skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I (developer) chatted with a water quality consultant during a plane flight. Consultant mentioned the CRM for his niche business sucked. He asked if I'd be interested in building a CRM for no money upfront, instead making money later (a percentage of his business I could sell, a license fee, profit sharing, whatever). I realized in that moment once the app was built, I wouldn't need him at all, and that I could sell it (let's assume it'd be a valuable product) to all of his competitors. Either he wins, or I win, but there wasn't​ a scenario I could imagine where we both won. I explained that to him, and he was no longer interested in having me build the software for him.
There is nothing stopping Amazon from having a machine that is double that config, and renting you half of it, however.

As soon as 32GB DIMMs drop enough in price, I would expect them to do exactly that. You can configure a Dell R930 with e7 Haswell CPUs online, if you want to double-check it. Not sure if the R930 can go to 8 CPUs (which the e7 Haswells CPUs support).
I'm in the process of bootstrapping a SaaS. I'll say it's absolutely possible, or more precisely, it has equal chance as the programmer going it alone has. The simple reason being that the product is only a tiny piece of the puzzle.

I find the opposite question equally as valid. Why is it assumed that a programmer can bootstrap a successful SaaS alone?

To build an application, you need someone who can identify an opportunity (product market fit.... and that's harder than most would assume). Of course even if you have something customers want, you still often need to help them want it... so you need a marketing/sales guy.

Implementation is the last piece of the puzzle. I think these are completely different skill sets, and a successful company 90% of the time needs 2 or more people to pull it off.
Here is the good guide to deep learning:
http://yerevann.com/a-guide-to-deep-learning/
Appears that they're offering patent lawsuit indemnification as a built-in to using Azure, as they have a massive patent portfolio: "use Azure, and as an additional benefit, we'll cover damages related to patent law suits that arise, if we have a patent with which we can defend."
There's also some structural reasons. Why is it that larger practices don't write their own software? Well, maybe a few do, but:

a) nearly all states require that ownership in medical practice be restricted to those licensed to practice. This reduces access to capital, and more or less ensures that practices remain small businesses.
b) nearly all care in the US is fragmented across specialists in different practices.
c) healthcare in the US is largely paid for by parties fairly disinterested in actually transacting. While most folks on HN might A/B test UI improvements looking at click through rates, the implicit idea in insurance billing software is that submitting claims is someone else's expense to deal with.

When you look at places where there is a scale to medical practice, opportunity for software opens up. VA and DoD both operate and staff their own health care facilities, and have software systems they've implemented. But even DoD has problems receiving and retaining records from outside care providers (if Wikipedia is to be believed).

If there were fewer, larger medical practices in the US, it would both be easier to agree on standardized data sharing protocols, and more likely for patients to see multiple doctors working for the same employer, thus never necessitating a data transfer. Admittedly, it'd be harder entrepreneurs like yourself to break in. Perhaps you'd be an employee or Engineering manager working on the problem instead. Or perhaps you'd be selling a plugin to a larger EMR.
>Curious: if anyone thinks it is bad for Google to give the police information, do you think it's bad for Google to have the information in the first place?

Yes. Having such comprehensive information stored in centralized databases on billions of users is extremely dangerous.

It's like when armies in WWI marched in straight rank and file against machine gun fire because they didn't yet know the capabilities of new technology. Though this is much more subtle.

I.e. the OPM hack => black mail on everyone with a US security clearance.

Anyone who can gain access to this information (via hacking, social engineering, or court order) potentially has total control over the identities of their targets.
Not displacement (volume), but pressure from velocity: lift. The amount of lift by definition has to equal the weight of the aircraft at 1G.
This is a difference between San Francisco startups and Silicon Valley companies.
Ask HN: Evening events/groups in Bay Area to participate for exploring startups
Hi HN,

Are there any groups/events in Bay Area where one can informally chat with very early stage startups or people interested in starting?

