skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With a range that large, I would be highly suspect that when you did get 90%, it was just fitting the data. And how would you even confirm if they had the flu - even a doctor could misdiagnose mild flu, which adds more noise.

60% really means very little if it's a binary choice - flu or no. You'll be right 50% of the times no mater what.
>3. How precise is it.

I've just been away in the Midlands (UK) and used Google Maps on a mobile for the first time. The triangulation of position was only accurate to about 1500m radius and then would switch between positions quite often. Such info would look much like a user that was moving quite a lot - I expect it could be filtered out but this sort precision (and lack of accuracy) appears common in the UK.
This doesn't really seem to counsel staying up late, as much as it counsels working while your spouse is asleep. It could just as easily be really early in the morning (which was my method at one point in life).
Prelude> head []
* Exception: Prelude.head: empty list

Damn I think might need to trace this one.
fyi: peak -> pique
Robert X Cringely is such a solid individual. I love every word that he says.
Judging YCombinator performance against Techstars, etc.

Although I think at this point it's pretty indisputable that YC has a substantial lead on any of it's competitors.
> Storing Mongolian is not a big deal.

...

> You'll need a lib to e.g. calculate UTF-8 lengths,

...

> There are no technical limitations there.

You cannot be seriously making this argument. Why not just code everything in assembly?
People use the word monopoly very casually and rhetorically, but never correctly.
And now it's implemented.
it is, but that just links your account to your hacker news account. you still need an email address and password to be able to login to the hntrades.com site (they don't have anything to do with your email and password for this site).
According to one ancient belief system, the 8 levels of charity:

8. When donations are given grudgingly.

7. When one gives less than he should, but does so cheerfully.

6. When one gives directly to the poor upon being asked.

5. When one gives directly to the poor without being asked.

4. When the recipient is aware of the donor's identity, but the donor does not know the identity of the recipient.

3. When the donor is aware of the recipient's identity, but the recipient is unaware of the source.

2. When the donor and recipient are unknown to each other.

1. The highest form of charity is to help sustain a person before they become impoverished by offering a substantial gift in a dignified manner, or by extending a suitable loan, or by helping them find employment or establish themselves in business so as to make it unnecessary for them to become dependent on others.

Obviously, #1 is better than #8. But #8 is still better than doing nothing at all.
umm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twingo
> User-configurable color schemes are in the works.

That's great, but providing sensible defaults is more important than making them configurable.
>60% really means very little if it's a binary choice - flu or no. You'll be right 50% of the times no mater what.

What? Just because something is binary doesn't mean it happens half the time.
It is interesting just to see what types of companies they fund.
Thanks for the kind words, and good luck to your family. We really do want to make this into a tool that can help people, if possible.

My intuition is that being able to quantify and visualize 'quality-of-life' automatically, will help support diet and lifestyle changes.

What kind of features/UI would you like to see in such a tool? Would it be better is this was generic (e.g. like Facebook), or something specifically for patients with CF?
Indeed, when I saw that not only had zero-cost proprietary software come into Ubuntu, but they had actively invested in adding the infrastructure to allow people to pay for it I started to consider Debian for my next install.
Techcrunch predominantly covers consumer startups, b2b startups in general get much less coverage. Crunchbase has better b2b coverage, but by-and-large it's because companies have added themselves (and naturally smaller startups have more incentive to do this, so you'll find more recent b2b startups than older ones).
What the heck do you think Peter Thiel's evil motives are here? He's trying to help those people and disagrees with you about how best to help them.
Seems to be lacking a good amount of data, but a reasonable first draft. Why not make this a public-editable Google Spreadsheet (or the equivalent)?
What syntax?

Or to rephrase:

What (scant) syntax there is, I'm in love with.
Hmm, yeah... good point on that. I'll leave my comment, but I take it back :)
Permission to Panic
At the direct-to-consumers level, think "I've fallen and I can't get up!" Automatic detection of illness and alerts for the old and infirm could be a potential market, though research on college students is not going to be at all effective for monitoring old people. And, if it can only detect trends rather than a specific individual situation, then it won't work in this context.

