skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's still useful to draw a distinction between humans using the internet through browsers, and applications using the internet to access services.

Of course applications accessing services through a network has always been part of the plan, but the shift from predominantly using services on the company network towards building businesses based on outsources services on external networks is an important one.

I can see why someone like Kay would find the current 'gosh wow' breathlessness about cloud computing a bit sad, but even if it would have been nice for this transition to have happened decades ago, it doesn't change the fact it's still an important and disruptive transition.
prisoners are kept in jail

That's cool, but if you are in the US, given the fairly dumb laws on a lot of things (drugs, mainly), how do you feel about helping to oppress the population? Are you only helping with really violent offenders?

insurance claims are processed properly

Isn't this just propping up an awful system? Wouldn't it be better to actually try and fix the base system?

~

As for the rest, good work!
Great news for the Elastic team.
Some additional details about Fetcher: https://www.quantopian.com/help (You will need to scroll down to the Fetcher section -- couldn't find anchor links)
Yeah, I loved the recent gmail new compose "tour" and used it as inspiration because I'm not too fond of multi-steps tours.
> In terms of your question, it could be a couple of reasons: 1) Either the price you are quoting is too high

I do not believe I have ever turned someone down because they wanted to throw a large amount of money at me.
But you cannot order only a $5 ice cream from Instacart. The minimum you must buy is $10 even with this yearly fee. If that doesn't work for Instacart's profit margins, they should raise prices and minimums across the board.

Of course, it's also incredibly shady to invisibly change terms of a service while someone is still signed up for the service. That more than anything is pretty odious.
The Mom Test Ebook
Aspire to solve problems.
Meritora launched standards-based web payments
Those jobs are gone these days.

I grew up mostly in an upper middle class neighborhood, but for high school, we were bussed to a school in a more lower class area. There were a lot more trailer parks in the area and the auto body program at my high school was pretty popular. Just last week I was driving through that area and saw business after business with signs outside looking to hire CNC machinists, HVAC installers, etc. Those skilled jobs aren't gone. They're getting harder and harder to fill. I don't think my high school even offers auto body classes any more, but there are two college-track magnet programs there.
Or to take his doubling example...

double([], []).
double(H | T, H2 | T2) :- H2 is H * 2, double(T, T2).
Tough decision to make, Instacart:

- keep the policy unchanged, and lose your customers, or

- remove the $35 minimum, and lose money on every order

Welcome to the real world !
Downvoted for "Instacrap". Grow up.
> I'm assuming they are developing it primarily as an internal tool

It's neither primarily internal nor external. My understanding is that the higher-ups feel Dart must succeed both inside and outside of Google to be successful. Which one must happen first is an open question, but I think the end goal is wide use both inside and outside the company.
ID editor for OpenStreetMap (built on d3) just hit beta1
Seems to be working again. Just submitted and got a confirmation email.
I like how you ask for data to verify it (which is totally valid) and then make a definitive statement (or options). Yahoo could definitely be #3 in active use, just like AOL still has tons of users and XP has a large install base. I know of many small businesses that use Yahoo for stores and web hosting (though it is generally an awful experience) because they have business processes around them, and changing those processes is hard and expensive.
An experiment that began with IPL 2012. 27 leagues, B$1.2m later, IPL is back.
Because after a bit of back and forth with no end in sight, I gave up. There shouldn't have been back and forth at all. My delivery was all sorts of messed up with incorrect items chosen as replacements. For instance I ordered deli meat from the deli counter, instead I got Oscar Meyer somethingthatlookslikemeat.

I am not the only person I know who gave up on Instacart after having so many incorrect items delivered. Safeway delivery is just as painful to deal with, but at least they pick better replacements.
I allowed push notifications and was receiving them daily (maybe more, can't remember). While a bit annoying, I definitely wouldn't call overuse of push notifications "shady."
Well, no. There's the middle ground they missed: Make damn sure you tell your customers that you're changing the rules.
Seattle-area Startup Cloudmunch packages an Integrated DevOps Toolset
I'm disappointed by this poor integration. I had hoped Google would at least make importing libraries somewhat easier by including them as official third party libraries.

http://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/lib...

This is just marketing. For some actual added value, Google could've made the whole process of acquiring tokens and billing transparent. Click a button in the App Engine dashboard, and it gets new tokens from Twilio which are billed through Google.
My employer for my current day job (~70k employees) pretty much says this in their 17 page contract. It was a big warning sign for me when considering the offer, but I know that many other major corporations do this.

