skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will be shutting down my health website. This decision was made last night.

It never became anything profitable. It mires me in controversy. It makes me a target of personal attacks. I am pretty thick skinned and I understand the reasons why people are skeptical of my story, but it simply isn't possible to develop the site in a feedback vacuum. The personal attacks I get in no way help me figure out what I need to talk about or how I need to talk about it. But they make it abundantly clear that it is potentially dangerous to tell my story. I did not spend twelve years getting myself well just to inspire some stressed out mom to shoot me because her child isn't getting well.

I will be focusing on lighter topics with more hope of being monetized. Hopefully I can figure out how to shut up about my medical situation. Shutting up isn't one of my strengths but I remain deeply in debt and struggle to get enough to eat every month. I need to figure out how to make money. Trying to make the world a better place has never gotten me anything but pissed on and very few people care at all that getting myself well has cost me so much. I cannot get anyone to understand that this is far cheaper and more effective than conventional treatments, the problem is a) it all came out of my pocket rather than being covered by insurance and b) the single biggest thing I still need is an online income so I do not have to go back to a regular job. A regular job winds up keeping me so sick that it is a net negative income. I have been better off jobless and homeless but my creditors are becoming a bigger and bigger problem.

Anyway, I am sure you don't actually care and didn't really want to know. Fwiw: cystic fibrosis currently costs the U.S. about $3 billion (with a B) annually for medical care for a mere 30,000 people. Much of that no doubt comes at taxpayer expense. My debts after getting both me and my son with cf well are a few $10k. One time expense. My condition is now managed with diet and lifestyle. Neither of us takes any medication. But I am a former homemaker. I cannot determine a means to monetize educating people about diet and lifestyle changes which cost a fraction of their current medical bills. And I currently need to focus on making money and leave the creation of medical miracles to someone else, someone with a spiffier title than "former homemaker" I imagine.

Thank you for the excuse to write something which will hopefully be cathartic and help me to move on and focus on making money.
I think we need a "not a microsoft employee" captcha. Uh, how about, "Bing sucks"?
There is a way to enable iterative calculations (which allows you to use cycles) (in the formula options) but note that it is disabled by default.
The Purse Factor Ultimately Won
Gearing up for PyCon US 2013
Right. I'm as great an example as any (and so egoless, to boot!). I grew up in bumfuck nowhere, suburban Maryland. Our "town's" (if you can even call it that) main draw was… a shopping mall. We had an IKEA! OMG! I never went to any fancy or esteemed college and, heck, I dropped out of high school.

And part of the reason I had the guts to do that was because I knew people then who went on to be people like Jason Snell, editor of MacUser. I knew him when he was a Mac repair guy. I knew Landon Fuller, who's pretty big in the OSS world, and he was my age and dropped out of HS and did great. I knew the executive (technical) assistant to the CEO of Cisco at the time (another HS dropout) and… lots of other people. How? IRC. A platform open to all. Then later, I wrote a Mac web site, and met all the Mac writer/publisher types. I wrote about wanting to grow up to be the female David Pogue and David Pogue commented on my blog post.

And on and on, and here I am today. I did the exact same thing in each "world" I moved through -- design (YayHooray, et al), code (PHP, then Ruby, then JS) -- meeting people in the community online, taking an interest in them, being around them, and writing and sharing what I learned. That's how I made most of my friends and met my husband. That's how I got jobs and speaking gigs.

Et voila.

Didn't matter that I started in my mom's basement in Zerosville and literally was the most computer-savvy and entrepreneurial kid in a 5 mile radius.
Kind of a moot point when most people are smoking hybrids.

And it's all besides the point anyway. Giving somebody who rarely smokes, or never has smoked, a bowl of hardcore sativa is a really, really stupid idea unless you want to babysit them all night.

It's also weird to pretend that one class of herbal is radically different from another. There are differences, but they get exaggerated.
Data visualization experts: is R a good language to learn for doing visualizations or would something like Processing or javascript and D3 be a better choice?

The article makes it clear that you can do nice visualizations in R, but not if it's the best option for someone getting started.
All you're really demonstrating by that thought experiment is that when there's a huge knowledge gap, the more knowledgeable person is well-positioned to get away with spewing a whole mess of BS.

That is obviously true. But it's also obviously nowhere close to being an appropriate (or even smart) way to conduct one's business relationships.
d2vid just emailed me about his little google rant. d2vid is in the SF startup scene and has been helping my team at Rally.org and a few other start-ups with product and dev work. Definitely, not MSFT astro-turfing :)
>Latin is Latin is Latin. It's been the lingua franca (sic -- hey, three latin words already!) of European culture for almost 2000 years, hence transmitting and influencing each and every field of human knowledge.

