skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It may be obvious to you, but that's a pretty handwavy dismissal. Once again, please explain how a government knowing biographical/demographical information about its population impacts personal freedom

Once again? It has been explained in extenso by history. Every oppressive regime or bureaucracy works by gathering biographical/demographical information about people. Ask senator McCarthy or J.E. Hoover.

If you think you're safe because you're an ordinary citizen, then you might be right --it's not about ho-hum, average Joes. It's about people that are agents of change, from MLK to union leaders, to gay rights activists, and what have you. Heck, even John Lennon, a mere singer, had a huge FBI file. Those are used to track their moves and in many cases entrap them.

Even an improvement in the way the government tracks crime impacts personal freedom. An example: imagine drug laws being able to be enforced 100% and with perfect tracking of individuals. Half the population would be in jail, including perfectly functional teens and adults. No "stoner rock" for you, no sixties hippie communes, Cheech and Chong or Timothy Leary. Not even Henry Miller, Velvet Underground and of course no Grateful Dead. Heck, even a certain Jobs could have ended up in some jailhouse, not to mention most CEOs with their cocaine habits.

(or more importantly, how reliable identification impacts personal freedom in a way that unreliable identification does not).

Reliable identification means the government has the (potential) power to know where everybody is, all the time. Do I really have to explain the consequences of this? Your whereabouts used to be considered parts of your PRIVACY --in fact for the police to follow you around and/or wiretap you required a court order.

>Tracking and cataloging financial transactions is not just an integral function of a bank, it's the definition of a bank. The term "bank account" long predates credit cards, and for a reason: banks keep track of the money you've put in and taken out, and what they've done with that money inbetween.

We're not taking about them "keeping track of the money you've put in and taken out, and what they've done with that money inbetween" --rather, we're discussing about them keeping track of what YOU HAVE done with that money, which is something else altogether. My bank has no reason to know I bought a XXL-Vibrator 3000 or that I like to read Firefly fan finction.

>Old school, small town banks identified people by gasp facial recognition; it's just that their facial recognition happened to be manual.

The same thing can have very different consequences once it can be automated and obtain far more reach and capability. Think papyrus vs the printing press. So, no, the fact that "facial recognition" was also used in small towns is not the same as the ability to real-time track, index, catalogue and store people and their movements nation-wide.
You are implying hand waving all around with such use case.

I, for instance, imagine it as replacement for trackpad - I type happily on my keyboard, and I just do some slight gestures for scrolling, switching, closing, minimizing and pointing. And all while keeping my hands close to home row. It's even in similar form factor as trackpads!

I don't know why everyone thinks it will be like signaling on an airport or doing any strenous activity at all.

It's a very delicate device for very delicate input.

And that's all not counting cases where wide space hand usage would be extremely useful (3D modelling, directing a virtual orchestra, interfacing with kiosks...)
South Korean Household Debt Hits Critical Point
Seems this is the right formula for estimating monthly cost:

0.01S+1.80R.max(0, 1-0.0017S/D)

S is number of GB stored.

R is the biggest retrieval of the month. Parallel retrievals are summed, even if overlap is only partial.

D is the amount of data retrieved on the peak day (≥R)

e.g., for 10TB storage, max. 50GB per retrieval, and max. 200GB retrieval per day: $2188.20 / year

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.01*10000%2B1.80*50*ma...
I would imagine the number of people accessing the site from different timezones is likely to be the reason for it, an article can quite rapidly disappear from the front page before someones had the chance to see it.
Peach Muffins with Cinnamon Topping Recipe
Peter Thiel invests millions in artificial intelligence startup
The point in the title is valid, but his answer to the original question seems misguided to me: in the time of the bible the only lineage that mattered is the paternal one. If your grandmother was King David's daughter that would not make you his descendant. Not in the eyes of your contemporaries.
It proves that re-posting is effective for content owners, although it's really annoying when reposts don't include anything new. This one seems to sneak through because it's really interesting. I just pre-ordered one.
Yes, and that person will be the inventor of some robot or other.
Facebook sued over Timeline profile
Correction: See my other post
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4416684
So you're wanting to use an automated system (which one might loosely term a bot) to prevent content from being displayed without having to have that content moderated by humans.

