skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The current leader on angel.co for blended metaphors may still be "Mint for X". It seems like "Uber for X" is destined to replace it, but its popularity is still staggering.

AngelList has startups which are primarily described as Mint.com for "stocks" (Vuru), "financial institutions" (MoneyDesktop), "banks" (MyJibe), "student loans" (Tuition.io), "education" (Always Prepped), "cloud content" (AnyCloud), "your digital data" (voyurl), "your time" (Meexo Labs), "your career" (Mighty Spring), "your belongings" (Itemology), "relationships" (EvenBetterHalf), "maternal and pediatric health" (HealthyUs), "fitness" (Curl), "health and fitness" (Total Health Card), "medical records" (ExtrinsicCare), "diabetes" (HealthEngage), "legal services" (AttorneyFee), "sales software" (Stride), "enterprise marketing departments" (Allocadia), "small business marketing" (BringShare), "business relationships" (Mosec), "business" (Cheqbook), "consumer utilities" (dropcountr), "energy" (MyEnergy), "energy usage and expenses" (Power2Switch), "mobile payments" (Wallet), "cars" (Price My Ride), "insurance" (PolicyOwl), and "travel" (Superfly).

Whew. And I didn't even include the ones that are something else plus Mint.com for X.

Honestly, after going through this list I'm not sure what "Mint for X" even means anymore! Cynically, I suspect it means the technology they're hoping to apply is pie charts and snappy web design.
That makes sense. I was over-thinking it.
Near the end of a fairly successful and long programming career I made the mistake of taking a QA job (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5785759 for some details) and boy, was it a mistake. No matter how sophisticated the work, QA people get no respect.

It might be better than no job, but I suspect if you start out with one it could have a long term detrimental effect on your career (I escaped that because my QA job ended with a demanding software project and the company was independantly of my group going down the tubes, Lucent made a bad bet on next generation technology, and in trying to catch up, shipped a ton of equipment that didn't work ... and financed too much of their equipment sales, which ended badly when too many of those companies went bankrupt; see http://www.amazon.com/Optical-Illusions-Lucent-Crash-Telecom... for lots more details).
This is also a problem, patents just happen to be the more immediate issue.
I think you missed the point. I wasn't offering confirmation bias+cherry-picking as an interesting phenomenon alongside "expert intuition." I was suggesting that the latter is nothing more than a manifestation of the former.
No. It's because MSIE for Windows wouldn't run on MacOS and they couldn't use Wine. (MSFT would never do that.)
No, it doesn't, because 99 people in a room controlling 61 pieces of a pie aren't as influential as 1 man controlling 39 pieces of pie.

He has very real, formidable power. The least influential of the 99 will dislike that. They all have to share their 61 pieces - in practice, a significant fraction have no pieces of pie.

Analogy aside, the way this model of wealth plays out is that the 1% are typically the only outlier, and the other 99% don't all control the remaining wealth in the same way - they don't have a disproportionate amount to their own percentile, or a number larger than themselves.

But disproportionate amounts of money is potentially good - think of what billionaires can do if they are so inclined.
> Chrome extensions, Chrome sync, Chrome packaged apps

All those things are not enabled for web content. They are additional things that Chrome does, but they do not change how websites are built - they do not change the toolkit of things that web content has available to it.

If you add an extension to Chrome as a user, or use Chrome's syncing, that's fine. You're modifying the browser in a way that you want. But if Chrome adds a feature to web content that is nonstandard, then it risks fragmenting the web: Some sites will use it, and they will only work in Chrome. That's what the standards process is meant to avoid.
Support for asm.js in Chrom{e,ium} was announced at Google I/O, though.
There would be very little legal risk associated with selling this on the black market. The problem would be finding the buyer. The prosecution would have to prove that the seller knew for a fact that he was selling the vulnerability to a known criminal.
Absolutely. Cigarettes were good for health too. Pretty much anything that makes an industry is good for you, until it's not. I highly doubt that GMO is different.
> It's because of stuff like this that Cloud Computing is not a very good solution

Yes it's the technologies fault. It's not the policies or the ridiculous regulations...
It's not because judges think warrants are a headache. It's because judges are deathly scared of being perceived as "judicial activists." The story of the judiciary of the last 20-30 years is the story of the backlash against the judiciary for liberal activism during the 1960's and 1970's, and a subsequent tendency to defer to the political branches whenever possible.

