skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that the license plate situation is a concern, but banning the scanners is the wrong fix. I could organize a group of friends to all point cameras out our windows and do the same thing, without the help of government (and in fact, have sort of considered doing so just as experiment, to prove how trivial it would be). The privacy incursion occurs when the government requires you to attach an easily recordable unique public identifier to your vehicle, not when they document sightings of the identifier. Once you put the license plates on the cars, you've lost already -- anybody could be looking, and you'd never know; it'd be basically impossible to regulate.

Not to say I don't think there should be license plates; obviously there's a public safety argument for having them, and that argument has to be counterbalanced against the privacy concerns (and perhaps rebalanced as technologies advance and change the relative difficulty of some kinds of privacy-invading tasks). But focusing on the scanner is pointless. More broadly: acknowledging that people trivially have access to tons of data that, when taken together, damages privacy, and trying to fix the privacy problem by telling them they're not allowed to look at it, is never going to end well. If the problem is solvable at all, it's by controlling access to the data in the first place.
Why pour it out? Sell the bottles for cash to another party.
How do you recognize these types of good companies?
The first thing the adult does is order an audit, so it amounts to the same thing.
Completely agree with this assessment.

The way software is completed is pretty crazy today, little time for research and development and a lack of focus on quality, but focused on short term changes that cost long term technical debt. Estimation is hard and project plans are only ever about 60-70% right.

There is a big problem with not allowing sliding dates as well. When software is completed one day early that is a pile of crap it is lauded short term and painful longer term submerged in technical debt, then when more time is taken up front for quality it is short term pain for long term gain later on the maintenance phase. The problem is the latter is hard to do with development schedules not set by developers.

Note: I accidentally hit downvote as my mouse glitched and wish I could reset that.
As a person close to the "teen" demographic, I can tell you that teens still use Facebook. Thinking of social media as a zero sum game is a common mistake; each has its own use case. For instance, Facebook is usually used when chatting on desktop/laptop with friends, adding new people you met, or chatting with people who you aren't really close to. Also, Facebook is widely used for groups and events, which no other social media provides. Snapchat might have replaced some aspect of the Facebook newsfeed but people still post things on Facebook. When a teen says, "omg Facebook is like so old and no one ever uses it". They mean to say that they don't use it as much but they still use it for things I mentioned.

Edit: It is important to note that Facebook has the "identity" aspect down like no other.
Here's a quote from a post I enjoyed (https://www.elttam.com.au/blog/a-review-of-the-eff-secure-me...):

> This type of score card drastically simplifies the problem domain, and leads one to question what the tradeoffs are when installing an application from the list. While the advocacy of privacy based communication is something we love to see reach a mainstream audience, we believe the scorecard misses many considerations and metrics that are critical to the discussion.

To quote myself:

> The EFF score card is an embarrassment which is essentially equivalent to one of those "comparison table of our competitors" on a SaaS website. That's a good analogy for it, because it uses the same questionable metrics and even more questionable ranking system that one of those tables would use. The score card gives Signal the same ranking as Cryptocat - that's an instant negative result for its usefulness.
This is so true. It also explains the revolving door of CIO/CTOs at many places. Every 3-5 years, a new one comes in, makes minor changes and avoids the elephant in the room. On and on we go.
[I can see the images in Chrome, but not in IE11.]

I like the images, but when you move the "yellow fish" all the other points move randomly. I'd prefer a similar image where all the other points are fixed.
Not quite. It's more so just that Snapchat is new and is something that not everyone was already on. However, that's changing quickly...
It will be distributed in deposits across banks that do have deposits at the Fed. We'd try to do it in such a way as much of our reserves as possible are FDIC insured.

Have you heard of CDARS? It would be similar to that.

http://www.cdars.com
I think they want something complementary to the existing system. If you had approved Drew Houston and gang you would not be adding anything since YC also approved them. Look for a sign of potential success that YC would miss.

One advantage HN has is more time to think. HNers will look at a much smaller stack of applications, and won't be restricted by the brief interview format YC has.
I think a much better approach would be to start with the 1000 most common words, but allow defining terms from there. This allows you to develop the correct jargon which will both enhance understanding and allow communication with others about the topic in the future.

