skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How would having twitter integrated into your trading system help you in this instance?

My suspicion is that by the time other people start re-tweeting this the and you can get any sort of twitter sentiment determination the market will have corrected.

Are you taking the other side of this and hypothesizing that you can determine twitter sentiment before the market reacts? If so please mail me, I write in house trading systems for a living and I'd love to chat.
"But is this even a real problem? No, not really."

If you have that luxury then that's great. For you. But if you're doing client work you likely don't have the luxury of never having to estimate. And even if you're not doing client work then it would likely be a good idea to at least give it a passing consideration.

Say you have a client who wants [x] and it needs to be done by a certain date (Yes! This does happen!), then it is helpful for you to know whether or not you might be able to deliver.

Say you have a client who wants [x] for [money]. Then it is helpful for you to know whether or not you might be able to produce it in a time frame which makes sense economically.

Say you have two ways of solving a certain problem. Then it is helpful for you to know if one solution would take a week and the other a year.

Estimation can be hard, sometimes impossible. But I'm not sure pretending it's not a problem is a viable solution for many.
That has definitely crossed my mind more than once. There's a few reasons this isn't as scary as one might think:

1. Contractors work on tons of apps, the vast majority of which don't make any money. Their business is making apps, not selling them.

2. Focus on long-term relationships. If the contractor knows you're going to hire them in the future for more work they'll be less likely to screw you over now.

3. Last resort: you can report pirated apps to Apple.
Steam's DRM is very unobtrusive, at least in all the games I've played. I can disconnect from the internet and continue playing a launched game, or even quit and launch a new one, without it affecting the gameplay (or ability to save). So no, Steam isn't Always On DRM, at least not how I understand the term.
I can see why this would be annoying when a project is first being set up, but once things are underway I much prefer having individual emails for each event. The advantage comes when you only scan the subject line for each notification.

For example, we use trello at my day job to track projects and tasks. They offer to send emails either "periodically (once an hour)" or "instantly". Nevertheless, they still fold multiple actions into a single email if they happen in rapid succession, and send an email that says something like "2 new notifications on the board Development". I would much rather see each notification as a separate email since sometimes they are relevant to me and sometimes they aren't.
interesting. clearly some work has gone into this and, like with any research, the results will always be open to debate. although i think obviouslygreen has got the wrong end of the stick by comparing apples with oranges. i wouldn't be surprised if the valuation number is actually higher. would like to see some more details on those 'assumptions'
File extensions are optional in Windows. I haven't had this problem with Opera, FWIW.
How do you nurture and maintain a marriage from prison?
Yes those first two months suck and every child is different. One thing that my wife and I did was that she would pump and go to bed at around 8/9 pm. I would stay up with the baby monitor and the baby was my responsibility till around 1am. If the baby got up I had to deal with it. I also gave our kid a bit of formula as the last bottle before I went to bed. The rumors were true, our child was fuller longer and slept longer. This gave my wife and I pretty close to a full night sleep.

One more thing that people will tell you is that you need to put your child on a schedule. Really, the child ends up making their own schedule, but you can influence the schedule. In the evenings pick a time that you want your kid to go to sleep, and don't let that kid out of his bedroom. Keep the lights dim and don't offer up any stimuli other than basic soothing. Hum a lullaby, really don't worry nobody can hear you. During the day don't let your child nap for longer than 2 hours. Wake them up, feed them and play with them. Start this two hour cycle every day at the same time, and don't let them sleep in. If they sleep in and don't consistently wake up every two hours they will never get on the day night sleep cycle.

We eventually got our child to sleep through the night. We put him down at 8pm every day consistently and he would sleep till around 6:30am. This all will take a bit of time, but wow is the whole family better. Well, until teething, my child just turned 1 and he his next tooth coming in is a molar. This is a whole other post.

