skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that someone on a site like hacker news (which I like consider are on the more intelligent side) would make a comparison like this, deeply disturbs me. We clearly have fundamentally different world views. (edit: I don't want this to sound like davidirch shouldn't have that opinion, just that it's easy to assume people will share your opinion)

I don't understand how you can be against what seems to be a completely reasonable proposition to me, that everyone should get a fair chance, regardless of where they start from.

I don't see any of this as making it harder for rich children to get a good education, except to remove situations where they currently have an (in my opinion) unfair advantage, like expensive tutoring aimed towards helping them pass exams, which is not available to many.

In fact, the precise aim here is to help bright students get good grades, and dumb ones get bad grades, which is the exact opposite of the comparison you seem to be making!
People don't seem to realize how huge this is. This venture could easily turn out to be the most profitable in IBM's history, and one of the most important inventions in health care.
"Empirical reasoning does not operate in absolutes."

Precisely, and so 'rule out' shouldn't be taken to imply an absolute ruling out of things. =)

Perhaps I should've said effectively ruled out. Life on the Moon has been 'effectively' ruled out (lack of liquid water, no atmosphere, full exposure to radiation and impactors, etc.) - but many years ago it wasn't extremely unreasonable to suppose that life might exist there. Now we know better - we'd have to reach for very convoluted scenarios to argue for the existence of life on the Moon. The same is not true for Mars (although it's not a picnic, obviously), which I would say is remarkable - there aren't many celestial bodies that have passed that test.
I think the part where your stylist first tries to talk you out of the (in their opinion) bad idea is the important part.

I've built plenty of things for clients that I thought were of dubious value, but I always tell them my concerns and push them to iterate through the project to avoid getting in too deep.

Sometimes, I've been wrong about the value.

And sometimes, as the post suggests, I've said no.

I don't think either is a wrong, as long as you are honest from the get go.
In many cases, Paypal is complying with the law, not the other way around. Paypal spends a lot of time/money on risk management. If they see a lot of money being funneled into the US, they are required to report and/or take action. It's as simple as that.

My business account just got similarly flagged and we provided all necessary documentation that proves we are a real business. They removed the flag in 24 hours.
How to ride the viral wave to your advantage.
I have a couple, maybe...

Are you on IRC (/msg sente if so) - would you be up for chatting?

Not trying to be secretive here, but feel 10 mins of chatting would be far more effective than posting a write up.
I agree - this seems like a turning point in health care. granted, in five years most people will still get their medical advice from a person - but I wonder for how much longer after that.
Jessica Willis
Why I have the eerie feeling that this sort of thing might be very dangerous?

I mean, what happen if too much people start to rely only on this, and then it is used to mislead (WWII battle of beams style) or what happen if people start to become dependant on it, and you have a power failure?

For example a massive solar storm might happen in our lifetime, the last time it happened (about 150 years ago) it made telegraph lines catch on fire, and people could read newspaper at night using the aurora in the middle of the caribbean. If that happen again, it is very likely that we will have some time of global power and communication loss. Of course, that will mean some chaos. How hospitals that rely too much on technology will treat take care of the emergency?
I'd add Dan Ingalls (Smalltalk) and Mitch Bradley (Openfirmware) to your excellent list.
When I first read the title I thought this would be an article about governments impeding meritocracy not a screed against it. I guess we are running out of problems if meritocracy is one. Lots of immigrants come here work hard and are very successful. Virtually anyone willing to work hard will succeed but people have different priorities. As for always comparing the US to Nordic countries, if you compare them to Massachusetts they look bad, if you compare them to California they look insignificant and then of course there is the rest of the country.
Your account could be at risk of state-sponsored attacks
A British psychologist called Richard Wiseman spent a year conducting a "scientific search for the world’s funniest joke". Here is his conclusion:

"Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, “My friend is dead! What can I do?”. The operator says “Calm down. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says “OK, now what?”

However! In the context of Hacker News, where the goal seems to be knowledge transfer, (b) is important as the joke should be a way to frame the knowledge transfer process.
Do you also think someone should take the money away from the rich child and give it to the paycheck-baby welfare mom's dad's-run-away child?

I have noticed lots of robin hoods in the world today. Maybe a true communistic and socialistic society would work if we just gave it a proper chance? If everyone just shared one bank account, all suffering would end?
Processes in uninterruptible sleep and what can we find about them
Their main complaint about games is that they don't allow sleep mode. Brilliant.
This article isn't really about railing against meritocracy so much as it is about promoting equality of opportunity. I ended up agreeing with much of it, but based on the title I sure didn't expect to.
Egyptian Court Orders YouTube Ban for refusing to remove insulting video
SpaceX Reddit AMA
I'm not sure what you're point here is.

