skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is Zach himself running the Kickstarter campaign (at least as far as I can tell). This isn't a stealth marketing campaign by a Hollywood distribution company, using Zach Braff as the front man. This is Zach the person. He may be a celebrity, and he may have tens of millions in the bank -- but if there's an interesting way to validate demand for his movie, market the movie, and partially finance it, why shouldn't he try? It's smart business.

Now, I understand the argument that the Zach Braffs and Rob Thomases of the world pose a danger to the future of truly independent artists and filmmakers. As I see it, there are two potential dangers here: 1) that they raise the creative and marketing bars beyond the level of the average Kickstarter artisan's ability to compete; 2) that they attract big companies, who will start subverting the Kickstarter spirit by using it to market, pre-sell, and finance Hollywood productions.

Of these two dangers, #1 hasn't seemed to materialize just yet (though the jury's still out). If anything, the presence of big names on Kickstarter seems to be shining more of a spotlight on the site -- and the rising tide may lift all boats. Danger #2, however, remains distant but possible. One can only hope that the market is smart enough to reward the deserving and punish/withhold from the undeserving. But we'll see.

In the meantime, I see no reason to limit Kickstarter to projects and people "who can't get funding elsewhere." Kickstarter should be a free marketplace for ideas. The quality of the ideas should drive the level of funding the ideas receive. If established filmmakers and stars want to trade off of their brands to get a leg up, so be it -- it seems to provide real value to their fans. Remember that there are real people in the "crowd" behind crowdfunding. If thousands of real people want to pay real money to see X product brought to life, why should we stop them?

If anything, Kickstarter may provide a real alternative to Hollywood financing for creatives who don't want to play the Hollywood game if they can help it. Aren't we supposedly rooting for that?
Yeah, in the optimistic financial planning they may be budgeting for a profit on every project? I always expect profits to be a fair bit lower than the back of the envelope estimates, so many little unaccounted for things come up.
This also points to why "apps" are a broken model.

We desperately need mobile device standards, and HTML5 is just one step on that needed path.

Could you imagine, if browser had to do this? (Say, you're on Firefox, thinking of using Chrome, & have to use a complicated feature that analyzed all of your most recently visited sites, & told you if those sites worked on Chrome, & then if not, showed you comparable sites)
The judges statements will already be in the public record, but I'm glad they're not mentioning his name prior to a conviction.
Introducing Categories
Pretty cool, few minor things :

1) You might want to restrict your own domain, e.g http://gowatchtower.com/preview?url=http://gowatchtower.com/...

2) Will you be able to get around X-Frame-Options ?

3) The ability to save page on an anonymous account before signing up may probably help conversions?
Show HN: Web API Authentication with SSH Public Keys
The Best Browser Extensions that Protect Your Privacy
From the article:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

Is there a central place were one can get a list of the mentioned agencies and who they are accountable to? If the Washington Post did all this research it would be great to see them create an online resource with their findings.
> it is a democracy

I would beg to differ. During the 65 years of its independence, Federal government in India has remained under the control of one single family (the Gandhi family). Being the "biggest democracy" is just a farce. Similarly, most of the state governments are under the control of a select few families.

> Indian citizens vote in elections and enjoy the freedom of movement

Not really. They are not allowed to protest. The Indian police has the right to use force against peaceful protestors, which it often uses. Google "lathicharge" and you will know what I am talking about. There is a huge lack of education, and in my opinion, giving someone the right to vote without the right to education doesn't mean anything. You can easily buy votes for $10.00 each.

There are reports that trillions of dollars equivalent of Indian money is stashed in offshore banks by Indian politicians. Hardly a week goes by before you hear about a multi-billion dollar scam. Some economists have argued that if all that money is brought back and distributed, every one would get around a 1000 USD, which is a lot in a country where 66% make less than 2 USD a day.

Unlike North Korea, India does have the money to feed its poor. But it never gets to the poor.

Update:
I failed to mention, that the government can "acquire" your land for pennies, anytime they want. This is what's happening in central India, where the govt. is taking away the land of people and giving it away to multinationals for mining.

And there are no human rights, whatsoever in India. The police detains and tortures people all the time. Actually that is the only investigation technique they have: detain a few suspects and beat them until one confesses, regardless whether he/she actually committed the crime.
Are you seriously going to 1) extrapolate graduate admissions to undergrad admissions, and 2) go against hard data with an anecdote?

For #1, grad schools are looking for extremely different things than undergrad. In fact, the plurality, if not majority, of grad admits at top schools are internationals. As another example, most PhD programs care about your research almost to the exclusion of all other factors. Extracurriculars? Don't matter very much.

