skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know if you'd get the same quality of data, but it seems like you could get the same kind of data from a user's Foursquare (location) and Facebook page.

Now that I think about it, I imagine most young people use Facebook messages/wall posts more than phone calls and texts.

Or perhaps a browser plugin that anonymously reports browsing habits.
>When Madan trained software to hunt for this signature in the cellphone data, a daily check correctly identified flu victims 90 per cent of the time.

I'm very surprised by this - it strikes me that I'd expect it to be hard to tell from such data that it wasn't a stomach upset, tiredness, onset of disease or simply a heavy cold. Indeed 90% sounds like it might be higher than correct identification via an interview with a doctor.

>[...] in Rwanda between 2006 and 2009. He saw a clear reduction in people's movement, which may have been due to the disease. But the outbreak was caused by floods, which also limited mobility. Distinguishing between the two possible causes on the basis of phone data alone was impossible, he says.

Makes me the 90% figure highly suspect.

That aside I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to have a smart phone app that gives you epidemiology info in return for entering your health status for the day. To encourage continued use a sort of diary function and stats could be added. Wouldn't this be more predictive than monitoring movement, and less intrusive?
I would market this to pharmaceuticals as a way to effectively gauge demand geography. The value added for them would be supply chain optimization.
It's more than that - if you could assume #!/usr/bin/javascript (Or c:\windows\system32\javascript.exe) on any machine that had Netscape installed, then you'd have a viable ecosystem. The reason Perl became popular was not because it was the "best" language for CGI scripts but because you could assume that the sysadmin had already installed it for his own use. Node.js (which admittedly I've never used) would appear to be available only on a tiny minority of machines you would encounter "in the wild".
I personally find the 'cyberpunk' sub-genre of anime fascinating.(According to wikipedia entry: "Plots often centered on a conflict among hackers, artificial intelligences, and megacorporations")

The prime example would be the "Ghost in the Shell" anime series and movies. The Wachowski brothers, makers of "The Matrix", have mentioned this series as an influence.
I would be interested to read a good paper about how sleep patterns changing with age.

I also wonder about how waking hours not only shifts as we grow old, but I wonder if life-span has been tracked and analyzed in terms of waking hours.
There is at least one counter example in Naruto. (A series where genuine literary merit hides under genre convention and filler.)
That they are or are not correct is your opinion, not matters of fact.

The statements above are also the OPs matters of opinion.
Generally, the reason why some vehemently hate proprietary software is on ethical and idealogical issues; some I agree with, others I don't.

Notice how much more popular Ubuntu is than Fedora, a distro that is more strict against proprietary software, but is criticized for including firmware support. Very interesting.
But the problem is that the instant you venture out of Clojure and into a third-party JAR all those assumptions about purity go out of the window. Clojure's strength is also its weakness in that regard.

Haskell does make real guarantees about what does I/O and what doesn't.
On the other hand, you could use accessibility patterns like UJS, alternative text, skip links, ARIA roles, better semantic markup, and make your site about 80% more usable in about an hour :)

I agree, but sadly it remains easier to solve even hard technical challenges than seemingly easy social ones where, if you're lucky, perhaps 20% of developers will cooperate.

As a developer I find accessibility interesting, which is why I submitted it, but unless I'm being forced to implement it by law or context (e.g. a site with a high demographic of people using screen readers) I haven't the inclination or motivation to focus on it (though skip links, alternative text, etc, are good ideas anyway). It's a bit like dealing with IE5 or WebTV in that regard.

There are lots of ways in which we could make the world better for disabled people, I'm sure, but typically we've built technology to make life easier for them instead of changing the way the world already operates (with the notable exception of building codes enforcing the installation of ramps and disabled access systems). I'm not saying that's always a good thing but people are notoriously slow to change en masse (y'seen the average quality of HTML out there?).