How is that not replacing moderators [in part] with "bots"?
This. When founders bemoan the "talent crisis", they are really complaining about the shortage of people who are excellent coders/marketeers/whatever but have naively optimistic expectations of what their equity will be worth. It normally only takes one startup job for people to fall out of that Venn intersection.

There's a third option if you can code and want to be involved in/profit from the startup scene: contract for big day rates somewhere like NYC or London, and angel invest your spare cash and tech mentor a basket of N startups. You will probably make better picks (and give saner advice) than most VCs.
Why should .com be an automatic english language domain? It defines no single country.

co.uk
co.us
co.au

for example, I'd be surprised if they defaulted to anything other than English for a public website. But not .com
Start-Up Chile Company Installs Pipelines by Air (Helicopter)
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tohl/tohl-elevating-infrastructure<p>FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE	AUGUST 20, 2012
Atlanta based start-up creates a proven solution for installing pipelines by helicopter, through new sustainable and cost-effective techniques.
TOHL – A Social Enterprise with Humanitarian & Industrial Applications
Atlanta, Georgia –TOHL has developed a new pipeline installation method that not only enables poor communities to cost-effectively have access to a continuous water supply, but also has significant disaster relief uses and industrial uses. TOHL is able to cost-effectively and quickly install pipelines by un-spooling large rolls of coiled tubing from helicopters. The helicopters are able to reach remote locations in order to mobilize communities with a continuous supply of water. Other applications include mining, agriculture, and other sectors. Click this link to TOHL’s 1st installation in action: http://youtu.be/_vkmSIEaqiQ
TOHL’s methodology was first conceived of in the wake of the Haiti earthquakes, when the Georgia Tech student, Apoorva Sinha, envisioned a fluid transport system that would cost-effectively and efficiently deliver fluids to victims of the earthquakes in Haiti. Apoorva thought of using helicopter deployed supply lines to get water and supplies to the people who needed it directly after the earthquake disaster in Haiti. Just last month, this dream was realized after the TOHL team was able to complete its 1st installation by helicopter in the community of San Jose de Maipo in the country of Chile in South America.
On July 5th, 2012, TOHLcompleted the fastest known pipeline installation ever recorded. A 1 km pipeline was installed via helicopter in only 9 minutes over mountainous terrain. Through TOHL’s techniques, pipelines can now be installed cheaper and faster than ever before, which is crucial for people in developing countries.
Read more: http://bit.ly/PWRS06
Photos: http://bit.ly/O54Bwd
Support addicts... and their families and child services in some cases. I don't want to turn this into "think of the children", but in case we're talking about addicts which need to be taken care of by the government, it's unlikely that the effect will be limited to that single person only. In case that person needs to be treated in a special way, that person may affect the nearby environment too.
Declaring War On Bad Password Practices
Yes. Now considering you were wise enough to put in a 4 year vesting with a 1 year cliff that means the employee is going to work 4 years to get that $100k. That amounts to just $25k per year.

Congratulations, you just got a very devoted developer for a measly $25k/year bonus that there's an 80% chance you'll never have to pay up.

And if they don't turn out well in that first year, you don't owe them anything.

After the cliff, let's say they get 0.5% per month. The time they leave decides how much you have to buy them out.

Vesting is a wonderful thing ;)

EDIT: You also have to consider this - "If they're that good that they can singlehandedly build your MVP. What are you offering that they would rather take 20% of yours, than 90% of their own?"
Funny how Apple seems to endorse theft when they are doing it, but somehow sees it as wrong if others are taking stuff from them.