As against the other two branches, all the court has is political capital. Nothing stops the President or Congress from just ignoring a court decision. The judiciary spent tremendous political capital during the civil rights era, and doesn't have enough left to battle the current era of overreaches in the name of national security. And in any case, national security was always one of the areas in which the executive branch was considered to be supreme over the other two branches.
I didn't get that. Besides, the thing you are disingenuously failing to understand is that while wealth grows and is not a finite thing on long time scales, the growth is slow enough that controlling 40% of the currently existing wealth, and a sudden surge to say 10% total wealth increase in the next year (a big jump) going only to people not in the top 1%, would still leave those people with a huge disproportion of wealth ownership. It takes a huge amount of mental gymnastics to pretend this is is something that could change any moment because wealth is not fixed amount resource.
please, no game theory or social modeling necessary...

Talking about nature, on the Serengeti you see a handful of lion and thousands of zebra. In the ocean you see a couple of whales and millions of fish. Now who doesn't want to see thousands of lions or whales?
But it hasn't happened. ever. in nature. So its safe to assume we aren't going to do any better.
All we can try to do is ensure everyone has an equal shot at becoming a lion if they so choose. Most people are perfectly happy being Zebra imho.
Their demo page fails to take into account pixel density, which is a shame since serving the right image to the right device is their entire justification.

Those images look awful on my Chromebook Pixel.
Huge Asteroid Makes Its Closest Pass To Earth Today
No kidding. How about Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, Pioneer, Dow Agro? There are many players in agriculture, it's a huge industry.
Only if they can prove that you knew exactly who you were selling to and for what purpose. This is a pretty high standard to meet...
One guy had one bad experience as a gameplay tester, and now it's time for all gaming contractors to strike? That's a pretty big leap.

This sounds like a typical story of poor management in any industry: Lack of communication, failure to follow through on performance review policy, hostile work environment, inability to recognize and allocate talent, etc. Then again, we're relying entirely on this guy's self-assessment for that last part. This bit in particular set off some alarm bells for me:

> I took the job by the horns and ran with it. I did everything I could to stand out. I asked a ton of questions about code, the debug, the game modes, everything. I talked to all the producers and developers and level designers I could to ensure we were on the same page and also so they would know my name.

Despite his good intentions, he might have inadvertently gone too far and turned himself into "that guy". You know, the one who people see coming from a mile away and think "Shit, here he comes to bug me with a million pointless questions again." Ambition is a good thing, but sometimes they just want you to do the job they hired you for and stop distracting other employees, and those other employees only have so much patience for the new guy who keeps asking questions.
I've been working at a standing desk for a few weeks and I don't think I could ever go back to sitting all day. My neck and shoulders feel so much better. Getting a nice mat to stand on is definitely the key though, otherwise your ankles and knees will start to feel it.
I don't think Gawker was banned because of the articles. I think it was banned because tons of their articles were getting submitted whether they were relevant or not, spamming up the "new" page.
You shouldn't joke about that stuff. I know for a fact that every single creature that has ever consumed it later dies.
>unprecedented potential to save billions of lives

Potential, yes; but not with massive financial interests behind it. In a world where shiploads of wheat are held back in order to game the wheat market, things need to change before GMOs can cure 3rd world hunger.

