skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi, my biggest learning from my failed startup was that I should show respect towards what I am doing. About two years ago everybody started to speak about startups. It sounded so sexy to become a startupper. So I wanted a startup. I found a nice idea I sat down write the whole strategy alone planned all the way till IPO and till sunbathing on my huge yacht. Than I went to a developer company and spent all my money to have the Final Product created. I have not even told my mother what the idea was. To say it short I didn’t have a clue about startups, not to mention lean, idea validation, etc. I lost all my money and the project was a total failure. Than I „stood up” and spent a year on learning, reading and discussing the industry. I started to respect my own time, money and efforts. A month ago I had a new idea that still looks promising. Having my previous learning and being in the „advantageous situation” of not having a lot of money to spend, now I follow lean, think and rethink, test each assumption and talk with as many people as I can. Overall I become a much more opened and friendly person. My friends keep on saying I am a new person (in a good meaning).
All I have to say is: thank you. Thank you to every single person involved with Kiva in any way. Every month I have an auto-deposit into my Kiva account, and I'm always excited to jump in and distribute the funds.

The team I'm in (http://www.kiva.org/team/nerdfighters) is open to anyone and has themes where each month we fund women, people from specific nations, etc and work together to make sure that the recipients' loans are filled. It's both fun and helps decrease world suck.

Keep up the good work -- to you and the rest of the team at Kiva. You rock.
Hospital sticker prices mapped (Medicare chargemaster data)
im no economist, but i cant help but feel thereis a huge flaw with PPP comparisons between first and third world countries.

if someone made $0.08/hr in the US, they would starve. homeless people make a lot more than this in the states. but somehow, people manage to raise whole families on those wages in third world countries. what am i missing?
I don't think you are right, I think you are misled by some anti kid cliche.
Jumping off from this story, I found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week to be a mind-broadening read.

---

Has anyone considered making months and years non-interlocking the way weeks and months are today?

A day is the obvious time period based on the most salient object in our skies.

A lunar month is the next most obvious time period based on the second-most salient object in our skies.

A year has immediate value in helping keep track of seasons.

So my proposal is to replace the existing two parallel hierarchies:

1 week = 7 days;
1 year = 12 months = ?? days

with the following parallel hierarchies:

1 year = 365/366 days;
1 month = 4 weeks = 28 days

I wonder if this has been tried.
‘Neural Dust’ Implants Revolutionize Brain-Machine Interfaces, Allow Recording
100% agree. This is definitely a simple analysis meant to give people an idea what the value of their options is.

I'm going to caveat the rest of this comment with my very little understanding of real options. I've only worked with a real option calculator once about 6 years ago. with that being said, here's my thinking on real options: You can do a much better analysis with a real options calculator, but you would have to make a lot of assumptions in your real option calculator about the different branches the individual could travel down at each node. At some point you could say that there is some very unlikely probability that this job allowed the person to travel down a path in 5 years that enabled them to start their own company and IPO'd that company. This would have an impact on the value of the options offered today, but I cannot imagine all of the possibilities of a real option calculator.
Yes, I think you're right, my article isn't accurate. I'm going to publish an update.
Sounds handy, but at some point breaks the concept of not saving the main password on any platform. Still not that bad, since app specific passwords only are in use if you also have 2-factor-login.
Link: http://www.retro-gression.com/product/ride-sticker
Documenting this does not solve the problem.
I like fastmail. Their two-factor auth leaves something to be desired though -- I also wish there was an imap/smtp only password type.
Alliance of 63 companies to request greater transparency from NSA
Uhhhh … how so?

Yeah, if someone has actual physical access to your device they might be able to detach the LED. Not easy to do – but imaginable. But that is hardly an in any way relevant scenario.
Email me at [yahwehagape at gmail.com] if you want to explore the possibility of it being a spiritual bankruptcy. Feeling a lack of meaning in life can (and should) be remedied by finding meaning in life.
That's true, but I never said sure fire.

I'm just saying if I'm looking to work for a startup as a non-founder, the first thing I'd want to know is... what did the founders do before this? If it's related and was successful that's going to give me more confidence than just about anything else.
I have to admit, I don't use Gmail for just e-mail. It's more or less my home page -- it's a portal to the people I chat with, the documents I access (on Drive) daily, and just so happens to be where I send e-mails from.

These days, (to me anyway) the fact that Gmail is an e-mail service is a little incidental.
Could somebody enlighten me to the expected balance of salary and equity?

How far 'below market rate' is the average salary at a start-up where you're getting these small amounts of equity?
Speaking of e-mail, why does Gmail show a different total number of search results depending on which 'page' you're viewing it from the search results? At least Yahoo gives the exact number.

Example: http://i.imgur.com/n1qeN3i.gif
If you're tired of the gmail interface (like I was), I'd highly recommend http://fastmail.fm.