I am interested to know more about groups that meet at a regular cadence.
What I really don't get is, why do everyone advocate for universal basic income, instead of a negative income tax.

The negative income tax model achieves the same basic income with less negative motivation for people who want to pursue work at the low-end.

It also avoids wastefully paying it to people who don't need it.

This is my inspiration : https://youtu.be/xtpgkX588nM
Do you happen to have a link to more info about the NL case where the judge excluded the camera evidence?
AWS requires you to give up your ip to use their services. Microsoft is lending its customers his patent portfolio umbrella. [1]

Am i correct?

[1] ttp://www.iam-media.com/blog/Detail.aspx?g=b1c57b03-5b9c-4cbf-b8dd-e209daf3f686
For anyone interested, there are several great youtube videos[1-4] that show the wakes (the wingtip vortices in particular) created by various aircraft.

This incident brings the Reduced Vertical Separation Minima (RVSM)[5] into question. Strategic Lateral Offset Procedure (SLOP)[6] can be used used to avoid such incidents.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1ESmvyAmOs

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfY5ZQDzC5s

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy0hgG2pkUs

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXlv16ETueU

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_vertical_separation_mi...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lateral_offset_proce...
> It's difficult to describe in concrete terms how I feel

I can tell you how I feel.

I feel great that I'm not being forced to subsidize your career with my tax dollars.
The product is still the most important piece that you can't do with out. You might be able to get by without a marketer/sales guy, but without a product you're selling vaporware. All the other jobs can be done (poorly) by the programmer, but the reverse isn't true.

Just look at all those scams on kickstarter, the one thing they're missing is a viable product that an engineer can tell them is impossible.
Python.NET (pythonnet) 2.3.0 released with docker and nuget support
Using FreeNAS I have 4x4TB drives. 2 mirror sets that are mirrors of each other. Only 7.25TB total space but I am not to worried about a failure. Disk are cheap, loosing 16 years of family photos, not so much.
> one thousand feet above

Are the imperial units of measurement an aviation thing, or an American thing, or a bit of both?
Show HN: Sportal – Find Players (Helps you find players in your locality)
Introducing Sportal: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.getsportal...

What does it do?
It helps you find players in your locality for playing any sport you want.

Why have I developed it?
Because I myself faced the problem. Many times when I wanted play my favourite sport I found nobody to play with. Then I conducted a survey and find out that many people face this issue. So, I decided to develop a solution!

Who is it for?
For everyone who love playing sports.

How is it different from other such apps?
It is easy to use and core-feature driven. It can take you from thinking about playing a sport to scoring a nice goal or hitting an amazing six in a few minutes.
Why do you assume that water quality consultants would buy a software product from you alone? Selling is hard, and a big part of it is knowing your customer, and gaining their trust. This guy would have a much better chance at accomplishing that. He had a lot of value, you just failed to see it. He made the right choice by finding someone else.
What Happens to the Founder of a Failed Company Backed by Angel Investors
I saw one system that seemed like a must have: apps that ensure you got the prescription right. Paper-loving doctors screwing up prescriptions harms a lot of patients. Especially when they insist on writing in cursive.

Much of your post seems to be about bad tech, though. It could mostly be mitigated with a supplier that gave a shit.
I agree. I'm mostly experienced in front-end and I like to work on back-end as well, but I can say that I feel a lack of practice on back-end side since I don't know everything you have mentioned.

What do you think is the best way to learn production best practices for back-end?
Looks like there's a couple parts.

1. They promise that if you get sued for using something open source that Azure is built on, they will indemnify you. Eg, with AWS, in theory someone could say to you: "We have a patent on DB replication, you use MySQL with RDS, that has replication, you owe us money." Unsure if that's a valid risk, but maybe.

2. If you get sued and you've been paying $1k a month or more to Azure, MS will give you one of a their 10k patents on a list if it'll help mount a defense. Could be helpful, I suppose, but hard to figure out the value. If I'm sued, AND MS has a relevant patent on the list, how useful would it be?