I've read that GMOs have to be bought anew for every season because the harvested crops can't be used as seeds. Is that actually true?
The package manager I work on for Dart supports something similar: a package can which version(s) of the Dart SDK itself that it works with.
"Metadata" in this context is such a silly concept. It's another example of the hilarity that ensues when lawmakers attempt to use analogies to shoehorn digital concepts into the traditions of physical reality.
As I understand it, the trouble is that money isn't evidence, necessarily (while Dotcom's server data would be) and civil seizure of money only applies to the proceeds of a crime. If you're a mob boss, you probably have lawyers and accountants working to keep the illegally-earned money out of your legitimate bank accounts.
I currently work from home and am interested in a new job in SV, however all of the companies I have spoken with will not allow me to telecommute 2-3 days per week.

I don't see any reason why I need to give up 2 hours of my day traveling to / from work on the days when I need to work exclusively on coding.

So I'll stay where I am.
Note: definitely worth reading the comments, especially from Sarah Bird (COO at Moz), and the Inbound thread and comments - http://www.inbound.org/articles/view/how-seomoz-sent-us-a-ta...
On Code Complexity
There's a difference between a functioning market for something and your ability to one-off 1:1 contracts for things. Hyperbolic comparison: you can also pay to have someone killed, but random people on the Internet don't have access to a market for putting out hits.
I live in Austin. Same concentration of crazy smart people, only with less attitude. Did I mention that you can actually buy a house here? With a chance of paying it off? And a 25 minute commute?

THIS is why 1 of every 50 cars in Austin has a California license plate.

EDIT: there's less access to VC money here. But that doesn't seem to be stopping people.
Amazon Updates Route 53 DNS Service
This website was blocked by my company's firewall as "suspicious."
You're being downvoted because your comment is inane, off topic, and adds nothing of value to the conversation. Even the grandparent quotation from Back to the Future suffers from the same problem and is being downvoted.
How do I do this?!
If you say so. I think you're probably wrong about this.
Many of the structures that make up our society (jails, taxes, laws, rulers) were not "our" creation, but the creation of kings.

When those kings were deposed, rather than abolishing the structures those kings had created, they were instead largely preserved and put under "democratic" control.

It could be that this was a mistake: that there's something structurally intrinsic to the instruments of monarchies that can not be eradicated, regardless of who nominally controls them. ACAB.
Photo Archive Raking in $120K per Week Selling Old Newspaper Photos on eBay
As mentioned above, I hope you are correct, but Google's announcement and statements in the Google IO PNaCl talk seem to show otherwise. If there is a misunderstanding, then hopefully Google can clarify.

If Google only enables PNaCl on the web if/when it is on track to become an industry-accepted standard, then everything is ok from my perspective - I think you agree to that?
How to Get Responses from Cold Emails
My first post on Hacker News, so be nice. I wanted to share some real life learning on how to do cold emails, look forward to hearing your comments and feedback.
>> "Like slavery in the 18th century"

This person is clearly a troll. Ignore.
[Edit: or is this a joke that I didn't get ?]
Hey, just jumping in, I have a BS in Biology and api's post here is full of non-scientific and pseudoscientific garbage.

I believe he suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect and his completely unsourced post should create a huge red flag in any readers mind.

I'm not going to go point by point as the average HNer should be able to research for themselves, but I will respond to this gem that generated the largest facepalm:

> Nearly all food "innovations" of the last 100 years are unhealthy ... The only beneficial modification to the food system from a nutritional perspective has been fortification with certain key nutrients,

This is such a shockingly misguided statement that it hurts to read it. This is why I believe he suffers from illusory superiority, because I think his utter inexperience with agrology is leading him to think that he actually understands this field and can speak with expertise on it.

For a counter-point that "all innovation has been bad", one should only have to look at Norman Borlaug, known colloquially as "the man who saved a billion lives" and "the father of the green revolution". Norman Borlaug was Nobel laureate and agrologist whose research changed agriculture around the world and is credited with preventing billions from starvation.

The innovations of the past century directly allowed nations to increase wheat and rice yields by 2-10X, saving more than one nation from mass famine. I certainly would not label that "unbeneficial" or "unhealthy".

