skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah I think him manually clearing a table over and over again was the big problem here. The amount of entropy that had to be introduced into the process to turn a routine task into millions of dollars of loss was tiny. He just needed to click in a slightly different spot on the webpage to bring up USERS instead of RAIDS.
I'm not sure how I missed this earlier, but this is the first YC company in a long time I'm genuinely excited about. This is as close to telekinesis as I'm likely to get, and I want it, dammit.
Author here.

It might be rationalizing if I wanted the outcome to be a certain way. I actually do not like this outcome, as noted in the article.

This is pattern recognition. Of course, there are many variables, and correlation doesn't equal causation. Still, as rational actors we are forced to give it our best guess using data, anecdotal or otherwise. Simply because "it feels good" doesn't make it better -- or worse.
This is the most ridiculous thing ever. Why weren't there backups? Sure, the author was the one who "pulled the trigger" but the management "loaded the gun" by not making sure there were back-ups.
This is sad, sad, sad. I wonder how much awesome communities died that way. I stopped visiting Orkut when communities there got overran with spam. Also the same apply to some Usenet groups and Google Groups I used to like.
There are many conditions which are extremely common, but for which more effective treatments don't propagate to patients. About 5% of the US population has clinical depression, for example, and writing gratitude letters has been shown in studies to be quite effective at treating depression (more so than drugs or therapy). Yet, most patients don't know about it.
I met Stefan for coffee and invited him to hang out with us at Mavenlink for an afternoon and it was very enjoyable and productive. Stefan is a very nice guy!
This story is getting even more bizarre. You pitched a start up idea to a Wells Fargo branch manager?? That makes no sense at all. The insinuation that bank higher-ups were actually evaluating your idea and killing it is presumptuous. Unsupported ideas have very short lifespans. Do you realize that Dwolla is trying to do similar things but it takes dozens of employees, millions of dollars and an indirect route to get there (same with PayPal)?

I guess I'll keep reading because the inanity of it all has me hooked but pray tell part 4 gives some sort of short description of the user experience for this supposedly simple solution (that sounds anything but simple so far).
All the problems are the integration with "real money", i.e., the account where you get your salary, the accont where your company pays salaries from, the card/whatever that you buy stuff with, and the card/whatever that you get cash from.

For that, you'd need to interchange payments with your system and bank accounts.

1) Gov't regulates financial institutions, and there are good reasons for it - otherwise Ponzi schemes and 'bankers' stealing deposits are a real pain and causes the public to ask for regulation. So they will want (force) you to submit to regulation if you want to do anything serious; or you may try to do "only information" and have another, licenced institution (a large bank) hold the actual money - this is what many finance startups do, but then they depend fully on the bank(s).

2) Gov't and banks don't like anonymous transactions, and there are good reasons for it - money laundering, tax evasion, organized crime and stolen money are very real issues. A basic principle is 'know your customer', i.e., don't do any [above $X] business with anyone you can't identify; and don't allow your customers to front payments on behalf of others, unless they identify all those others to you in each transaction. And it's often simpler/cheaper to disallow 'on behalf' deals at all than to integrate your customer/transaction data with the bank's systems. For example, see MtGox AML limits for money withdrawal - if you want to handle "real money", then that would apply for all transactions, not just withdrawals.

3) There are a bunch of consumer protection laws that may hurt you. For example, if a customer's account is hacked and money transferred, above a certain limit you (not the customer) will be liable for the loss. And there are other cases as well. So you (as the organizer) really, really want a money system where payments are (a) traceable, (b) revocable if legally required and (c) can't easily go to any other untraceable, irrevocable systems. Banks do so. The alternative is to charge huge fees to cover the risks to you.

4) Payment systems (ACH/etc) require huge collaterals or guarantees from participants - and there are good reasons for it, as you don't want to receive a gazillion payments, give the money to your customers, and then have the payer institution say that they're insolvent and won't cover the bill for the payment-messages that they sent. Technical and legal barriers to joining are also quite high.
Does anyone else find it strange that the author of the article interjected one of her own tweets in the middle of the article?
For what it's worth, it's not new. My latest project, Fork the Cookbook (http://forkthecookbook.com) uses a similar system
reading that back, damn, the "depresses me deeply" is a terrible exaggeration, making light of anyone who actually suffers from genuine depression.
The second link is extremely insightful as it attempts to address all fronts of the current socioeconomic of today's students. Thank you!
Sorry but have you EVER worked at a large company before ?

Because none of what you said makes any sense. There is no evidence that people at Yahoo are more or less "checked out" than any company. And it is ridiculous to think she can magically weed out those select few who are not committed to the company's mission.

