skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is also an excellent clip showing stepped leaders in extremely slow-motion (the electrical leaders that lead to lightning strikes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLWIBrweSU8
Why not start with the customer first?
Ask them questions to uncover their workflow...then pose questions like "what really makes you want to pull your hair out when it comes to doing xyz"...

Also at the OP said, any thing that involves communicating with phone + manual work - things businesses are already doing - are opportunities (potentially)
I suspect it's something like "don't use it unless you need to".
The state of modules in javascript
Thanks. I'm more comfortable with R, but I'm trying to wean Excel junkies off of Excel, and something like this (Python and SQL within Excel) seems like a good gateway drug. Sadly, RStudio is a bit too big of a leap for that.
Yeah, it was really meant as more of a dark joke than a serious point. But it does make you wonder what people consider "serious enough" to warrant a trip to the hospital, given that medical costs are so high.
> simply driven to profit

Really? Then they are pretty bad at it. At least short term. They don't seem to be monetising any of their recent projects.
Design a Recurring Revenue Model for your Startup
When I was building the Stumbleupon toolbar for IE way back in the day (2009ish?), we decided that we were going to use two things that made our life extremely easy: 1) Javascript and 2) SQLite. We basically had some C++ code that exposed SQLite to the embedded JS, and ended up writing the majority of the code in JS rather than C++.

SQLite was a fantastic embedded DB that was trivial to integrate with the JS engine in Win32. I don't recall ever having to deal with any support issues around corrupted databases.

It looks like the IE toolbar is still using SQLite to this day - you can explore stumbledata.db from any SQLite explorer.
Where does the article conflate Google with a governmental body?
What the fuck are you talking about?

A longer diagonal does not imply a larger screen with variant aspect ratios. To compare two screens based on their diagonal is fine if they have the same aspect ratio and I have no problem with ads doing just that, but this here is utterly unacceptable. There is no weaseling out of this. You cannot redefine screen size as diagonal length, that makes no sense with variant aspect ratios.

I’m also not really aware of such brain-dead comparisons being widespread in ads and official documents. Sure, it’s an easy enough mistake for consumers to make (especially since the diagonal is used so often in ads, even if not in comparisons), but if companies make that mistake, than that’s stepping over the line. By a mile.

There is nothing acceptable about this. Nothing at all.

(I can believe that this was a honest mistake, some intern screwed up or something. Shit happens. As I said, it’s easy to assume that the diagonal tells the whole story. So I would definitely not jump to the conclusion that this is some evil plot – but I cannot fathom how anyone can honestly belief that this is somehow defensible and might be in any way acceptable if it were not a honest mistake but intentional.)
It's such a surreal concept to me that having to be picked up by emergency services will cost you money. I feel so incredibly lucky to live in a country where healthcare is free.
Oh right, but there is a company that profits from Android market share!

http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-most-profitable-mobile-opera...

(Not sure what this chart is showing share of, since it doesn't correspond to the 74% Android and 3.2% Windows Phone chart that has been circulated lately.)
Life After Harvard?
Stumbled on this... does anyone know the author? Something to keep an eye on for sure. lifeafterharvard.com
In fairness, I thought it was a quality piece otherwise. It was probably just something her editor threw in.
Interesting that he had just moved to North Carolina. Strangely enough, NC is very high up (#4) on the list of "most dangerous states for lighting accidents"[1].

I'm not not sure exactly what it is about NC that makes us so prone to lightning related accidents, but we sure do have a lot of them. I'd always speculated that it was something to do with geography / climate... just the right sort of semi-tropical climate to have lots of severe late-afternoon summertime thunderstorms or something. But when you look at the top 10 list, they seem to be fairly spread out. South, Southeast, Midwest, Southwest and Northeast all represented. The only conspicuous absence, to me, is the Pacific Northwest.

Edit: Did some more exploring... this graphic[2] makes it more apparent that there may be a geographic / climatic correlation. Southern states, Eastern states and Southwestern states seem to be particularly prone to lighting strikes and damage, with the Midwest, West and Pacific Northwest seemingly safer.

