skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me add my perspective as an Indian living in the SF bay area, spending about 20-25% of my time in India. The poverty of India is inescapable, it is everywhere around you. The reason I got into business, particularly business in India, ultimately is that in my mid-20's I found myself simply very depressed about this, and decided that business was the only way I could make a real difference. I was inspired by the examples of Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan and similar places, which went from miserable third world poverty to middle income prosperity within about 30 years.

About charity, in the here and now, when you are surrounded by such need that you see all around you in India (I personally know hundreds of stories), small and local acts of charity are very necessary and helpful.

At the same time, I do not believe that charity can work on any kind of large scale. First, given the vastness and diversity of India, it is impossible for any one person to know more than a small fraction of India. With that said, I firmly believe that the part of India that I am familiar with - the Southern part accounting for about 25% of Indian population - could have been a Taiwan or South Korea or Southern China, if only the Indian government had pursued a relatively sane economic policy. No I am not complaining about corruption and so on - South Korea or China did not develop because they had enlightened, corruption-free governments. Even today, Indian economic policy is miserably wrong-headed. It hurts the very poor the most, but our political class is simply oblivious to it.

One example would suffice: today, the second largest textile exporter in the world, after China, is Bangladesh. With all the political turmoil, corrupt government and so on, Bangladesh has made more progress in lifting its poorest citizens than India, and the 3 million textile industry jobs are a primary reason. Why couldn't India do it? Policy, in one word. Textile industry is the classic climb-the-ladder industry. China is just about ready to vacate the lowest rungs of the ladder, and Bangladesh is getting on it. India's poorest are still waiting.

To summarize, I believe in charity-in-the-small, in the here and now, but large scale economic development, lifting hundreds of millions of poverty in India (which accounts for most of the world's poor) needs something different.
> "...nothing will turn you off faster to learning than a client who yells or berates you for your lack of experience"

I never got berated, because I made it clear up front that I was a beginner and that I was charging a very small fee. It motivated me to make something that was worth it. I'm confident that most people have the ability to make something good enough to justify a $100 fee, it's just that they don't have a reason to try hard enough.

> "The problem with fear that I've found, is that it only pushes you to slightly outrun that fear..."

This is a great point - in fact, when I was first starting out I was often ready to be done with projects. They were stressful! But they taught me skills that I don't think I'd have learned otherwise, that I could have more casual, curiosity-driven fun with later. I doubt anyone would put themselves in a stressful situation like that unless they had some genuine curiosity. It didn't permanently scar me. It just was an accelerator, like taking off the training wheels. Stressful and scary but a necessary push forward to learn faster and stretch myself.
The principal never increases.

You're basically just renting the house from the bank. And this is common (not good, but common) in every country where interest is tax deductible, because you can multiply your 'renting' power by your top marginal tax rate.
Um... Irony alert: Mac skills are required for some jobs at Microsoft.

lol this article is fail.
Nowadays? C was never a high level language except and wasn't designed to be. Mid-level yes. As in just above asm.
I called your statement moronic, not you. I will not be apologizing for doing so. If I say something idiotic, calling it such does not entail that I am an idiot.

There may or may not be a class of problems that only induces anxiety, but your example is not a member of that class even if such a class exists. Trivially, I can address the disconnection between people in our technologically mediated society by going out and meeting people in person. If I write a lament about that disconnection, I'm not speaking out solely to induce anxiety, I'm doing so to urge people to turn of their computers, to quit starting at their iPhone, and to go out and make personal connections.

More specifically, Ms. Bracy is not, in any sense, suggesting that the problem she identifies is insoluble, or that it cannot be addressed by individuals. She says, in part:

What if, instead of imploring people to vote on Facebook’s privacy policies, we were pushing Florida lawmakers into fixing the state’s broken voting system? What if prison reform advocates could speak as loudly as the anti-SOPA activists?

More generally, her post is a plea for the participants of the Valley startup scene to look to address problems outside their own, quite limited experience. That's not anxiety-inducing, that's an exhortation. The fact that she doesn't link to a kickstarter for a specific project doesn't undercut that point. It's easy to imagine someone in the Valley casting about for a good idea to decide to say to themselves "We don't need another socially networked tastes-organizing app. What problems are worth solving in St. Louis for people who don't have smartphones?"

You have an extremely limited view of 'agency' if you think Ms. Bracy's post exists solely to make you feel badly.
Boy, am I glad my Mom didn't have a "no porn rule." I'd have been really confused about my body and people's behaviours. (I also would have been in a totally different field; turns out optimizing a 386 for fast porn teaches you everything you'll need for your career.) I might have even turned to religion.

Our society is set up in such a way that porn is one of the few "safe" ways for young people to figure their junk out. Heaven help us if they do censor the net.