3. MS promises that IF they transfer some of their patents to a patent troll in the future, the terms of the transfer will prevent the troll going after you. Again, hard to quantify the value, especially since it depends on MS's actions. "We have a big hammer, but we promise not to hit you" is only partially reassuring. But still better than no promise at all!

On balance these all seem like unmitigated goods, although it's hard for me to evaluate if they have any value. It never occurred to me to be concerned that I might be sued for using open source tools on AWS. :)

I'd estimate it to be about 80% marketing, and 20% a good faith attempt at defusing the disaster that is modern IP laws.

(Edit: And contrary to some other commenters, I don't see anything malicious or harmful going on here.)
"Culture fit" is a weasel word. It means nothing at all.
Installation options:

https://github.com/pythonnet/pythonnet/wiki/Installation

Re-designed docs:

http://pythonnet.github.io/

Short intro and tags:

https://github.com/pythonnet/pythonnet/blob/master/README.md
Slightly OT: I read somewhere that whenever you see "to disrupt" you should replace it with "to fuck up" as that is the true meaning of what is being said. Not that it's always a bad thing, but it is almost always destructive.
Australian Leaders Pledge Funds for Energy Storage After Billionaire Tweet Bet
It's an aviation thing.
Steve Jobs’ Liver–And the Quest for a Better Organ Algorithm
An aviation thing. Flight levels are measured in feet across the vast majority of the world.
How long do you think before we are in a Ready Player One world where we spend both our free and job time in an alternate reality?
Yikes. I've only really had true production experience with AWS. I guess all clouds aren't made the same.
Aviation thing (unfortunately, but it is what it is).

You'll hear them referred to as Flight Levels or Angels as well (Angel 15 == 15,000feet).
H.A.P.'s F# code is still parsing Kiln searches to this day.
In aviation, feet are exclusively used, except in Russia and China.
Mostly an aviation thing but descended from the fact that many early airplanes were American/British. IIRC only China, Russia and the DPRK use metric units.

EDIT: ahahaha <3 HN commenters
Software should only be covered by copyright; software patents are crazy... there are too many dumb ones to count.
slow news day, huh? seems this story is aired about every 2-3 years...

EDIT: I'm being downvoted for pointing out that these kinds of articles have been rehashed for years? thanks. continue on, then.
Kinda already there.

https://xkcd.com/722/
... and the force of that lift on the plane has an equal and opposite on the air. A Heavier plane disturbs the air more.
Big problem is the use of autopilot navigation locked to the GPS route.. this pretty much guarantees that you will fly right below the wake of the above plane on the same route! (Before GPS it will be very odd to flight exactly the same path) ..
I know this is a tired argument by now but argument by analogy is generally terrible a raven isn't like a writing desk and your google history isn't like convenience store footage.

If we skip the obvious step of proving that unalike things are in fact unalike we can address things as they are and examine them truthfully.

In an ideal world your privacy ought not to be invaded by the authorities unless there is a reasonably good expectation that violating your privacy in particular will produce evidence relevant to the case at hand, that there is no narrower means to address the same cause, and that there is real harm in not doing so.

Obviously the way these concerns intersect is complex but we ought also to attend to the poorly thought out idea that we can justify invading everyone's privacy on the argument that surely SOMEONE is guilty because this line of reasoning would be so fantastically prone to abuse that we should have no privacy at all if we go this route.

In this case there isn't even reason to believe that any evidence should turn up even if we violate everyone's privacy, the logical alternative is real police work, and the potential consequences of letting a low level dirty bag slip away for a while are inconsequential.

The vast majority of us give away more personal data to search engines and ISPs than we ever gave to our local libraries it just seems that this data doesn't have the same protection not because such a rule wouldn't be socially useful but because the law hasn't adapted to modern times and search engines and isps don't have the tradition of social responsibility that libraries do.