One problem that we did have is pooping. That kid had the hardest time pooping. When you rock your kid to bed don't rock them like you see in the movies. Try a couple different positions. One that worked for us was holding them like a (American) football with their head on the outside of your elbow, and your arm and hand supporting their body.

All the books say to put your child on his back to sleep. Supposedly the statistics say that your child is more at risk of sids if they sleep on their stomach, but when we put our kid on his stomach there was a bit more pressure applied to his stomach and that pressure seemed to help. If your child is having a problem pooping say and I'll post more about it.
I was trying to come up with a framework for estimating the incremental impact of YC. Some of these businesses would have been successful without going to YC. And we can't just compare against the general startup population because YC also selects the best.

So what's a good proxy for estimating the value that an incbuator provides to startups? Perhaps time. Iterating through product ideas, getting introductions, and getting help with legal work & administrivia probably shaves somewhere from months to years off of getting to a good product-often to the point where the product/business would have been abandoned before getting traction.

Let's pick a completely arbitrary amount of time saved-one year. Most of the value of YC's portfolio comes from AirBnB & Dropbox. It's hard to get good revenue numbers, but based on users, nights booked, and other heuristics their growth rates are estimated at around 100%-500%.

If we take an estimate of 350%, that means that we could attribute roughly 70% of the value of YC's portfolio companies to YC itself. I'm not sure if these assumptions are all accurate (especially the 1 year saved figure), but this can give us a starting point to estimating YC's impact on their portfolio companies.

ETA: the amount of time saved is probably the most important variable. If we assume YC saves each company 6 months instead of 12, then YC's impact drops from 70% to 47%. With 3 months, it's about 27%.
Only commenting on the last point. He's referring to the previous proposal from the final years of the Bush administration wherein Congress would have passed an internet sales tax if the various states (mostly meaning Cali and NY) would have agreed to simplify their taxation structures ahead of such legislation. The idea was that states would set their sales tax at one of several fixed rates (i.e., 5%, 7.5%, 10% etc) subsuming county/city sales taxes into the state tax rate. Counties and cities would receive their proportionate shares (though the mechanism for determining shares was never discussed in depth).

The proposal actually received a lot of discussion among policy makers, but then got dropped when it became clear that state legislatures wouldn't go through the trouble of reforming their sales taxes without Congress first passing the legislation.
If You Do Something, Stand For Something
I've been writing about Bitcoin for a while, so I'd definitely be interested to know where you end up on this. Please get in touch with me if you end up accepting payment in Bitcoin.

As for advice: consult your lawyer and accountant. The truth is Bitcoin is a huge grey area. There are some folks who think Bitcoin is an investment vehicle like gold or silver and should be reported as capital gains income.

http://qz.com/72637/why-bitcoin-millionaires-could-accidenta...

And there are others who would say that because you're using it as a form of payment, you should report it as regular income, probably in the same way you would income earned in a foreign currency.

http://www.businessinsider.com/do-you-have-to-pay-taxes-on-b...

Either way, you will need to report income in Bitcoin to your country's tax authority in some way or risk prosecution. Again, if you end up pursuing it, I'd be very interested in hearing the story.
I agree -- I'm not defending the policy, I'm just trying to point out that these polices don't come out of a vacuum. People who run prisons are concerned about the welfare of their people first.
Ask HN: How do you name your servers?
I've heard (and worked at places with) lots of interesting stories about hostnames within an organization, but I'd love to see if there's some consensus.

So, HN, how do you name your servers?

To start things off, I've seen servers named for Transformers, One Piece characters, people in the Bible, and philosophers.

What are your best server name suggestions?
A single stage rocket is desirable from a technological point of view since it sheds a lot of complexity: you don't have to deal with multiple engines, separation mechanisms, structural considerations, etc. However, multi-stage rockets can deliver more real payload to orbit, since they maximize the amount of fuel that is spent on taking the actual payload up there.