I made the switch (moved 55k+ messages with http://protips.maxmasnick.com/export-gmail-to-fastmail-or-an...) and haven't looked back.

FastMail offers a similar infinite scroll feature. I was able to select and move several thousand messages through the web interface when I was first configuring it.

FastMail's highlights for me are:

- Really good, customizable "personalities" (alternate email addresses with their own SMPT servers, auto-BCC settings, etc.)

- Sieve support -- SO much more powerful than rules in Gmail, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)

- Customer support that actually responds and is super helpful in my experience

- Ability to use your own domain name(s) without all the overhead of signing up for Google Apps.

- Jabber support (not in-browser, but they do have a server that works with Adium/iChat/Pidgin)

- Very fast, modern web interface. Definitely faster than Gmail for me. Good keyboard shortcuts too (very similar to Gmail's but with a few differences).

- An archive folder that works well with the archive functionality in Mail.app and other clients.

The only thing that isn't great is search. It works ok for everything but searching within messages (i.e. from/to/subject searches are fine). I believe FastMail does have support for a lot more search operators than Gmail and can search headers as well. But I'm not an expert on the power user search features for either.

This is because I actually use the search in Mail.app on my Mac, which is actually better than Gmail's search capabilities for every search I've tried (same good results, but way faster). Obviously works great with FastMail too, and I figure it's good to have a local copy of email.

I also miss a few things from the (old) gmail interface, but I definitely like FastMail's interface better on the whole than the new compose in Gmail. Things I miss in FastMail are the mainly the ability to pop composing a message into a new window with one click and sync with the address book on my phone. Neither are deal breakers.

I actually use MailMate (http://freron.com) for the majority of my email access now. It's still a little rough around the edges but being able to compose emails in Markdown and see the entire hierarchy of a thread (not flattened into one level) is worth a bit of UX pain.
If they were legal at the time, then no, he was doing his job, congress would be responsible. To clarify, PRISM and related programs are completely legal via the FISA bill (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/110/hr6304/text). They shouldn't be legal, the supreme court will likely strike them down as unconstitutional, but they are LEGAL.

As for torture and extraordinary rendition those things were ACTUALLY ILLEGAL. So yes, President Bush and/or his administration should be held responsible for them.
EU Decides Google's Settlement Proposal for Antitrust Investigation Isn't Enough
This year has seen really interesting competitive threats to Gmail in the form of an improved Yahoo Mail and hotmail 2.0 (aka Outlook.com)

I'm glad others are noticing as well -- competition is good =)
Why Is Netflix Secretly Cropping Movies?
people running wikipedia have principles

Sure, if you want to call ego a principle. Or whatever you want to call the emotion that leads to tunnel-vision; to thinking about what you're going to say next without even hearing the other side.
That's exactly my point! Thank you for reading and understanding!
In brief: (a) We have an entrenched two-party system that makes a big show of conflict and gridlock, yet manages to collude on a surprising number of issues on behalf of the same donors and powerful lobbies; (b) Elections have become a marketing game, and no one can hope to run on a national level without massive amounts of capital, which means not rocking the boat of the corporate welfare state, or upsetting any other PAC donors who are playing "asynchronous quid pro quo".

I see three possible solutions, any of which would help, but all of which I'd like to see:

- Campaign Finance Reform: there are many potential ways to do this, the most straight-forward being publicly financed elections. This seems expensive, except when you compare it to the "media-electoral complex" we have now. Congress should not have to spend as much time as it does on fundraising, and should not be so motivated to accept kickbacks to PACs.

- Instant Runoff Voting: This would give third parties a chance to actually win by removing the "spoiler effect". It's a richer way to measure what the voters actually want, instead of continually forcing a choice of lesser evils. Anyone who still wants to cast their vote for a single party still can. Meanwhile, the mainstream parties would take third parties as a more serious threat, and focus more on the desires of their base, rather than taking them for granted and spending all their energy on a handful of politically inactive undecideds.

- None of the Above: Allow voters to choose none of the candidates as an option, forcing a new election. This would bring the protest non-voters back to the polls, the people who are so jaded that they believe (with cause) that voting is pointless, and whose opinions are going uncounted.

There are also other ideas like Proportional Representation, but that would represent a massive shift in our political structure, and so is probably not realistic. The above three options could be bolted on to our existing framework on a state-by-state level, or (theoretically) by Constitutional Amendment.

The problem is, both major parties and their donors benefit massively from the current system, and so it would take a huge upswell of public support to force a change. (Media companies would also fight tooth and nail; political advertising is a major source of revenue.) On the other hand, those members of Congress who are not blatantly corrupt don't like having to spend so much time fundraising, so it's not a completely uphill battle once critical mass is reached.
for those not familiar with Go, here's the problem translated in C terms: "I passed a pointer to your function and it called free() on it. how dare you!"
Sure thing. Sorry for the previous terseness--I really really really hate this whole "Coursera --> Kaggle --> DS job at Facebook" meme when it (rarely) appears on HN, since it isn't even close to reality.