Having to continually fall back on silly terms like "up goer" does nothing to enhance understanding when you can define what a rocket is and then just use the word rocket.
Thanks! Definitely going to look at these. Can't believe I wasn't aware AWS came with an API gateway service as well.
I'm a little concerned that this experiment could attract the wrong kind of behavior on HN, and bring in new users for the wrong reasons. I'm excited to see how this goes, but it will be quite a shame if the quality of regular content on HN suffers as a result.
Speaking for myself, I would never ever look at that. I did upvote you though.
According to [1], k-NN is pretty far from being the top general classifier. Admittedly, all the data sets are small, with no more than 130,000 instances. When does it start becoming "very hard to beat", and what are you basing that on?

1. http://jmlr.org/papers/volume15/delgado14a/delgado14a.pdf
LinkedIn Stands Up a Private Cloud to Speed Development
If it makes you feel better, Fred Brooks of System/360 ("mainframe") fame has a pronounced Southern accent, and is a Turing award winner.
Apply HN: Kohapp – Helping friends hangout without the hassle
We are trying to make it easy for friends to hangout with each other and have fun. There are various instances where we decide to hangout with our friends but face the following problems in doing so:

- Long calls/texts/chats to decide on a place to meet and even after all that there is no surety that a decision is made. This is the biggest problem while planning a hangout.
- No easy way of checking which all friends are coming and which are not.
- Deciding on a date/time that suits everyone.

Even if going through all the above problems was not enough while planning, there is one other major problem at the actual hangout place. We all have those friends who never reach on time and we end up calling/texting/chat (again) to enquire about there ETA (everyone hates to wait :))

All these issues are not only painstaking but a waste of time as well. Kohapp helps to solve all of them under one roof through the help of technology. Its an app to plan/organize hangouts in 3 simple steps without need of calling/text/chat.

We are currently in development and hope to launch in the coming months.

http://facebook.com/kohapp
Yes I refer to the gzipped size as usually the other libraries do. I don't think that gzipping is so heavy on system resources considering that most of the websites are gzipped nowadays
The only reason I even live within commuting distance of a large city is because that's where the only good-paying tech jobs are. If I had been a, say, banker or a mechanic or a plumber I'd be able to work in any town in the country, but no, dumb me had to become a computer programmer.

If I could participate in this career/industry from a smaller town, you bet your butt I'd do it in a second.
Thanks. That fixed me up:

In [6]: r.connect(host="localhost", port=28015, password="", ssl={"ca_certs": "./cert.pem"}).repl()
Out[6]: <rethinkdb.net.DefaultConnection at 0x7f92ea759fd0>
More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren’t Making Payments
Really? I'm originally from the south but have had zero issues in the northwest -- everyone is super mellow.
The author is obviously self-aware and this is precisely what makes it frustrating. Nearly every point is obfuscated through ornamentation, or broken up into parenthetical statements like a jigsaw puzzle. The entire article could be summarized in a concise paragraph with minimal loss of meaning. It's just pretension.
We'll add the keyword "hosting" in some of the explanations which should help. Thanks for the feedback!
No. He's doing some drawings for text books. There is no chance that the thing explainer 1000 words affectation will be adopted for the text book for the purpose of actual teaching.
How Eve Online's greatest military leader once fooled the entire galaxy
I'm with Orwell on this one. Whether by design or "happy" accident, Trump exemplifies the trend for politicians to be vague. Or as he puts it, speaking like this "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...
No, I am thinking through this properly, you're just being overly paranoid. A computer ML system right now will not be able to, with a high degree of accuracy, know enough about the image to provide targeted advertisements. They even showed samples of descriptions; they're vague and general, not specific.

The description might be "two people, outdoors, at beach" while the content could be "Awesome beach day today with my best buddy!" with X tagged in the image, geolocated to "Y beach" (either through your phone/camera's geolocation feature, or the poster specifically tagging a location which is something Facebook encourages), posted at Z time. Which do you honestly believe is going to provide more information for targeting? Hell, even if the content is "It's a beautiful day out!", you'd still have far more information from the metadata (tags, location, time) than the vague description the auto-generator could possibly provide.
What the Best Startups Have in Common
I understand your point, but established Silicon Valley investors are not the audience I'm trying to reach, or persuade.

I would call what I do 'impure trolling', since I run an actual business, and have given an earnest series of talks calling for regulations on mass surveillance.

Following in this earnest vein, I live a life of independence and fun, and would like to encourage young technical people to live that life too, rather than wasting their youth in pursuit of a one-in-ten-thousand shot at plutocracy.
> Mental illness is different because in many cases, the people in question are do not possess the faculties required to live normally, decently, or (in rare cases, peacefully) in society.

Mental health care facilities are a thing. Medication is a thing. Of course mentally ill homeless people cannot pay for these things themselves. This is where decent humans have to come together and help.

