skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you look at returns from even the most successful of funds, there's usually not a lot to be impressed by.

That's not correct. The top funds have very high IRRs. For example, Foundry Group on slide 5: www.scribd.com/fullscreen/57221228 . I remember Marc Andreessen describing A16Z's first fund as returning >100% IRR. I'm sure SV Angel's is very high as well.

In some cases, one or two investments account for most of the returns.

That's not at odds with a fund being successful. Startup investing is inherently about finding outliers: http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html . Its alright if the median investment returns nothing as long as an outlier can return the entire fund. You might disagree with an entrepreneur aligning herself with investors that have this sort of thesis, but it's not accurate to say that the top funds perform poorly as a result.
Bring Some Order to Your Hack Days
This is no doubt interesting, but it's very obviously a PR piece written to subtly engender American support for arming Syrian Rebels. This chaotic conflict is making for very strange bedfellows of the United States and certain extremist groups.

There was a nearly identical article in The Atlantic a few months back, Edward Bernays would be proud!

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/02/diy-weapons-of-th...
Absolutely not, this metadata is useful as leverage for getting plea bargains out of people. Exonerating someone removes leverage.
As everyone has said, good idea, but I see one big pitfall.

Don't become LinkedIn's "endorsement" system. I'm not an employer, but I think it has ended up losing it's meaning (people just endorse each other willy nilly or a scratch-my-back-and-I-will-scratch-yours kind of thing) -

I'm thinking one way to escape this whole is finding a way to enforce/emphasize talking up friends that you have personally WORKED with for extended periods of time, to get more honesty
We are at 99.937% uptime for the month of July. We have had 28 minutes of downtime and most of that is related to deploys and fixing a puma issue we had.
We'd need to calibrate against some kind of effect that is more heavily influenced by forces other than mass. You're right actually, that might be a lot more tricky than it seems on the surface. If we're left with the Weak and Strong forces to play with, that makes experimental design pretty difficult (and perhaps impossible).

Hmm...
Russia leading the way once again.
Non tail-recursive functions in core.async go blocks
Just be prepared for the onslaught of mosquitoes from leaving around standing water.
“Lyme disease is the only infection I know of where we have a safe and effective vaccine, but it’s not available to the public,” says Dr. Allen Steere, the physician who uncovered the disease:

http://www.wbur.org/2012/06/27/lyme-vaccine
I find giant rants against people using but not spamming affiliate links to be much more of a bother than affiliate links. Now what.
I've been using mine for two months and I love it. They have an data API http://dev.fitbit.com/ and said they may open a hardware one too.
Powershell is really quite good if you don't mind learning a slightly different shell. And there are good tools to extend it (PowerGUI is one I like).
Profits from student loans are ‘obscene’
Incidentally Coursera's Intro to Data Science looks/ed to be a trial run for the first of three classes in the UW Data Science certificate program [1]. Each class is a bit over $1k. UW did the same with Intro to Computational Finance and Financial Econometrics.

[1] http://www.pce.uw.edu/certificates/data-science.html
Flipboard for Video
EuroClojure 2013 (Berlin) Call for Presentations
TI has a DSP processor where the assembly looks quite much like the early days of C:

mov reg1, reg2 ==> reg1 = reg2
mov reg1, [reg2] ==> reg1 = *reg2
add reg1, reg2 ==> reg1 += reg2

And so on.
How to Time Travel your Data
> dumping of retail price with the purpose of locking in users - a blatantly anticompetitive practice that would be illegal in most industries

What? There are scores of industries that use loss-leaders to get customers to commit to long-term contracts. Razors, satellite/cable TV, etc.

> This doesn't happen in places like the US because there's a very strong cartel/oligopoly there that affords them the right to simply deny you a terminal if it's not under the carrier's conditions.

This isn't true at all, and I don't know why you would think it was. Here's a counterexample: https://ting.com/
Thanks for the comment. I'll tell the audio engineer to add it to the list of things he adjusts for. Episode 6 is already in the can but ideally it will be better for you after episode 7.
I like the way you need a "boy" to cross a stream...