It shouldn't be too far fetched to significantly improve the usability of screen readers even on the hairiest of pages - most regular browsers do a stellar job at interpreting horrendous markup. Half of the stuff that your recording comes out with isn't even visible on the screen.. do screen readers pay full attention to CSS and states enforced and controlled by JavaScript? If not, that's probably step one to making things better.

I suspect the problem is that there's little money, fame, and too few people looking at the technological aspects of this problem, whereas inventing a new "standard" and sitting on some W3 fancy board looks great on the old résumé.
Canvas' drawImage() supports painting of SVG graphics.
Yes, I do mean Mobile Safari. A bookmarklet will be great. And I can't wait for the backup/sync/sharing. Good luck.
Interesting.

Questions

1. How fast can you spot a trend?
2. How is the tracking working?
3. How precise is it.

I could imagine traffic would be a good area to look into.
Player would reset to the beginning several times, and wouldn't let me skip to the part I was currently watching. FLV file is much easier to deal with :)
Minimum Viable Product in practice
Apply to YC:)
Xerox Alto for sale on eBay
User interface? How do you handle keyboard navigation, focus tracking, assistive technology hooks?
I was talking about the catchphrase "open-source", not what the OSI talks about.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html
How to crack a Microsoft interview
Also, what random peasant farmer could read?
Sometimes. It is an interesting tightrope to walk in IT here: you want to be able to talk with coworkers about a common hobby, but white guys in Japan who desire to be taken seriously also don't want to be That Guy.
I think a very strong possibility lies with the very experiment described in the article. Flu is a huge issue at college campuses, high schools, etc. Every level of education involves cramming a bunch of individuals in to small spaces with high amounts of contact (more so than in a prison, for example). In higher education, sexual activity and drinking (i.e. sharing cups) further increases risk of infection. My campus of 5,000 undergrads turned into a textbook example of mass hysteria during last year's swine flu scare. I can only imagine how many hours of education must have been lost through the whole ordeal.

So build an enterprise level system and sell it to individual universities. The school installs your application on each student's phone and receive an aggregate view of anonymous data through a back-end interface. This could give them a real-time look of how the infection is spreading through their community and allow them to be far more responsive in prevention measures. What if they could receive warning that the 3rd floor of Residence Hall A had signs of a potential outbreak? Just bring in those students for a preemptive checkup and stop the bug dead in its tracks.

Of course there is a boat load of legal and privacy issues to sort out for this type of intrusive monitoring. Nothing that couldn't be overcome I don't think (IANAL). I know that my school installs an app on all of our athlete's Facebook accounts for monitoring purposes so this isn't too far off from that.

Good luck with whatever path you choose! I'm always open to discussing startup strategy so feel free to drop me a line.
If you're US citizens doing this, and >50% of the foreign corp is owned by US citizens, the company is a "controlled foreign corporation" and effectively treated by the IRS as a domestic corporation. If you don't report, you might not get caught, but then if you do get caught, you're approximately doomed.
This is what I do in my day job. (International tax lawyer).

1. If you're in the USA the game is to escape State income tax. You are pretending that your business operates out of a Post Office Box in Las Vegas and therefore you shouldn't pay income tax in California (for example)? Good luck. It's a dead loser.

Don't waste your time. Especially when you're a startup and have no profits to speak of anyway.

2. Again if you're in the USA, on the merits of using Delaware or Nevada compared to your own state to form a corporation or LLC . . . .

Forming your company in Delaware or Nevada and operating your business in California (for example) just adds overhead to your business. Unless there is a compelling reason to do otherwise, use the corporate law for where you are. Keep it simple. Look at Google. They started as a California corporation and later reincorporated in Delaware.

3. Onward to your second paragraph. Again if you are in the USA and you want to think about taxation of your business, think about where the humans are. That will give you a clue on how the business will be taxed. Pretend you are selling equipment leasing deals over the phone and making a commission on each deal you made. Who would want to tax you? Yep -- the state where your ass sits while yapping on the phone. There's nothing mystical/magical about tech stuff.