But, when you weight by population, the pattern seems much more muddled and nonsensical. Hmm...

[1]: http://weather.about.com/od/thunderstormsandlightning/tp/lig...

[2]: http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_lls/fatalities_us.html
>Photo management is still broken – we want to change that.

Are you sure? Really really sure? There are countless photo management web, desktop and mobile apps.
A Tactical Apron For Chefs Who Take Their BBQ Very Seriously
Interview with a Blackhat (Part 3/3)
Slightly off topic, but has anyone built an Excel-esque program on top of SQL? I feel like something of the sort could really be an improvement, as now it'd be easy for end users (who normally use excel) and developers to collaborate on the same data.
Personally, having it backed by Google makes Go better in my opinion. I feel a ton of smart, very insane individuals are working on it and it can only get better.

Nimrod? Never heard of it or the person backing it.

I'm _not_ a language snob, trust me! I'm just a regular, family guy, software developer and I try to put my proverbial eggs in reliable baskets.

Go doesn't seem to be going away any time soon and it's really really fast.
As a former google wave developer, I can only say that I hope this isn't the case. Wave's federation protocol embedded an XML-like data structure (wavelets) in protobufs (binary) which were then encoded using base64 and embedded in XMPP extensions (ie, more XML).

That way lies madness.
Guns are general purpose self-defense tools.

Do you believe that self-defense is legitimate?

If so, why not with guns?

In the US at least, guns are used about 2.25 million times a year in self-defense. Rather obviously, only a very tiny fraction of these incidents result in death, in fact, the vast majority don't even involve a gun being fired, e.g. the display of one with the obviously willingness to use it if pressed is sufficient. And legally, we and the police are not allowed to kill per se, only to stop (killing is reserved to the judicial system).

You've also left out the middle uses of rural areas, where guns are necessary tools to keep various wildlife, generally in the class of "varmints", in check, in part because we've killed off or driven off many predators in favor of keeping our children etc. safer. They're also used in a much more managed way to keep e.g. deer populations in check, that's win-win-win for all concerned (government has the private sector do it and pay for the privilege, the private individuals benefit, and the public e.g. has fewer deer to crash into, they are the most deadly animal in the US...).
Will usually come out to ~$500 even after insurance (at least in California, where I've been in an ambulance a few times -- much to my displeasure)
I respect you a lot Michael, but don't you think perhaps you are romanticizing the past a bit too much here? I mean there was a time when tech advancements were more fundamental simply because you couldn't do as much in software. What makes you think VCs have changed so much?
> hate to be a jerk, but why so many first-world problem startups?

Short answer, because it's easy. Any developer can build a photo management app. It's a known quantity.
One thing I always have in the back of my mind is to work hard to avoid hating anyone because they're good at what they do

Stop right there. None of us hate people who are good at what they do. When we find someone who's better, we seek that person out and try to learn as much as we can. I'd believe this to be especially true on HN, where there's an above-normal proportion of top-5% programmers, many of whom rarely get that opportunity to learn from someone of truly superior skill.

The problem with political players is that, while they suck at what they do, they're great at hacking evaluation processes and making themselves look superior. That hurts everyone (except them) because their shitty decisions and ideas result in a widespread proliferation of crap.
> But just throwing a new protocol over the wall and creating more walled gardens is not cool.

Well, what financial incentive does Google have for creating a completely open and free communication standard?
>The whole page is a great example of black-hat marketing.

You mean similar to the Marketing tricks we now see everywhere?

The use of $X.99 or $X99.99 to subconsciously trick your brain into seeing a lower price point

The use of bold fonts to re-enforce the message

The choice of colors - Eg: Hollywood with Blue and Orange for posters and covers to enforce the cool and energetic feel.