Tough luck if you're an all-daughter or childless family I suppose. Get used to your side of the stream.
Keeping evolutionary design's gene pool clean - who's your predator?
'The Wire' Creator on Trayvon Martin Case: 'Ashamed' to Be an American
Goodyear bids goodbye to blimps, says hello to zeppelins
I guess I see it the other way, in that just because a computer can calculate where you were last Friday "quickly" in seconds, vs. a group of cops comparing a bunch of notes "slowly" doesn't change anything. It was still possible then to track you as easily as it is now given the right amount of manpower or attention.
If you buy a charger for $2 on eBay and it's sent from China, it's almost guaranteed to be dangerous. If you buy a $19 charger from Apple, it's going to be as safe as you get. If you buy a cheaper charger from a store like Target, it'll be safe but probably worse power quality. More or less you get what you pay for. (No charger is 100% safe of course; Apple chargers have had recalls and occasional problems.)

I'm the author of the original post and I've torn apart and analyzed a lot of chargers if you want to see the differences between them: http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-ap...
Moving on from Terminator
Punitive damages never stand on their own, they're always accompanied with compensatory damages. Good luck proving privacy violations directly result in loss, injury, or harm suffered -- information sharing agreements between law enforcement agencies and those interested in this information precludes any claims of negligence or recklessness.
I have done something similar with with a python script that basically:

- parsed locations from an html file and stored them in a list

- parsed them into this url: 'https://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s' % (location)

-parsed the html for an address

-parsed the address into this url: 'https://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=%s&sen... % (address)

-parse the coordinates

I used it to get oil refineries in the united states and it worked pretty well… i can put it on github if you would like.

It probably can also be done between the front-end and back-end with a little bit of trickery (the calls to google on the front-end, POST'ed html processing on the back from the front-end), so that users ip is using the service and not the servers.
BIND assigns a score based on every IP it talks to and a hit rate. (so if ns1.foo.com resolves to 3 IPs, each is tracked individually, same if ns1.bar.com and ns1.baz.com are the same IP) It is a pretty small cache, maybe like 1024?

This is all from fuzzy 5 year old memory.
This is actually a whole different issue vs. driving under an intersection stationary camera that snaps your picture as you drive by.
Using singular they is fine, but since too many people will jump on you and say you're doing it wrong, it's probably a better play to just restructure the whole sentence to avoid gender and the awkward double first name. Something like:

"$NAME wants to make your day with a $20 gift card..."

The author here is incorrect. I also dislike namedropping random startups / people I've never heard of, or actually just namedropping in general.

Also: http://xkcd.com/326/
"theres a bootcamp for that"
http://zipfianacademy.com/
> At the very least you should probably look at the theory before claiming to discredit it.

I didn't claim to discredit it. All I did was point out that there's no evidence for the theory, and that it would require rewriting most of the known laws of physics. Other than that I specifically said I saw no problem with it.

> The "radiation" is lower energy microwaves which are quickly scattered.

Scattered by what? The behavior of light is well understood. It doesn't just scatter randomly, whether or not it's "lower energy microwaves" (whatever that could possibly mean). And why would the fact that the microwaves are scattered matter? Microwaves would still be detectable even if they are "scattered". Look at the sky: that blue color you see is visible light scattered by the atoms in earth's atmosphere. Why would scattered microwaves be any less detectable than scattered visible light?

(Feel free to treat those as rhetorical questions, by the way.)

> As for your other questions, these are addressed in the theory. How about reading that first.

Life is too short to spend time doing a detailed debunking of every crackpot idea that comes along.
Honestly, they could probably "deal with" half the dogs by patting their own thighs while saying "Who's a good puppy! Who's a good puppy!", and optionally giving the dogs a good pet.
>Google has harvested the location, name and signal strength of many millions of wireless networks across the world - an act which can be in no way cast as user convenience.

