skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The opportunity has been exploited for years.

IIRC, Rotomotion was the first outfit to Open Source their autopilot, and that was almost 10 years ago. I think they've since gone closed source, but their initial market was powerline and pipeline monitoring from semi-autonomous helicopters carrying cameras. Whether related to their OSS efforts or not, the DIY UAV scene exploded soon after.
Amazing pics and special effects
Hello. I was amazed when I saw these amazing pictures. I am sure you would be impressed too...
Neural based training, situational awareness, and personal resilience
Servers Too Hot? Intel Recommends a Luxurious Oil Bath
You're thinking much further ahead than me.

> colonizing Mars would certainly help Chinese Civilization gain ascendancy in a pan-solar civilization.

Different presently-recogized civilizations, such as Western, Muslim, Indian, and Chinese civilizations, will be indistinguishable by the time a pan-solar civilization arises.

> Mars will be well positioned as the largest population center, and largest agricultural and industrial power other than Earth

I believe people who grow up in one gravity zone can live for a long time in a weaker gravity zone, but can't adapt at all to a stronger gravity. People born on Earth could move to Mars to live, but people born on Mars couldn't live on Earth. If true, that gives support to your argument. But perhaps Titan or some asteroid would also become a large industrial power.
Hospitals often bill 5x-10x actual costs to make up for the "discounts" that insurance companies force upon them. If you're uninsured and get hit by a huge bill, you need to negotiate with the hospital to bring the amount down. Doubly so, because hospitals have lax tracking of costs, and no one really knows how much your visit really cost. More about this from an actual MD:
http://truecostofhealthcare.org/hospital_billing
If it wasn't for prison rape, I'd love to have those 12 months of free food and roof, and lots of time to study.
One of the major models of the current boom is the marketplace model (Airbnb, Etsy, Kickstarter) and without external financing it's very hard to build the critical mass that will allow a marketplace to be successfully self-sustaining.
Understanding the dangers of ego depletion
As a Canadian, I couldn't imagine having to decide between money and healthcare. I don't know how you guys do it...

Relevant reading: http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/07/12/how-i-lost-...
> We already have a wealth tax. It's called "inflation." If the government wants to tax wealth, all they have to do is print money. The culture of living within your means and saving for the future basically died before I was born, so the point that this kind of policy punishes responsible citizens who are capable of living frugally, within their means, and saving the future is essentially moot.<

Not true, in the slightest. Inflation benefits those with income producing assets, like rental property. Inflation is a trick to make the rich richer. All the evidence points that way.

And let people be vague with wealth valuations. This is about being more fair, not being burdensome. Those with obvious wealth will finally pay a fair share of tax. Those who work hard will finally have some reward for their work.

The comment about cashing out your bank account every day is absurd. You pay 40%+ in income taxes right now. Would you not like to keep 97% of what you earn instead of less than 60%?
Life saving treatment is usually like this all over the world, and in Denmark they will give you a bill unless you're apart of EU, as you'd have the EU health insurance (EHIC), which is free. This card is also valid in countries in the Schengen Area, like Norway, Switzerland and Lichtenstein.
Looks like you're a solopreneur like me. Would love to connect and exchange notes.
Silly americans... in my country, it's obligatory to have health insurance and if you cannot afford it, the government will pay your insurance, for god's sake. Not even the most conservative and right-wing politicans who see our freedom in danger when we can't keep fully automatic assault rifles at home anymorehere question this system, because it just makes sense.
And if you spend money on 'living well', that is a massive increase in GDP through money being recycled in the system... which is what fuels the economy. i.e. it's a good thing
>You're right long term, but self-driving cars that are allowed to drive without any human behind the wheel is more like a 50 years out thing, IMO.

Why not just outsource the driver to, say Eastern Europe, Mexico or India? Rent out a room, buy bunch of computers, screens, tables, chairs, and then hire a bunch of "virtual drivers" with enough experience on the road to control those vehicles remotely. Furthermore, program the car to stop on the side of a road in case should it lose the wireless connectivity. I guess the ping could be a problem, but haven't most of the people driving on the roads today got slower reactions to events than 100-150ms? Later on, as the tech progresses, teach the software to direct the driving to that virtual driver on hold only when the "AI" wasn't be able to figure out the current situation.
> They are world's apart .. you might want to cut down on the hyperbole.

Rustynails backed his comment with evidence and reasoning, while your reasoning is backed by.. hyperbole.

You seem like the type who would defend patents over for-loops because - Hey, it wasn't obvious to you. How about you come up with an objective test to determine if something is "obvious", and maybe the rest of us will take you seriously. Until then, please, lay more hyperbole on us.
You've got your causality in the wrong direction. They have a Twitter base of 25k followers because they provide something useful. Multiple times per day. With original content twice per week, on average, every single week for three years.