The lingua franca of the Roman empire was actually Greek.
Ask HN: Ok to use HN for our blog comments?
Comment threads on Wordpress blogs across the internet are often low-quality, whereas people seem to be well behaved and insightful on HN. Is it okay to simply have a "Discuss this post on [Hacker News]" on every blog post?

Is there a posting rate above which this would be unacceptable? I don't want to flood the "new" section.
This is exactly what happened - UPS said "We strongly suggest that you contact your shipper to initiate a package investigation. Shippers are encouraged to report lost packages because receivers may not have all the shipment information needed to perform a thorough investigation."

I conveyed that information to Google, and Google strung me along giving me the impression that they were doing something about it, albeit slowly.
Startups fail for a variety of reasons, PG listed some mistakes that Startups make in 2006[1] which is still actually a good read/relevant today (I disagree with the Single Founder point though).

However, there are problems which you generally see when a startup fails:

1. Poor Management Team
- Can't effectively execute, have a poor strategy and a poor management team 'breeds' a poor team (A players hire A players etc). A good management team will avoid the other issues below:

2. Market Problem - No Market or a Market not large enough. (May have been too soon etc)

3. Product Problems - Creating a poor product, so noone uses it.

4. Business Model Problem - Acquiring a Customer costs more than Long-term Value

5. Poor Execution

6. Building A Company around Technology not the Solution - This goes back to point 2 but your users don't care about your stack. Seriously you users do not care about your stack they care if you have a solution to their problem. If you do then you have a potential company but if you focus on building it around technology instead of giving them the solution, you're going to run into a lot of problems.

7. Lack Of Focus
- Not saying 'NO' enough

8. Running Out Of Money
- Most people raise to get to the next round of funding. That is wrong! If you are raising money etc then you should raise enough money to achieve a set number of milestones which attracts another round of investment from existing/new investors.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
Oh my bad...sadly all this seems very "typical" of Google support ... something didn't go right? Visit a forum.

Ok ... 2nd idea ... charge-back the order on your credit card with the already. Claim fraud whatever...at least you'll have your money.
Not insensitive at all. Fostering is just the first step, and can be followed by a formal adoption. Our three adoptions were foster for ~2 years as the case made its way through the courts (we got all the kids at <1mo old).

Depending on the situation, kids can go back with their biological parents. The social worker should be pretty up front about the prospects of that, though. Of the 5 kids we've fostered, 2 went back to their parents and we were well aware of that before we took them (they were 3 and 6 years old). Usually when infants are removed from a home, there's not much chance of them returning.
That's part of the very cool M:Lab project, other apps running M:Lab http://measurementlab.net/measurement-lab-tools
This is an interesting story, and one which we may see more of in the future. Here is a company which is dependent on open source for a large part of the 'base' engineering load, and they have created an 'attractive nuisance'[1] with it which, true to form, attracted bad actors.

It puts an interesting 'box' around what sort of things you can build with open source and what you can't. Or more precisely how much you can leverage it. So leveraging the Linux kernel in your gizmo is fine, but if your gizmo controls something which crooks would like to control, and you don't keep it patched, you are liable for the crimes that the crooks do with your gizmo. Yuck.

[1] This legal term defines a setup which is something which encourages criminal activity.
Visualize Foursquare check-in history and set goals
> That's why I regret how much I have pursued my curiousity about Human/artificial AI, evolutionary biology, the nature of religion, etc.

Can you elaborate?
Buttered coffee
I suspect that at just about any company, even the good ones, at least 20% of the workforce would swear their product sucks ;)
No, definitely not. If your top priority is performance per dollar, then no rational person would choose Linode. As a result, Linode attracts people whose top priorities are reliable support and good uptime. People who are worried about uptime don't run their boxes at 110% all the time.
For the last ten years I've been coaching a form of high school debate in a Chicago public school. This activity involves arguing for and against federal government action on various issues and so requires, as a minimum for success, reading comprehension, an ability to express thought in writing, and the most basic familiarity with your grade school history textbook.

Let me tell you right now: A lot of kids can't do it. And by a lot I mean almost all, at least with respect to Chicago public schools, and this goes all the way up to the selective enrollment schools, one of which I coach.

As a volunteer with limited time, it kills me to see kids eager to join the activity only to find they lack the aptitudes to present and defend rational arguments, and I just don't have the time to reverse years of standardized education. The problem gets compounded if you're not attending a selective enrollment school, where general neglect at all levels is mandatory.