As others mentioned, making it a standard part of all phones might be something you could sell to governments, particularly in areas where flu frequently becomes epidemic.

It's a public health issue, which isn't usually an extremely easy to go-to-market area, I would think. Since it doesn't cure people of the flu, and doesn't help prevent it in any particular individual, it has nearly zero market value for any individual. I wouldn't even have a reason to install it for free...what good would it do me?

Is there some element of your research and tech that can be generalized to spot other kinds of trends? Trendspotting is extremely valuable, particularly to marketers...Google would probably acquire a company that can effectively trendspot from mobile devices, and even if they didn't, a mobile ad platform with trendspotting would be incredibly lucrative.
Thank you, I really appreciate the fact that people seem to be receptive to the things I had to say.

Frankly, I wasn't sure what kind of reaction my talk would get... but since pg personally asked me to do it, how could I pass up the opportunity?
PointHQ.com

Beautiful UI, redundant nameservers, completely free
Because nobody has mentioned Erlang yet, I should point out that CouchDB, Riak, and RabbitMQ are all written in it. They seem to be holding their own when it comes to practicality.

Erlang is a functional programming language without so much as a single iteration construct; if you want a loop, you have to use recursion. Variables are immutable, and it communicates via asynchronous messages between lightweight processes.
These are all good points to think about. For this particular one, I agree:

Even if he were examining that many people, he wouldn't expect to detect cancer at nearly the rates that modern medicine would.

But at the same time, as the book claims:

At the same time, he was regularly diagnosing cancers among the crews of whaling ships and other Westernized populations.

So detectability, probably, was not that big of an issue itself.
This seems unrelated to net neutrality. In this case the ISP isn't restricting or preferring any content on its network, rather a content provider is discriminating based on ISP.
Does someone have Jed's contact details, I did a lot of research on this for a blog post a while back, probably makes sense for me send some of the corrections his way.
Pilot to TSA: 'No Groping Me and No Naked Photos'
Snopes says the second story is fake (scroll down past the Trump one): http://www.snopes.com/luck/trump.asp
One problem here is that there are a lot of collusive merchants who act as fences for stolen transactions, both directly and by paying affiliate fees. Since you presumably don't buy many herbal supplements, you haven't come into contact with them, but they're out there.

Between the merchants, consumers, and banks, it's the consumers who have the least control over transaction authentication. On the other hand, without the threat of any penalty, merchants are incentivized to optimize for conversions at the cost of security

It does not make sense to me that the banks should be ONE HUNDRED PERCENT liable for losses.
I work at Mint. We do use a lot of open source, but as others in this thread have pointed out, we only need to open source our code if we distributed modified GPL-like code (which we don't).

The Wesabe code is completely unrelated. We heavily use MySQL, Hibernate, Spring, XMLC and YUI.

We have contributed code back to the community in some cases, such as YUI.

If you want your JavaScript to be more Minty, I suggest you take a look at Matt Snider's excellent blog (http://www.mattsnider.com). He has code samples that are very similar or identical to what is actually in the Mint codebase. He explains the rationale behind a lot of the design decisions and to my knowledge, it's free for anyone to use.
You make a great point, however, I don't think that was the point of the article.

I saw the lesson emerge in this sentence: "The more work I did, the faster I got, and the better I got."

He illustrates: "I loved working late at night. I worked on office stuff, and I worked on personal projects. . . invitations for my friends' parties, packaging for mix tapes, one-of-a-kind birthday cards, and freebies for non-profits."

I saw the point as when you're young, and you're passionate find the extra time to practice and hone your skills.