Yes, getting an SSN is easy (just find an on-campus job), but cashing out the $200k could lead to the OP being deported for earning an income without proper work authorization.

If you get an SSN, you are still only allowed to receive an income from authorized jobs/sources. On-campus jobs are one of them. But a self-run online business, does not count as one -- unless you get it authorized via OPT (or some other means.)

> Generally, that's impossible

It is indeed possible to work for your own company while on F-1 OPT status. I've explained it in detail on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5191832 (which I referred to in the grandparent comment).

I should add, "incorporate a sole-proprietorship" is a non sequitur. The term "incorporate" by definition describes the act of forming a corporation. A sole-proprietorship is when you operate a business on your own name, and not under a company's name. It does not give you the "liability shield" that a corporation or LLC provides, and is generally a bad idea for most businesses.
Preach on. I'm baffled by how techies can be so underwhelmed by what IBM is doing.
The world’s most and least ‘forward-looking’ countries, based on Google searches
> news like this would have a huge impact on their faith.

Not necessarily. Non-believers often underestimate the intellectual sophistication that one can find in religious traditions.

For instance, Augustine in the 4th century was already saying things like this:

"With the scriptures it is a matter of treating about the faith. For that reason, as I have noted repeatedly, if anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical universe] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures."

And C.S. Lewis (best known as a Christian apologist) wrote some interesting religious science fiction novels with extraterrestrial angels. (The Space Trilogy.)
A T-Shirt For Everyone Giving A Talk On Entrepreneurship
I totally disagree with this. You cannot judge the potential success of a clients idea. As stupid as it may sound. As big or small it may be. You don't know if it will succeed. Your job is to build it for them, not to judge the idea. It is their job to try and make the idea work for them. I have personally built things that sounded very stupid to begin with, and then went on to make lots of money to my client. Had I been so arrogant, I would have been the wall that kept my client from changing his/her life for the better.

One of the downsides of the tech bubble is that some programmers get a sense of entitlement because they are such a precious and valuable genius. Not really. Programmers are not more special than other professionals (or even more special than the people who pick up my trash). Don't believe the hype. You might one day find yourself working at Burger King after the bubble bursts.
The Windows Phone Store is down worldwide
To be fair, a country's constitution must also be interpreted. That's why things like Supreme Court rulings are so important. The SC gets to decide, "What this amendment means is..."
cool !!
Woolor
(http://www.woolor.com)
I'm a developer, not a business analyst. My perspective on the veracity of an idea is pretty irrelevant and in most cases ignorant.
Security firm Bit9 hacked, Stolen Digital Certs Used To Sign Malware
Google "Just World Fallacy"
Blindly trusting your doctor is dangerous, yet most people do.
Sixty years is not a long time, and there's no reason to believe that this trend will continue forever.
Isn't this essentially the same scheme the article author has used?

A password for the encrypted outer volume can be given out if forced without revealing the existence or password to decrypt smaller volumes.
some well known companies are using it
http://emberjs.com/ember-users/
The author should clarify whether he's acting in the role of a consultant to his client or a contractor for them. The questions he's raising definitely signal "consultant" but his price signals "contractor". The expertise he thinks he's being hired for is "make my project successful" (consultant) but is probably "build this thing for me" (contractor).

Consultant's generally have to spend a lot of time persuading their customers to follow their advice, and charge high rates to make sure that they do. Contractors focus more on efficient delivery of their work, and let the customer sort out what to do with it.

Note that I'm using the titles consultant and contractor in their extremes. Most people who have one of these titles actually do both jobs during the course of a customer engagement. It helps to be aware of which one you're doing when you're doing it, though.
I guess so. Though do the same journals stay at the tops of their fields for that long?
"For instance, standardised tests were supposed to favour the brainy, but the $4.5 billion test-prep industry, which disproportionately caters to the rich, indicates that this is being gamed. Intelligence tests should be more widely used."

As if intelligence tests weren't gameable and didn't favor the prepared. What's worse is that they test a very narrow definition of intelligence. That cure would be worse than the disease.
They might not be out to destroy or punish us. They might take no more interest in us than we took in thousands of species that have been destroyed to make way for farms and shopping malls. Maybe our planet would make a good Vogon parking lot.
Writing a Gnome app? Do it in JavaScript, say developers
Kind of like when the space shuttle re-enters the atmosphere, isn't a significant portion of the slow-down caused by the pressure of the water being displaced ahead of the boat? So even with no friction, you'd still be pushed around by this giant mass of water. I'd be curious to see what the contributions of the drag on the bottom and sides of the hull versus the water ahead of the bow are. Links, anyone?
None of the proposals were about that. They propose relying more on intelligence tests instead of the current SAT that can be gamed with money. Also, having varying college fees based on whether you are rich or poor also makes sense.
Meritocracy is not a problem with government, it is the solution. This badmouthing of Meritocracy is a way for the ones who are in power but don't deserve to be there as a way of maintaining that power.