Pot calling kettle evidently goes a long way back as far as Apple is concerned.
> Google is making the (completely wrong) assumption that those people cannot type google.co.jp instead of google.com and make their own choices.

You're making the completely unsupported assumption that the average internet user understands domain names. Like patio11 suggested, if a user from a Japanese IP is accessing google.com, it's likely that this address was pre-configured in some way: the search bar was set up like that, or the company sysadmin set up the home page like that. But even if the user manually typed "google.com", if they're in Japan it's still (way) more likely that they wanted a Japanese version rather than the English one.
I'll keep this in mind when I go search for my chief engineer next week.
Direct link: https://github.com/davidoc/taskpaper.vim
Responding to the New High-Resolution Web
Didn't google lose a huge lawsuit about something to do with online pharmacies not too long ago? My guess is it's something to do with that.
T-Mobile adding unlimited data plans with no throttling on September 5th
A better title: "How paperbacks transformed the way people read". Americans were late in the game. The protagonist in the essay was a copycat. Apart from the title, though, the essay is excellent.
Ouch. I hate to say this, but your co-founders are scr~~ing you. They're putting you in a holding pattern waiting for the company value to inflate, and starting to give you a pseudo-salary to muddy the water, so that they can claim that you're just an intern-turned-employee whose salary is lagging given the slow sales.

Why did you pitch a 2% equity per month deal? You clearly don't have anything left to prove - you've already demonstrated your value and commitment to the project, not least by working unpaid.

I would negotiate hard for 33%. It's on your co-founders to give reasons why your share should be less - and here I would only accept hard contributions from them (e.g. cash they contributed to the business, additional months they spent on the concept), not soft contributions like "ideas" or "contacts".

Good luck!
Yes, I remember doing this circa 1990, now. There's some neuron in my brain that recognizes that address.

Thanks for looking that up.
> .com + browser settings == english

Browsers are often configured improperly and it's not always practical to rely on them but it definitely isn't offensive to follow the explicit preferences sent by the browser.
Arq, please add support for Glacier. - Happy customer.
In 1986? Buying Pixar and founding NeXT. He had been fired by Apple in 1985.
"Either I'm a cofounder, or I'm a freelancer" - +1 . I've started following this recently, it really keeps things simple and weeds off any chances of misbalance between 'your perception about your role' and 'their perception of your role' in the company.
Desktop applications on Windows are particularly prone to this kind of thing. If you happen to have an english version of Windows, but the locale (timezone, currency) set to another region, many applications assume you also want the interface in that region's language.

This is extremely annoying (especially when there's no way to choose the language manually) and moreso considering there's a way to know the language of the system.
I use Windows with an English localization and most of the software installers irk me to no end by defaulting to French because they don't rely on the system language but my location.

I also hate the fact that I have to do something as cumbersome as putting the browser in private mode whenever I'm using someone else's computer to make a search on the english side of google since, like for japan, google.com redirects to google.fr instead of letting me use the US database so I have to go in the preferences and do so in private mode so as to not mess with the cookies as they wouldn't be pleased if their google permanently turned English even on google.fr. God damn it.

Hey GOOGLE, domain names are not just for show, FFS. If I want the French edition, I'll go to google.fr. If I want it in English, I'll go to google.com. Don't mess with something that worked rather well since the beginning of the Internet.

I hate programmers who try to write "smart" software. Software that makes attempts at thinking in your stead. Fuck off ! I know what I want, you don't need to make annoying guess works.
What is the probability that a descendent carries even at least one gene from the "Most Recent Common Ancestor"?

The human genome has only 20,000 protein-coding genes (which comprise 1-2% of human DNA). I'll be generous and use the 1% figure to assume that human DNA has about 2e6 "genes" (protein-coding or otherwise).