He probably thought he'd get to play Angry Birds under his superman blanket. (Remember reading comics with a flashlight?) Instead he got an obligation and an emasculating letter. "Don't say anything you wouldn't say in public" probably would have sufficed. He can't even throw it under a bus for what it represents, because it isn't his. It's hers, and she's loaned it to him... :\
Users are always looking for enhancements and willing to pay for them. Allow people to bid features up, by paying.
It seems to me that is correct.

I would be more concerned about the other ways I might "get use to" this sort of augmentation. Ignoring all the optic advantages/disadvantages, what sort of information might I start using this sort of device for, and how crippled might I feel as soon as I no longer have the device on? Having my phone battery run dead while I'm out in public is bad enough, and I only look at that a couple of times an hour.
Some ask for credit cards, others it's simply a button that says "yes I'm over 18". It's not really about enforcement, it's about assigning liability.
And what are the exact problems with the current interpreter?
As it goes, Linode has an amazing DNS service bundled with their instances - replicated between all their international datacenters.

If you host with Linode I can't see why you wouldn't use it, unless you are just futzing/curious to roll your own.
Oddly enough, or not, 13 is also around the time where kids start puberty. It's not just a physical change, but also a time where kids are most impressionable. The "kids toys" get put away and they stop behaving like a child, because they are old enough to understand certain things. In short, they are becoming little adults.
That's only because D&B have to look like their existence is necessary. So they just trawl for new entries at companies house and auto-generate the entry in their DB.

They're not the only ones though.
Awesome! I'm glad you got something out of it. If you ever want to chat about strategies email me! nbashaw [at] gmail
This is a must. For example, I used lisp for a computer competition and never since. I feel that there are more people who know lisp than programs that use lisp.
Completely agreed. Things like don't text anything that you wouldn't want the other person's parent to know about seem ridiculous. Again as another person in his twenties, I would have refused this silly deal and bought my own damn cellphone.
The fact that government makes an investment on favorable terms does not change the underlying nature of the investment. The point is to challenge the self aggrandizing west coast narrative of rugged individualists setting out and building civilization from the desert. In reality, the west coast was an investment of the taxpayers of the east coast. Without that investment, California would be Mexico, or perhaps a private colony--a wholly owned subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase.
The question is why did you get one sale? Is it possible to scale that? Maybe you need to market to the people who think like that first customer. Did you change something after the first sale?
Of course, since he's a minor, he couldn't sign a legal contract anyway. He'd have to have a guardian sign the contract for him (dad, maybe?).

Anyway, dictionary.com says "an agreement between two or more parties for the doing or not doing of something specified."
Even Google doesn't let execs (up to a certain level) fly C class (but you can, sometimes, if you're smart about bookings).

Pretty sure they've done the analysis. :)
Can you explain what you mean? I hardly think C is a benchmark for irrelevance.
From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

A more better title for this submission would be "Why Smart Glasses Might Not Make You Smarter: A Q&A with Steve Mann"

---

The article references Google Glass by Mann's concern that a device which fully replaces the user's vision can cause confusion if the camera is offset from the user's eye. Google Glass doesn't replace the user's view of the world, so I doubt it would exhibit the negative behaviors he discusses.
I think the mom knows this isn't how most kids use their cell phones. It's like giving the kid half a cell phone, letting him get used to its power and temptations gradually instead of throwing him into the deep end. As she puts it, he's borrowing her cell phone.
First of all that’s a lovely ad hominem based on absolutely zero knowledge of the projects I have worked on. I have led teams for Pay-TV deployments on satellite and OTA with budgets orders of magnitude larger than any live streaming package and deployed hundreds of television channels. Of course you make the same claim again which I’ve had time after time from engineers like Microsoft, Google etc who think web is the be-all and end-all. I use the following technical arguments each time to bring these guys back to earth.

First of all you totally ignore the point I made about high bandwidth usage affecting the viewing experience. Do you really want to sit there on Patch Tuesday waiting for the video on your TV to buffer because your PC in the other room is downloading updates? At best you’ll see huge quality fluctuations as the adaptive streaming tries to react. At worst you’ll miss the goal waiting for the stream to buffer. A managed network gives you a similar broadcast experience to licensed RF spectrum.

All the web services offering “HD” are based around a simple concept – you can get acceptable quality at web bitrates when you’re delivering p24 content with buffer times of around 5-10 seconds (the usual chunk length in an adaptive streaming system), which gives you a huge VBV to work with and a huge keyframe interval. Contrast this with broadcast and its ~0.5-2 second channel change times. Good luck convincing users to wait 5-10 seconds to change the channel (channel-surfing is part of a television experience). The fact is to deliver p50/60 content for sports you need significantly higher bitrates than web bitrates – with current bitrates you’re just watching blocks all day because of the necessary smaller keyframe intervals and VBV. It is nowhere near to a sports offering that people are paying the equivalent of a cable subscription for - even more so on a larger screen. That doesn’t even take into consideration the poor quality of web encoders.