That extra time can pay huge dividends to your career in the long term, and that time is harder and harder to find as you get older.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1318916
The problem is that real world bugs are often too complex to use in interview questions. From my experience solving production bugs often involves having to piece together bits of information from logs, databases, etc. and making educated guess to track down the source of the bug. It's pretty hard to replicate in an interview environment.

Spotting bugs in code, operational questions, and writing code samples are probably the closest you'll be able to come within the time restrictions of an interview.
Wei Dai's "B-Money"(Cryptocurrency)
Form a startup corporation in the USA now, keep it running for five years or more and sell it. End of 2010 startups are 100% exempt from federal long term capital gains taxes.

Build and run your company in Wyoming. There's no state income tax for corporations or people. Maybe you can teach wolves and cows to write Ruby. Forget Java; Wyoming's climate is too cold for monkeys.
Why we moved to Linode
Never tried to have a nap before continuing, although now that I read you it sounds like a natural thing to try.
Thanks.
Which Caribbean island? I'm from Antigua; I think we are suppose to be a tax haven
The challenge with 'think I've fallen' is that you constantly have to ping the accelerometer. From a battery-life perspective, that kills the smartphone. Also, its hard to distinguish those pings from

For that particular application, its better to use custom body-worn hardware (e.g. fitbit).

Regarding spotting trends in face-to-face networks, we've done similar analysis political opinions during the 2008 election campaign.

Results here:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~anmol/political-2.pdf
Can't stand it. Even Miyazaki/Ghibli, which my kids adore. Love animation --- particularly the 2-D Sita/Kells/Ware type stuff. Just can't deal with Japanese-style animation (in Miyazaki's case, I think part of it may be the minor cognitive dissonance of the voice over translations).

This actually dovetails with an irrational aversion I have to geek signifiers of all sorts. Can't listen to trancey techno music, or goth/dark/industrial (which used to be all I listened to). Can't stand role playing games. Can't read science fiction. Coming close to not being able to read long-form comic books anymore, too. It's getting worse as I get older; I noticed it starting back in 1998.

I wonder if I'm the only one this happens to.

I've never liked anime though. Other than Miyazaki, there's too much stylized violence and too much emphasis on sci-fi action plots. I was the Sandman-readin' kind of comic book kid.
There's a reasonable number of projects using it, though not nearly as many as other licenses. Some that come to mind: Gitorious, Launchpad, OTRS, MongoDB, StatusNet.
Income Inequality: Too Big to Ignore
Exactly. I honestly don't know the name of most of the cleaners or waiters or shopkeepers at the places I frequent, but I do recognize them and they recognize me. I'm also polite to them. You do get better service or other perks sometimes, but that's not why I do it.

I know what it's like to be in a crappy service job where everyone who has a bad day wants to take it out on you, so I try to show them a little appreciation.
What kind of features/UI would you like to see in such a tool? Would it be better is this was generic (e.g. like Facebook), or something specifically for patients with CF?

The CF market per se is pretty small. I wouldn't look to customize it specifically for them. I also think that "good practices" generalize. If you can come up with some parameters that work well with vulnerable populations, it should work regardless of their specific issue.

Features that might be nice: A text message "alert" when early indicators are noticed and perhaps a means for the customer to put in custom "prompts" so that, whatever their medical condition, they can self-remind (for example: that they might have forgotten to take a particular medication). People with medical conditions often become "forgetful" as their condition starts heading into a downward spiral and the sicker they get, the harder it gets to think about what they most need to do to stop the downward spiral. A reminder to do the right things and an alert that their patterns suggest they might be in need of extra care could well be the stitch in time that saves nine.
I look at it like this 90% of american tv is garbage, and 90% of japanese animation is garbage. But the 10% is gold (see berserk).
Incidently, the bitcoin project(successor to the B-money proposal) naturally select individuals who are market anarchists, if not crypto-anarchists.
What he really means is work on your craft. Staying up late has nothing to do with it.
Only a few titles, but I watch these titles all the time

Code Geass

Dragon Ball Z

I've watched (and liked) several others too, but never obsessed with anything like the above two!

