skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bond issues like this are usually subject to popular vote. Not sure whether there was loophole in the procedure, or public approved such bond terms, but Californian cities do have to get majority of residents to agree to new bond issues.
It's new for some. It doesn't have to be newly created content, as long as it gets people interested (which usually means that for many it is new). At least it is an unwritten rule.
Half a million votes isn't cool. You know what's cool? Half a billion votes.
Ask HN: What is your personal use-case for social networking?
I have been recently thinking about how I use social apps and tools. My electronic social experience consists of bits and pieces of Facebook, Pinterest, Gchat, iMessage, and email. My primary use case is to keep in touch with people with whom I am close, not necessarily broadcast things to a wide group of acquaintances. I have customized the Facebook newsfeed settings with custom lists, update types, and notifications so that I can view content that is of particular interest to me based on the particular people sharing it. Pinterest is mainly used for their more recent "secret" board feature for communicating with a small set of close friends in a more visual format. Facebook, Gchat, and iMessage are used for IM-style communication depending on the other person and their preferred platform. And Facebook has largely replaced email for lots of my friends.

This got me thinking - how are others using Facebook and similar social tools? How are others using these existing tools to solve their unique problems? Is there any room for improvement or new social tools to better fit these alternative use cases?

So, how are you using the currently available tools? Would you like to see anything done differently?

Thanks in advance for the awesome feedback!
Kim Dotcom shows off new mega service
Motivating video indeed. The slide showing what percent of Americans fail to get the RDA for various nutrients is eye-opening. Thanks.
Now when you see another California prop raising money for education, you know precisely where the money is going.
Personal expression increases engagement and thus audience, which brands seek.
Apple Maps strands motorists looking for Mildura
I personally have a fear of making things nobody will use. I know that the act of working on something is not a waste of time since you learn from the process of building but I can't ignore the feeling that I wasted my time anyway.

The way I do my projects now is that I try to get a core group of influential people in their niche to get excited about the project I'm building and I leave it to them to tell their friends about it. I've never spent a dime on marketing. A lot of traffic to one of my sites comes from FB, for example, and mainly from fan-created pages.

With the new project I'm currently working on, I noticed a group of users trying to shoehorn their activities into an existing platform that didn't exactly fit them. The first thing I did was to contact a lot of these people personally and asked them questions about what they were doing. After getting a fairly good idea, I then asked them if they were interested in testing something that I'll make for them in the next few weeks which got a positive response.

I spent a week building the core features that I thought were the most useful for them. All the core features worked but since I ported a lot of existing code from my old projects to speed things up, a lot of the other stuff was broken but that's okay. I hate building useless stuff so I needed to know right away if I was on the right track.

I invited the people I contacted to test it out. They didn't like it. Discouraging but expected. After a weekend of tweaks and discussions, they started getting more and more excited about the project as they started to see things progress. I made sure I involved them in all of the design discussions and tried to make them feel that this was their project as much as it is mine. Basically, tons of buy-in which also works wonders for my morale to keep going. They're excited, I'm excited, and now we're at the point where they've decided that they're going to bring all of their activities over to the new site.

It's a lot of upfront work to be sure, but this way, I can approach it more from a systems analysis standpoint now than a marketing exercise later.

TL;DR Find a key group of prospective users and involve them in your project from the beginning. Let them be a part of its creation, generate excitement, then let the marketing take care of itself from there.
Nice. (Can you find a better alternative to HWIGS? - I tried, got nothing)

I particularly find the "Show HN" and "Review my startup" threads the best ones. I automatically upvote them and most comments. Negativity is uncommon in 'ask', 'show' or 'review' threads.

Anyways, sometimes we become the person we dislike. It happened to me. A person with a strong opinion on a subject, based on it's own limited perception of reality (like we all have) made a comment where it downplayed everyone that didn't share the same opinion as her. I lost the opportunity of being quiet and replied by throwing a chair. We are both idiots.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4844632
Very interesting read. I've been thinking about it for a while, and although the explanation in the article makes sense to me, I wonder if the following is equivalent:

Consider a spherical surface S. We can construct a mapping from the point of S to the points in a finite and limited subset of R^2 (say, the square [0, 1] X [0, 1]). One way to do that is to map each point of "latitude" ρ and "longitude" θ (in degrees), to the point ((ρ+90)/180, θ/360).

Now, let's consider the rectangle [0, .5] x [0, 1]. There is obviously a 1:1 mapping from this to the original square (just halve or double one of the coordinates to change from one to the other). In an intuitive sense, there are "as many" points in half the square as in the whole square, a bit like there are as many natural numbers as there are even numbers. (This is one definition of infinite set, if I remember correctly).