People choose to listen when you provide something useful, on a regular basis, in a channel that they're already paying attention to. Once you've gotten their attention, you can convince some of them to join a new channel for which you have better access, control, and tracking.

It's less about getting the listening than the continuous choice to proving something useful.
SEEKING WORK - Remote (based out of Milan, Italy)

Full stack developer. Profile here - http://muis.co/abhishiv

Frontend: Backbone, Sencha, Phonegap
Backend: Ruby, Rails and Node

I would actually love to work on a html5 mobile app, so if you have something hit me up.
Actually, let me rephrase that a bit to ad: What is B? I'm not convinced either if we just asked: "how do we encourage the great and the good" we would end up with something like the current system.
A favorite of mine is the Sametime song!

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/stwiki.nsf/dx/Sametime_Song
Nginx is awesome. This looks like a major improvement also.
Ask and ye shall receive.

http://unbounce.com/content-marketing/checklist-12-things-yo...

Doubly interesting since it's both an example of what they do to attract followers and a guide on the steps they take.
Teach her to turn off Javascript. Voila. No more ads. (Or at least a drastically reduced number of them.)

Just as Google is entitled to show ads, the user is entitled to disable Javascript.

It's a fair trade.

And as for inserting the ads into the video, as Zach says, she'll just figure out how to skip them.
I'm Canadian but lets be realistic, there are many things that would cause serious financial hardship due to medical costs in Canada. A friend of mine right now is suffering through intense pain from her teeth that aren't being fixed because she doesn't have money/insurance. She's deciding between healthcare and money.

You can also lose your life on a waiting list in Canada. Not much purpose in having $23K in the bank but being dead.

For sure you're not going to get a $23K bill for a bug bite but you will pay $3000/month for chemo, etc. Lots of things aren't covered by medicare, and they're quite expensive. Canada is more like a $23K bill for getting cancer, or other long term/terminal illnesses.
Google engineer finds British spyware on PCs and smartphones
An interesting post on a board the almost solely exists to help people find private equity investments.

Leveraged buyouts <> private equity. It is just one form of it. Sometimes the money is borrowed from investors who expect a return on their money. Listen to the horror stories here about diluted shares on a buy out. Whoever lends the money has the leverage.
> parasites like Romney getting filthily richer by doing things like bankrupting KP Toys.

If you're a major league batter, sometimes you strike out, but at the end of the day you still get paid.

If you're a Senator, sometimes your bill gets defeated because your party simply doesn't have the votes, but at the end of the day you still get credit for fighting for it.

Beating up on Romney for not being able to bat 1000 as a consultant has always seemed a little harsh to me. Sometimes in life, you're simply dealt a losing hand, and nothing you can do will lead to the outcome you wish for. Without knowing more details of the circumstances, I'm willing to give Romney the benefit of the doubt on this one.
Everyone has not decided that 15% is stingy. I dine out a lot and at least here in SoCal 15% is quite normal, 20% for good service or - if we're being honest - if the server is attractive.

However, I have found that people who are former servers use 20% as a minimum out of empathy. But they usually don't guilt others into doing that, either. Perhaps you frequently dine with former servers?
The AI's out there apparently. I've heard Marcin Wichary, explain that he reproduced the AI in JavaScript when he built the Google doodle.

I think it's in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttavBa4giPc
Reminds me of my kid's $6000 bump on the head. Or the time I had and knee operation and they took five minutes extra to clean out something they spotted and added $3500 to the bill. Or the eye operation where they took fifteen minutes extra because there was a detached retina adding $9000 to the bill. (Insurance wouldn't pay that one. They never said why either.)

You are not exactly going to negotiate at moments like these.
It seems more like Branch. It's not question/answer based it's "conversation" based, pushing people answer more complex questions and have deeply involved discussion.

Again, Branch fills that space. But Branch is new, and it's an awesome space to be in because Yahoo Answers is currently the leader and boy is that a horrible service.
Indeed, however to say anything about damage you need to know the area where the force is applied and more about the materials. If the bottom of the copter is padded the duration of the impact coud be much longer and spread over a larger area.

Also, F = m * delta V / delta t is only valid if force is constant in this context. I would expect acceleration to vary during the course of the impact so this relation would likely not hold [EDIT] in terms of determining damage I mean.
You sound very excited about telling us nothing of what it is you do or make.
This was just what I needed and one more reason I love Joel's posts. Over the summer I stopped working on an idea that would've been pretty cool and is much better than the one I'm forcing myself to continue with. It's funny because I've got one of those ideas that I don't think is bad but there only moments when I think it's bad (https://writeapp.me if you're curious).