There are plenty of things you can do tax-wise that are cool. E.g., I have a guy who has a California corporation that makes money this way and he sits in the Caribbean and the first $192K of net profit every year is tax-free (half to him, half to his wife who is on salary). No State income tax to him because he's not living in California. Yeah, the 1.5% S corporation tax applies. He's living well.

4. Throw me a few more details and I'll give you more concrete suggestions.

/Phil
The Next Release of Java: Java JDK 7, out mid-2011
I don't know how old the article is but it was in an Oracle newsletter that hit my inbox today.
Ideo: How to Turn Social Taboos Into Innovative Products
I don't know how old that article is, but it was in an Oracle newsletter that hit my inbox today.
Psh, everyone at my school thinks it's crazy that I stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning. That's when all of my best work gets done.
so how this answer can help folks like me?
Thanks very much for your answer
I would think the dominant impression would be screen resolution rather than typography. Is this true for you of all Android devices, including the current phones? The iPhone 4 does have a great screen, but I find my HTC Incredible more readable than the earlier generation iPhones.

Is it visibly different within apps or only when dealing with the system? For example, he concludes in the article that the Yelp app is pretty much identical on both systems. Do you disagree? I'm sensitive to kerning issues too, but I'm not sure the iPhone is in the lead here.
There's actually a theory of what makes a complete coroutine, similar to what makes a complete closure. I don't remember all of it off the top of my head, but it's basically:

1. coroutines act as pipes that can send (yield) and receive values.

2. coroutines are first class citizens like closures so they can be passed around as values, referenced, garbage collected, etc.

3. they can yield from any point in the stack, so you can use them inside functions deeply nested without any caller N frames up from knowing about it.

4. one side of a coroutine doesn't have to know about the other side, just like functions.

5. you can inspect them to find out if they are running, suspended, etc.

I'm probably missing some things, but the gist is there's very few languages that do all of this. Lua's the only one that really gets them right and makes it easy, with probably Lisp continuations being next. I'm sure there's other languages but I know Python, Ruby, and Java really get these wrong.

I'd also say that Erlang adds one very very sexy addendum to this in that you can take any process and send it over the wire, store it, recover it, etc.
For all my career, I've worked late. When running my own business or consulting, I tended to have a 3 or 4 am bedtime.

This fall my daughter started school. I have to be up at 6:00 AM in order to get the day started and drop her off for classes.

This has completely changed my sleep patterns, and thus my work patterns. Feels like it takes a lot longer to get anything done. So I definitely agree that you should take advantage of late nights while you can.
Do you have any experience with incorporating in the BVI and similar jurisdictions? If yes I think I'll be contacting you very soon :) See my post below (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1801001)
I can't quite tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
The demographics that seem important (e.g. baby-boomers), use mobile phones but not necessarily FSq.
Oh, I use it and I like it just fine as a program, though I sometimes wish they didn't hide certain things in context menus. The name, though...
Incorporate in Singapore! Respected jurisdiction, 1st world country, one of most business friendly in the world, yet all foreign earned income not brought back into Singapore (put it in a bank account in hong kong for example) is not taxed.

That 2.5 million is personal income and wealth, no matter where it's stored. America taxes it's citizen's and green card holders globally after the first $100'000 annually even if they are no longer resident. So unless you don't want to report that income and smuggle it in, which your CPA was alluding to, it would be already taxed appropriately. If it's under the corporation's name, then there will be procedures to go through. But don't let that dissuade you from saving yourself millions to hundreds of thousands of dollars in avoided taxation. The idea is to structure yourself that you don't have to lie, hide and put yourself under legal liability that you can still be in the open, they'll know how much is in your bank account and get what you want. You'd be in a much better position with your $2.5 million out of the country and then you can choose at your leisure on how to structure it vs. before the fact.