On the other hand, if you make it too easy for a young person to climb the ladder (working like a dog), than what's the point of getting to the top? There are no benefits to being there except you will be living a life with more hours at the office than ever before. The reason people work to climb the latter is because there is a reward where you can work less and tell others what to do, and they can't dethrone you.

Remove that reward, and you may find a population regarding climbing the career latter as foolishness. Why would you want to take on a second job, for no extra pay, where the workload increases exponentially with the new upstarts out of college, and the right to take it easy is gone. Like a second job at McDonalds, the moment you take it easy, you are replaced. Why strive to get that?
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy already parodies Maths:

http://hhgproject.org/entries/bistromathics.html

Clearly, Douglas Adams spent a lot of time in Bistros, as the second review on this site echoes his sentiments about the odd behaviour of waiters and nonabsolute numbers such as time of arrival:

http://www.yelp.co.uk/biz/giannis-italian-bistro-san-ramon
Any alien lifeform that can reproduce would be subject to Darwinian natural selection. It would tend to grow exponentially, if the resources were available, and if you do the math, the universe ain't big enough for more than one exponentially reproducing species.
I can imagine, how this will look like, so I illustrated it for your convenience. :)

http://img542.imageshack.us/img542/3633/watsondiagnosissm.pn...
But git is distributed so this shouldn't be a problem right?
Exactly. If you've politely let the client know you're not convinced by the business model, the client still wants the work done, and you need the work, why refuse?
Suddenly I remember the zero-friction toilet bowls in Jerry Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye...
Brings the Efficiency and Simplicity of Windows 7 to Windows 8 PCs
> Do you have the same "continous work requirement" as normal employment under post-completion OPT?

If by that you're referring to the rule that mandates you maintain minimal periods of unemployment; Yes.

Since you're running your own company, as long as you don't fire yourself you should fulfill this requirement.

The F-1 OPT status allows for upto 60 days of unemployment though. This means that means if you were to work a regular job, you still do have a little gaps of time in between switching jobs to search for a new job.
The following are mutually exclusive:

a) All children have equal opportunity.

b) Parents are able to spend money on their children.

I've spoken with many people who are in favor of both a) and b) and don't see the cognitive dissonance, but from this:

> like expensive tutoring aimed towards helping them pass exams, which is not available to many.

I guess you really favor a) over b). Unless your point was that exams should be selected to minimize the influence of last minute cram efforts which disproportionally benefit those with expensive tutors, in which case I might agree with you.
Yes, except for vaccines that target virus(es) that are part of a group in which there may be only a 15-59% chance that it will protect outside of the laboratory. Per the Lancet and per the CDC, this is the case with seasonal flu vaccines. And, you have a small percentage actually die or have ongoing health problems because of problems with the vaccine.

References:

"The Lancet medical journal, the study found the seasonal flu jab, available free to seniors, is only 59 per cent effective...": http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/seasonal...

"Influenza vaccine would be estimated to be only 15% effective": http://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/vaccination/effectivene...

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/protect/keyfacts.htm#side-effects
How  to Keep the Right Customers for Your Startup
Facebook to Tell Users They Are Being Tracked
New way to checking and buy battery for laptop
New way to checking and buy battery for laptop
what you think
Snowcraft revived in the Appstore
This, yet again, reinforces my view that funding schools through property taxes is a perverse and ultimately damaging idea. I understand the ideals behind it (schools are funded locally, playing into the strange american fixation with avoiding distributing tax revenues). Affirmative action is mentioned as outdated, but perhaps it is a sign that american society still feels guilty over the fact that not sixty years ago large swathes were still arguing against the integration of schools.

(As an aside, isn't there a thing where the titles of links are changed when they don't match the content that everyone keeps complaining about? Wouldn't this be a prime example of a link whose title should be changed to match the article within?)
Run Your Family Like a Business
An "entrenched meritocracy" is a contradiction. It's not a true meritocracy. Instead, it's an aristocracy claiming to be one, which is a bit tautological, since every such class claims it deserves its privileged position. People in other times and places believed they deserved their privileges just as sincerely as you do right now. Of course, the situation is different because we're smarter than they are ;)
This is the single most impressive use of artificial intelligence today. Let's hope we can improve successfully improve the lives of everyone with this technology.
Nexus 7 as a tool in the system administrators toolbox
Elevate your apps in Google Drive
To offer a top plan is good choice. But why not offer every plan as trial?
Permalinks for Google Drive Images
Merit == effort? I don't think so.
You would need to read your country's law books, which may differ depending n whether you are from South Africa, Japan, Romania or anywhere else where you can use Paypal.
The ABC’s of Android game development: Load and display sprites
get a lawyer, get an accountant, get incorporated.
It's certainly not difficult to apply directly to the big tech players - you can find these pretty easily with '<company name> uk careers' Google searches:

http://www.google.co.uk/about/jobs/locations/london/
https://www.facebook.com/careers/locations/london
https://jobs.apple.com/uk/search?jobFunction=SFWEG#&t=0&...
http://careers.microsoft.com/careers/en/gb/home.aspx
http://www.ibm.com/employment/uk/