Improved location data on wifi is one way.
Just read the FAQ and saw that Flynn is “Super Dokku”

Awesome job.
>maybe use a multi-track recording software and then adjust each speaker's track to match volume.

Or just a compressor/limiter on the whole shebang will do a good job of normalizing the audio levels.

http://auphonic.com/blog/2011/07/25/loudness-normalization-a...

http://www.hometracked.com/2008/04/20/10-myths-about-normali...
You make a very good point, and I apologise for my part in this meta-sub-thread.

Some off-site META discussion place would be useful. It needn't be just for HN, it could be for all online communities. Sort of like Meatball wiki was, but for everything. And not a wiki.

People have all sorts of ideas about moderation and karma and banning and etc.
Honestly, I have no ideas. The site admins have said you can email them to appeal an unfair hellban, but normally that's for the hellban-ee. It would be awesome if they added a feature to upvote people back from hell. Frankly, in this case the user doesn't have any contact info or about me, and he's not that active (and he has negative karma).

My big complaint is that this pattern of habitually telling everyone they're hell-banned seems to contravene the will of the mods, and produces a bunch of low-level noise on the site. It's come up before, and the mods continue to use hell-banning as a punishment so obviously they think it's worth the risk of losing casual commenters.

If you see a case where you very strongly disagree I think it's appropriate to comment, but this doesn't seem to meet that standard.
For those interested, there is a twitter bot doing exactly this with the twitter firehose.

https://twitter.com/pentametron

Singular re-tweets do not make sense, they need to be taken in pairs.
C is like the marketing slogan to Othello (reversi):

A minute to learn, a lifetime to master.

The language is fairly simple in terms of features and aspects you have to learn to use it, but concepts like pointers and direct memory management are difficult to master. Programming in C is like building a building out of bricks; bricks are relatively simple objects, building a building out of them is not a simple task.
> "the mistake is surely damaging the “high quality” brand Starbucks cultivates in order to sell $5 coffee."

I would love to see the author try to seriously defend that assertion.
Couldn't agree more. The Syrian rebels are a loosely associated group with several elements who are radical Islamist and Al Qaeda. This could have easily been titled "DIY Terrorism".
Good start but you should include an email for others to see. Good luck.
I was just going to write this exact comment. I am a data scientist, and I do not think the $60,000 price tag is worth it. I might do it for $2,000 or $3,000, but that's already being a little generous.

The $60,000 price tag must come with a guarantee that you'll be making the proposed $110,000 - $130,000 salary range for at least 5 years. Otherwise, wow.

The best way to learn these things is to just dive right in. If one need's human interaction, the community is easily within reach (at a much lower cost).

Maybe one could argue that the "networking" is worth the price tag. Still, I get these "data meetup" emails about 5 times a day, which I could easily go to for networking.
What is the Cloud?
I've been in a funk for quite a long time now. I think the most important thing is to establish a vision for your life. What do you want your life to be about? It's a question that might take some time to answer. You could always randomly pick a popular subject to learn (economics, web dev...). But the question you'll have to ask yourself is why do I want to learn one thing over another. Time is the most precious thing you have, and so it's good to have a direction in your life, so that, what do you do is gradually guiding you in that direction. On the other hand, sometimes you could take that analysis to the extreme (called analysis paralysis) and never decide what you want to do. In that case, just pick something that's interesting and stick with it for an extended period. This is something that most of struggle with. There is so much to do, you can flip-flop between activities, never really getting much depth.
Good luck, it's a long journey, but you're already asking the right questions.
Some things to add to your list:

Setting dip switches on modems to be able to dial into a BBS.

Calling 411

Renting/Rewinding VHS tapes

Getting grounded for running up the long distance phone bill (by calling BBSs)

De-soldering bad memory chips on your Apple ][ boards.
My birthday was last weekend and you set the categories so that I just moved up. Thanks. joints creak
How to enhance your brand's storytelling with video
So the solution is to never use pronouns?
A/B split testing with Django and Mezzanine?
Whoah, I'm about to make my third category transition while still working for the same startup.
"I was seriously thinking about an Arduino hack"

I have a container garden in the yard with numerous drip irrigation emitters. There's nothing terribly Ardiuno specific about actuating a valve, so pretty much any system would work, doesn't have to be arduino. I was unable to find all the parts I'd need cheaper than a COTS system around $40.