As a result, I have to take extra care not to "release" anything I create on the side, which is frustrating because I have always enjoyed working on side projects. Realistically though, it's unlikely for the company to claim ownership over any of these petty/small projects; but I'm sure if you released something that gained a lot of traction, especially something that competes with them, they would pounce on it.
One piece of advice I haven't seen yet is to pick varieties that are known to work well in your geographical area. Growing tomatoes in London or northern California is drastically different weather-wise than Texas. Where fancy heirlooms can work in the former, planting them here will net you a couple of really great tomatoes and mostly frustration.

Picking varieties that are known to work will with your climate will largely eliminate the need for the fish head-egg shell-aspirin voodoo. Though if you're into those things, feel free. Gardening is better if you experiment and enjoy yourself as most journeys are.
Why Dart over http://meteor.com/ https://github.com/yahoo/mojito or http://derbyjs.com/ ?
Very good question. I'm not sure I have a good answer. I haven't though about it in terms of it being a moral obligation.

My intuitive, immediate response is that it has something to do with (most?) privilege being an unfair, oppressive institution: one that is self replicating unless it's actively fought. I'm not sure this actually addresses the question you asked though.
What you're going through is a Premature Midlife Crisis. I went through mine at around 28-29.

If it makes you feel better, I turned 30 past November and I look like death incarnate... after a bender. And I've looked like that despite not smoking or drinking (though I do stay up late nights working) since my teens. Nothing much I can do about my looks or age; I'm not gonna land a super model, but there's one thing still going for me.

I refuse to quit. I refuse to be told what is productive, worthwhile or otherwise contributary to my life's worth. You're not the sum of you debts or your age and you're certainly not just another degree-holder without direction.

So what if your degree won't be as useful? So what if you hit 30? Or 60, for that matter? What someone else thinks of your life is really irrevelant when you think about it, since it's your life; they can't live it for you, therefore, their valuation doesn't really matter.

It may take a little while to pay off those debts (maybe you'll get it done sooner if you're lucky), but that and your age aren't the be-all, end-all to you.

If your work or life is unfulfilling, you can still do something about that. I went into this field because I've been told I'm good at it. It wasn't particularly interesting to me; I just wanted to make soap. That wasn't working out at the time, so while I slowly work my way out of this, I'm planning my next phase in life... and there's always a next phase, whether you look forward to it or not.
This really doesn't make any sense to me; do you have any sources for this? Everything I've heard about problems with healthcare in the U.S. falls in line with the OP, along with:

1) People go to the emergency room precisely because they don't have insurance, and what's more, they wait until the last moment (ie, when it's most expensive to treat) [1].

2) If people were really getting so many tests done and going as early as possible, surely the U.S. would be far ahead of most other countries in terms of preventative medicine [2].

[1] - http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/emergency_roo...

[2] - http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/media/Files/Publications/I...
Well but then diagnosing this equals to making our own nature wrong(or sick) by definition and then it's a paradox... if we need to start synthetically molding our body and cognitive functions that are healthy for the animal we are because it doesn't fit the society we designed and built for us ourselves to live comfortably... well, then something's wrong.
assuming it's like the UK

That's a pretty big assumption on Hacker News.
Bitcoin Can't Gain Mainstream Ground Without a More Reliable Infrastructure
Just riddles
If you want to get a best collection of just-riddles. From our just-riddles.net/ you can get a better user experience among all categorized.
> But technologists used to work on big problems. Not First World problems, but whole world problems -- sending humans to the moon, ending poverty, ending disease.

Having enough surplus capital that we can take a three day trip to the Moon seems pretty First World to me.

Which technologists worked on "ending poverty" as a primary goal? Did we stop working on ending disease? We can't seem to decide whether we are spending way too much on ending disease or way too little.

Articles like this keep popping up but they don't really seem to have any point other than being self-congratulatory to the author and likeminded audiences for how much they care about Important Things instead of Uber, which is just for taking a car from SFO to Moscone (oh wait except it's not, it actually turns out to have side effects that are significant benefits to immigrant women who would otherwise be shut out of the cab industry: http://transpoplanner.tumblr.com/post/40777853649/is-uber-em...).
Does anyone know if this copy will work in VirtualBox on Linux as well?

Edit: nvm, it's all sold out
Size Matters for Connected Devices. Phablets Don’t.
Balanced Raises More Money From Andreessen Horowitz, CollabFund, And Others
This is why I'm weary of relinquishing my credit card information to companies. I have no oversight and the companies can alter the terms arbitrarily. Despite the fact that this may be illegal, the amount of effort and money spent litigating wouldn't be lucrative at all. So, effectively, people are stuck tolerating these sorts of dubious, consumer-hostile alterations to terms.

People are infatuated with decrying the evils of advertising-centric business-models, and are weary of giving their email address, search history, etc. to companies, but willingly relinquish their bank accounts and credit cards...

Long story short, never trust companies, especially when they have the capacity to surreptitiously take your money.
The strike price doesn't have to be "fair market value" by law, but if the price is under the price then it becomes current taxable income.
Would this be illegal?

