skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not a very good question -- how can we know someone is a "genius" unless they have the resources to thrive? We can debate on the meaning of genius, but regardless of how you view it, a person simply cannot reach their full potential if they have to constantly worry about feeding themselves or a family.

Before we can even identify someone as a genius, they have to have been successful in some way. For them to be successful, they have to have access to at least some basic resources (there are "rags to riches" stories, but I'm not sure it's even possible to argue that those are the norm). So how would you even begin answering your question? How do we identify someone as a genius even before they've actually succeeded at something? Isn't there some massive selection bias there?

Since the only difference between a wealthy person and a person raised in poverty is income/upbringing (poverty doesn't change your genes, does it?), I think it's a safe assumption that we're missing quite a few "geniuses" because of poverty.
you don't need to preach to me on the benefits of business

OK... fine. But if you aren't going to fully understand Ayn Rand's work, then you don't need to preach to us about how misguided you think it is.

The whole point of discussions like this is to have an intellectual discussion. To dismiss people who disagree with you by accusing them of "preaching" (when they aren't) has no place on HN. (As I'm sure you well know.)
Because it risks having his veto overridden with none of the changes he would be able to demand otherwise.
Doesn't make it any less a logical fallacy. Andreessen partners could wipe their asses with $100 bills. If someone with less money tells them that's a poor use of money, would you tell him clearly Andreessen knows better because they have more money?
Hand sanitizer?

It takes all of 2 seconds to squeeze it onto your hands, and you can apply it on your way to the next patient.
Could anyone expand on why they must build social products from scratch instead of adapting existing products?

It seems to me, the existing problems they have with the upgraded products are simply usability design problems. Something that could be fixed by just moving the right elements to the right places. Or, more importantly, adding links to the right "methods" of the right products at the right places in other existing products. I do think they've been making terrible design decisions lately, but that seems like something that can be fixed by just... getting better designers and listening to feedback.

Why exactly is that some people think otherwise?
As someone who accepts global warming (and is uncertain how much alarmism is warranted), I completely agree with you. The best way to debunk (or validate) the climate skeptics is to attack the theory as vigorously as possible, and to see whether is holds up or not.

Of course, I still think in the meantime we should be building nuclear plants, investing in solar tech, etc, but there are many reasons to wean ourselves off of oil and coal rather than just climate change.
I have a VPS. When i read stories like this, I think there isn't any point in going over to GAE or AWS. But lots of people do use these services, so what am I missing?
Covert Browser has been around for a very long time. This seems like more or less just a clone.

http://www.covertbrowser.com/
My problem? I just read through 4 pages of this article and I still have no real idea what the "pirate party" stands for.

It feels like the occupy movement to me. They are very accepting, which means no real focus. People need focus. You need to be able to break down exactly what your party wants in a few bullet points.

When I think "pirate party", in my mind, it's a party that just wants to get copyrighted materials for free.
Is Git actually better than Mercurial[1], or did it just win because Linus forced it on people?

[1] Properly answering this requires imagining an alternative history where all the massive ecosystem was built around Hg instead.
Did you miss the last two centuries where philanthropists built universities named after themselves (or their family members)?

"Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community." - Andrew Carnegie
Sundar Pichai: Google Drive Is About Context, Where Competitors Are About Files
Hands up who else spent way too many half-hours drawing "rainbow snakes" and psychedelic cycling dots with the spray can.

Well, ok. Maybe it was just me.
I don't see what's so wrong with implying that the might not deserve everything they earned, unless you also think people in poverty deserve to be where they are.
In that case, the sections the Administration objected to (and got removed) were about compelling the executive branch to act; in this case, the ones cited in the veto threat (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-obama-a...) are about the precisely the privacy concerns you're worried about.

Though I'm not familiar enough with the bill to know if everything objectionable in CISPA is in fact objected to in the memo, it's definitely a substantial and positive step.
Legit already solves some of those problems http://www.git-legit.org/
Who are these 21-year-olds intelligent and passionate enough for a start-up with nothing else going on?
kudos to Amazon for running time backward and letting you pull your foot out of the way.

I can't help but think that if benign decisions lead to disasters like this in the cloud, how much destruction could robots wreak in the future due to similar benign choices?
"By giving half their profit to charity, one could take them as implying that profit is bad..."

How do you make this leap? It's utterly baffling to me. Giving something away doesn't imply that it was bad to have in the first place.
What ever become of "Doug's Math Aquarium"?
In most major US cities, that wouldn't even cover the base salary of an skilled employee.

Only if by "most major US cities" you mean San Francisco and New York exclusively. The vast majority of the United States would still be happy to make $88,000/year!
Onion Browser developer here.