Probably your best bet would be a barrel (rain barrel?) full of water with a bubble lift (think old aquarium under gravel filter design) Then turn on the aquarium air pump for 15 minutes a day or whatever. This abstracts your problem from a plumbing mystery to merely turning a low wattage AC outlet on and off. Perhaps via a SSR or a commercial X10/insteon/other system. If the air pump and other electrical gear is mounted above max water level, no possibility of mixing water and electricity exists, just like a proper aquarium design. On the other hand depending on relative heights you might be building a siphon which will empty the whole bucket in one run, could be an issue.

Aside from the siphon thing, the barrel design also means the inevitable malfunction will not result in a flood over 55 gallons, and an air-lift obviously isn't damaged by running dry.
#1 is sold in Japan as http://bonex-asean.com/
Rowing to Kabul
I understand the main complaint against BT Sync is that it's not open source. That said, is it possible for anyone speak to its security? I've been testing the desktop client for some time and it seems one of the most promising applications I've used in awhile - even at alpha status.

Would like to recommend this to peers I work with as a potential collaboration tool for projects that require security.

Next up, BT Mail? Would love to see that.
How is selling you something on credit 'anticompetitive'?
Hey would be great to see the differences between GoInstant and Firebase. (Or parse)

Thanks, page and services look great
It's pretty ridiculous that this discussion devolved into a few people who have been here for 1.5 years or less telling someone who's been here for nearly 8 years that he's doing it wrong. I have no problem with affiliate links. I do have a problem with drawn-out, off-topic discussion. But that's probably expected in a submission about White Coke.
someone should close the older polls, no?
This is so fucking stupid. “They” has been a singular pronoun since the Middle English period (Linguist here).
We had one of these just three months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5536734
From what I understand from skimming the site, Dev Bootcamp teaches people RoR and a few other web technologies in 9 weeks. All that tells me is that you know one programming language, it doesn't tell me whether you are a programmer, whether you understand concurrency problems, race conditions, algorithms etc. Sure, this is alright for a lot of programming positions because there are a lot of positions out there that don't need those.

The problem with data science is that it is incredibly hard to teach anyone Linear Algebra, Probability, statistics in 9 weeks. Sure, I can hand wave all that and then teach you a bunch of machine learning algorithms. All you get at the end of it is people who claim they understand it intuitively and don't need the math. Except that mathematical intuition builds up accumulatively.

It is easy to see this in interviews; you can see folks who are really good at drawing pretty pictures to explain say PCA. They have no clue when not to use such a thing. It makes no intuitive sense to them why PCA breaks down when there are outliers. If they can't draw a picture of it, it is difficult for them to comprehend.
I really do hope a BTSync protocol spec is released.

Not sure if there are any efforts being made at reverse engineering. Maybe it would make a good project =)
Introducing Wakari Bundles: Simple Python Code & Data Sharing
So it's not open source yet?
And there was a great discussion about whether or not it was a good idea to let people vote twice.
^ This. Using a noun instead of a pronoun just because you didn't know what pronoun to use defeats the entire purpose of a pronoun and makes a ghastly sentence which would have been thrown out of my grammar class back in high school.