And this underlying assumption that there is a relationship between working remotely and productivity/innovation is simply unproven. Especially when you realise that much of the innovation in our industry comes from open source projects where everyone is disconnected.
I kind of like the lanyard idea.
Great, and thanks for the info.

I see how that issue - name/history/etc. - would make it hard to provide credible success stories.

Site still not working for me, so this may be there:

Perhaps, someday, maybe include a patient story or two with medical history but no name? (With appropriate HIPAA waivers...)

Even better, it would be WAAY awesome if you posted, whenever possible, the results of your research on your site for review by anybody. It may not be in your current business model, but the "giving back" angle might be the edge that pushes you into popularity.
How is it that a company with 'millions in revenue' is directing a junior developer to develop on a production database with no backups?
Facebook Lets Advertisers Tap Purchase Data Partners To Target Customers
Bitcoin hits new all time high on Mt. Gox
The previous high of $31.91/BTC was set back on June 8, 2011. As of this posting, it is trading for over $33/BTC.
Some good sites for charts and order books are:

http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/

http://mtgoxlive.com/

http://bitcoincharts.com/

http://bitcoinity.org/markets
People who don't have a car, mostly.

When I lived outside a big city, I didn't think twice at going a few miles to the Trader Joes, even if I didn't need much. Right now, I'm in San Francisco and without a car, and it's an event to go just about anywhere from where I live, short of a small corner store.
This is when you start going up the chain to see where it's broken. If some random leaf node employee isn't online, that's a problem. The fact that someone else didn't notice it until now is also a problem. This person's "manager" is clearly in need of review. This may continue to that person's manager (because they didn't notice their report not checking on the VPN person) and so on.

It sounds like it's time to break out the chainsaw and start lopping off dead limbs. This is good stuff.
And if you click back to his website, you'll find that it seems to have been solely built using WordArt, which is quite an impressive feat!
To determine whether people are coasting or not delivering as much value ("work output") as they should be, you need to be able to measure it. Maybe people are under-tasked and teams are too big for the amount of work available (bloated), but in order to hold people to a standard, you have to have a standard in the first place.
Neckbeard Republic - bite-sized python screencasts
The purpose of life is to contribute to evolution
Yep, looks very similar. Damn, they stole my idea! ;-)
There are two big questions that yahoo faces. What the fuck do they want to be as a company? And what do they intend to do with the engineers they have right now?

They haven't come up with an answer to the first question so far as I can tell, which is a bigger problem than anything else.

For the second question they are faced with a lot of problems. If they want to try to retain as much talent as possible they're going about it the wrong way. If they want to instill discipline and transition down to a smaller more mediocre more "enterprisey" company that pumps out crappy line-of-business apps then they're doing a damned fine job so far.

If I were forced to try to turn yahoo around I'd start by identifying the major projects that yahoo should execute on and then I'd either fire almost everyone and start from scratch or I'd work by replacing the company from the inside out by growing a "bubble" that was a new division built with new rules with new management that hired both from outside the company and from within yahoo and was highly results oriented and, at least initially, worked on fast iteration projects that are easier to judge success on.

A couple good candidates for projects that could serve to help re-energize the company are flickr, yahoo stores, and yahoo hosting services. Revolutionize those, iteratively, make them competitive, and you could go a long way toward revitilizing the company and providing projects that people actually want to work on.
DRY KISS TEO
They are now...
What happened to leading by example?

"Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer built a nursery in her office so she could bring her baby to work, which has angered some stay-at-home employees following her demand that all remote workers report back to the office.

'I wonder what would happen if my wife brought our kids and nanny to work and set em up in the cube next door?' the husband of one remote-working Yahoo employee asked in an interview with AllThingsD's Kara Swisher.

Many employees are upset because they don't have the money or clout to build their own nurseries at work. And many assume Mayer has a whole team of people, from nannies to cooks and cleaners, helping her raise her son - after all, she does have a $5 million penthouse atop the Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco in addition to her $5.2 million 5-bedroom home in Palo Alto."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2284828/Yahoo-boss-M...
Light on dark can be really hard to read for anyone with a pronounced astigmatism.

The background color bleeds into text dramatically lowering the contrast. On computer displays, black on pure white can cause the same issue to a lesser effect. I find black on a pale color is optimal.
You are very much over-dramatizing.

Just describe the user experience. There are plenty of people here who know plenty about cryptography, payments and getting service usage.

Note: here's all you have to tell us related to cryptography: the service is as secure as a mag-stripe.
Next generation mouse
> If men simply stopped approaching women, then eventually women would be forced to start taking the initiative (or all die single).