I can agree that the page uses clever marketing but seriously black-hat? Not even remotely close.
لعبة مكعبات خريطة الكنز
لعبة مكعبات خريطة الكنز

لعبة, مكعبات ,خريطة, الكنز

http://www.dlu3a.com/Game-316.html
Question is, were you dropped somewhere with or without a smartphone? :-)

My personal rule is absolutely no googling. I've been tempted to print out a list of all the phone area codes and take it with me in my virtual alien-ship-to-random-destinations since that is something I could actually do were I preparing for such a scenario.
North Carolina is on the eastern ass-end of a common circulation pattern of cold fronts. They get a lot of the big squall-line fronts with heavy/torrential downpours in storm cells, while the mountains act as an extra lifting mechanism.

With that combo, you get much more lightning overall. This may account for the high death rate.

The Pacific Northwest has much fewer thunderstorms where population is concentrated. Go east of the cascades and there are far more storms, but far fewer people.
While I am really looking forward to IPv6, I am slightly dissapointed about global addresses. Granted, globally routable adresses is the main (only) thing that is getting me exited for IPv6, but there is something nice about being able to go into a new network and only need to remember "2.10" for an IP address. (Espessial when all the IPs I care about are set to the low "0.x").
> This article uses the term "realtime"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_web
"The real-time web is fundamentally different from real-time computing"
It is easy to dismiss these vulnerabilities from a perspective of a common desktop user. "I already have privileges on this box" or "any desktop user already has a way to escalate privileges."

But X11 is also used in process control settings where crappy ancient programs run on decrepit old machines with modern X.org servers used for displays. Would we be so dismissive if someone revealed a host of major vulnerabilities in VNC or RDP clients? (Probably. :))
Car2Go is an amazing idea! I really hope they don't raise their prices as well since it's actually cheaper than Lyft or Sidecar + you get to drive!
Isn't that exactly an argument why it had to be abandoned? The government couldn't increase the money supply, because dollars had to be backed by gold.
isn't there also a condition where electicical voltage-lysed cells spill out their contents and trigger cascading apoptosis, leading to death, but only after a few days? I don't know if there's a prophylaxis for this, but if there is, it might seem prudent.
I'm _really_ hurting for money this month, and couldn't even afford $100 for anything at the moment. I just committed to spending $350 on an attorney to review my TOS to be sure it's going to be effective in my use case. But I'll keep odesk in mind for July when I have a new budget to work with.

Another thing I just committed to is $1.61/day each ad spend on both Facebook & Google AdWords, which equates to $100/month, and is about all I can afford- leaving me with little or no money for things like coffee shops or breakfast diners for myself. Hopefully it'll be enough to bring in _something_.

I'm currently on disability, but I just applied for a part-time job at a grocery store today in hopes of raising enough to cover Google AdWords & drawing some traffic to the site. If I get the job, I'll be able to spend a couple hundred on odesk like you say.

Of course, if someone would like to help for free, I'd certainly be happy to accept their assistance. My hosting doesn't support _any_ server-side scripting however, so everything has to be strictly static html. Which is unfortunate because I have a lifetime Mixpanel membership I'd love to use with it.

Thanks for your reply.
That doesn't sound like an offense that should be hellbanned.

I can put it another way: if your comments contribute then your account shouldn't be banned. External factors don't matter at all. Even if you're hitler.

So it doesn't matter if there was something behind the scenes, it should have been dealt with there.
Business Cat
Yeah, and there are places where people want to use their computers where there's no power. For example, on airplanes.

More airplanes are getting internet, and power.
Many Americans don't even realize how expensive an ambulance ride is until they go through it. It just seems counterintuitive.
There are two independent parts. The Z monad is nothing more than a ReaderT monad giving access to some config and environment information. Since it's a transformer they can execute actions in higher monads (like IO) pretty easily from Z, but it can also be used in pure code if you just need the configuration information.

Parallel to that is the ZResultT monad. It's built on the ZResult monad (it should be easy enough to write a Monad instance for it anyway) which looks like an Identity monad with some "Z-specific" error handling layered in. ZResultT just lets you have a transformer stack interleaved with the ZResults.

Then you combine those two stacks in ZZ which gives you both "Z-related" configuration and "Z-related" error states.