Now, the school I coach is also my alma mater, and yet, my own aptitude for debate was fostered precisely because I gave two shits about schooling in general and basically attended just to debate. All of my teammates were in the Top 50 of my class but couldn't debate to save their life. I had a student who was the number two student in a class of nearly 1000 and it was the same story - and she went on to attend the University of Chicago!
Well, that should be the job of the principle in charge of the school. One of the big problems is that it is very difficult to fire bad teachers, even if it is obvious they are not performing well. Right now, union rules make it very difficult for a school principle to properly do their job.

This isn't 'automated' accountability. But it is a real answer, not the short-cut that many people are looking for with standardized testing.
For over VPS benchmarks, I love serverbear.com

I host with Ramnode.com, and I love their prices and SSDs. Not one issue yet except the odd DDoS attack. Used the server bear coupon code to get 31% off my services for life.

I wonder how it stacks up to DigitalOcean. I also have a linode server, but I'm thinking of cancelling because it is too expensive, but it is solid as a rock.
lol yea thats the only problem with this app..
It's funny how important perspective is. They seem incurious because everything is going on in their head. I'll say without thinking twice that ganja tends to make you less observant of the fine details of all of your surroundings (which would be overwhelming at times otherwise) but instead makes you focus on very specific things.

There have been some studies that show a huge spike in activity in the frontal lobe during the onset of cannabis effects. It's been suggested this contributes to interesting time effects noted by smokers, especially inexperienced ones: So much thought occurs compared to regular activity that passage of time seems to slow significantly.
"Comment threads on Wordpress blogs across the internet are often low-quality"

I'd recommend switching to Facebook comments for your own blog if that's the concern. It improves quality dramatically.
"I firmly believe that any student who wants to learn will learn"

Not if they are punished for it, and students in America are routinely [edit: punished] for any attempt to learn outside the confines of a narrow curriculum. Students routinely lose points for answers that are not based on what they were taught in class, even when their answers are correct and their techniques are logically sound. A student who is bored in class will be in big trouble if they skip class and spend their time learning independently.

The problem is not that students do not wish to learn, but that our education fails to prioritize learning and actively discourages it. A student who wants to learn will be just as poorly served by the education system as a student who has no interest in learning. The only students who succeed are those who have mastered the art of compliance, as the primary purpose of American education is to produce compliant people.
I deny the premise of the OP's doctor analogy. Given a rare liver disease, and the amount of information available on the internet, and access to doctors to ask questions to, a motivated learner could become quite proficient in understanding how the liver works and how it is affected by a specific disease. The patient does not have to become a doctor to do this. A doctor has to learn many, many things to become a doctor. Whereas the liver disease sufferer only has to learn about one thing. It is easily possible for a lay person to learn enough about their condition to have a meaningful "technical" conversation about it with their doctor.
You should probably make it clear during server creation that if you have added SSH keys on the web site, they will be injected into ~root/authorized_keys in the image, if that's what you do. Linode, for example, lets you add SSH keys on their web site, but that's only to access your VM's console.
I think asking whether wevorce provides any benefit to its customers is also a pretty good question. This is why the self-selection problem is important. 99% of wevorce users don't go to court, but is that an improvement over the baseline percentage for the kinds of couples that would use wevorce?
CPI is only one measure of inflation. For example, substituting housing price index for owner equivalent rent raises the CPI a lot recently.

Look at asset prices, they are going up very fast (historically). Or healthcare or higher education, they have been growing faster than CPI for decades with fiat money. You have to look at who has the newly created currency, and where they spend to see the inflation (gov't, high wealth, and upper middle).
Bad tools also completely confound beginners and can make them think they aren't suited to or do not enjoy an activity that they might otherwise enjoy if they had better tools.

For example, I used to hate cooking, because I hated the prep work, it was very difficult for me. It turned out that my hand-me-down knives were very, very dull, a fact I didn't realize until I decided to invest in a nice set of Henckels. A sharp, quality knife makes the prep work easy and now I enjoy cooking much more than I used to. And now, whenever a friend tells me they want to learn to cook, my first recommendation is to make sure they have a good sharp set of knives, because for me, that made all the difference.
According to this http://www.camara.cl/prensa/noticias_detalle.aspx?prmid=5526... the client is still responsible in the case of credit card cloning fraud and they are introducing a law to change this, not sure about other types of fraud.

I saw on TVN some months ago the news of a couple doing this credit card fraud and the bank was returning the money, perhaps due to the public outcry.
Random question relating to both e-mail and the law...

So everyone puts these signatures/disclaimers on their e-mail now which say (paraphrasing):

> This message is confidential. It may also be privileged or otherwise protected by work product immunity or other legal rules. If you have received it by mistake, please let us know by e-mail reply and delete it from your system; you may not copy this message or disclose its contents to anyone. Please send us by fax any message containing deadlines as incoming e-mails are not screened for response deadlines. The integrity and security of this message cannot be guaranteed on the Internet.