Single-stage rockets need to carry a lot of dead mass (empty tanks and engines) all the time, and that is a lot of wasted fuel. A multi-stage rocket can dispose the big first stage engines once it's cleared out most of the Earth's gravitational pull and use smaller engines to continue.

Another important consideration is that rocket engines don't run optimally during the whole burn. The first stages are optimized for atmospheric conditions, whereas later stages are optimized for vacuum conditions. Therefore having one big engine propel you up all the way incurs in an even grater loss of fuel due to the inefficiency at high altitudes. You could probably have a rocket engine capable of having a variable geometry to compensate for this but AFAIK is almost impossible to do it.

See the following for more details:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staging_(rocketry)#Advantages
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_engine_nozzle
But those examples are not going far enough to be truly remarkable. They're still not putting the customer's interests ahead of their own.

With Citi, how about instead of making giving your rewards to charity an option, make it the only option? That would be remarkable.

What if KLM instead emailed me saying "we found a cheaper/more pleasant flight than the one you've already booked with us. Click here and we'll automatically change your reservation and refund you the difference, no fees." That would be remarkable.
Great post, alot of good stuff here. Its all about understanding your customer and bringing them True Value!
No. I validate the credit card before completing the transaction. Maybe you should check whether the game is terrible before you buy it.
It strikes me as strange and ineffectual to use the hellban on a person who is obviously a regular on the site. It's my understanding that it's intent is to cause newcomers who make low-quality contributions to quickly lose interest and leave. It can't really do its job against people who know about it.
Devil in the Blue Faceted Dress: Real Time Cloth Animation
Nice. Blackmailing your customers.
You can only get two: 1) Schedule, 2) quality, 3) quantity. So if your client / manager insists on you keeping the schedule you figured out months ago before full information, either quality will have to suffer or you'll have to cut features. There's no other way.
Great initiative - I GLOWING PLANTS ROCK!
Ricin Suspect Released
> FWIW the vast majority of my friends married in the 20-28 yr old range, as did I. I don't see it as much of a time limit practically really.

There's another angle on this issue. Evidence is accumulating that the reported big increase in autism-spectrum disorders is correlated with late marriage. No one knows why, so it's only a correlation at this point, but it's pretty reliable -- late marriage and late childbearing equals more autism disorders.

http://www.science20.com/science_motherhood/autism_does_incr...

Quote: "In unadjusted analyses, both mean maternal age and mean paternal age were significantly higher for ASD cases than for the birth cohort as a whole."
Original, readable version: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-04-18/opinions/38641...
That'd only be worth doing if the cost of hiring a replacement and getting them up to speed is less than just paying 2 months' salary. Sometimes true, sometimes not true.

Beyond that it varies by state. In New South Wales, from what I can gather, the employee can cash out a pro-rata portion of the benefit upon termination if they've been employed for longer than 5 years, unless fired for misconduct. So you'd have to lay everyone off after 4 years 11 months to keep from paying out, which would increase the cost of employee churn even more.
Firefox's reader is an improvement over Adobe's, sure, but that's like beating snail in a foot race. Go Firefox, you show'em Chrome! It's still not SumatraPDF, it's not Evince. Saving the file and having it auto-open these programs takes less time then waiting for the browsers PDF readers to kick in. Of course it could be better, but frankly, I'd rather things be more unix'y, not less.
In this article they assume plants can use about 3% to 6% of the light, but actually they can use about 0.1% - 0.2%. So instead of 60 W/m^2 you have 1 W/m^2.

Meaning you need to dedicate 1% of the tree's energy to light, not 0.02%.

They also use a 210 lumen bulb to compare with - but 210 lumens is very very dim. Assuming each tree is planted 20 meters apart, each tree needs to illuminate 400 m^2 of area, which would be 0.5 lux.

For comparison that's about as much light as the full moon provides.

For normal street lighting you want about 18 lux, meaning you actually need a 7000 lumen bulb.

So, now we need 35% of the trees energy delivered as light. But of course half of the light will be emitted upward, so we really need 70% of the trees energy.