Yes. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110802/02374615353/court-...
Yes, I believe the intended lesson of the story isn't about simple solutions or explanations, but about how the reasons for doing things in certain ways are forgotten or misconstrued as they are handed down through generations or across organizational boundaries. The mother tells her daughter they cut the legs off because it cooks more evenly; the grandmother says it's because it makes for a better flavor; the great-grandmother says it's because she couldn't afford a big enough pot.
Overly picky, I know, but it doesn't cope with font size changes...
Congrats guys. Way to pivot to other ideas, hang in there and keep things growing!
The Long Tail of Technological Solutionism | allenc
This is an interesting comment, but just a quick note that if you talk to Uber drivers, you'll sometimes get specific complaints about the comp and service model they use too; the big difference is that Uber hides the issue from you; that might be a good thing, but there's a way to look at it where it's a bad thing too.

(I started talking to most of my drivers after Jason Fried posted to Twitter that he'd been getting uniformly positive feedback from his drivers; that has not been my experience, although I've never gotten overtly negative feedback.)

I'm always hesitant to relate anything I hear from talking to Uber drivers because I'm worried that Uber might be smart enough to track online comments back to drivers.
A pull request that's gone on for far too long
Says who?

I don't know a single person who uses dropbox for personal stuff, but I know tons of businesses in the furniture industry that use it all the time. For them it's only second to ftp. So it's my anecdote against yours, showing opposite things.
This should be the name of the pigment that imbues those cheap bunches of flowers at the local deli with their artificially bright neon petals.
Map and other functional constructs may be declarative, but I only "feel" like I'm programming declaratively when I'm coding in a language like Prolog.

The fact that, with unification and backtracking, you can not only get a result for a query, but also "pass a variable" as an argument and get a possible value makes it seem much more like a mathematical expression and less like a computation.

For example, I can define some relations:

parent_of(john, mary).
parent_of(mary, eve).

grandparent_of(X, Y) :- parent_child(X, Z), parent_child(Z, Y).

And then I can simply run a query:

?- grandparent_of(john, eve).
Yes

But I can also make it fill in the value for me:

?- grandparent_of(john, X).
X = eve

'grandparent_of' is not some piece of code, it's an actual declaration of a relation between the terms.

Of course, you can do unification and backtracking in other languages, but Prolog is designed for it.
... If they execute well.

Google is a tough company to evaluate in the long haul, because the value of some of the services Google offers to Google is difficult to assess. Plus, they make mercurial and random decisions.
You just can't compete with the synergy and safety of one organization fully controlling / having full management capabilities over all of the pieces.

You mean the single-point-of-failure of having all of your eggs in one basket, and one company completely in control of every piece of your life. You're right, how could anybody compete against that? :-)
I've used my various side projects to learn technologies that I then use in my actual job. For example, I first tested Redis on my side project, as well as a JS/CSS compressor and a newer version of Django.
The cloud is overhyped because we're not using Plan9.
Show HN: Markdown + Bootstrap + Bootswatch = text based themeable mind maps
It said Sold Out for me as well 10 mins ago, but I retried again and it worked :) #paystonotgiveuptoosoon
Is there really any need for this?

Maybe I'm a little traditional but last time I checked Microsoft handled this just fine on their own, is Yahoo Mail really in such a bad place that they need to outsource their file attachment hosting?

When I'm using outlook, I click on a file once and it downloads, simple as that, I don't want to have to screw around signing up for yet another service just to use it.

I don't really care how amazing Dropbox may be, if I have to screw around accessing another service instead of just clicking "download attachment" then the user experience is already ruined for me.
> I'm always hesitant to relate anything I hear from talking to Uber drivers because I'm worried that Uber might be smart enough to track online comments back to drivers.

Yes, I hope I haven't done that here... I intentionally eliminated as many details as I could.
here you are: https://www.quantopian.com/help#overview-fetcher
Cool!

Now add risk management. It's not sexy, but it is table stakes.
Interesting post, but not sure what it has to do with startups or technology.
It is not just as programmers. Consider, most cookbooks. Then consider the directions that come with Ikea furniture. Of course, the real beauty of both of those examples, is that they are a mix of declarative and imperative instructions.

For some reason, it seems we programmers are adamant that it must be one or the other. Consider all of the examples, either purely imperative or purely declarative. Why not both?
Hi Vish! When you say "proprietary pieces around the control plane", does that mean inside or outside of nova?
Thanks! Yes, we'll be testing it extensively, and your feedback is very helpful.

The idea is not to replace cloud storage solutions, but to create a complimentary guide to managing your documents and other legal workflows. In other words, it's not a storage tool, but a productivity and monitoring tool. It's designed to help cut down on both legal expenses and internal time devoted to legal compliance.