Now this means that we can remap all the points from half the square to a complete sphere, and the points from the other half square to a "new" complete sphere, in fact mapping points from the original sphere S to two new identical spheres.

Is this reasoning correct, or am I missing anything (probably something obvious...)?
It's probably gauche to make the first comment on one's own submission, but what does any of the following mean?

"shows a 2048-bit key being generated."

“To strengthen the key, we have collected entropy from your mouse movements and keystroke timings.”

I'm not a crypto guy so the above sounds like marketing/gibberish to me.
Not afraid to say it: I have directly benefited from homeopathy. Specifically: Treated my heartburn with "Carbo Veg 30" and now it's gone. Don't care what anybody says or might think about the placebo effect - or any other argument, for that matter.
To me its just shows that users don't care about Facebook as a social place to gather together -- they care about the product that Facebook serves (social place to gather together). If the rules will get too tight, they will start moving towards something else, but they won't do much themselves about it.
What about Google? They make a copy of almost every image on the internet with the full knowledge that they are nearly all covered under an absolute copyright license of "All Rights Reserved", including the right to store and rehost a copy of that content. How would Google's financial outlook change if they decide to follow the letter of the law and never use pieces of copyrighted works "for financial gain" without explicit permission from each rightsholder first?

It seems to me that the only difference between Google and NZBMatrix et al is that the media companies like one more than the other.
I think awk gets a pass because it's a programming language with a handy syntax for running small scripts. Find is in an awkward position of being not quite that general but still very complicated.

The solution to filenames with newlines in them is one garbage-safe script involving 'rm' and a stern email to whoever created the file. Containing complexity instead of letting it leak into every single script is a good thing.
I think this article has laid it out a bit easier for those that havent heard this concept before:

http://www.fastcompany.com/1840496/how-your-locus-control-im...

The title of the original article is link-baity and it worked; but the whole idea of locus-of-control is that it give people a perception that they have control over their lives and it has them take actions that are consistent with that, which generally gives better outcomes.
Fighting Tech Debt with Metrics
The small value transaction is called a pre-auth and yes it is designed to test whether the card works. It's not a big deal in most countries since it just disappears automatically. But IIRC in the UK it doesn't. Google probably figures they can use the same rules in every country. Pretty dumb move.

The reason stores do it this way is because of legal reasons. They can't bill your credit card until it is shipped but yet need to know you have the money before building it.
Even if you just focused on console apps, that would be a huge milestone for many folks.

One example: being able to run XCode's command line build tools to generate iOS and Mac builds on our Linux CI boxes without a dedicated Mac build slave would be huge.
On the contrary, that is precisely why businesses offer gift cards. It's because empirically some X% of gift card value never gets redeemed (the number I've heard is 10%, but that doesn't matter). To a business, selling gift cards without a discount is free profit.
I also live, work, and have grown up in Atlanta. I have to say he gives a realistic and well made argument. I'd personally rather live/work in Atlanta over Austin, but the culture of Atlanta, while improving, is nowhere near the likes of San Fran or NYC.

But there have been many successful start ups through out Atlanta's history, such as Coke, Turner Broadcasting System(CNN/Turner/etc), UPS, and more. All of these were revolutionary start ups at the time, and now are massive corporations. I expect future companies like this to be founded here in Atlanta, because it is essentially the capital of the South East, geographically about a quarter of the country.

What makes me want to move away from Atlanta is the poor city infrastructure, the dependence on suburbs, and the lack of culture. In Atlanta there is possibly less muse than in San Fran or NYC, and the city as a whole can sometimes come across as anti intellectual, which is quite the opposite of most of San Fran and NYC. Beside GA Tech and Emory college students, networking would be relatively small when compared to NYC or San Fran. But for someone who already has their network built out, such as a start up from SF/NYC trying to cut costs, Atlanta could be the place. And it's also ideal for people moving from smaller cities who don't want the large city feel.

If Atlanta had a more walkable and livable environment, it's be quite amazing.
What causes the US to be (or at the very least, be considered) so corrupt? My main theory is lack of political parties. Just like how companies take advantage of the consumer the most when they're a monopoly, the government can take advantage of its people when the party's worst chance of getting elected is close to 48%. However, I'm sure there are many other factors that play into governmental corruption.
I agree with the general notion that tech patents are too abstract, but you're right, its just too convenient for companies that don't hold many software patents to agree.