Good luck with that.

And we haven't even touched on the fact that the light is not created on the surface of the plant, but rather throughout the tissue, so a lot of it will be lost internally.
trevmckendrick - good to see the app do well! If you remember I (Sleepyhead) helped with the email forms. We pleasantly surprised to see the post here :)
feature creep would be a good topic for another blog post some day... met many of those.
Could and real or kerbal rocket scientists here explain why SpaceX isn't doing something like the curiosity rover landing? Sure there's 3 extra steps, deploy parachute, cut parachute, and evasive maneuver, but the fuel saving would massive.
Of girls and geeks: Environment may be why women don’t like computer science
How to Simulate a Ponytail
I think highly paid managers are inevitable over time. It's somewhere between regulatory capture and Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureacracy.

Luckily companies who follow that path will eventually implode and be replaced by others who can only hope to survive long enough to follow the same path.
IMHO the reason not to worry about being crippled by moving around too much is that this is about completing the task. In most cases they will add more, and to top it all off, if you learn a few key "most useful" shortcuts/features of the IDEs you end up using, then you strike what I call an acceptable middle ground.
"AMD's advantage in Bitcoin mining was purely due to an architectural quirk"

False. I authored a Bitcoin miner utilizing this quirk (bit_align). I was also the first to leverage another instruction exclusive to AMD (bfi_int): https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=2949 bit_align "only" gave AMD a 1.7x advantage over Nvidia. The biggest perf gains (2x-3x!) came from the fact AMD has more execution units: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU... (I also authored this section of the wiki).
> You don't need to time it, do you? If you have resting buy orders the market is going to come down and hit you at a favorable (to you) price. You can close the position when the market rebounds.

You are, of course, right if you know how far down the bottom is and that the market will rebound.

Maybe I'm just a coward, but all I see is risk:)
Here are the big questions to ask yourself before trying this.

What if the market doesn't rebound, ie if you set your buy at a 1% drop and it drops 3% and then closes down 2.5%. That's enough to shut down alot of prop shops:)

What if it doesn't drop low enough to hit your bid, ie the market just ignores your buy and shoots way up. Then your short position crushes you.

Or if you use a short butterfly, what if the market just yawns, you've lost your one chance at moving the market but atleast you live to trade another day:)
“12 Hours of Separation” Connect Individuals on Social Networks
It ships when it ships is a great mantra for someone working on something in a vacuum.

Marketing, sales, demos, meetings, running out of cash, press embargoes, and a host of other reasons can create real deadlines whether you like it or not.

Plans and deadlines are also helpful as a measure of progress - are we ahead or behind what we planned?
That's easily solved with Backblaze backing up one of the synced machines. Then it's $5/month for unlimited with off-site backup.

I agree with you that this is a very important consideration: Sync services (even Dropbox) are not backup services and shouldn't be treated like they are. You are in an even worse predicament if you are using it to sync everything locally.
I also lie when giving estimates.

This is the only part I disagree with. You can't lie about something you don't know, and it's the nature of an estimate that you cannot possibly know whether it's right... if you did, it wouldn't be an estimate. You may present part or all of an estimate that's just not what you actually believe, but it might still end up being right if the right things go wrong.

Estimates suck. I'm pretty good at estimating, and doing it still sucks; they are never exactly right, for too many reasons to enumerate. Unfortunately, in many situations (e.g. consultancy, as you mention), they are important sales tools... I'd venture to guess I'm not the only small business owner that considers estimates one of the many good reasons to move from a consulting to a product development model once the means are available.
> Everyone has their own view about it

I disagree. There's a lot of research on this issue, and they nearly all conclude the same thing. Here's an example: http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

Most humans don't like screen-width columns.
Should we change the Higgs boson's name?
A professional computer expert is now part of the UK's House of Lords,
Fair; it's not for everyone - but that's really not the point.