I'm not a data scientist, but I work with them very closely as an engineer and I've considered going down the same path. When I talk about data scientists, it's not a reference to any of the following:

> Engineers working with big data technology, like Hadoop, Storm, Kafka, who are essential but often uninvolved in model construction and evaluation.

> Analysts who develop models, then hand them off to engineers/IT to code them up (or keep them in Excel spreadsheets).

Instead, I'm thinking about someone with a specific background. They likely have a PhD, since that's an excellent way to experience the "ask-explore-code-test-present" workflow needed to answer an interesting question with real-world implications. The strong academic background is not necessary, but it greatly reduces friction during the research workflow (since you've spent 3-4 years in it). I'm getting a MS and working hard to make it as research-oriented as possible, fwiw.

This person also has a strong foundation in applied math. They might have worked on signal processing questions, applied algorithms for learning Bayesian network structure to proteins, or thought about the transition from Hopfield networks to RBNs or whatever awesome deep learning stuff is going on nowadays. A guy I respect described this quality as that of "a traveler," someone who can understand advanced work in a number of disciplines in addition to their specialty.

This person is an engineer. They learn languages easily, understand algorithmic complexity and think about the complexity of their models. They don't have to be Linus.

Finally, the person is forward-thinking. They understand that questions are motivated by business needs, and that answering these questions can have serious implications for the company or its partners. I should channel patio11 here!

Anyway I'm obviously very opinionated about this, but it's just one opinion. I'm happy to discuss this more with anyone who's interested, though--contact is in my profile.
Did someone just finish a game of Civ?
When a fire alarm rings, people do not act. They stand around.
Minbox vs. Dropbox
Actually mature companies share options can be very lucrative I know this years BT share save due in sept is going to net people about £50k tax free.

This is just the basic options options available to all BT staff.
Yep, same here. I live in Sydney AU and the app also put me in the top 1% richest people in the world by income.

When I did it by wealth, the result was: "Your personal wealth is equal to the combined wealth of 0 people in Myanmar." and "1% of your wealth could feed a family of four in Ethiopia for 0 months."

There's no doubt that we live way more comfortably than most people in Myanmar do but it's clear that being born with wealth to start with helps no matter where you live.
This should be at the top of this thread. Save the $60k for a MS or PhD in machine learning, applied math, or information systems at a graduate program. Don't do this.
yes, thats almost certainly the case. but it's inappropriate to boil it down to $/hr. because you're not cognitively comparing living in the US for 0.08 vs 25 an hour.
I breathed a sigh of relief when the neo-cons voluntary relinquished power; I had been convinced that Naomi Wolf was right, and that democracy was almost over. Turns out, Cheney was just one head of the hydra, and the march to tyranny never really stopped. :(
Whatever the merits of socialism vs. capitalism in the past, doesn't this sort of progress portend an eventual move toward the former? And is this necessarily a bad thing - when machines do more of the work, shouldn't humans be at leisure - or free to pursue formerly "frivolous" careers in arts, literature, sport, etc. while being supported by a strong social safety net?
Not quite, a listener isn't supposed to steal your thread of control indefinitely...
Roger Peppe and Tim Penhey both work on Juju at Canonical. One of them wrote to the mail list regarding the issue that they encountered. The other vented his frustration on his personal blog.
You know, I still wonder the same thing, "1-20 of many" is quite annoying too..
It's much better for the core team to compromise a little than force everyone to update their code all the time.

In particular, small semantic changes that can't be caught statically will just break people's code with no warning whatsoever. That's bad.
I also noticed that. I'm hoping to get up to zero net worth in the next couple of years, though...
Just a minor styling note - the black background on hover behind the twitter button is not attractive - at least to me. And, from a consistency standpoint, is not the same height as the rest of the menu options. If you keep it, at least make it consistent.
I think that's exactly what PPP is about, though: income is converted to how much you have the power to purchase, so it's designed specifically to equalize that comparison. Or maybe I'm misreading.
I feel like these sites aren't accurate. It's not fair to say the guy in Zimbabwe only earns $.53/hour compared to my $40+, because everything in Zimbabwe is much cheaper. For instance a nice apartment in San Diego is $1,600+/month.

I'd really like to see how I compare to other 1st world countries. In other words don't compare California to some super poor country in Africa. If the cost of living and goods were the same in both countries then fine, compare otherwise don't.
Nice. By the way what's the password for the spreadsheet? No edits can be made without it.
or "I passed an fp to your function, and you called close() on it. How dare you!?" :)
but only for people poorer than you.

for rich people like us, the comparison works. for poorer people, they're poorer anyway. it doesn't change anything. you can't avoid the conclusion that you're still horrendously privileged (which i suspect is what you want to do, but maybe i am just a cynic).
Evomail v1.2.1 - released
This was an absolutely indispensable resource when I built my bike many years ago. The man's a genius, and I was incredibly sad when he passed. RIP
It should be no surprise that this is happening. Give anyone unlimited surveillance power and it will always be abused.