Honestly, I'm surprised that:

a) He's writing this opinionated a post just to provide a solution which is that horrible.

b) He teaches English at UMCP. Pronouns in language are a difficult problem to solve at the best of times, and someone who proposes this sort of a 'bulletproof' solution of "Well, just Replace It with a Noun when you're confused!" worries me as an English professor.
I'm with you 100%. John McWhorter wrote a nice piece on it recently for TNR: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112896/tyranny-pronouns-f...
It was interesting to follow Patrick's reports few years ago, when they were specific and factual, but attempts to extrapolate from that into a field of full-on startup mentoring and coaching looks rather strange to put it mildly.
The US is home to one third of all the world's data--here's who's storing it
Agree with both parents. "Simple" to me means that the code does exactly what I ask: no more, no less. For better or for worse. No behind-the-scenes magic (garbage collection, etc). I know exactly how much memory I am using, where it's allocated, and how it's passed around. Again, for better or for worse. With great power comes great responsibility!
It's still in the early stages of development. We're currently fundraising so that we can work on it full time. All code will be pushed to GitHub as we write it.
Individual Health Insurance Buyer's Guide
Withholding potentially-exonerating evidence from the defense in a criminal prosecution is a big no-no. Of course it happens on a regular basis, but if you've got the money to fight it nicely sets up the basis for a reversal of a conviction on appeal. See: http://www.totalcriminaldefense.com/news/articles/criminal-e....

This is not a search or privacy problem per se. Most situations where exculpating evidence is withheld aren't so clear-cut as photographic evidence of the supposed perpetrator's car in a different place. It's usually something more like a statement by a witness whose exculpatory potential is ambiguous enough that a prosecutor can rationalize it as irrelevant. Indeed, I think technology ameliorates this problem. It's hard for prosecutors to withhold DNA evidence, for example, because juries know its widely used and take it so seriously. If use of photographic evidence in prosecutions becomes common, I think it will be difficult for prosecutors to withhold relevant information from the defense without compromising their ability to get convictions from juries.
FYI, Zerigo DNS is a joke.

They have a few boxes at SoftLayer and Linode. See my comment on their last outage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5922707
I wonder if the Wayback Machine can get content from the NSA.
If the harm that a person suffers from their child being kidnapped and murdered is negative infinity, then even the smallest probability of it happening makes their expected harm from kidnapping negative infinity.
Ask HN: Have you replaced your phone with an iPod Touch?
My contract iPhone is expiring soon, and instead of renewing for another 2 years, I'm considering just using an iPod Touch to talk and text over Wifi.

Anyone have experience with this? I'd also get a cheap pay-as-you-go phone for emergencies. But I like the idea of not always being "on", as well as the obvious lack of monthly charges.
My cosmetologist told me I was gaining mass too. She recommended a diet though - not further research.
Yes, but if the communication is encrypted it doesn't really matter. So these text messages should be by and large safe.

I agree about the voice calling, though, which is why I'd like them to use RedPhone as the default dial app, too, so at least you can have encrypted voice conversations when connected to the Internet.
Not benign at all. Read the story about how some Facebook administrator challenged Facebookers to hack into Facebook. The way they did it was to drive by his home and impersonate his home wireless router. My understanding is that once you do that, you can do man in the middle attacks.

Example: Oh you thought you were accessing Facebook, bank, stock, tax... oh you are... but first you are passing along your password to a third party.

Also, once you gain access to the network, what percentage of networks allow administrator access over wi-fi? I would bet a good percentage. What percentage of these have the default password? Again, a good percentage. So basically, you can hijack quite a few networks this way. Do you know what most routers keep a log of? Your entire browsing history. Do you know what else you can do to the network? Open up inbound ports.

Note: The impersonation attack may work even without passwords. Figure out what his/her network name is. Give your network the same name. Scramble the signal coming from the other router. Have him/her enter in a password to your network. Voila.
Author here. Thanks for these comments. They are not harsh and very useful and I can see where you are coming from with all of them. I do want to address these issues, but I also wanted to ship, so hopefully I can evolve the design and other aspects as you've mentioned.
Are you using MinTTY or the native cmd.exe-like terminal? MinTTY is based on PuTTY code and is quite reasonable (and a major improvement over the standard Windows way.
As the author, I should probably take my own advice and do what I always tell my students. If the structure of the sentence causes so much controversy that it distracts from the meaning, change the sentence. Allow me to offer an alternative that solves everything:

"Matt Hofstadt wanted to make your day by sending you a $20.00 USD Starbucks Card eGift to spend on your favorite beverage."