And this is just the elephant in the room in terms of examples, believe me when I say you could write books on the subject of the benefits of agricultural development of the past century. Entire schools are devoted to this study.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_revolution
Next they need to go after the 1986 Apple Lisa landfill! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_lisa#The_end_of_the_Lisa
Good call Ryan, on both accounts. On the wording, I've tweaked it to include "some of" the smartest people in the world.

But doesn't address the bigger issue of smugness, which I've noticed too. Certainly something in the SV attitude that includes a holy-than-thou vibe, but now that I think about it, I get that vibe whenever I'm around successful entrepreneurs - no matter what city I'm in.

Re the living expenses - it's definitely a deterrent if you're starting your own company. If you're working for someone else though, from what I've seen, the increased pay more than offsets the increased cost of living.
As someone who manages commercial software development projects (also for embedded devices) I can tell you that it is a royal pain to manage the copyright notices. It is a list that has to be created, maintained, updated and has to make its way into the final product or its documentation. You also have to manage copyright notices from software shipped by your partners.

While you do this, your programmers will just drop in another library ("But I've checked the license, it's fine, it's BSD!") without telling you. And that library will have dependencies.

Overall, if you want to do this right, it's a major pain, for very little actual gain (who reads these copyright notices anyway?).
Not sure if you got your sign backwards or if this is a really nerdy burn on Erlang.
Let me re-phrase that.

What's the longest time you've ever gone without seeing or talking to another human where you can't easily do so? i.e. you can just walk outside and see one, or pickup the phone, or chat on internet.

I do remote hiking trips where it would take me 5 days to see another person even if I wanted to.

Remove yourself from the world, completely.
For the bitcoin economy to grow, anonymity needs to die
Hey all. I created this over two years ago.

I created this for myself, which means it is highly opinionated. Some will love it and others will hate it and that's ok. I have been using it for the last two years and there is no way I can go back to the old HN. That said it is equally possible that most of you do not like it as much. And really that is fine. There are more important things for us to argue about. :)

Feel free to reach out at tuhin @ me.com or ping @tuhin on twitter in case you guys have more constructive feedback.
I dunno. Machine Learning as a Service seems like a tough thing to monetize, as most machine learning in practice involves a lot of tweaking which would then imply that practitioners would like to go further down the stack to work directly with an R, Python, ?? module, look at its code, see where it's failing, working etc.

I do like Machine Learning as a Service as a loss leader. e.g. customer walks up to the door, can't really get the problem cracked with an out of the box solution, but instead you sell/him her on an expensive long-term consulting project. i.e. the IBM Model.

Does anyone know how one of the pioneers in the segment, Numenta, is fairing? They've been around for a while and seem to have recently changed their name to Grok Solutions.

Deep Learning as a service seems like something that could work as their are less knobs for the user to fiddle with. That being said, it does not seem like Deep Learning is quite there yet.
Homoiconicity is when the code of a language is represented in a structure that is primitive to the language. It doesn't have to do with how data is stored, it has to do with how the program text itself is stored.

The advantage of homoiconicity is that the language itself is manipulable as a basic type in the language. In Scheme, this means that it's easy to generate, analyze, and modify Scheme code using simple procedures in Scheme. e.g. I could (although I wouldn't) generate a scheme expression to compute an arbitrary fibonacci number with[1]

> (define (fib-code n)
(if (= n 1) 1 `(* ,n ,(fib-code (- n 1)))))
> (fib-code 4)
(* 4 (* 3 (* 2 1)))
> (eval (fib-code 4) (the-environment))
24
> (eval (replace '* '+ (fib-code 4)) (the-environment))
10

Notice that I'm not just pushing strings together to write code. I'm actually manipulating data structures in the language to produce and modify code. That is homoiconicity.
lol thank Christ? Who's letting the creationists in to a scientific news site? Go back to faux news.
There is child pornography in the block chain already unfortunately.
DOE had options on Tesla equity, but their contract cancelled them out on early repayment.
> V8 is fixing bugs they had that caused asm.js-style JavaScript to be slower than it needs to be. I doubt they'll honour the "use asm" directive in the near future.