Now if a company with many software patents got behind this brief, I'd have more faith in the industry's desire to get rid of such patents.
If you look more completely at the deal it actual is a good deal for the school district. They will pay a total of $34 million over 20 years to obtain $25 million. So their effective total interest is only $9 million, which works out to about 2% per year... an excellent loan rate for anyone. What is hidden in that is that the other $23 million (34-9) in interest that is "free" to the school district is actually paid by all of us as taxpayers. If given the opportunity why not have taxpayers across the country finance your school district? I would fire any superintendent who DIDN'T take that deal. I'm not arguing that this is a morally correct thing to do, just that it makes good financial sense from the superintendent's perspective.
That photo is a photoshop; some planes wouldn't be able to take off at those angles.
They do but we found that mac minis do so more often. I have a sample of about 15 out of say 100+ other regular 1U rack mountable machines. Mac minis failed at a much higher rate.

The worst part is that some failures were not a 'stop dead failure' where it was easy to detect and replace. Some would just freeze intermittently, some just got really slow.

One could tell that there is a practical difference between server grade and consumer grade components. In retrospect time spent debugging and messing with this was probably not worth the gain in density and the cost.
I wonder if transparency into operations might help solve some of this. Being able to see that a local principal or superintendent is doing great things might attract more prestige within the community, or nationally, vs. "oh, he's another superintendent of schools in a small town". So maybe data tools could help.
In fact, they often go hand-in-hand :)

I lived in Lexington, KY for 14 years and I believe we were among America's leaders in churches, strip clubs, and chain restaurants (per capita, that is).

There's a Portland joke somewhere in here...
If this sounds irresponsible, you really, really do not want to hear about pension financing. This is "In return for $1 in the present day, we will pay you $10 in 30 years." Californian state employee pensions are "In return for $1 in the present day, 30 years from now we will reward you with a non-callable perpetuity bond with a $10 a year coupon. Oh, here's your dollar back."
St. Louis - I recommend St. Louis. Startup culture, associations and opportunities are blowing up.
People often defer to professional administrators. If a school administration asks for something, I think the default is to give it to them, after all, it's "for the kids". And if they only bring one option to the table, even if it's not the best option, it might still be better than doing nothing. So you're still down to needing competent administration, even if the public has some oversight role.
I'm still genuinely surprised Valve hasn't launched a game streaming service. Then suggest developers offer Win, Linux, Mac, AND streaming, so they can stream to every platform (like this Steam Box) they can.

"Steam Cloud Stream?"
China-based interview startup InitialView bags US admissions expert as advisor
I wonder how many people who will look back in twenty years time and regret that all their photos from this time are compressed and altered heavily with filters.

Actually, just thinking about it, the future could be worse than that. Either some people will have too many photos it will too overwhelming to look back through, or all the photos will have been stored on some failed photo sharing site and lost forever. (or stored on a cd, SD card etc).

There is a lot to be said about a box of negatives stored in an attic.. (oh no, I sound like a grumpy old man)
Awesome story. One major question about this therapy (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1103849) is what life will be like without B-cells. They're pretty important to a functioning immune system.
Why aren't there subgroups with just nzbs?
Is it? The signals in your nervous system that give you the sensation of pain are pain.

Let me make an argument by analogy.

You are saying that understanding the chip architecture and the instruction set of a computer does not allow you to understand what it is like for that chip to run a given program. Is that a fair analogy? Can you improve it?

If this is a fair analogy, then I think it is clear that you are wrong. We absolutely can understand what running a given program is like. We may need to use a different vocabulary and abstract away detail in order to efficiently communicate the idea of running the program (say, talk about a data structure rather than the individual bits that compose it), but that is true in every field. This is basic tool of reasoning.

If that is not a good analogy, please let me know how. I am not satisfied at all that I understand what you mean when you write "the actual subjective experience". I understand what those words mean but I cannot match them with an object.
And wearing a dust mask and googles of course.
Is there any gameplay footage available? I don't have an iOS device handy.
During one of the recent California budget emergencies (don't remember which one, there seem to be two or three every year), the state issued I.O.U.s to contractors and employees. Initially banks accepted I.O.U.s at the same rate as US dollars, but ever confident about California's legislative wisdom, politely declined afterwards, which led to a whole bunch of entrepreneurial activity on Craigslist "services" section, where you could sell a California I.O.U. for about 75-80 cents on the dollar.