It's tough to continue sometimes when you want the rewards now and all you see are high bounce rates and a handful of signups that come in short bursts. It's motivating when you get those bursts but when they're few and far between on an unfinished project it's hard to keep going. I've found that working on something that meets your own needs is one way to avoid the problem of not finishing. In my mind, even if the world hates what I've created, at least I have a new tool that I've always wanted to use. So instead of creating a win-lose situation where you only win if people like and use your product you have a win-win where you win if no one likes it because you use it yourself and you win if it takes off for obvious reasons. But even so, even with a project like that, there are times when you feel like giving up. Its the not the definitive cure but building something you want that others may too is definitely one way to lessen the chances of giving in to the temptation to give up.
I have absolutely no idea where where I can purchase a live grenade. However, living in a rural area, I'd have no trouble finding people who know how to make explosives from common (and cheap) farm materials. Hell, I was making blackpowder when I was 11 years old.

Now add to that the fact that in the US I can buy a used car or pickup truck cheaper than I can buy a cheap GPS-equipped model helicopter and I definitely know which option I'd be more worried about.
Many countries bill for emergency stays. US emergency rooms definitely send bills, even if it's acute live-saving treatment. Even Canada, which has national healthcare for residents, will bill nonresidents who visit an ER. If you're from another country, you may get away with just not paying one of those bills, because if it's life-saving care they have to provide it before verifying you can pay. But they'll still try to collect on it. That's one reason it's common for people to buy travel health insurance that covers emergency care.

Afaik, Denmark doesn't require the EHIC for acute emergency care. Anyone is eligible for unbilled emergency care, with some exceptions to combat medical tourism (if you're found to have traveled to Denmark for the specific purpose of entering an ER to treat a health condition). The EHIC qualifies you for some additional care, e.g. childbirth. This is actually a big current sore point in Danish politics, because many other EU countries don't extend a reciprocal courtesy.
Can someone please explain to me the purpose of an insurance company when participation in the pool is mandatory? A policy like this seems like it creates a legislated middle-man that just wastes money.
+1 for Academia.edu. Great team, and they host great hack nights with really nice people.
nice write-up.

> "choose the S3 option from your EC2 Management Console."

do you mean AWS Management Console?
Haha, I'm with you there, big thanks!
You already posted this comment word for word in the original article.
Ask HN: How do you guys control your sexual urges?
I know this is a very strange question to ask. But off late, I've found myself wasting time, being not able to control my sexual urges. Do you guys ever feel pangs like those? How do you control such pangs?
LomoBook
Oh my, did I not say thank you!?

Thank you for the link! I love Jeff Atwood! CodingHorror.com's RSS is one of my favorite Google Reader Feeds
"Young, rich, handsome, and fat. One out of four ain't bad." -- Tim Siedell
I control my urge to drink by having a drink. Urge to eat, by eating. Urge to have sex, by having sex.
execution > ideas
This is an inappropriate article for HN.
Chemo is most definitely covered for me.. just as everything else that would be medically required.

http://www.health.gov.bc.ca/msp/infoben/benefits.html#notcov...

Nothing you have commented with is based on fact.

Edit: OP added a ninja-edit to his comment that included the part about teeth-pain... as my link explains, non-emergency dentalcare is not covered by default.
Do people buy clone scripts?
Yes, thanks for the heads up. I've corrected the typo.
Since I live alone for now, and not particularly a very social life, responding to that, I end up masturbating. My problem is, I've been wasting a lot of time in that. I hope to listen from anyone else who's had a similar problem earlier.
I think you're largely correct, but you're probably underestimating how much societal pressure goes into making things this way. Parents taking away the rocket ship is just the tip of the iceberg. Not only are young girls pushed away from science and other subjects that are considered masculine, but they're also socialized to have a "broad range" of interests and not to obsess over any one thing, which is the exact trait that enabled me and many other programmers I know to get ahead in programming. I underestimated it too until I read Unlocking the Clubhouse (http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=8515...) a few months ago.

For problems this large and systemic, significant corrective action and positive reinforcement are required.
"The Veteran - The first ten lines of any function, even an accessor, are all assert statements. All the error conditions for each function are dutifully checked and handled"

Even spent a couple hours tracing through a zillion code paths to reverse-engineer the implicit contract for a particular method? Do any clients explicitly check for the FooException which bubbles up the stack when Method A accepts null for an Integer value (fun with Java) and passes that null down into Method B which in turn, ....

I'll take overzealous assertion vs. the alternative of under-definition any day.
My PHP code looks pretty much identical to my code in other languages. Everything is in namespaces and classes. There is abstractions for database access and other common operations. I don't think PHP needs an expert mode; it just needs to continue to be a better language.

However, I agree, all languages should have the ability to turn off the backwards compatibility crud with some kind of statement. In PHP, it would be great to do that at the namespace level -- allowing different libraries to operate at different levels of support/strictness in the same project.
Some people believe they should be allowed to do as they please in Walmart. Walmart disagrees.

iOS app approval isn't some new policy Apple is springing on people out of the blue.