In the context of all of the above it seems puzzling to me that you are advocating for a position that is so bad for nearly everyone. If we allow fishing expeditions in the name of expediency I very much doubt this will be end of the matter.

Please reconsider your positions or at least provide a better justification for same.
Post-edit, this is the best comment in the entire thread. You should be at the top of the page.
Few years ago, an embraer actually cut another's plane wing off for the exact same reason. (They were flying at the wrong altitude though)
AWS provides a SAN in the form of EBS.

Colocation provides a SAN in the form of calling up a datacenter storage company and having some consultants install you a SAN.

What are you going to do to get similar functionality on OVH, Rackspace, or Softlayer?
True, but I bet the company cares a lot about preserving the not-too-bright-with personal-finances culture.
That's basically why I've gone with raidz3, yeah. raid10 still allows a second drive failure to lose data, it's just less likely to be that specific paired drive.
Similar experience here.

If the other person in the proposed partnership cannot demonstrate equivalent-value skills and equivalent previous success in critical-to-the-business areas where I'm weak (or uninterested) like sales, marketing, biz-dev, enterprise sales, acquiring VC - then my answer is almost certainly going to be "Sure, $8k/month is my usual rate - discounts of 20% for 3 month or longer block bookings. When would youy like me to start?"

If the other person refers to themselves as "An ideas guy!", my rates double, and require 50% up front.

Software development is serious time consuming and often difficult work. Do not ask me to do it for less than market rate without making it very clear that you are going to work just as hard with equivalent skill and experience to make the idea succeed.
Getting the login: Nobody knows precisely what cuserid() does
I think the idea they were going for is that Google Health would be an EMR intended to be used by institutions except that the patient is in control of their record - enabling them to take their health record to any provider. The problem is that institutions have close to no reasons for investing into something like that.

I think Microsoft HealthVault was more of what you describe, where it's a portal intended to be used by patients.
I'm assuming from the filename that that only works if you're on Ubuntu 14.04, right?
Accusing people of being "cheap" is the lamest insult anybody can come up with. Try again.
Running Kubernetes in Kubernetes
So if the best way to avoid the mess is accountability for keeping things clean, how do you do that from the start? Would something as simple as tagging resources to specific teams/departments be a good place to start? I'm helping with setting up a completely new account/environment and I know once the buzzword fever passes and the annual costs are reviewed there will be frantic requests to cut down the bill. Getting ahead of that inevitability with a plan and some preparation will save us a headache.
People are outraged because audio ads sound a lot more intrusive than visual ones. Google can seamlessly show ads on the web, but not so much on speakers. There's also a bigger shock because people presumably anthropomorphize the assistant and think of this as a betrayal. Everyone is trying to sell you stuff through these assistants. Maybe people don't want sales assistants.
I think this is where UBI leads if it ever happens.
It turns out re. docs and nurses, not really. It's important to understand the who pays for what in healthcare, and how many links in the chain exist between payer, payee and who benefits. Physicians and nurses are not able to pick whatever software they want to view patient data because 1.) you need high security all around that data, and 2.) that data is primarily useful to someone else. It's useful to the doctor because they want to treat the patient. It's a lot more useful to the hospital because they want to get paid for what was done.

So the hospital is willing to shell out a ton of cash so that they have a Very Secure system that helps them better manage their cash flow. If you walk in as a doc with (for example) a nifty phone app that lets you track your patients in real time, you'll confront 2 problems: 1.) the hospital won't let you connect because it'll assume (possibly incorrectly) that it's a huge security hole. 2.) even if they did let you connect, their EMR is non-standard (basically all of them end up non-standard) and there's no lingua franca protocol for medical data, so your app is incompatible.

It's really really tricky to solve all those issues AND have it be cheap enough for a doc to be willing to shell out for it out of pocket. I personally you'd need that kind of consumer-side scale to get enough competition to get medical software to innovate more quickly. I will say a common interchange format would help a lot, that's one of the objectives FHIR had, and the industry has been slowly adopting it.