True. I feel like this is gradually happening, I know in the US and Japan but probably other developed countries as well. Women predictably are irritated by this trend and you often hear them complaining nastily that men need to do things like "get off the computer", "put down the video games", and "step up their games" (dating wise).
Nokia wants to build the Google of human behaviour - and share it
In Buenos Aires, foldable housing for disaster relief
I don't see it as a luxury. The fact is that resumes just don't work very well as a marketing tool for the amount of effort they take. There are better ways to go about it, in my opinion and experience. There is a very good reason why Apple doesn't give you the "resume" of their devices and I stay away from resumes for the same reason. Finding a job is just sales and marketing, nothing more.
> Let me guess - you're a white male, aren't you?

No, I am not.

> ...couldn't possibly do tech, are a threat to the American Way Of Life(tm), and should in general not be so uppity

So, the analogy then is that some people are saying these kinds of things about minorities. If I can speak frankly: Who says this kind of stuff or thinks that way besides idiots? If someone is still racist in this day and age then there is little hope of changing their thinking. Those kind of people should just be ignored.
The Treo was not new, the Blackberry already did everything the Palm did years before.
When I was at Yahoo in 2008, some staff were always "working from home" but never responded to IM or email. They'd surface for a day or two, squeeze out an artefact, then vanish again for a week.

I somewhat blame their direct managers. It's always tempting for lower-level employees to game the system, especially if they are having personal issues (young kids, bad marriage, low workplace morale). Managers should provide guidance to bring their reports back into line.

Then again, the managers in question were busy fighting org politics and seemed happy just to have an extra "soldier" on their roster.

So maybe Marissa's stalinist purge of remote workers will prove to be a blunt but effective instrument for flushing out the bludgers.
No bank is going to move on one unfunded guy's weak story.
> Whenever we run a test in medicine, we ask, "How would the result affect management?"

Yet, a lot of unnecessary tests are run daily at every hospital I've seen. But what's worse is that often times doctors are reluctant to find out more about a patient's illness simply because they believe "it wouldn't affect treatment and it's not worth it anyway". It doesn't take a scientist to figure out why this approach can be disastrous. At the same time, high-paying private patients are often considered to be worth finding out the specifics.

The whole system of clinical knowledge and action is broken from this point on. Doctors often do not keep current with advances in medical research, and I encountered a few who are actively opposed to it, asserting that medicine should not go any further than it does today because it's considered "unnatural".

Medicine is in danger of becoming scientifically bankrupt. This startup, while I think it's a great concept, is a symptom of this disease. Practitioners, even in the odd case they're interested in advanced knowledge that is not being passed down from whoever the resident rockstar surgeon is, generally do not have proper access to current knowledge and statistics.

It seems to me this system, where a life is more often than not considered ephemeral and expendable (except if you're a small child or a pregnant woman), this system is broken and cannot in its current form provide the services we will need as our civilization advances. As it is, this system plays into the hands of religion and pseudo science (a trend which doctors are generally comfortable with), and it is one of the dehumanizing factors that make our hospitals places of desperation instead of regeneration.
World's first underwater nuclear explosion
Beelzeboy: Indie game sneak peek
Were you working for or do you work for Yahoo? The allegations of rampant abuse of the work-from-home system in TFA is some sort of evidence, at least.

And frankly, relating open-source software to productivity in a big company is a worse argument that what people have been saying about productivity and working remotely.
Wow, what a terrible article.

There's zero context for what he's talking about. And he doesn't help much by going off on a million tangents and trying really hard to be cool.

And opening with "Hello! Is this dog?", a bunch of empty space, and then half a picture of an old meme is kind of dumb. I mean, I had to scroll down a screen just to find out the article was confusing and written badly.
Moving money is one of the easiest parts. Money movement is not nearly as broken as the OP would have you believe.
I assume he means that node + nginx runs the game at the HTTP level but the actual game engine and logic are in Java.
The play button seems to have stopped working; and the number of players seems to be shrinking slowly. Something broke?
For reference, make sure your site can handle real traffic before posting it to HN. Not doing so will hurt your brand and reduce chances of getting some good initial traction. More so with such type of service. My initial perception is that I cannot trust a business with my health when they can't even properly setup a website.
That is very misleading marketing speak, to the point of lying. You (or your copywriter) just killed Celery's credibility.
I agree that it will be interesting to find out if Yahoo is sitting on a pile of talented engineers who just need better management in order to return to productivity, or if years of bad management have caused all the real talent to flee. My hunch (based on working at a poorly managed big company) is it's the latter and that years of bad management have created a sort of adverse selection in engineering talent. Talented productive people will leave or be poached away and the people you're left with will happily sit around doing nothing and taking a pay check. My prediction is that Yahoo is going to fire a bunch of people this year.
Ask HN: do you use a ChromeBook?
Will be good to also know which model and for what.
But can't you also find someone's username by hiding the facepile plugin from the user, waiting for it to load, then pulling the username once it's loaded?
They had the guy in the trenched die to hold the enemy from taking over your towns and your tank research teams, your aircraft factories; to buy time for the engineers and scientists to master their craft.