Business school programs most heavily weight your work experience (followed by test scores, essays, and extracurriculars), which is why a lot of military officers get in, because of their impressive leadership-related work experience.
Arabs are classified as Caucasian
Thanks! Very little coverage of this story, appreciate the other links, slightly easier to read when the text isn't swimming in ads!
Gross margins vs net margins was all it took to put close to a 100 people on the dole. In a cut-throat industry it takes pretty precise bookkeeping to know what you can bid on a contract, if you think you're making 10% when you're actually making -10% growing your business is the worst thing you could possibly do. First you'd need to fix your margins, and if that is not possible and some competitor still outbids you then you should simply let it go. Otherwise you'll end up winning all the battles but you will still lose the war.
All I needed to hear was: "My last feature documentary was We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists." It was an outstanding documentary that managed to accurately describe anonymous --a feat in and of itself given how many entities in the news seemed incapable of doing so-- and didn't shy away from calling out its negative antics and highlighting the negative aspects of decentralized action, in addition to mentioning the positive effects.

Given Knappenberger's proven track record thus far, I have every reason to believe this would be an outstanding documentary if funded.
The problem is now you're stereotyping. It's like as if I said something patently untrue like "Black student life is just playing basketball" [and that's too "black" and not well-rounded] or something like that.

EDIT: Agreed with jlgreco, added [] to what I said earlier.
>there's a difference between understanding a basic concept (margins) and understanding its effect on you/your baby/your life.

That's absolutely true, but that's more of an abstract observation of human behavior. On the other hand, the author is stating that Mr. Sherman literally did not understand the basic math of margins (ex: that the more products they sold below cost, the more money they lost).

In my opinion, that's a completely ridiculous notion. Such statements are insulting and fit with the tone of the article, which essentially attacks Mr. Sherman as incompetent and a virtual imbecile. The author appears to have some other motive to be so bluntly disrespectful to someone who has passed. C.Y.A.? Personality conflicts? Something else? Who knows? But, since Mr. Sherman is not here to defend his actions or rationale, it seems a shame to allow these ridiculous memes about him to thrive.

I'm sure there is valid criticism that one can heap on Mr. Sherman's days at the helm of Ecomom and the decisions he made (including the one to discount products and give up his margin). If one wants to critique that, then it's fair game. But, to sit around and suggest that the man literally couldn't understand basic addition and subtraction is ridiculous. It is no credit to the author to insult the man when he's no longer here to defend himself.
This seems somewhat narrow, unfortunately. Suppose I have a laptop with an encrypted hard drive, and I'm known to use that laptop. It's going to be hard to convince someone that I don't own the laptop and drive, so it seems like the government could still compel me to decrypt it.

Of course, this would protect me if I happen to have encrypted hard drives scattered randomly around, but that's not typically how one would store data.
I'm not in favorite of pedophilia -- I'm just a spectator who wants to watch God fight.

God says...
C:\TAD\Text\WEALTH.TXT

, and with it, that of all the
leading men of British America. Men desire to have some share in the
management of public affairs, chiefly on account of the importance which
it gives them. Upon the power which the greater part of the leading
men, the natural aristocracy of every country, have of preserving
or defending their respective importance, depends the stability and
duration of every system of free government. In the attacks which those
leading men are continually making upon the importance of

----

fuck-em up God! They won't know what hit them!

God says...
C:\TAD\Text\QUIX.TXT

'If your head aches
rub ointment on your knees;' at any rate I'll make bold to swear that in
all the histories dealing with knight-errantry that your worship has read
you have never come across anybody disenchanted by whipping; but whether
or no I'll whip myself when I have a fancy for it, and the opportunity
serves for scourging myself comfortably."

"God grant it," said Don Quixote; "and heaven give thee grace to take it
to heart and own the obligation thou art under to help my lady, who is
thin

----

God says it's fat women's fault.
There is the very real question here - He got special dispensation to do the stuff at his work. It may be (I don't know but wouldn't be surprised if it was) logged/monitored by law enforcement, even if it isn't, the reasonable suspicion is there. So:

Would the judge, probation board, or whoever is in charge be ok with something like bitcoin? It is pretty linked in the popular mind with criminal doings.

Would any bitcoin exchange be OK with their development potentially being monitored by the government?

I think both of these are pretty likely answered in the negative.
I think this policy makes perfect sense. In the Netherlands we've put the borders wide open since the early 90s and perhaps even earlier due to EU legislation. Overall the results have been terrible. These are some of the issues we deal with nowadays:

- many immigrants are on welfare, this puts a huge economic pressure on our country.

- many immigrants of Middle-Eastern descent put a huge pressure on our healthcare (e.g. very many visits to our general practitioners).