Or similar. Do these things actually have a legal purpose/meaning? I mean can you really enforce a contract the other person hasn't agreed to? Can you really demand what THEY do with an e-mail YOU sent them?

A few years ago I thought this stuff was silly but now a lot of big companies are doing it and I can only assume these companies have a legal department...

PS - If you were to reply I wouldn't assume it was legal advice, I am asking you as a person who just happens to be a lawyer, not as a lawyer. :)
Yep, or even better, Disqus. This gives people the option of using multiple accounts they already have, and people are concerned with their reputation, which always helps behavior.
No, YC has always favored founders over ideas. But one of the main way you judge someone is what ideas they have.

When drew was first applying to YC I didn't know him. But I'm going to presume that, like most young people, 6 months or a year is a lot of time for personal growth.
I think Google has already invested in Solar City (Elon is chairman there) and Model S uses an Android-based dashboard. I think they are in a pretty friendly relationship. I think I've even seen Larry Page praises Tesla's cars. So that's definitely not out of the question. On the other hand, I heard that self-driving equipment costs $300,000 right now, so it could take a while before that goes down in price, if true.
Excel is excellent for simple formulas in a single spot. It sucks in two points: complex/ugly formulas (anything that requires a switch/case statement or nested IF's) and heavily repeated(copypasta) formulas.

Here's what I can imagine as a real improvement: Allow me to write a piece of code that does the job of a function, but allows to touch multiple cells - and integrate it into excel as deeply as 'normal' formulas.

This means the following things that current macros don't really do:

a) Show the "formula" in the formula bar when selecting a result cell (it will usually be only a couple or dozen lines long anyway), and allow editing it in the sheet, not in a separate editor;

b) When a result cell is selected, highlight the data source cells (as is done for 'normal' formulas), and the other result cells;

c) When I change a source cell, recalculate all result cells automagically as for normal formulas - this likely imposes a 'no-side-effect' restriction on the code language.

d) For the "stdlib" use the same function names as current excel formulas, so you don't have to learn a new set of them.

Simple, and very useful - could LibreOffice handle that?
I agree we need to test but I think the problem is what we do with the test scores. It should be a natural goal for a school to raise it's test scores as time goes on. Learning the correct way to do things and improve.
The main issue I see is how funding is provided to schools based on the scores. It makes everyone focus solely on the scores because each administer is trying to get money to run the school which is based on how they test. Provides the wrong kind of message. We should be passively looking at these scores and sending additional support to schools that are low not basing how much money the school gets based on them.
The yields on treasury bills are extraordinarily low by historical standards (i.e. the prices are high) because they are in high demand, not low demand.
Where did you see this? 10 GB of Bandwidth? That's sounds awfully limiting!
Interesting. Then again, I lived overseas and the government bank there was an enormous entity that could very well have employed engineers for various reasons. I just had this picture of a Bank of America branch laying its own sewer lines :P
As someone who doesn't have kids, I always feel ridiculously uninformed about the whole education debate. From a distance it seems to be:

- administrators correctly determine we need to use metrics

- administrators then choose crap metrics

- teachers rightly point out that crap metrics create an incentive to tune performance towards those crap metrics

- teachers then conclude that metrics in general are a bad approach

So then presto, we have an argument where one side is defending crap metrics, and the other side is attacking the general idea of metrics.
What is your classroom size?

What you can reasonably do with 20 you can't with a class of 160. When children learn to think, they are all going to think differently. That makes it hard to interact with them in a group setting and still encourage thought. Impossible? I won't say that. But I would call it well beyond my abilities in a classroom setting.

It takes him 13 hours to give each student's paper 5 minutes of attention. That is what is passing for "individual interaction". This may be very far from being the whole problem, but it definitely is a problem.
You're totally right, I thought about ordering a second set of phones and then initiating a chargeback if the first set didn't arrive/weren't resent.

If there had been absolutely no support from Google, that's what I would have done. But they claimed to be making progress in helping me. Fool me 32 times, shame on me.
A Response to The New York Times: Stalled on the E.V. Highway
Using IP multicast is a solution to a problem; and I'm pretty sure the parent comment meant that he could solve any problem given enough time, money, and resources.

It's not like you _have_ to use IP multicast to solve certain classes of broadcasting problems, it's just more helpful.
Your link is incorrect, it should be:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_James%27_Park#Renaming_of_th...
I like the way http://mcmaster.com has the online store set up.
Using Cohort Analysis to Optimize Customer Experience