It sucks, but it worked.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is just the beginning.
> You pitched a start up idea to a Wells Fargo branch manager?

Sure, why not? Had to start somewhere.

> The insinuation that bank higher-ups were actually evaluating your idea and killing it is presumptuous.

I don't know what happened at Wells, but I do know for a fact that senior management (and in two cases the CEO) was not only evaluating the idea, but actually signed off on it later. Just because I started naive doesn't mean I stayed that way.

> Do you realize that Dwolla is trying to do similar things

Of course. So? Lots of companies are trying to do similar things. None of them (except Paypal) existed when I started.

> but it takes dozens of employees, millions of dollars and an indirect route to get there

Yes, of course I realize this. And your point would be...?
I guess you cancel out my intuition with your random opposing statement and we are left with me with a ton of links to studies and you with absolutely nothing.
I saw the SEO post he's referring to (it was one of the articles in SEOMoz's top 10 monthly email). Site owners don't realize the amount of work and headache they cause forum communities when they contract out SEO work without an understanding of what that work entails. Or they do and just don't care.

Google's Penguin update didn't deter the spammers, either. Here we are nearly a year later and I'm still cleaning out accounts created en masse by XRumer or other bots.
Idea is great.

But I feel pricing model needs a revisit.

For patients with some serious ailments this is all fine but what about less serious issues like..a person with allergies, thyroid, migraine etc. These are kinds of things which bother people but still not enough to spend 5000 for analysis.

Probably a profile based pricing is a good idea? Just a thought.
A rushed ten minute consult annoys us all, but How often is my medical condition going to be something that say paying the doctor to take 45 mins would not uncover.

Most of us have diseases that are horses not zebra - and you have a strong financial incentive to encourage hypochondriacs to keep hearing zebra.

If my condition has Gregory House stumped, sure ill pay you but otherwise that lump on your skin is a cyst not a tumour and that shortness of breath is lack of fitness not a heart failure.
The menus at the top use mouse-hover which doesn't make sense on phones, but the links at the bottom go to the same set of pages as the menus.
I wonder how much of bitcoin's value is related to it's ability to buy illegal drugs?
Isn't this the same guy who discovered the mass assignment bug in Rails last year?
I'm certain that anyone who axes a popular benefit like telecommuting at such a large company is going to catch a ton of flak regardless of their gender.

If anything, I think her situation (brand new baby regardless of her gender) is less likely to draw criticism because she has more reason to telecommute than nearly anyone and also stands to lose more by not having it. It's a "lead by example"/"if I can do it so can you" approach to fixing their telecommuter problem.
I see the target market here as being rich people who think they have Morgellons, frankly.
I understand wanting to bring up that word. Even then, that particular word implies that the person so labeled poses some degree of danger to the labeler.
Hello. I agree with your criticisms of the medical system, and MetaMed was started specifically to help fix these problems - to bring science back into medicine. It's impossible for any one person to keep current with all research, so we provide a service where a team of scientists can keep up on the latest research for individual physicians and patients. We're all about giving access to statistics and scientific knowledge - it's what we do.
XBox runs on Azure from what I hear. Its not getting shut down anytime soon. In fact, if I were a betting man, I'd even go as far as to say that Azure is the future of Windows Server.
I'm just asking for a few examples. Do you have any where they advertise an open job but the pay is low?
Well Mr. Brown was part of the team when they launched, so he wins?
Almost certainly none.
Hi,
Source Sans Pro is open source (SIL Open Font License):

https://github.com/adobe/Source-Sans-Pro

http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro
Genome Compiler
Anecdote is not the plural of data.

If you don't have some correlation coefficient between working from home and lack of productivity then your entire argument is moot. My point with open source software is that there are plenty of facts on the ground that working from home does not necessarily equate to a lack of innovation. I was proving the negative.

If you disagree. Then provide some numbers.
You could shoot the hostage and add rel='nofollow' to all outbound links. You should be able to programmatically do this.

Then with an auto-reply (or 'link policy' page) inform 3rd party sites that the link-juice (good or bad) is no longer flowing.