I live in a western EU country and have a friend in law enforcement. Last year, he brought me to see our city's traffic surveillance 'control room'. Almost every street corner and traffic junction here has a pole-mounted police camera transmitting video data back to servers accessible from this room and elsewhere.

To summarize the demo: He was able to type a vehicle registration plate into this system, and instantly see every journey the car has taken plotted on a map, as well as the thousands of raw video clips of this vehicle that were used to generate the map.
> (assuming, of course, that Go accepts Reader as a valid subtype of ReaderCloser (i would hope so!)).

Yes it does: http://play.golang.org/p/OnBotL9zfF
Not having SSL as default is unfortunate, but the menu options doesn't seem very obscure to me. Turn on SSL is the correct name for the option.
GMail is deteriorating. I loathe the new 'reduced' inline reply UI. Half the time I am searching for how to reveal the sender address or subject field because I need to change them, but GMail seems to think this is an edge use case.

Today I got the new tabbed inboxes - 'Primary', 'Social' and 'Promotions'. Lots of important email is now out of view from the primary inbox and buried with unimportant crap. This is so far from what I want I can't even recognize who GMail is trying to target with this. There is apparently no way to turn it off, either.
Thank you. For the last few days, I've been looking for the The NIST Statistical Test Suite, not in C#, have you a link?
Too bad this is broken...

It does not accept negative wealth (well... I own about 2000 USD in personal objects, have no investments, and still owe about 10k USD in student loans...)

If you input a negative number, it assumes it is positive, you can even try stripping the minus (or adding a minus) and clicking the button again, it won't even calculate again and will assume it is the same number.
The longstanding question of whether or not phone metadata collected by NSA includes geolocation data has been answered. "We are not collecting that data," Inglis said, "under this program."

Well that's a relief. ;)
Perhaps not from the outset. But if you put your mind to it, you can probably make a good guess about whether to cut and run after 12-18 months, and go for another lottery ticket.
I think you missed the "under this program" part. You can basically hear him winking at the end of that.
You could come at it in a similar way to how the real second was developed. Initially the second was defined as 1/86,400th of a day, later narrowed to a mean solar day, but that still wasn't specific enough so they switched it to the current caesium atom definition.

If we wanted to subdivide the day into 100,000 new units instead of 86,400 seconds, we could simply take the current caesium atom definition * 864,000 / 100,000 and you would get a precise, scientifically acceptable unit that would be about 1/100,000 of a day, but still have the need for the occasional leap units.
> But telling people how this is for their convenience is really demeaning.

I see your intention here, but I think you've stepped out of touch with the vast majority of users here, and I don't mean the "people just want to share their lives on facebook, privacy be damned" kind of way.

"Chats are kept, and everything you share, like photos, is put in folders and stored" really is a feature that people want. Not being able to set a default for do/don't save all chat history should be fixed, but what you quote really is for convenience.

I search over my gtalk history all the time, as just as much useful information is in there as is in my email. I don't use the Google+ picture auto-upload, but I do use the Dropbox one, so that all the pictures I take with my phone are automatically uploaded to my dropbox folder and available on all of my computers. Those things are really convenient, and I love not having to have to think about them; they're just there when I do need them. I don't see how that could be possibly construed as only motivated by ad revenue and government regulations.

What needs to come along with those features:

1) easy to disable/enable with good granularity (per feature, per contact, altogether, etc)

2) possible to secure client-side if I want to

3) government needs to demonstrate probable cause to get warrant to get access to what is not secured client-side

4) I need to be notified within a reasonable amount of time of a warrant being served

none of those things preclude these kinds of "nothing is ever lost" features.
Good find. Control-F suggests there are three mentions of PRISM.

On page 349 (pdf pagination): "LPR technology uses specialized cameras and computers to quickly capture large numbers of license plate photographs and compares them to the hot list (NCIC, ALERT/REJIS, KDOR, PRISM)."
We use an app called Syncdocs to encrypt everything locally with AES256 before uploading it encrypted to Google Drive. It is simple to setup and seems to work well.

http://www.syncdocs.com/how-to-set-up-google-drive-encryptio...
There is a subtle error in the way this article is phrased. Since the outcomes are mutually exclusive you can sum them when computing the expectation. And you're also neglecting all the high probability-low gain outcomes.
Notwithstanding that the most expensive hospitals are presumably on the cutting edge of medicine, you have to wonder whether they're actually 20-30 times better than the cheapest ones. It would be interesting to see this data cross-referenced with property values and average salary data.