> In a sense, I think the reason someone is poor is more important than the fact that they're poor at some given moment in time.

Of course, and one of the main reasons people are poor is because they were born into a poor family, or otherwise disenfranchised condition. Class mobility in the US is basically a myth, because the social welfare including everything from child subsidies, education, food, living, healthcare is quite terrible and getting worse.

> I believe that a just system concerns itself with making it possible for those who desire more wealth and are able to earn it to do so

And one of the main factors here is for people to have the ability to get a good education, get healthcare, stay away from crime and drugs, have a certain amount of social and financial security and stability, etc. All of these things is not something a person is born with, these things either come from a well-off family or from the society. Some people manage to break into the upper classes from the lower classes, but these are very few and are the exceptions, not the rule.

Also, I don't really see how you can equate 'justness' of a system to it being able to allow those who want more wealth to get that wealth. That's basically saying 'a just system is where the greediest get the most.' - it's pretty ridiculous.

A just system is where all humans have the same human rights and the same opportunities irregardless of greed.

> Hey, no one is stopping you from helping them.

This is so childish... I don't even.
To ensure each application gets the same amount of views (with the exception of the top ranked and bottom ranked applications) you can pick the next highest/lowest and it will work out fine. My concern with this implementation was that it might be possible for the same applications to be compared multiple times at the high and low ends of the bell curve where elo becomes more spaced out. A better solution might be internally listing all the applications by their elo, selecting an application and random, and then selecting from an application within 5 ranks of itself. I.E. App #342 is randomly chosen and then an application between #337 and #347 will be randomly chosen to compare it with. I am not aware of any name for this voting process.

Each potential implementation has slightly better/worse corner cases, but the general quality of the ranking should still be extremely accurate regardless of the particular implementation. It takes surprisingly few comparisons for items to find their appropriate ranks.
Silicon Valley startups stumble, forced into cost cutting
Love this idea! Would love to beta test it.
Paypal handles these kinds of transactions just fine without preloading and without needing my bank account's username and password. In addition, banks typically tell you to never hand out those credentials even to their own employees.
A lot of properties that you'd want in a logic stop holding once you hit second-order logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-order_logic#Metalogical...
isn't this how a/b testing works with google analyitcs?
there are other reasons to track time, starting with legal proof that you worked on the project.
Business Developer | San Francisco, New York or REMOTE

At Density Labs we are hiring a Business Developer Person.

http://densitylabs.io/careers/business-developer/

Or send me an email federico@densitylabs.io

Federico Ramallo
Founder
DensityLabs.io
Interesting concept. I was married in New York last September so I think I understand the pain points. Getting married today probably isn't much different then it was in the early to mid 2000s. The vendors have simple websites and all sales processes involve multiple emails, phone calls or in person visits. My (now) wife and I both hated dealing with the vendor sales process.

That said, one thing you may to to think about is people don’t just want to find the cheapest vendor. Of course they want to save money but at the same time, they want it done right. You only do this once. When we got married we wanted to find vendors we could trust that also were affordable. To do that my wife mostly spoke to her friends and asked them who they used for various tasks.

I personally think you will be better building this platform first as a way for friends to share vendor details & reviews. If executed right this builds the demand side of your platform and vendor data. Since sharing would be a core part of the experience once the ball is rolling you should be able to increase the number of active users quickly. When you have a ton of users on the platform swapping vendor info it’s going to be much easier for you to convince vendors to hop on board.
Which states do you feel are "unimportant"?
User Experience checklist for creating websites and applications
I agree, but that newness had to have an appealing idea, not just be a clone of FB. These things are like TV shows, with a run of 5-7 years on average.
Turkey is investigating leak of 50M citizens’ data
White House declines to support encryption legislation
WebTorrent CLI: https://github.com/feross/webtorrent-cli
WebTorrent Hybrid: https://github.com/feross/webtorrent-hybrid
I love the technology that Facebook make but I hate their day job.
Wings 3D: an easy to use Modeler written in Erlang
This seems like a silly idea to me, frankly. What makes you think any of us are qualified to decide what the best company to fund would be? See this for precedence: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/world/europe/boaty-mcboatf...
That's a good point. It only applies if you know your blog's audience in real-life (university, workplace, meet-ups etc), but I guess that's actually the common case. I wouldn't know, I'm not a blogger :)
I'm trying to keep the library as specialized as possible. Nothing prevent you/someone to write a plugin to add more behaviors tho
Students ask Jam pretty much anything. For instance, we get a lot of bar recommendations, job-hunting, miscellaneous advice (love tips, etc.) and a bit less restaurant recommendation, meal/cocktail recipes, or shopping.