Let's not pretend that the people who want free as in Stallman apps signed up with Apple and are now shocked at this new development.

Let's also not pretend that Apple security will show up at your house if you jailbreak your phone.

Let's also not pretend that Apple is the only company that has a policy against certain types of apps in their store.
The article has the title: "Apple sued precisely because Samsung wasn't innovating"
Not sure if you are joking. Having everyone inside the pool makes up for members with chronical illnesses and other illnesses that need a lot of care. Some still healthy young poeple pay maybe a little bit more but everyone can be treated reasonably well. If you run an insurance without mandatory participation people with problematic illnesses are a risky for the business and that is one reason why the op can't get an insurance in the USA.
Every time a healthcare discussion comes up and everyone gets derailed on whether (or how much) to socialize things, I wonder the following:

from a technology, taxation, and moral standpoint, what the hell led to a system where some heavy-duty antibiotics cost about 10-15X what they should? More importantly, why do generally intellegent audiences get caught up in arguments over socialism rather than correcting the cost issue first? Is it sue-happy lawyers, is is an anti-competitive marketplace, or is it the pushing of the very concept of insurance that has given us such an unsustainable system?

I truly want to put out a call to geeks: for every healthcare dollar you spend, grill your provider. Haggle them down, and make them justify the price, or we're all screwed, no matter who is paying for things.
In the US there are many community health centers. NYC alone takes care of 450,000 people without any insurance at all through CHCs and other sources. The very poorest generally have Medicaid in NY State, so the uninsured might be people like waiters. At any rate, there are community health centers throughout the country.

One issue that I have with the Obama Affordable Care Act is that they should have put much, much more money into the CHCs.
Insurance companies make more money if they refuse payment.

I've always liked the old Chinese medicine system. You find a doctor who is willing to take you as a client. You pay the doctor money per month when you are well. If you are sick, you do not pay. Of course, refusing treatment is acceptable to get you disqualified, as are a few other things.
Having experienced emergency care in both Denmark and the U.S., this is also the main reason I won't relocate to the U.S. until this is sorted out. I had what was thought to be a broken ankle in Denmark thanks to icy conditions and I was so well looked after, and charged nothing, I was awe inspired and wish there had been some way to pay it back. I sliced a finger in the U.S. and was made to feel like a statistic, with a $1000 bill. Thanks to inexpensive travel insurance that cost me just $100, but how I am supposed to feel when my travel insurance is less than quarter of the price that actual insurance would be if I lived there?

(Edit from reading other comments: probably not charged in Denmark because of European health reciprocity, but they never verified this at the hospital).
8% sounds great. US currently spends around 16% of GDP on health care every year. I think the majority of Americans would support a universal health care system that provides far more coverage at half the cost. Instead our total spend is expected to double by 2020.

Source: http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/28/news/economy/healthcare_spen...
I am now forced to quote Douglas Adam's "Restaurant at the End of the Universe:"

"A green salad," said Arthur emphatically.

"A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.

"Are you going to tell me," said Arthur, "that I shouldn't have green salad?"

"Well," said the animal, "I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am."
Because getting rid of the middle man is considered socialism in these parts and that doesn't fly with Joe and Jill six pack.

(Unless of course you are talking about Medicare then its the most patriotic thing since apple pie).
The actual title: "The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy Is on Your Screen".
Well, somehow it seems to work. Swiss insurance companoies aren't known for being insolvent.
Well, what are you trying to make?
I think the point retillit is trying to make is, why even bother with private insurance companies if insurance is compulsory? Which is a good question.

The answer, I think, is partially politics, but also partly whether you think the competition a system like this (in theory) encourages outweighs the cost of profits.
LOS ANGELES - Blayze (MuckerLab Fall 2012 class)
FULL-TIME and will consider PART-TIME

We are an early stage startup focused on optimizing the relationship between content creators and their fans. We have recently been accepted into the Fall 2012 class of MuckerLab - one of LA's hottest startup accelerators.

Being a 4 person team, you will have a large influence and meaningful impact on product development, as well as, the ability to conduct interesting research. Emphasis is on the team aspect, we have a good vibe going (no bro-gramming, no attitudes) and are looking to execute faster but still maintain that good feeling.

Working from the MuckerLab office, you will also be exposed to other startups, mentors and investors.

We are looking for lead and junior engineers with experience in any of the following:

- Building and optimizing sites in Ruby on Rails.

- Crunching big data with Java, Clojure, Hadoop, Storm, NoSQL, etc.

- Crunching big data with machine learning and data science.

Generalists welcome!

Ping me - Bennett Neale - bennett (at) blayze (dot) com
Crash course in mathematical notation for programmers
You mean like auto insurance (liability)?

You're subsidizing risk across a large group of people. The chances of something happen to an individual are small, but could be financially devastating. So everyone pools their risk together for affordable premiums.