Covert Browser’s been around since November, but apparently doesn’t support cookies or POST requests. (Easy way to test POST by itself: try a search with https://duckduckgo.com/lite/ or the regular DDG with the "Address Bar: No (POST)" option, it doesn’t work.)

Also figured an open-source clone would be more beneficial/trustworthy to really paranoid folks (who could even go as far as build it themselves).
Oops, I was looking at listing 8. Thanks.
I get some traffic from email lists, the link in my HN profile and things like that but I also get a lot of apparently non-sticky traffic from searches for things like "mild CF" or "saline solution". If I can get traffic, I can make enough money to feel it is worth keeping. I have other things I also want to work on. But this is the site that has the most traffic currently, in spite of severe neglect, and this is the site that keeps inspiring other people to gift me enough money to stay online in spite of making no effort to raise money previously. This is also the site for which I would like to develop a simulation if I can figure out how. I am healthier/more functional than I have been in years and unemployed, thus I have some time on my hands in spite of standing in long lines at soup kitchens and the like. Being homeless might actually be a good opportunity for me to finally develop my sites so I can stay healthy and not need a "normal" job, which was helping me stay sick. Not ideal, of course, but ideal would have probably involved being born without a genetic disorder.

I hope that makes sense as an assessment of where some things stand and does not merely sound like whining.

Thanks.
The problem with git wrappers is that there are a dozen of them but none have critical mass, so all docs and examples are written in terms of bare git. It's like CoffeeScript — it's fine if you already know JS and use it to save time, but you can't use it as a way to avoid learning JS.
I suspect something in the magic of the execution of github has also helped a lot. Maybe it's the strong focus on social ontop of code and storage or something else but that site has probably helped a lot.

Then again, even before that many big projects were falling to git from the likes of svn like Xorg and others. So it's hard to say.

Maybe going back to the mailing lists of some of the big conversations might help shed more light.

But yes, usually what can make a piece of software great is having some good applications, and the linux kernel was a great place for git to grow up and show off on. Maybe mercurial just suffered from less of that. Mind share seems to grow exponentially.
It actually plots the local time, i.e. a commit at 3am PDT and another at 3am EST would contribute to the same circle on the plot. (I did a clone of the old GitHub graphs a while back.) So it isn't really useful for knowing when to contact faraway developers. On the other hand, it is fun to see how many committers are regular night owls.
Army’s ‘Magic Bullet’ Will Hang Out in Midair, But Won’t Kill You
I am glad a16z is run by the people who run it, and not you.
Learning CFEngine 3 - O'Reilly Media
Giving is great. I wonder if down the road they will consider helping incubate these non-profits to make the return on their charitable investment even greater. They have the expertise of helping companies grow, why not give the money and brain power to help the charities too.

A side question, any idea if the contributions are from the firm or the individual partners? I'm curious about the tax break breakdown. If the company is the vehicle for donation, there is a larger ability for a full tax break on the money donated. However, it seems that for an individual, there is a maximum: "Only if you contribute more than 20% of your adjusted gross income to charity is it necessary to be concerned about donation limits. If the contribution is made to a public charity, the deduction is limited to 50% of your contribution base." - http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&#...

So, if 100,000 was donated by the company, the tax break would be 100,000. $100,000 goest to the charity and the company has no tax on that income. But for the individual, if the maximum tax break is 50%, then $100,000 goes to the charity but $50,000 was taxed at the individual's income tax bracket (likely 35%+ for these guys) so the 'cost' was really $117,500 to give $100,000. Check my math here, I'm not a tax expert but curious about they are looking at maximizing their contribution at the lowest cost.
Forget $40k a Year, Learn Online
It will never be possible to credibly predict financial crises: if you learn that in a month your stocks are going to drop 50% you will try to sell them now. But, since other people have heard the same prediction, they will do the same, and the drop would happen today, rather than in a month. Such a prediction can only be possible if it's made by someone people do not believe. Which is, accidentally, completely in agreement with very classic economic theory.

That being said, you are right in that climate models are woefully inadequate.
You can have AJAX without data. HTML can be AJAXed too.
lol I'll take DDOS any day over DDOM!!
You are very right. Things like rising cancer rates, alarming increases in extinction, massive destruction of natural habitats, destabilization of entire ecosystems, etc. Some may attack anthropogenic climate change despite strong evidence, rightly or ignorantly, but it's an absurd (and tragically common) the degree to which actual environmental damage that is happening right now is ignored. Some of it is likely due to global warming, but there are a lot of other externalities that are really dangerous for our planet and even our species.
I wouldn't read an ebook but I'd certainly read a series of blogposts.

> Taught me to not do anything unless I really believe in the idea.