You accurately point out revenue personnel and practice managers as key players here, and yes they're the ones that usually push EMRs etc. But the front line workers are kind of disconnected from the design and functionality of the EMR.

Put another way you have software that's bought by one person (hospital/provider), it's used to collect data by a totally different person with different needs (docs/nurses), and it's paid for eventually by another person who has no idea how it works nor any direct pressing need for it (patient/but let's be real, insurance company/government).

Without a tight connection between who pays for the software, who uses the software and who benefits from the software (most consumer software is a pretty tight loop), it's hard to have a good virtuous cycle of innovation coming from customer/user insight/observation/needs.
Hiring hacker for a job
I need an hacker to get in an university database. Paid job.
This is proof of the utter emptiness of the fiction of intellectual "property" as a source of innovation. IP is not a source of anything but overhead. You pay a baseline of insurance (or "protection" depending on your POV) to fend off lawsuits just to be able to do your work. It's rent-seeking, but the genius is, it's not rent-seeking over limited resources like land or resource rights, it's rent-seeking over totally artificial unlimited source of nonsense BS that you can never run out of. It's just a tax on existence, but it's not going into anything useful, just into the IP industry's pockets.
Exactly. Making a good hire is a management skill. Is it acceptable for managers to measure the productivity of their team by counting the # of line of code the team produce? or # of bugs the team fix? If not, why is whiteboarding with algorithm questions acceptable?
I'm not a lawyer, but I have dealt with patents a fair amount... so here's a quick ELI5...

1. Uncapped indemnification: this one is pretty simple. If you're sued for using some tech that powers Azure, Microsoft will cover any losses (indemnify you).

2. Patent pick: if you're sued for patent infringement _at all_, Microsoft will let you "pick" one out of a selection of 10,000 available patents to use in a countersuit. This is an extremely common tactic in IP lawsuits, but one that is only available to folks with large patent portfolios (this is what people mean when they say they have a "defensive patent strategy"). For example, Oracle sues Google for infringing patent X, Google countersues for infringing patent Y, eventually everyone settles (or not, heh). Presumably, the patent will actually be transferred to you (you become the legal owner of the patent) for the duration of the suit (I'm sure there are lots of conditions here).

3. Springing license: "non-practicing entities" (NPEs) are a _huge_ problem for tech companies. They're also known as "patent trolls." The reason they're so hard to deal with is that they don't actually do anything (other than sue people) so it's hard to use the countersuit tactic mentioned above (if you don't do anything, you're probably not violating any patents). Microsoft is saying that, while they do not generally transfer patents to NPEs, if they ever did so there will be a "springing license" to that patent granted to eligible customers. Therefore, those customers could not be sued by the NPE.

Now, some editorial. I actually think this is a good thing. They're trying to create a "patent free zone." They can't get rid of patents, so the only way to do that is with "legal hacks" like this. Right now small companies without patent portfolios are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to defending against frivolous patent suits. This would absolutely help. Moreover, one of the eligibility requirements states that you must have remained "patent peaceful" against Azure workloads for the past two years. The only way they could have made this better is if they had made the program more broadly available (btw, you're only eligible if you spend > $1,000/mo on Azure).

For what it's worth, the ideas here are not completely novel. Patent exchanges are fairly common (although you usually need a patent portfolio to join one). There are also some similarities with the Apache 2.0 "mutually assured destruction" clause which (again, in ELI5 terms) tries to prevent patent suits for use of Apache licensed software by saying that if you sue someone for using Apache licensed software then other people can sue you for your use of Apache licensed software (without giving up their right to not be sued).
You should call the 10 o'clock news so they can cover this.
That's Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907 --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gol_Transportes_A%C3%A9reos_Fl...

There's also an episode ("Phantom Strike") of the TV series Mayday about the incident; it's probably on youtube.