I don't really have any experience applying to mid-range companies, but intuitively it doesn't feel right that anyone should feel the need to conceal their identity when searching for a developer role, especially if your friend is experienced enough to be optimising salary rather than worrying about getting a job at all. Are you sure there hasn't been a misunderstanding?
Well...

I don't.

And then other people get mad at me for that, I am kinda tired that every time I argue with a doctor (or that people find out that I did that), there are a argument about how I am not a student of medicine or a doctor and should not argue with them.

So there is kind a social pressure toward that.

But I still don't trust them anyway (because I have my symptoms, there are good research on the subject, and every time a doctor did what I nagged him to do, it worked, but they are too conservative to believe in the research until whatever council they obey tell them to do so, and some even that way still refuse to change)
Using a Java Framework with F#: The Stanford Parser for NLP
The author might respond "They are less gameable than the 'standardised' tests, and the 'standardised' tests are even narrower than the intelligence tests".
> Tech guys rarely click ads on searches.

I'm going by my own results with AdWords, not by faulty intuition.

> While on phone call (inbound!) I experienced that it's hard to explain to users how to find my web site on Google. User enters the term, but then first 3 results are competitors' ads...

You might try putting "official" somewhere in the meta description to see if that helps with the confusion. Your site seems to be what people are looking for, so a simple change like that will tell people "this is the one you're looking for."

edit: It doesn't look like you have any meta description. It's not usually needed, but I think it might be essential in this case.
B2 visa holder: Can I work on my future Europe-based startup in the US?
Hey,

I am planning to move to the US for about 5 months to build a prototype for a startup I want to launch in my European country. The reason I am moving to the US is to join my co-founder, since he has better housing and internet and lives in a nice area where we can hibernate for sometime while we build our business.

I am a holder of a B2 visa, and I just want to get some quick feedback on this from the HN community. I won't be making any money in the US (Actually I will be spending my savings). Any other things to look out for? Is this anywhere illegal?
Apple's Java sabotage is bad IT business
Of course they do. What exactly is the point of this? The organization is against piracy (as are many many private individuals), but as they say an organization is made of people...

Is the point to prove hypocrisy? As if we needed any further proof that people and governments are hypocritical. It doesn't change anything and it doesn't make downloading content any more legal or morally right. Seems like a waste of time and attention.

Breaking news, some FBI employees also speed on the highway.
I suppose very few doctors have way less than 90% accuracy and, on top of that, Watson is not sensitive to external factors. This is a fantastic tool and may end up changing the way we interface with the health care system.
Groklaw report on Federal Circuit hearing in CLS Bank v. Alice case
One can already search for porn explicitly in google. I don't see how it's that big a deal that some meaningless queries return noise, it's not like anyone is likely to be making those queries on purpose.
I hope they're downloading "Home and Away" with a view to prosecuting the makers! (It's an absolutely dire Australian soap opera).

But more seriously, an Aussie expat (can they work for the FBI?) is probably missing the show and, as in so many similar circumstances, has no legal method for paying to watch so ends up torrenting.

(also, water is wet? who knew?)
Well, alien illness probably won't kill us. Without a common ancestry, it's highly unlikely that anything that uses an alien as a host can live in our bodies.
> Having to put a propane heater into a shiny, high-tech electric car would be a marketing disaster: it would emphasize that battery capacity was something that drivers have to worry about under normal driving conditions.

Battery capacity is, though, just like it is something you think about when driving a petro fuel car. Drive a diesel? You need to think about gelling fuel in Vermont in January. For a supposedly well educated technological society, an awful lot of us seem to engage in magical thinking.
Watch the Pirate Bay Documentary Online Now
¿Qué Demonios Regalar el 14 de Febrero a una Mujer? | Seducción 16
We are some slow species when it comes to evolution it seems.
That is not a bug, that's a feature!
I'm a UK based Web developer, and about three years ago I was looking for a job in the London area. While some of the recruiters I spoke to were a little bit pushy, they were nothing like the experience your friend previously had. So I think the fake cv thing is probably unnecessary.
The surprising thing is that they were doing this at work. Really, FBI?