This can be dangerous. Sometimes you're unsure if your latest and greatest idea will work out, and that's when you should put your critical thinking at play, i.e., weigh the effort vs. the likelihood of success. The "don't launch a startup, launch an experiment" mantra is valuable.
The most frustrating thing for me when using Google's multitude of services is their login across services / accounts seems totally broken.

There are certain services I can't log into with a certain accounts, others that automatically log me out and others that I am totally confused about what is even happening.

It's not an easy task and it seems that they are trying to fix it with recent changes but it's still a total mess.
How to modularize CFEngine 3 policies using methods: calls
Comparing taste in films using pairwise vector comparisons
Socialcam adds millions of users, scales, and pushes new version all in one week
That was exactly what I was thinking after reflecting on this issue...
http://blog.nelhage.com/2010/01/on-git-and-usability/

"Fundamentally, the way (most) people learn and think about subversion is different from the way git experts think about git. subversion’s internal model is fairly complex, but you are not expected to understand it. You just have to know the half dozen commands you’ll ever need, and you use them, and everything is fine.

Git’s model is fundamentally fairly simple (a DAG of immutable commit objects where branches are named mutable pointers into it), but you are expected to understand it fully to use git effectively."

...

" The other, perhaps more fundamental reason, is that git is designed to be infinitely flexible, and so it’s fairly rare that you can give an answer for “How do I do X with git?”, since the answer will often depend on, “Well, what are your project’s conventions?” "
Why not link it, http://spotlikes.com/?

FWIW I watched the video (all the women have moustaches!) but am no more informed as to how it works. I also looked at the business sign up page but couldn't find any thing there to help work out the mechanics of the process. It looks like you integrate with FB closely?
What's your evidence for that? Don't you think it's possible that initiative and creativity are important for getting your research noticed by jey on Hacker News, but not for actually doing the research?
I don't know how active the Mercurial mailing list is, but the git mailing list was hugely active when I was on it back in 2008/2009. I can only imagine that it's gotten bigger over time. I imagine that to some extent that had at least something to do with it (though I don't claim that it was 100% of the cause).
I realize they bank on their users not fully utilizing the allocated bandwidth but you can take as a somewhat similar example whatbox (or any other seedbox provider), they sell bandwidth pretty cheap and their users are in general huge bandwidth hogs.
This seems a bit naive. One needs to continually generate resources to continue to be able to finically stomach bets on risky ventures (startups). It wold be the equivalent of a farmer giving away all his crops and not having money to fix the engine on his thresher the following harvest.

Dependent on the details this should be applauded. Although I think it would be much more interesting if they took part of their money and created grants for companies doing good in the world that would have trouble sustaining profitability.
If only this were a logic problem consisting of three boolean variables... But reality is complex, and so I do give some weight to authority. For example, if I had a question about evolution, I would automatically trust an answer from Dawkins more than one from Santorum, even if you think that's some kind of fallacy.
I like to think I'm fairly familiar with Ayn Rand's work, though I'm by no means an expert. I'm a computer scientist, but my philosophy minor was supervised by one of the few tenured professors who specializes in Rand scholarship in academia (and he is a fan of hers).

I don't really see this as far off, though. Rand really did believe that it was unethical to be altruistic. Not because it led to negative outcomes, or was inefficient, but because it was, in her view, inherently unethical to be altruistic. The altruistic sentiment was a character flaw at best. She did approve of philanthropy in some circumstances, such as foundations that were set up to advance their founders' views. But it had to be for reasons other than altruism, and it would ideally take into account whether the recipients were "worthy" of the help, not be Christian-style unconditional charity.
If you are talking about something that is basically a set top box like apple/google TV then I'm not sure it fits the definition of "mobile" just because it runs android/iOS.

It is possible that Apple/Google could try to muscle in on gaming. I could imagine this to a certain extent with Apple but with Google it would seem to a huge swing from their core competencies and I think they are spread thinly enough as it is. It would be more realistic for Sony to announce that the PS4 would be an android device with a Sony UI and games running on top (probably + a load of proprietary APIs so you couldn't just install your games on a competitors device).

Another advantage that console games have is that they have to go through a brutal QA/Acceptance cycle before they are allowed to be released for the console. If you dig through play store game reviews you will see huge numbers of 1 star reviews because people found the games to be buggy.

In terms of having something that can transfer your apps/games/settings, Steam pretty much already does this (although in terms of instant you are throttled by bandwidth on that one). I'm sure the next gen consoles will have this functionality too and most purchases of games will be made online.

There is a case to be made for gaming when out and about but this is quite a different experience to actually sitting down for games therefor the games are likely to be different and have different input methods etc. When you are out and about there is fair chance that you are either: driving, working or doing some other activity. If you wanted to play games you would stay at home, the times when mobile games are useful is for killing short waiting times or for the occasional flight/train ride. So what you want in that case is short fun games like angry birds rather than AAA epics. This suggest there will be 2 markets for mobile and non-mobile games, in the same way that the gameboy was popular at the same time that the SNES etc were, it does not suggest one will kill the other.