- the culture of many Middle-Eastern immigrants doesn't merge very well with our Western culture. E.g. in Marrocan culture boys are generally higher regarded as girls. Additionally these boys are one of our biggest problem groups (very high criminality). Mothers don't have the means to correct these boys.

- I should note Marrocan girls seem to do pretty well in the Netherlands, low criminality and generally hard working students at school with good grades.

It's interesting when browsing fora of Dutch-Marrocan people (for example http.maroc.nl) you often see posts of Marrocan girls looking for converted (to Islam) Dutch guys to wed. These girls often prefer converted Dutch partner because the girls themselves would have more freedom in such a relation.

Many of these immigrants live close to each other. Since many woman don't work and are not allowed to leave home by themselves except for shopping / visiting the doctor, they often don't learn the Dutch language which results in them being socially excluded from the Dutch society.

In my opinion our own government failed big time on this. We should have had limited immigration from the start (early 70s or 80s perhaps?) and when people would come we should have made sure immigrants would be spread around cities, not living close to each other in "ghettos". This would have forced many immigrants to integrate better in our society.

Either way, I think unlimited immigration puts huge strains on society and eventually destabilises society as a whole because of culture clashes.
Live from Yahoo It’s Saturday Night
He was referring to JROTC, the high school activity.
Your reasons are wrong. There are many countries that meet those criteria.
When my eldest daughter had her visit at Princeton, it was pretty obvious that there was no cap at 5% Asian. On the other hand, why should they?

My youngest daughter was adopted from Korea, but our family heritage is almost entirely Swiss-German ... She's been part of our family since she was 11 months old, and she loves the ethnic German foods we eat (mostly Pennsylvania-Dutch type cooking), but is also fond of many Korean dishes (such as Bulgogi). What should an admissions office consider her ethnicity? A twist on the classic nature versus nurture conversation.
I don't remember if my college applications (not an ivy league school) asked my ethnicity, but on principle I always answer "prefer not to say" anytime I'm asked in a form. It's just a dumb criteria for anything.
Idioms, or How to Write Perlish Perl
There are unsortable or only partially sortable numbers, depending on your number system; it's not a problem if you can restrict yourself to real numbers, though.

But they never said that numbers were the only thing in the array.
Mixpanel pricing
Did you read the analysis? I mean, the length of his critique should already tip you off, since Unz's article takes at least 2-3 hours to read. Gelman only criticizes Unz's assertion that Jews are overrepresented.

Gelman says in that critique that he agrees there is an underrepresentation of Asians.
They Should Paint The Bay Bridge Gold
I presume this strongly depends on the location -- a slightly marginal location where the natural state is not particularly crowded would have a strong incentive to pull in more customers, even campers, to give it a vibe of "the place to be." Such locations probably have lower rents as well, and can afford larger spaces.

However places in prime locations and densely populated neighborhoods can be packed 95% of the time, whatever they do. For them, the tradeoffs are very different...
The labor market for programmers isn't really overheated
The startup, the lawyer, the Quora question, and the $1.2M seed round
If you truly believe that photography is nothing more than framing, then you have a very limited understanding of the medium. Given the same camera, same subject and same point of view (let's take a still life setup and a camera with a prime lens anchored firmly to a locked studio camera stand) I can make any number of completely different photographs that convey very different meanings and emotions. And that's before making any darkroom/post-processing decisions.
There can be a problem, though, with very uneven types of protectionism. For instance, suppose both apples and oranges are both subjected to very high tariffs. Then, you remove all tariffs from oranges, but leave them high on apples. you should expect domestic production to shift to apples and foreign production to shift to oranges, to the extent possible.

I can see how you would feel that creating more work visas would lead to a freer market. However, if these visas are heavily concentrated in STEM fields, this may end up producing a very distorted market that deters US citizens from pursuing degrees in this field.

One of the provisions of the immigration bill is to grant green cards to graduates of US-based STEM programs at the MS or PhD leve. Rather than a more general liberalization of immigration, that's just the sort of highly specific, targeted program that can produce severe market distortions.

Many of the people who object to these visas actually support more general liberalization of immigration - they just object to visa programs that are based on the notion that we need to use immigration specifically to increase the size of the STEM workforce. This is because they believe, as this article suggests, there is no shortage of STEM workers.
kyro did not claim there was a 5% cap on the proportion of Asians at schools. He claimed that the admissions pool was drawn out of the top 5% of each ethnic bracket. Those are two different things.
Internet pionner? Common! This has gone to far, a movie just for that kid? No way! At most he is an entrepreneur with great ideas that had a lame death.
I doubt he didn't get it, he just wasn't interested and thought he could make it work just by watching sales. He wanted a target that made sense to him. Obviously a flawed approach in the field he was in, ultimately.
Examining the Thiel Fellowship: Where are they now?
Rust I think has more potential to eventually replace C/C++. Besides having modern language features, it still allows the programmer to get down into the nuts and bolts of how memory is being used. (Not that I feel Rust is perfect either...)