The point is that no one really thought "22 year olds" were capable of making an economic impact before YC came along. Hence, someone with the simple idea to say "Hey, we should give 22 year olds this deal" created an employment impact on the economy as big as Facebook. The more people that come up with new funding models like YC that actually work, the better we'll all be.
Calm down friend. I'm merely stating that my belief that as journalist, one is in a trusted position of power to disseminate news to the masses and with that power (excuse the cliche) comes responsibility. Blindly retweeting sensationalist things without fact checking is no better than shouting "Fire!" in a crowded building.
> The idea that hard-working asians are "maladjusted" is mostly veiled racism

NO IT'S NOT. I am asian american and have encountered many of these people in my life and career. these people are broken.
kdb+ is also very fast for real-time time series analysis and signal generation. Seeing Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse in the customer list made me wonder if memsql could become a competitor in the niche that kdb+ currently dominates?
Hello! You guys did great work; those forms have done perfectly... over 30,000 signups so far.

Thanks for saying hi!
The Secrets Of Cloth Simulation In Alan Wake
> The rocket equation is a harsh mistress

Love this, totally making it mine ;) Also, there is the problem of efficiency loss due to over/underexpansion as you switch from atmospheric to vacuum conditions, and I have never heard of a rocket engine with variable nozzle geometry to compensate for it.
Imagine K12 Announces Start Fund and Rolling Admissions
The Atlantic piece is light on details, but the Sunlight Foundation has a blog post describing the technology used for text pattern matching, titled "Churnalism US: the Nuts and Bolts" (http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/04/23/churnalism-tec...). They've released the core matching code, called SuperFastMatch, as free software (https://github.com/mediastandardstrust/superfastmatch).
Sometimes it is, on my job it is. At home it's more about having fun - seing the code compile/run, but just as much writing and reading the code.
It's not just filesync, but layman's backup too.

It's nice to be able to rollback/undelete files. Plus everyone is forgetting that Dropbox snagged Audiogalaxy a while back, so I'm expecting to be able to stream music back to myself from my Dropbox at some point as a service.

I just moved a bunch of stuff to btsync to mess with it but I still need to find a place offsite to keep it in addition if I want it to replace Dropbox. I'll likely use both tools in combination.
Makes sense. But that seems way more hackish than just doing it in the HTML.
I was hoping something like this would come about for Vert.x. While I like Vert.x and want to use it more, I personally have trouble wrapping my head around certain things about it.
For a while all YC startups were getting 150,000 in additional funding. I don't know exactly how the terms work as I don't know VC finance.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-32973_3-57554351-296/ron-conway-st...
Great questions. Revenue is where it's at!

Initially it was just a paid download for the text of the Bible.

With more research in the App Store though I realized audio Bibles were selling much more than I was.

So I outsourced the audio (mentioned in the post I think) and now the model is that users download the original app (with the text) for free, and then can buy the audio as an IAP.

This works great on multiple fronts: I collect more email address, I rank better in search because I get more downloads, and the audio sells better as an IAP than as a stand alone app.
CIO at Boston Marathon victims' hospital shares security lessons learned
Thanks for the note! Definitely intentional: the callback comes back, but since there's no user ID, you hit the vanilla callback page.

(Basically, I wanted to make sure that everybody would have the card open... it's just the messages that are private)
For all Elon Musk's libertarian rhetoric, he sure disregards it whenever expedient.
Fair enough - I had considered that to be on the axis since it's the minimum value, and thus not a tick, but visually it certainly is represented as a tick.

At any rate, the point I was trying to make is that they clearly expect you to throw a lot of hardware at these systems.
No. If it were Helvetica, the ends of the "e" and "s" would be horizontal. They are angled, so it's definitely not Helvetica.
Y Combinator of Education, Imagine K12, Brings Funding For Each Startup To $100K
FWIW, from a few months ago:

http://jtimberman.housepub.org/blog/2012/12/29/process-super...

tl;dr use runit