropriate to distinguish between the numbers 1000 and 1024?