I think it would be interesting to develop the way we handle holiday requests : For example, Jam could help a student get a train ticket to Amsterdam (and an airbnb), and once the user is at destination we could guide them through the city.

Jam should be a "background-tech" type of product, avoiding the cumbersomeness of interfaces.
It is not currently, but the point I am making is the tech is coming in leaps and bounds, and I expect the next 5-10 years we are going to see something we haven't seen before; computers parsing semantic information from images, something that once was just an array of pixels to them. I point you to this TED talk where they can already describe scenes [1] (skip towards the end).

> So are they not allowed to use the data?

Being able to pull semantic knowledge from data changes the game. I expect in the next 5-10 years laws are going to have to come out to stop companies going too far with this. Sadly, laws are only really introduced after something goes horribly wrong, so we've got that to look forward to too.

> If you're just stating that the possible surveillance capabilities are increasing then I think this is pretty well known...?

Privacy advocates are a minority. My friends are almost all non technical and don't even think about it. That's because this is new ground, and there haven't been severe repercussions yet. But they are coming.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40riCqvRoMs
This is a cool idea, there are lots of problems in this space.

I worked on Rentabilities (https://angel.co/rentabilities) which we ultimately shut down after 3 years. We focused on product rentals, which is just a sliver of the things you need for a wedding. We ran into lots of issues being a marketplace. We were able to scale the demand side nicely with 150k long tail visitors each month (things like "backyard wedding tent rental" or "scooby doo bouncy castle") and hundreds of quote requests each day. I'd say 15-20% of requests mentioned weddings. We were able to get merchants to sign up, but only by calling them on the phone (email just didn't work). The merchants were pretty bad at responding to emails. We tried a bidding system where we exposed the vendor names but the overall response was negative. We iterated to a product that looked alot like Operator or Magic, with merchants and consumers texting with a small group of customer service people (starting with our internal team) in the middle. One thing you're up against with rentals or event services is a timeline: In general a wedding or birthday party is an emotional event and people want to get everything booked fast. This means that often times we'd spend hours researching an event for someone, only to have them not book because it wasn't fast enough. Booking rates were higher for requests we could fill multiple quotes on faster, but it was really hard to fill them fast because the merchants were slow. At one point we did some research into weddings and found that wedding coordinators like to work with trusted vendors, usually over the phone or in person, directly. They really care about making sure the wedding goes exactly as planned. We relentlessly pursued the product and I'd say one of our biggest struggles was the resistance from merchants to adopt technology. We were able to scale to about $50k/mo in revenue before we ran out of cash/energy.

I still think there's something here and you may be able to make it work, maybe as wedding planning software.

Hope this is helpful in some way. This was just my experience at the time I worked on it. Feel free to hit me up anytime. aacook@aacook.co.

Good luck!
As I said, if I was totally blown away by something then I'd act on it. It would of course have to justify dropping my other projects but I am willing to do that if the idea is good enough.
Hello, is it something like Tosca by Dassault? Thank you and good luck.
That's a good point, I didn't know about that functionality. I'm not sure the distinction that the database also contains other, unrelated, data and photos matter in this case.

Certainly the database that google has backing its mapping service has commercial value in a much more obvious way compared to the wikimedia public artwork database.

I guess that the licensing agency either didn't know of this function, or else started with the easier target.

My baseless guess for the outcome if they sue google is that google would win on jurisdictional grounds after five years of battle.
PANAMA PAPERS ENDANGER ANONYMITY OF ‘PIRATE’ SITES
> I really want to turn the automatic updates off, because they are actively counterproductive to everything I want to do. I know I need to update it, but I'll update it on my own schedule, thanks (like, when I'm not actually trying to use the computer).

I sort of get this, but I also sort of think that it's unreasonable. On the one hand: yeah it's annoying. On the other, you're using outdated software, yo. Security is seriously business and just being in a VM is not actually great protection.

> I know I need to update it, but I'll update it on my own schedule, thanks (like, when I'm not actually trying to use the computer).

I don't mean to be cheeky but, if you were actually going to do that then you probably wouldn't be 2 months behind on the update schedule?

I have this constant internal conflict between, "This is my computer it should do what I tell it to do" and "Wow as a user I am acting unreasonably and recklessly by expecting that thing to work the way I want it to." Maybe I'm just projecting that at you right now. If so, sorry.
I'd like to tip my hat off to this contemporary masterpiece of fine trolling. A truly exquisite feat of engineering.