I used to obsess with 'Detective Conan' but it got boring and repetitive.
With severely unbalanced classes, overall accuracy is not a good metric. So we use recall of the symptom class, and how it varies with the precision. Recall = 0.6 to 0.9. All results are based on cross-validation.

There is a lot more sophistication we can add (e.g. markov properties), these are almost first-order results.

Nonetheless important to validate with other populations. That would be a big part of testing any product.
I don't have a blog to plug. So, I'll shameless plug my Reddit post regarding coroutines vs. FSMs instead:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9fcna/coroutine...
Miyazaki mostly — My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke.
pings from device forgotten at home. sorry about typo.
I used to watch anime when I was a teenager (was a huge fan of Akira, Robotech, Ghost in the Shell, Princess Mononoke), but the only show I've watched recently is Avatar: The Last Airbender.
This is very cool, but a little opaque at first read... To get a quicker and digestible intro, watch the video introduction (linked on the page): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ
Interesting, haven't thought of Singapore. Will do my research! Do you have any experiences you'd like to share?
Nazis? Nah... give it some time though.
What Tool Do You Use For Reading Technical Ebooks?
Ask HN: Business to Consumer vs. Business to Business startups
After seeing many VC and Angel investment portfolios and requirements I somehow got an impression than B2C type of startups are more welcome than B2B.

My question is: is it true? And if yes what are the reasons for that?

Right now the Google (corr. from Facebook) capitalization is bigger than SAP or IBM cap., but that can't be the only reason?

Renat
That article makes some interesting points, but I'm not comfortable with how recklessly it tends to generalize, and at times it seems to be picking evidence to fit its conclusions rather than trying to draw its conclusions from the evidence.

For example, at one point it argues that the typical plot complexity and subtlety in most anime is "extraordinary". I suppose this is true for something like Ghost in the Shell, Princess Mononoke, or some of the longer-running plot-driven manga, but that's a very biased sample. Perhaps that's a sign of the time in which the article was written -- in 2003, Americans' reference pool of anime was smaller, and so there was some pretty serious selection bias going on.
Great idea in theory... Until you have to actually say how Sharia law is great, then you've got nothing to say
In what ways is this better than make -j?
I had to check the data and make sure it's not April Fool's Day. How can a state that massacred millions of people think it's at all appropriate to call for a "dominant German culture?"

This is scary.
I used to watch a ton. Then once I felt like I saw everything I could I stopped. I have no new source or way of getting new things recommended but feel like if I shared my likes and movies I enjoyed, someone with great knowledge could make suggestions on what to get. I do not have NetFlix (I know, im the last one) so I do not have a central point of movie taste graph setup.
reminds me of http://popurls.com and http://alltop.com
Just watch Fox News for half an hour. I was going to suggest Jim Cramer, but then I realised that Jim Cramer actually counts as a case against corporate personhood.
facebook capitalization is NOT bigger than SAP or IBM
This doesn't discuss much about passion for the product, which was always my first question and most important criteria.

Most of my interviews would revolve around telling the candidates, "Assume you're hired and you just started this morning. What would you do now?" The great hires already had tons of ideas and could demonstrate how they'd hit the ground running both with ideas and the execution to make it happen.

In general, approaching job interviews as something you need to crack or prepare for probably means you're looking for the wrong job. Really the job you want is the one you've already spent your whole life preparing for.
I think this comment at 3:51 PM EST on 10/17/2010 may be the official death knell of structured data.

A few years ago, YC would have maintained portfolio data in a spreadsheet or database. But in today's world, it's probably in a wiki.

It might be surprising that an uberhacker like PG doesn't have a custom database of YC startups (which would, by definition, make it trivial to export the "non-secret" stuff). That's why I think this comment speaks volumes about how -- even amongst supernerds who think in a systematic, structured way -- a loose affiliation of hypertext documents is the preferred way to capture and record institutional knowledge.