They don't need to use the "use asm" directive. There are many ways to optimize the asm.js style of code.

The important part is that it is not something that needs standardizing. It is a subset of JavaScript, nothing more. The output of other compilers like GWT is also a particular subset of JavaScript, and for years now browsers have optimized in varying degrees for many such subsets.
Show HN: new concept for group chat - for co-workers
RiverTrail, like OpenCL is cool, but not every algorithm is amenable to these models.
Ask HN: Salary offer less than 40% of expectation. What do you do?
A long time ago, I applied to a position at Blizzard.

At the start of the application, I filled in the box of my salary expectation. Now, I know the gaming industry tends to pay less, and I had worked before at another big game developer, except I did not have a degree and almost no qualifications to work there that time.

Apart from HR behaving very unprofessionally (e.g., changing interview times a few times, giving me the wrong interview time once), they low-balled me, after under unusual circumstances, having to go twice to their office for a few hours each. Taking into account commute and the time off I took from work, this was a monumental waste of time.

They offered me less than 40% of what I had expected and was closer to what I was making at the first game developer I worked for, when I had no qualifications/experience.

Have you ever experienced this and what do you do in this scenario?
Cool. Have fun in Austin.
Right, 9-10 day backcountry trips which I've done a couple times (although not in the past 8 years). Although probably within 1-2 days of people the whole time. And, I'd certainly take a satphone with me, at least emergency beacon, if I did it today (yay, technology).

(This also becomes a philosophical/psychological question: is it more holy to resist sin when surrounded by temptation, or when in a pure environment? Is it harder to avoid talking to people if you know you just have to pick up a phone to do so, or when it's a serious production?)
Poll: What is your home ecosystem?
Even though many, perhaps most people, choose an a la carte selection of sites for search, email, documents, photography, social network, etc. you probably have one that you consider your "home" in the cloud.

It could be a comprehensive provider of device software and cloud services, like Microsoft’s Bing/Azure/SkyDrive, Apple iCloud, or Google (or, even, Ubuntu One). It could be an Internet portal like Baidu, Yahoo, or AOL. It could be Facebook, or some other social network.

What is the center of gravity of your online life and work?
Microsoft Bing/SkyDrive/Outlook/MSN
Sina.com
If you have any other recommendations for making this process smoother, please let me know. I want people in your situation to be able to use my libraries without these irritations. (Author of the post.)
Thanks for commenting.

When you guys launch in San Francisco, I will try Tennis Buddy. I think it's an interesting concept if you guys broadened it to more general athletic activities (as opposed to just tennis).

I can imagine this being particularly useful for pickup basketball and running buddies.
"Anti-scientific"

Herein lies the problem. Science is a method, not a dogma or a series of religious pronouncements. Trans-fat and even cigarettes were once considered healthy according to the science of the day.

As far as suspicion of new food items goes, there's a scientific argument to be made there too. Human beings are the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of mammalian evolution that has optimized us to metabolize certain nutrients in certain ratios. In a healthy individual, this diet is likely to be optimal since evolution has been optimizing for it in a feedback loop for thousands of generations. Any deviation from this diet is likely to be neutral to suboptimal, and anything not present in this diet likewise.

Don't get me wrong... far worse than anything I mentioned in my original post above is the way we eat: tons of simple carbs and sugars. Drinking soda and eating empty calories is likely a lot worse for you than GMOs would ever be likely to be.

I do know a bit about genetics too, and I personally think that GMOs are probably safe in most cases. The only legitimate health issue I'm aware of is the possibility of allergies. I was talking more about the social context of opposition to them, and pointing out that it's based on reasonable extrapolations of a trend.