It looks like the whole thing is specialized to make it easy to build functions pure functions which only need a handful of the effects and then weave them together into the ZZ monad which is likely to be run at the top level, right below Yesod.
Tell HN: AT&T added fees on their service; now you can cancel the contract 
AT&T added $0.61 fee on all mobile phone service.

Per the following AT&T contract, now you have an opportunity to cancel your current contract without an early termination fee:

1.3 Can AT&T Change My Terms And Rates?

We may change any terms, conditions, rates, fees, expenses,
or charges regarding your Services at any time. We will
provide you with notice of material changes (other than
changes to governmental fees, proportional charges for
governmental mandates, roaming rates or administrative
charges) either in your monthly bill or separately. You
understand and agree that State and Federal Universal
Service Fees and other governmentally imposed fees,
whether or not assessed directly upon you, may be
increased based upon the government's or our calculations.
IF WE INCREASE THE PRICE OF ANY OF THE SERVICES TO WHICH
YOU SUBSCRIBE, BEYOND THE LIMITS SET FORTH IN YOUR CUSTOMER
SERVICE SUMMARY, OR IF WE MATERIALLY DECREASE THE
GEOGRAPHICAL AREA IN WHICH YOUR AIRTIME RATE APPLIES (OTHER
THAN A TEMPORARY DECREASE FOR REPAIRS OR MAINTENANCE),
WE’LL DISCLOSE THE CHANGE AT LEAST ONE BILLING CYCLE IN
ADVANCE (EITHER THROUGH A NOTICE WITH YOUR BILL, A TEXT
MESSAGE TO YOUR DEVICE, OR OTHERWISE),

AND YOU MAY TERMINATE THIS AGREEMENT WITHOUT PAYING AN EARLY
TERMINATION FEE OR RETURNING OR PAYING FOR ANY PROMOTIONAL
ITEMS,

PROVIDED YOUR NOTICE OF TERMINATION IS DELIVERED TO
US WITHIN THIRTY (30) DAYS AFTER THE FIRST BILL REFLECTING
THE CHANGE
I am not a crazy anti-healthcare nut as this comment will make me appear, but I think you mean "healthcare is paid for by others/collectively", since it isn't free to provide services, unless your doctors are working for no money.
The best parts of python... are C.
Google lets you choose how they spend £500,000 to create a better world
DBD::SQLite remains one of my greatest successes - so glad you like it.

So many projects I have prototyped using SQLite (although for most I later upgrade to PostgreSQL). Such a great little tool, and building DBD::SQLite the way I did (including all the source) made it so easy for anyone to install.
I'm not really sure I have an answer to that as I'm just figuring it out as I go. The most typical customer would be a first-time homeowner, early 30s, and 18-36 months post-grad school. At that point, you've accumulated a lot of debt, but likely have a well-paying job and stable career.

Everyday, I question if the Internet is the best place to market something like this and if a price point in the $5-$15/month range is too low. Eventually you start to creep up towards the level of service that a personal financial advisor would offer. But, I have limited desire to support the asset-side of household balance sheets (401K, stock investments, cash, etc). It's not that I don't want to go down that path, it's just that there are many more variables once you start to incorporate investment objectives, risk tolerance, return forecasting, and stochastic outcomes.

The other marketing challenge is how to cater towards people outside the US. In Europe especially, there are some crazy forms of credit made to people which have all sorts of embedded optionality. I used to work for a bank, building models to forecast this kind of stuff and it was such a challenge looking at it from the lender's perspective, I can only imagine the confusion from the borrower's point of view.
At a mathematical level, it's pretty elegant how quantum mechanics works. At the level of the article, not so much.

Once you get the math (and it really kind of clicks all at once), it's not too hard. The problem is that the math has a lot of historical baggage and the ways of translating equations into prose are not the most effective I think.

The whole "uncertainty" thing bothers me. I think there's better ways of expressing this concept to the public.