When you start a business, would you use such a tool if it were free? When your business got bigger and you have a larger volume of documents to manage, would you pay for premium services?
Looks really cool. Is this even remotely within the budget of later stage startups, or is it really targeted at the enterprise?
Are you maybe being given the chance to get direct stock instead of options? Check on that.

To be honest if these are options for a non public company than the complexities of it are going to be VERY high, if you can't understand them you could be taken advantage of.

There has to be a whole host of restrictions on the shares and when you can exercise the options etc. In part there HAVE to be restrictions because if you can own enough shares and can sell them freely you could force the company to become public.
I was able to checkout just now.
OK, he was pretty grumpy and cynical. But is he wrong?

Wouldn't a society of people who are reading and writing, thinking and creating be a better place than one where people are capable of no better than SMS-speak and TLDR and letting Siri do their thinking? What if our society turns into YouTube comments?
Aaron Swartz Memorial Grants Awarded, RECAP for Chrome Available
The former CTO of Kozmo gave a great speech at a Startup Funeral in NYC last year:

http://readwrite.com/2012/10/04/startup-funeral-honoring-the...

It was a fascinating story and a real cautionary tale for people replicating their mistakes.
But LevelUp is an awful product...

Seriously, have you ever tried to use it?

I tried LevelUp at five different merchants. My experiences were:

1. Merchant 1 didn't know what "LevelUp" was despite signs on the door and a glowing LED lit platform with a smartphone on it labelled "LevelUp" in glowing letters.

2. Merchant 2 tried to take my payment but their phone couldn't get a signal, so I had to pay with cash.

3. Merchant 3 refused to take the LevelUp payment. Said they only accept cash. When I pointed to the LevelUp sign the merchant said they didn't know how to use it. When pressed for details they said they only wanted LevelUp to bring in more customers and that they had no intention of actually using it.

4. Merchant 4, after 3 minutes of trying to scan the QR code on my phone, finally gave up and asked me to pay with cash.

5. Merchant 5 didn't know how to use the smartphone provided by LevelUp to take payments and insisted that I pay with cash.

I'm usually pretty patient when it comes to new technology but I've talked with other people who have also tried using LevelUp (and other ePayment methods involving smartphones) and they have all said something like "if making a payment with my phone is harder than taking out a card and swiping it, it's pointless."
And it works in IE8! Thanks for this.
Show HN: Mosaic – Use multiple iPhones as one big screen
This seems really interesting. When you say proprietary tools, I assume you mean more custom-built solutions and less paid tools available to anyone?
Cool! Totally accidental as I don't have an IE to test on, so good to know! Thanks :)
Someone else reported that it works on IE8, so I'd guess it should also work on ie10
the issue is that people expect innovation to mean "something new, useful" and it generally actually means "something different" and not necessarily new or useful.
so what would be declarative programming ? does it even exist? i mean, at some point you need to write some logic , and logic is imperative.
Let's take a html file. It is declarative. but the underlying logic is written somewhere else. so you cant really have pure declarative programming? if it is possible how ?
One word: "compliance". A lot of security standards demand that you run an anti-virus regularly on your servers. At least the first version of PCI DSS did, and it's MasterCard and Visa precursors did.

It's checklist items like "run an anti-virus" that make "compliance" into a pudgy, flaccid, bad word.
Show HN: Receive Job Offers Before Interviewing
1) About the internet usage....yes, it is very common for lawyers to look for that. It is however, uncommon for an ISP to turn over such data short of a subpoena, and ISPs will generally (but not always) fight a non-criminal subpoena. Also, ISPs log IPs, not URLs, unless you are also using your ISPs's DNS servers. Finally, judges don't really care if a party to a divorce watches adult content...unless the type/amount of such viewing creates a bad environment for children.

2) Yes, hire a lawyer...especially because she already has. It will be a cash crunch now, but your lawyer will save you money in the long run. (If she hadn't hired a lawyer, it would have been cheaper and faster to settle things amicably.) Can't say how much to budget, but I can say that non-amicable but simple divorces start at $6000 in my area and just go up from there. (Again, though...it's cash spent now to save 10x or more in the future.)

3) I repeat: hire a lawyer. It's worth it.
Interview: How to Maximize Java Application Performance in a Trading Environment
But until that butt-feather-loving predator comes along, the definition of merit continues to be how big a feather you have sticking out of your butt. It is just that the definitions change once in a while.

Nothing bad about that, but nothing good either.
Game of Thrones premiere sets piracy record
Outside of nova.
Cloudstack as it stands currently is a bit scary to me. They moved from being fully supported by Citrix to an Apache project which may or may not be fully supported by Citrix? Given that there are few contributors to the project, unlike with OpenStack, losing Citrix support I would see as essentially the project dying.