I think your CPA, like most accountants, has zero experience with international taxation laws in relation to the US and whatever jurisdiction you chose and still wanted to keep your business, so he dissuaded you from doing that.

Like most places though, you'll probably be taxed as a domestic corporation if your main office & management is there even if you incorporated in panama or wherever. The tactic only really works if your a multi-employee business bigger than a dozen people. You would have your head office in singapore and a loss-accruing development office in palo alto or somewhere similar if you wanted to be close to the bay area culture and pulse.
just make an app that warns you if any of you friends cell or computer use changes. I'd pay to see which of my friends might be getting sick. Luckily, each new health scare will drive up demand.
The 90% is a misquote, good catch.

The actual accuracy is between 60-90%, depending on clusters of symptoms, and apparently that was stripped somewhere during editing. Oh well.
Second comment is amusing: Oracle doesn't have "fanboys". No-one on Slashdot will ever actually come into contact with Oracle products. Oh wait, MySQL, they all love MySQL...
Thanks, that also has a bug but people who try it should know how to fix it. Basically if it bombs because you don't have json then delete the line of code as it does it correctly further down.
I'm somehow in the same situation Michael was in the 80s.
I'm young, my couple has to wake up at 6 and I can stay in bed easily till 8.
I've been trying to be productive in my personal projects (programming) either at night, after she goes to bed, or starting up very early at 6... but I haven't been able so far.

At night I'm brain-dead after the whole day programming at the office. On the other hand, in the morning I need at least 30 min to really wake up and start thinking correctly in front of the computer and that doesn't leave much time to do almost anything before going to work.

Anyone with a good advice?
What is the Poincaré Conjecture?
I personally tend to read manga rather than anime save for a few I feel need to be watched, and the stuff shown at my schools' anime club.
good idea. we had an initial chat with one of the major ones. They'd like to see more traction of course.
That'd be super slick. BTW, you're the guy that wrote sidereal right? I'm using it for the redis action. Very nice.
This article recommends working an extra shift at the office for free and creating an expectation with your boss that you can do twice the work everyone else can do in the same amount of time.

My recommendation would be the opposite. Carefully manage expectations and pace yourself if you want (a) to ensure your longevity as a tech worker, (b) to avoid serious health problems and (c) to avoid later regretting missing out on the valuable social and emotional opportunities of your youth.

You can develop your skills in your twenties without creating unfortunate imbalances.
What about this article makes you believe Shuttleworth is focused on "improving the Ubuntu ecosystem" with his position on copyright assignment?

It seems to pretty clearly show focus on improving the Canonical bottom line, to me. Which is also fine...but, Open Source fans should be aware of what motivates the organizations they work with. Red Hat and Debian have a long history of choosing openness and freedom over control and profit (though Red Hat still manages to be the most profitable Linux vendor). Canonical has a less stellar record, generally speaking, with a history of unilateral decision-making, and questionable motives.

Note that I'm not at all opposed to the idea of so-called "Open Core" software. Virtualmin and Cloudmin are effectively Open Core projects, with proprietary additions being where our profits come from. But, we don't have any non-employee contributors to speak of (we get a bugfix patch every three months or so, on average). Whereas Ubuntu is 99+% code written by non-employees. Their contributions to Gnome, arguably the most important single aspect of the famous Ubuntu "ease of use", are miniscule compared to Red Hat and several others. And, of course, I'm not saying that Canonical shouldn't be praised for their 1% contribution to Gnome. It's just that their contributions do not justify the level of control they desire over the community, and that the free software community should be highly suspicious when Canonical make these kinds of power grabs.