Debt obligations can serve as a proxy for money, so California can already issue those. What they don't have the power to do is to require it to be legal tender, so in a way this inflationary currency would only be accessible to those who have no choice but to accept it (i.e. state contractors and employees).
I know the feeling, happens to the best of us. THat's why I think a special thread would work best, where we all are aware of the rules.

I thought of a catchier name, but can't come up with one.

If you have a suggestion, feel free to share.
The biggest point they missed: Star Trek never had George Lucas directly involved.
Looks to me like a ton of time was put into the design. Don't think this kind of "it sucks but I am not going to explain why" comment really adds much.
If they enter the hardware market I suspect they will make different Steam boxes and have them meet certain specifications. Like Steambox A to run a certain list of games, and Steambox B to run the latest games at full performance. With such clusters of performance they could have pre-defined scripts to tweak the performance so that even a older Steambox can run the latest titles decently (make at lower details/resolution) or drop compatibility altogether if a decent performance cannot be achieved. That would be an "organized" segementation of the PC gaming scene.

This being said I am not sure this is really going to be necessary because there has not been much of race for graphics in game recently on PC - I still have a GPU from 2 years ago and it still runs all games very well, even the latest ones. This may change with the introduction of new consoles, but I am not too sure about that yet.
It's not gibberish, you could easily google it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28computing%29

> This randomness is often collected from hardware sources, either pre-existing ones such as mouse movements or specially provided randomness generators.
> I think the problem there is that just because someone has made a name for themselves in one field does not imply that they have some sort of superhuman intellect that means they will offer useful insights on a range of subjects.

Of course there is no such implication, nor did I make this claim. But it is absolutely true that certain people are simply better at reasoning than other people. This may be because of biological traits, educational difference, difference of habit, etc., but it is certainly true. Any experience with any human will reveal this to you, I think.

> Hawking's pontificating on metaphysics are of no more interest to me than Linus Torvald's on laptop screen resolutions or Richard Dawkin's theoretical thoughts on cosmology.

I am not at all clear why you would say this. In fact, I think you are committing an argument from authority in the reverse. You refuse to listen to this guys because you assume that they are not authorities. That's just bogus and I am sure you know that. Instead, you should listen to Hawking discuss metaphysics and decide if he is worth listening to. You would, I think, do exactly that if it were philosopher speaking.
Well, looks like it is just another case of bankers, (AGAIN) making off with huge profits that rely upon taxpayer money.
If typing into the search box isn't cheating:

1. Open folder

2. `type:text` in search box

3. Click 'ignore_me.txt' file to exclude, if you can't find it start typing 'ign...' until it shows up

4. Edit > Invert Selection or Alt,E,I
But you pay that 40 dollars at once, and it's on the price tag of the SteamBox you would buy (if they go for a Windows box). So, 40 dollars on a console price is actually a lot of money, since most console hardware is sold at 300-400 dollars point.
Ahk, it's free? After reading the post, I expected the app to be a way to bring in additional income. What's the motive behind making it free?

Good story by the way, way to push yourself to accomplish things.
The hardware they will launch on is probably going to be more powerful and with support for full HSA (heterogenous computing) and with DDR4 RAM, if they are going to wait until 2014 to launch it (and assuming they are going to use AMD's delayed and probably modified Kaveri APU).
You misinterpreted the sentence. They were saying that since the drives were bought with applecare, if one of them dies, he does not need to change the drive himself. Applecare to the rescue.
Perhaps my point was too subtle. Yeah it was a cheesy play on a line from that Facebook movie, but it hid what I really wanted to say, which is:

There is no number of votes that could possibly stop Facebook from doing whatever they wanted to do anyway. It's an illusion of choice. It doesn't matter how many people vote 'nay' vs. the number that vote 'yay'. The real figure Facebook is looking at is the number of people that care enough about the issue enough to cast the vote, vs. the number of people who don't care / don't know it is an issue, which to them is _every_ other user.

Half a million out of over a billion users is a very small percentage indeed. And Facebook couldn't be happier about it.
Let's rename the thing a Plutosaurus. After the brontosauroid kicked out of the planets.
Investing in Culture is Good Business
Who says splash pages have to be vertical? YouRad.io's horizontal splash page.
In a word: duh. However, I do not for a second think that you would not listen more closely to someone like Stephen Hawking than you would a guy shouting "Praise Jesus" on a street corner. There is no fallacy involved here. If Hawking is speaking nonsense, his being Stephen Hawking is not going to save him.
"Only when one recognizes the fault as a fault
can one be without fault"
I say don't blame yourself or anybody else because it's a negative approach. Learn what you can, embrace it and move on.