I am, however, bothered by the fact that QM is not deterministic. Most experiments have ruled out loopholes for a deterministic universe, but it still just weirds me out that randomness is inherent to the measurement of observables.
Well, some people disagree with the idea that the inability of the government to increase the money supply means the system doesn't work.
But very few of them really solve the problem well. And as photos are quite universal form of expression, there is need for multiple solutions: a professional magazine photographer have different needs than a serious hobbyist who again has different needs than a mom photographing her kids and sharing photos to grandparents, and the mom differs from a teen who wants to express him/herself to find a new friends and get laid.

After searching for a couple of years for solution my needs, I finally found Everpix, which is really really good, but it still doesn't handle sharing as well as I'd like to.

There is a lot of room for innovation or just plain good execution left in the photo space.
Relevant XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/927/
Ah, sorry about that. Most people in Britain would be delighted and honoured to be invited to see ER...
And in the same time, their competitors (Facebook, who isn't known for being open exactly) can use the same resources to push out more features.

Being open only helps in that users see it as a feature. Right now, not enough users see it as a feature to make being open as a priority for this product. And those who do prioritize openness are already starting to move away from google because it's gotten too big.

So google gains what, again?
Doesn't that "gross an unappealing" apply to most US advertising.

I don't know about you, but I thought commercials in my country (Netherlands) were stupid until I watched US television. I felt my IQ dropping with each commercial.

Also: advertising prescription pharmaceuticals, and in a way that would embarrass your local street drug dealer...
And you can always bite them then.
It "only" works in Chrome. That's a problem.

//

Limited in ie, firefox and mobile.
IETF is probably hyperbole, but it's a valid concern. Publishing an open standard leaves you vulnerable to people expecting you to support it, especially in terms of backwards compatibility. If Google is agile and pushes a new version of the standard (obviously supported by their infrastructure) weekly that breaks backwards compatibility (which they can do because they control the entire ecosystem), they will be criticized for not taking openness serious, because competing implementations will always be playing catch-up and thus never become a viable competitor.

A completely good faith (and perhaps naive) read on the situation is that they need to settle the protocol to the point where they can commit to some level of good faith long term support and giving proper notice of breaking changes, then they'll release it.
> My experience has been that the type system plus Haddock docs are frequently enough for me to figure out a library even without any prose documentation at all. This, to me, is a huge advantage of Haskell. The types only fit together one way, and that way is the correct one. When using a library with well-designed types, you basically can't get it wrong.

This is (a) exactly true and (b) a huge problem. For the expert Haskeller it's usually fairly trivial to figure out the semantics and operations of a library by exploring the types. This means that few experts are incentivized to explain the concepts of their libraries well. This is doubly compounded by the fact that so many Haskell paradigms are uniform across all libraries so it's easy to say "it's got a Alternative-Bifunctor-Semigroup interface" and assume the user will figure out what that means elsewhere.

Now, genuinely new abstractions like `pipes` get very thorough documentation because it pays to teach new abstractions just once. That stuff really ought to be decorating all of the stable, introductory libraries, though. Without it the entirety of Hackage looks terribly uninviting.
I think everyone in the world understands free healthcare to mean free at the point of service.
Its a search engine, and I have many services working together.
I haven't written a for loop in 6 months. Underscore is the shit.
Patio11 is kinda cute in a geeky kind of way (woman in the closet about her predilection towards nerdy types...excuse the lack of PCness Patrick)....

Anyhoo, on a different note, the material on hybrid sales was most interesting.

I believe it was David (Skok) who mentioned how much adding just one additional touch balloons customer acquisition costs considerably.

http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/business-models/the-touchles...

IMHO, an unaccounted touch in the sales process is probably one of the hidden costs that harms new businesses the most. The fact is, many business owners just don't track these steps in their workflow or sales process (failing to understand that when they want to scale, they'll need to add more staff and HR costs considerably)
Yes,

In the mobile world everyone is playing catch up with Apple.

In the desktop world everyone is playing catch up with Microsoft.

In the search world everyone is playing catch up with Google.

In business you play catch up with the industry leader till you become one. Its part of being a business. Your Point?
Did you try PyPy? I'm genuinely curious.
It is only free for one year. if you need free private repositories, you should stick to bitbucket