Overall latency is nowhere near television-like. Web streams are 30s to 1 minute delayed compared to television streams thanks to CDN buffering and adaptive streaming chunks. Different viewers in a household end up getting streams that are hugely out of phase (demonstrated during the Olympics where a race on one stream hadn’t even started when it had finished on another). Your neighbours have already finished celebrating the goal by the time you see it.
The technology to deliver web streams to relatively small numbers of users has been around but once you get to large numbers the capacity is not there – it’s one reason adaptive streaming is useful; once your ISP runs out of capacity you can be adaptively streamed to a low bitrate but still get a picture. In my city (Bristol, UK) on cable, YouTube interconnects are congested and only 240p works as result.

It’s no surprise live streaming OTT is provided as an add-on to Pay-TV – operators know it isn’t good enough yet to charge for as a standalone package. Some operators are going to use streaming to deliver their channels because of problems with multicast but they’ll be able to use DiffServ to maintain a decent experience.
Very true, also probably less stressful. When I was a student I couldn't really afford it though. The nice thing about doing freelance is you make money! haha
Instagram. An app for doing what we were all doing already anyway, but now with a lot of faux-effect filters. Sold for a billion dollars. All that time, energy, and money that did not one thing to help anyone else or measurably improve the world.
I agree 100% with the stupidity of the memory statement. And I think the rest is actually worse than you say: the mother doesn't appear to be talking about publishing the photos or videos anywhere, just taking them, and this should be perfectly fine.
>> Again as another person in his twenties, I would have refused this silly deal and bought my own damn cellphone.

Oh. That is such a pointless and drastic reaction. Would ruin Christmas. Just roll your eyes and accept idiotic rules. Idiotic rules tend to dissipate pretty quick with time anyway.
A few choice items from the contract, and how I would've read them as a 13 year old.

"1. It is my phone. I bought it. I pay for it. I am loaning it to you. Aren’t I the greatest?"

This phone is not yours. Don't use it for anything important and praise me for allowing you to even look at it.

"2. I will always know the password."

I don't trust you.

"4. Hand the phone to one of your parents promptly at 7:30pm every school night & every weekend night at 9:00pm. It will be shut off for the night and turned on again at 7:30am. If you would not make a call to someone’s land line, wherein their parents may answer first, then do not call or text. Listen to those instincts and respect other families like we would like to be respected."

I don't trust your friends or your opinions.

"5. It does not go to school with you. Have a conversation with the people you text in person. It’s a life skill. *Half days, field trips and after school activities will require special consideration."

Once again, I own you.

"18. You will mess up. I will take away your phone. We will sit down and talk about it. We will start over again. You & I, we are always learning. I am on your team. We are in this together."

You are the only one that can mess up, I am untouchably perfect and this contract is perfect.

---------------------------

This contract makes it seem like the kid is a worthless, non-thinking drone and it glorifies the parents as gods.

#3 taken with #11 creates a situation in which the kid has to decide when to turn the phone off, but at the same time answer every phone call.

#15 states that the kid's peers' music preferences suck.

#1 directly contradicts #6 in regards to who pays for the phone.

This is insane. I hope someone can show me that this is not as I think it is.
The operative word for the MVP is "viable". What was viable for Apple with the iPhone was a beautiful touch-UI, amazing hardware, and some native apps built by Apple. It wasn't native apps from 3rd parties (not available until 2008), the fastest processor possible, or the optimal screen size or resolution. They iterated those things.

Minimal and viable mean different things for different projects, but defining and adhering to those are important for everyone.
No, he's articulating the Unix philosophy: tools should do one thing (knives are for cutting), and their user should be able to use that one thing for many different purposes, in conjunction with other tools.
porn is one of the few "safe" ways for young people to figure their junk out.

I'm not exactly an expert at either porn or in-the-flesh sex but... I've always been given to understand that they are quite different.
1. Find a project you like 2. Spend a weeks looking at the code

The daunting part is the time commitment.
A history of anonymity
No, it doesn't. Especially for schools - it's a pointless waste of money and sneaky tactic by MS to hook students on their products early on. Schools should ditch MS and adopt open source solutions for the sake of the future generations.
Page reads vastly better without the background images (and then with anchor color set to something other than white).

1997 called, it wants its page designer back.
Especially since HTML,CSS and JS is actually a way to not learn to code. (Or rather a dangerous way to learn coding.)