Also when you have a system and games designed to run off mains power and without the same constraints for weight etc you can have much more beefy hardware and create a different level of experience.
As it is my android phone burns battery running even relatively simple games.

I imagine the Steam for Linux is part of a bigger play, either trying to get in on Android or a precursor to launching their own hardware. Either that or they just want to show MS that they have other options.
London Olympics Won’t Allow Sharing of Photos and Video via Social Networks
Building realtime applications with RESTful streams
I learned a lot from the Twine kickstarter updates.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-li...

I suggest reading through them.
the css shadow isn't required.
I don't understand the privacy concern - a publicly accessible URL doesn't offer any privacy. It's the same as a transparent proxy.
I've used zip before to find an LCA:

def lca(a,b)
a.ancestors.zip(b.ancestors).take_while { |a,b| a == b }.last
end
Thanks. I will!
I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just asking for examples that back his claim "It's unbelievable how much genius is wasted in poverty."

The statement he made is unnecessary to his overall point, which is that charity can help people. His claim about the "unbelievable" number of geniuses being squandered has no real basis in fact.
Does anyone has invites to check out Ark?
畜禽产品检测
Declaration of process
I hope Amazon casts its all-powerful crappy-legacy-vendor-destroying eye upon the medical supply market soon.

All the value-add GPOs offer (other than pricing) is stuff Amazon could easily do for free -- inventory tracking, etc. It's all IT, and basically zero marginal cost.

As long as existing GPOs can't legally prevent a hospital from also using the Amazon GPO, I don't see how anyone could stand against Amazon. Amazon would have zero incentive to lock new device vendors out of the market. Sure, purchases from the Amazon GPO wouldn't contribute to meeting your legacy GPO quotas and rebates, but Amazon has access to capital at levels which will let them destroy regional competition if required -- they could price match any subsidized prices.
This is not just limited to "cloud" services. Hosting companies recycle hard drives all the time. If you're lucky, they'll wipe it after they pull it out of your machine. If you're not, they won't.

It all comes down to what kind of recycling policies they have for old hardware. Ideally, all drives should be wiped and then stress-tested to avoid the problem where you eventually wind up with nothing but bad disks in the recycle loop. After all, good disks stay in production and thus exit the loop, whereas bad disks fail and come right back.
Zuck paid, what, a cool billion for Instagram? Elon spent $800 million, and has an orbital vehicle that can dock with the ISS. And SpaceX is actually profitable.

So, yeah, you can be for-profit and change the world. Or be for-profit and help people share photos. Changing the world is a pretty big grey area.
You can clean the data according to certain metrics: e.g., "We removed all results that were greater than 6 standard deviations from the result".

There are other metrics of dropping data that is "out there".

As someone finishing my Master's, I will be releasing all my work, including test inputs and reproducibility results, as a Mercurial repository. Some of it depends on an exterior compiler, but the interesting ideas don't. I feel it is absolutely critical and honest to release source code and all data.

See the CRAPL: http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/.
I saw qTip, but looked too heavy. Prob. took as much time to write the plugin as to read the qTip docs.
It's cool they're taking a new approach. I wonder if there aren't scientific papers on this stuff.
Why enterprise software matters
Automatically Creating Bamboo Elastic Images with Bellatrix and Puppet
>the only other major options for consumers are Microsoft-based //

Not heard of Android then?

"Apple's market share in tablet segment slipped from 64 percent to 57 percent in Q4, 2011, According to the research reports from iSuppli, Amazon's Kindle with an impressive 14 percent growth in the market snagged a large share of iPad sales in Q4, 2011." (http://www.91mobiles.com/blog/10192/Apple+iPad+tablet+market...)

"In Forrester’s analysis, Samsung has a 5 percent share; Motorola 4 percent and Acer a 3 percent share. HP’s TouchPad, now discontinued, had a 6 percent share, but that was during that series of crazy fire sales when everyone suddenly rushed to buy one." (http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/05/forrester-no-android-tablet...)

TechCrunch here estimates Kindle Fire to have sold 40% as many units as iPad for the "holiday quarter".
Not all fields rely on grants -- but in all fields the careers depend on results. Which is not a bad thing in itself; but it would have been nice if "results" were not quite as narrowly defined.
(Not in order) PR, ensuring infrastructure was in place, working with sales/support on priorities, product direction.
Tell me about it. I had to create a hacky little Chrome plugin just to avoid being logged out of YouTube all the time

shameless plug

http://kwerty.com/YouTube-User-Guard/