After 100 generations:

Probability any one gene comes from MRCA: 1/(2^100).
Probability any one gene does not come from MRCA = 1 - 1/(2^100)
Probability NO gemes come from MRCA = (1 - 1/(2^100))^(2^6) = 0.9999999999999999999999999999495129020658552444536494

Probability at least one gene comes from MRCA = 5.05 × 10^-29
Except that Judaism has a form of Matrilineality so King David/etc were probably bad examples.
I may be missing something but it doesn't seem necessarily true. Our last common ancestor may have already died and we may not get another with all the divisions that exist, or space travel that may happen (ie. we don't and won't breed at random).
I can also vouch for OmniOutliner, though I personally don't use it for task management. I use Notational Velocity (http://notational.net/) for taking reference notes, and for task management I email myself action items and tag them using the GTD system. Gmail's amazing tagging and filtering system and its abundance of single-key keyboard shortcuts make it better than any other system I've tried. I don't even miss being able to edit items; I've gotten used to either forwarding or making a new one, and it's a good tradeoff. I'll write an article about it someday.

For nearly everything else I'll default to OmniOutliner, and I usually have at least three or four windows of it open. I've never found any outlining software that comes close. Favorite features: Rarely lacks a keyboard shortcut I want it to have, has audio recording built in (I'd suggest an external mic for it to be useful though), and exports to plain text, HTML, RTF, and Word.
Can Linux be included in this list, too?
Get your wasted time back. Here's how
I'm very curious: How do you use Anki for behavioural reminders (and what exactly do you mean by that?)

I'm a big fan of Anki's for language learning (I've studied some 4 or 5 languages with it already, and it went pretty well in all cases,) and I know many people use it for other things, but I haven't really seen something that would really captivate my interest besides language learning.
So in 3000 years we'll all be having sex with our relatives. Good to know!
Crunching the numbers on a Techcrunching Part 2
The analogy is flawed because self taught programmers are often able to programme computers, often just as good as university programmers, do not believe in radically different things from university programmers.

No 'self taught programmers' use their own "base 3 logic system" fighting against the "base 2 conspiracy".

Some of the things nutritionists believe are at odds with basic science, e.g. nutritionists who think you should eat green veg because the chlorophyll will oxygenate your blood... ignoring the fact that chlorophyll works in the presence of light, and there is no light inside your body...

Let's be clear here, Nutritionism is up there with Astrology, Creationism, Flat Earth Theory, Crystal Healing, and the Magic Power of the Stars to Heal You.
Writing and Publishing Your First Symfony2 Bundle
Cilk/Cilk+ is not the answer, despite years of Intel promoting it and open-sourcing it.

Intel removed the features that gave Cilk a reason to exist: inlets and aborts. They're useful for (partially) parallelizing hard-to-parallelize problems that don't fit well into the other frameworks like OpenMP etc. Why did they remove them? I'm guessing because they were difficult to do well, and the algorithms that need them don't present such nice linear scaling graphs for marketing slides.

However, without those features, Cilk just doesn't distinguish itself enough from OpenCL, OpenMP etc. Parallelizing easy to parallelize problems isn't the problem, it's the others we need help in dealing with!

The poster childs/demos for the original Cilk were parallelized chessprograms, some of which did quite well in real tournaments. It's a very well studied area that exhibits a lot of parallelism, but not in a form that's easy to extract (hence there are no competitive ones using OpenMP, GPUs etc). Cilk was able to do it, a major achievement. But you can't even construct those in Intel's crippled Cilk version any more. Well, not any that would be competitive, anyway, which is the point to begin with.

If your solution only solves the easy problems others have already solved, what exactly is your right of existence?
I always get confused here between "Eve" and MRCA.

AFAIK "Eve" is not what we are talking here - that is not as identifying one person who is the ancestor of all living people, but that if we go back to the time of David, then he, and 80% of everyone alive at the time (approx 1 million) MUST be ancestors of everyone alive now. That is some of his DNA and some of everyone elses DNA at the time is in me.

That is pretty weird.