In short, Canonical historically isn't all that great of a community member, and this is one more example of them putting the desires of Canonical above the desires of the Open Source community in importance. Open Core is fine, if they want to do it with their own entirely in-house written code. But, it sounds like they want the culture of Open Source to start shifting in the direction of corporate-led Open Source projects, even in situations where non-profits and communities are currently leading effectively (like Gnome).
Yeah I love BBSes. Seems a lot of other folks like them too so I'm going to continue hacking on this as the official "something more than chat" demo.
Sysop of a Wildcat BBS on a 286. Still remember how excited I was to upgrade to a 386 with an optical drive. The idea that I could store 650MB available for download! If I ever needed more I could just change the disk.

Missed many nights of homework working on that thing. Making contests for LoRD or Tradewars. Zed described the death of BBSs very accurately. It went from THE thing to do, to lights out almost overnight.
Mandelbrot's last talk on TED
Thought:

You might see if this could get funded as a means to help seriously at risk populations reduce their risk, spot problems at an earlier stage and so on.

I have a form of cystic fibrosis, as does my 23 year old son. We have gotten a great deal healthier than doctors claim is possible largely by making dietary and lifestyle changes to protect us from illness, rather than waiting until we are ill and loading up on drugs. I'm extremely controversial in the CF community. But if you had funding from some "kosher" organization (unlike me -- I'm just some loudmouthed individual speaking from firsthand experience...aka "fruitcake"), well, there is real potential to do real good here, not just for the individual quality of life but also the economy: By my estimation, the 30,000 or so people with CF in the US consume roughly $3billion+ annually (edit: I mean in medical care -- doctors visits, drugs, hospitalizations), most of which does not come out of their pockets. Most of it comes from insurance, state aid, federal aid, charities, and even medical write-offs when patients who are routinely deathly ill simply can't pay. I don't know how to tap into that $3 billion, but it is in someone's best interest monetarily (if nothing else) to help this population (and others like it) stay healthier. And I know it is an achievable goal because I do it every day. I just don't know how to adequately explain to other people how to do what I do.

I hope this goes somewhere. I am excited to see something like this. It fits nicely with my views on what works, health-wise.

Best of luck.
Having a nap after work before continuing, and then continuing may help.

Or have you tried going to bed really early and getting up much earlier?
Just some yaoi, occasionally (I hope this thread was already meant to be weird enough).
Nonsense. The basis of "civilization" is the just rule of law, and protection from external threats. Which are paid for by your taxes. Without these things, it would be impossible to create technology startups.
Are you comfortable with singapore? All foreign income not brought back into the country (in an out of singapore bank account) is not taxed.
TextMate comes with support for Markdown and version control (Git, Subversion, etc). OS X only, although I've heard there is a wanna-be clone for Windows.

www.macromates.com
Basically, by "bumping" the thread. Hopefully someone else will see it and do better than I did.

I'm very sorry that I'm the only person who has replied so far. I really am.
Trends are spotted in the first 48-hour window, in our sample. There is the big open question of validation outside the sample population of course.

By precise, do you mean precision versus recall? The tradeoff depends on what you want to do with the inferences. If you send the analysis to say a nurse or family member (i.e., human in the loop, which we think is the right approach) then recall should be optimized.
Just tried it and got errors galore. Oh well, I'll keep trying.
You're right, I neglected Chiyo's revival of Gaara. I guess I personally make an exception for instances when people are only dead for a few minutes (call it the difference between "mostly dead" and "all dead" if you like). There are a few revivals like that, both in Naruto and elsewhere. All had positive portrayals, that I can remember. It's kind of hard, sometimes, to know when people are really dead, after all.

Orochimaru & Kabuto's Kuchiyose: Edo Tensei ("Impure World Resurrection") technique, on the other hand is more the kind of "resurrection" I had in mind.
I don't believe that's the lesson to take away. I believe one should become and be a person who is happy to take a small part of one's time and share it with others. Taking the time to become that person is the reward.

Being genuinely interested in others is a skill that one can develop and will serve one well, but being useful is not the point.

The point is to take opportunities to be a better person and make the world a better place. My opinion, and you may disagree, but I like myself better by making these my goals.