To expand a bit, the most fun part of coding is clever tricks based on understanding a system. But with building a website, you get nice results by just treating coding as a complicated way to do photoshop, and settle for this.
FYI it also appears that the submitter is the author (Elise Ackerman). Not that there is anything wrong with that in itself, but this feels more like someone using a sensational title to generate clicks.

While we're at it, it also looks like Steve Mann's wikipedia page is written almost entirely by Steve Mann.
Tell HN: Happy new year!
Let's make 2013 a great year with lots of succesful startups, innovative technologies, and of course, hacks!

My best wishes to everyone :)
As someone who is in twenties and may have family in near future, I worry that it'll be hard to deal with teens in this new 'tech' era.

But then I realized; most of people in my generation were teens in late nineties when Internet was exploding. Our parents didn't know how to use that thing in majority of cases. But we turned out fine. There was unfettered access to porn. Then things like FB/Twitter came where we were putting ourselves (and lot of intimate details) on digital shelves that would never be cleared. Yet, we all turned okay. Agreed, there were occasional mishaps with someone we know. But given the reach of Internet, we all turned quite well. I believe all of us had strong moralistic values that were imbued in us right from childhood. And those values turned out okay for Internet age too.

As someone who doesn't have kid, it will be stupid to pass judgement/opinion on her letter. May be I will be doing same thing since I will be older and worried about safety as well as well being of my child. However, when I was a kid, I remember whenever parents told us strict no for something, I itched to do it (unless it was something extreme). Just out of curiosity. And so did all my friends at that time.
A 13-year-old is not an adult. The fact that the mom is giving her 13-year-old a $600 piece of hardware at all obviously means that she trusts him with some degree of responsibility. An internet-connected pocket computer is a very powerful device, and it'd be ridiculously irresponsible of her to not set out some kind of guidelines that helps to ensure that he uses it responsibly and "inside the rules".

It's called parenting. A 13-year-old is not an adult, and does not have the maturity of an adult. Even if her rules aren't something that you or I would personally agree with, good on her for entrusting him with a large responsibility and setting out the guidelines for that responsibility. It is her duty as a parent to do exactly this - to trust her children with progressively more responsibility and freedom, but to also set hard-and-fast boundaries that shall not be crossed.

I like to say "I was such a good parent before I had kids". Parenting is all nice and neat and easy until you actually have to do it. It's really easy to armchair quarterback this one, but I'm pretty certain that anyone without kids is wholly unqualified to pass judgment on this one.
I have been doing raid data recovery for many years. A very common scenario is "Two Drives Failed at Once". This is usually not the case. What usually happens is 1 drive fails. The raid then goes into degraded mode and continues to function. Nobody notices the warnings. Some time later... months or years even, a second drive fails, the raid goes down - now they notice. They call in the techs who declare 'two drives failed'. This is when your data is most at risk. People start swapping boards and drives, repower the system, rebuild drives, rebuild parity, force stale drives online etc. I have seen alot of raids that would have been recoverable had they done the proper steps. Then they hand it over and say they found it this way... didn't touch a thing...
www.alandata.com
Putting 2012 To Bed
Give it some time. One not so good morning ages ago I was underway to an employer sponsored course in 'effective cobol' (whatever effective cobol is still eludes me to today, so I guess the course wasn't all that effective). A car cut me off on a green light for me straight ahead by turning right into my path going as fast as I could to try to catch my train in time (cycle to my dads house across the city, drop off the bike there, take the subway to the train station and then the train to Utrecht, miss the connection and be a half hour late). I braked, much too hard on the front trying to avoid becoming hamburger, the rear of the bike left the pavement and because of my clips was attached pretty good to the rest of me. I smacked to the pavement with the bike landing on top of me. I didn't really realize how badly I was hurt until the receptionist in the place where I was going came close to fainting when I walked in, my whole face covered in blood and scratches from the impact everywhere where skin was exposed. If not for the dumb toeclips I'd have been much more in control of the fall and it likely would not have ended as bad as it did. Since then no more toeclips for me.

I hope your emergency will continue to be in your future, unfortunately mine caught up with me. After I stopped using toeclips I went as fast as before, even did emergency stops a couple of times, including another front wheel flip (and with those new disc brakes that's even easier now than before) but nothing ever came close to the time when I was strapped to the bike.

The one good thing about the bike falling on me was that I was pretty poor at the time and the bike didn't have any damage ;)
That filter only applies to the network (E/3G/4G) not wifi. With ISP's those filters are still opt-in.
The difference being that startups are populated by mature and self-responsible adults, not 13-year-olds in the middle of getting their asses kicked by puberty.
If users are submitting pull-requests and you're just too busy to manage the process for free, that's one thing. Good luck charging for that.

But if you have a backlog of enhancements that a bunch of people want but can't/aren't coding themselves, maybe you could run a little campaign to raise $this_much money by $this_deadline in order to deliver $these_features