The other thing that gets me is that till agriculture, it seems human population was stable at around 1 million. Then it started to grow to 1 billion by 1800. Freddie Mercury could sing to the whole population of earth in three concerts.
I made a gross simplification with saying "Nutritionism doesn't exist". It obviously does exist since people call themselves it, and we can talk about it.

However it 'exists' and is true as much as Astrology and Creationism.
Exactly. When it comes to the world of programming and IT, English is the lingua franca. I'm French but spend 99% of my time on the English-speaking web. The French edition of Google is only good at pissing me off.
Someone has decided to downvote you. I really don't much like Dawkins (I'm a Christian), but this is very interesting. I hit the update button - your comment is a very worthy contribution to this discussion!
Where Recycling Fails, The Art Is Born
This is a cynical attempt to sell the products of Progress software corporation, who are getting access to the location based GPS data of unscrupulous telecoms companies.
Yes this is the key - people won't have just one ancestor but many millions.
Fascinating! Well, happy to be proven wrong - thanks all for the links. I'm very surprised that this is even possible!
I find BufferBox a strange inclusion here, given similar competitors such as Ireland's parcel motel are up and running on a larger scale here already...
Fair enough :-) I'm actually quite amazed this is even possible, but quite happy to have been proven wrong! You learn something every day on this site...
This is all ego. I know VCs that love giving away "co-founder" titles because they can often get away with giving less equity in exchange for the title.
There's already a diy movement for weed. there are forums with growing techniques and tips.

But i'm not sure it does reduce the risk in a big way. It might even increase the risk, while also increasing complexity and work. Doesn't see like a good solution.
Unity3D graphics engine coming to Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8
Does cooperation evolve?
Except it still gives me mostly bad German results for technical queries if I don't completely remove German there.
Because it's not making the final decision on weather a question will be allowed or not. It just aids in providing the user advise about how to improve the question even before the user has asked it.

The problem right now is that the user mostly has very little opportunity to improve his question, because most of the time it has already been closed, and has very little chance of getting opened again (unless the question is flagged for moderator attention).
Ask HN: Reapply to YC with same team / product?
Albert Einstein famously stated that insanity is doing the same thing over and over yet expecting a different result.

We didn't even get an interview for SYC12. So should I find a new co-founder, change the product or both? Without any feedback, it's extremely difficult to know what to do..
Or more importantly, we're already having sex with our distant relatives!

Well, some of us are.
Portugal has decriminalized all drugs in 2001.

"Serious drug use is down significantly, particularly among young people; the burden on the criminal-justice system has eased; the number of people seeking treatment has grown; and the rates of drug-related deaths and cases of infectious diseases have fallen."
I find most startup guys to be complete douchebags that just want to profit off the hard work of more competent and talented individuals. That or have the fancy title.

This is based on two experiences of being the nice guy whose skills/connections were wanted. Shame on me for being trusting, I know.
Why is it more difficult to do those gestures on the trackpad? The trackpad is closer to your keyboard and it is very quick to switch between the two.
The Republican spending plan for science
"Shorten the time between external input needed, and external input available"

This is project management 101, and does not mention the pathological issue: if dev A is waiting for approval on code A, then he will go off and do work on lower priority code B, C, D. And they will wait, piling up the amount of work, making it look like the company requiresmore project management, better communications, more layers of managemnt and priority.

Basically Scrum has tried to evolve as a IT lead solution to pathological project management.
It feels very sluggish here, immediate showstopper for me.
There's a cheery thought!

Seriously though, what about if you marry someone from a different country? I'd imagine the chances are somewhat lower.
Even though I switched to Chrome, I hope Opera does well. It still has my heart, I've used it for seven years or so.
I wouldn't work for you. That has no bearing on you, but it makes me feel better.
What's more--bad software marketing is SOOOO bad! Think of all that "cloud" marketing that is full of empty lies. Developers don't want to see that. It's such a frustration. I agree with the sentiment-- if you're a marketer, try to code something --or better yet, just download your product you're trying to sell. You need to empathize with your customers a bit to understand how they can get to your product.