Go has some cool features... but I have yet to find a really compelling reason to use it over anything else. I also find it to be kinda gross looking. (But maybe I am just weird in that respect?)
Some people just love to find ways of asking about big-O without asking about it.
By the success of the campaigns I must clearly be in the minority here, but I find the use of Kickstarter by millionaires to be offensive.

I perfectly understand his unwillingness to give up creative control. That's respectable. But Zach Braff has GOT to have 2 million dollars. He could totally fund this himself.
Would you say that electrical engineers from MIT benefit from an "old-boys-network"?
The Future of Mozilla: Fast Second Follow
Obviously it comes down to the judge's judgement call (no pun intended) but based on this ruling there could perhaps be other ways to cause doubt which lead to this ruling, for example could you argue that your laptop has the ability for you to use it without unencrypting said drive, while potentially allowing one or more other people to use the encrypted part? Or if you are using encrypted files (e.g. TrueCrypt but not encrypting an entire drive) then having multiple encrypted files, perhaps even labelled in a way to suggest multiple users, such as stored in a folder called "Shared storage"?

Obviously all these things would need to look like they were genuine rather than thought-up for legal purposes, so I imagine if I ever ended up in this situation this comment might act against me... but as a non-American, the fifth is unlikely to be relevant anyway. On top of the fact that I currently have no encrypted drives.

Even without circumstantial suggestions that there are multiple options, I wonder if you could simply make the argument that possession of a single encrypted drive does not indicate usage of said drive, and therefore there is no reason to believe you have access to the encrypted contents?
Realistically, however, gold's utilitarian value does not even come close to accounting for its actual value. Sure, you wouldn't lose all your investment if the gold market suddenly collapsed, but you would still lose the vast majority of it.

Even in Misesian economic theory, the utilitarian value is primarily accountable for originally popularizing a commodity's use as one or more of the three uses of currency (store of value, transfer of value, measurement of value), not for its continued use in those roles.
And my anecdotal experience says there is not a ton of demand for skilled programmers. Guess we're back where we started now.
From an InfoQ interview:

"InfoQ: How does it compare with Google Go?

GH: Go's a good language. It's less complex than Rust, but also less ambitious. So you can pick your poison. Go's memory model, for example, has no concept of isolating memory between co-routines or threads, nor of controlling mutability. Everything can always race on the same global mutable heap. Similarly it has only one kind of pointer, which can always be null, and all pointers in all co-routines are subject to a single, global garbage collector. Rust statically differentiates all these cases, divides memory and pointers up into different types, which means we can control safety and performance much better, but at the cost of the programmer having to think more. Rust also provides a few extra "modern bits" that Go lacks: generic types, destructors, disjoint unions, that sort of thing. But to its credit, Go gets a lot of mileage out of the stuff it included, and I'm glad it's making headway."

http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/08/Interview-Rust
You'd be rejecting most deals, then, because what Spark is doing is unusual.
http://www.dunstanbaby.com/

The stress may come from the crying of your child. My older brother and his wife had the same stress problems (don't know about the resentment part), but mainly due to the fact that they couldn't understand what the baby wants from his crying. The frustration of not being able to appease that cry can in fact produce great stress, try the Baby Listener's advice. It worked for my brother and his wife. Search for videos about it.
Tomphoolery's point was that his name was included in the Judge's statements quoted in this article, i.e. that even though they avoided using it in the text they wrote themselves, the article still included it.
bitcoin-B would not be bitcoins, nobody would use them, and they would at best be tulip bulbs.

Unless you are using them to do something different then currency.
Oh, I see what you're griping about with regard to my "worldview".

Yes, I do believe that SV is a pressure cooker. I'm not sure if that one opinion represents a "worldview" and I'm not sure who actually disagrees with the observation, but you're certainly free to do so.

Still, that was literally just a side note (as I mentioned). It has no bearing on the ridiculousness of the suggestion that Mr. Sherman literally couldn't add, subtract, or multiply.
> When I grew up, Switzerland's population was 7 million. Now it's 8. That almost 9% growth.

Switzerland's projected population growth for 2000-2050 is 1.8%.

Just for comparison Australia's population growth over the same period is 28.9%.

Source: http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/Australia/Switzerland/Pe...
A better question would be "how much blood on your hands" it takes.

Huge money is never totally innocent -- even if you invented the drug that cures cancer.
More on ways to get the word out on your shiny new SaaS would be wonderful.