Or maybe it is in a spreadsheet and PG is just lazy. But I doubt it.
the menu at top reminds me of alltop, and the layout of the feeds reminds me of popurls.
I've noticed myself being the same way, it's weird. When I was a teenager I used to be all into anime, LARPing, industrial music, Japanese RPGs, Dragonlance, etc. Now that I'm 30, some of my friends are still into these things but I almost find myself actively avoiding them. I'm still into video games here and there, but I find myself feeling guilty playing them since there's SO MUCH WORK TO DO.
The best place to incorporate a startup is Delaware - and the reason doesn't have anything to do with taxes.

Assuming you're using the most common definition of "startup" (as distinct from "small business" or something like that), you want to use Delaware because it's what your potential investors' lawyers will already be familiar with - and the tax benefits, to the extent that they exist, of incorporating somewhere else are just not going to outweigh the added barrier to fundraising that you're going to create by going with some kind of funky tax haven.

Beyond just fundraising, Delaware really is still the industry standard, and in general you can set up a very solid corporate structure that will last you right through fundraising, bringing on your first employees, later employees, scaling, and all the way to sale/IPO without having to waste a lot of headache and lawyer fees later on because you're trying to customize all of this stuff for whatever jurisdiction you chose for tax reasons.

For any given startup, a marginally higher tax rate is a REALLY good problem to have. I wouldn't worry about taxes at this point -- worry instead that your startup will die before it ever makes enough money to be taxed in the first place (e.g., because you couldn't get funding because investors didn't want to bother with trying to understand your convoluted tax-minimization structure).
I had a hunch you were conflating the concepts of fact and opinion. At least I now know what you meant, though.
Node.js has synchronous, blocking IO options along with all the async ones. Just append Sync to the end wherever it makes sense.
I blame the board game Monopoly. You get Board Walk and Park Place, and they call it a monopoly. Linguistic injustice!
Something he doesn't touch on, but it's one reason I am willing to work on Saturdays: When the office is mostly empty, it's quiet and you are more productive.
The reality is we have more CPU power on personal computers these days than most people know what to do with, that's why mobile is making so many gains.

Most people run a browser, the end. If they have a mobile or an iPad they run apps that use almost no CPU power, and are fancier interfaces to web services than a browser is able to be.

Since app development is moving towards mobile devices that means battery power is a concern. SMP often has overhead in terms of power consumption, it should be something you must resort to. So, my tablet's fancy drawing program might need to use Clojure to maximize its speed (and maybe not), but its twitter client doesn't need the advanced concurrency mechanisms of Clojure.

Sure, there will still be plenty of desktop computers running complex simulations that might really benefit from something like Clojure. But that'll be the exception.

Just my $0.02
I like anime vs north american television because often it's a succinct 26 episode series. It's going to have a conclusion. It feels like reading a book at times.

There are many anime that go on forever. Dragon Ball Z, etc. The ones truly worth watching are the science fiction ones. Planetes, Nadesico, Ghost in the Shell, some of the early Gundams, and Evangelion. Each of those paint a very coherent picture of the world. Very unlike american television where a series is milked out over years and often fails to deliver.
Similar arguments to what I was making
http://rakkhi.blogspot.com/2010/07/fixing-verified-by-visa.h...

Good article but would have liked a bit more detail especially with how they think it is easy to do a man int the middle attack on a TLS secured transaction
Do you tweet too much information?  Twitter privacy.
IRC and video games are two things I avoid not out of irrational aversion to geekiness but because of the intense feeling of guilt I get for doing them; they are the Cinnabons of time management.

Hacker News and West Wing reruns are big two time vices (Hacker News being an almost perfect replacement for the time I used to sink into Usenet).
Just Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged for me. I prefer manga where at all possible- I don't really enjoy any subs or dubs.