skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quick question: Do you have some kind of monitoring setup on HackerNews for the keywords "Free Plan" or "Free Trial" or are you just that active? You always get to these topics so quickly.

Thanks for chiming in!! :) I always find a lot of value in your advice.
The blockbuster heist that rocked the Deep Web
I'm not 100% sure either but I suspect it's more about Google taking their design to a new level. These kinds of effects have been seen elsewhere before but it's interesting to see Google implementing them for their own real product pages. It looks good.
This is one of the directions the project could go in, and I personally would like it if that happened. But first we have to build the software, right? :-)
$0/$0

The return is undefined actually.
By your logic I'd be running a WAP site over Gopher to satisfy the progressive enhancement ethos. At a certain point it's absurd to assume javascript isn't there. [1]

What brought on this particular use case was a JSON response where all the times were in UTC. I'm not really into forcing a technique on someone when it isn't required. If that's not your use case, then you don't have the problem!

[1] http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/23.0/releasenotes/
I had the same "Squee!" reaction when I first saw that photo some time ago, but many if not most of your users probably won't know most if not all of them except of course for Einstein, so for them the first paragraph will fall flat and the effect will indeed likely be negative.
What's your domain knowledge/experience with nutrition and weight loss? I see you're an MD at Cornell, any specifics?
Usually "returns" are measured as profit over invested amount so it would be 0%.
Most likely one of the easier ways to "cashout" on stolen credit cards. There is nothing to pick up/ship, its fairly anonymous and if you have the volume it can easily be worth it.
I found this to be especially refreshing. I may just be placing my own spin on it but it seems to me like Paul was saying: have integrity and know what you're talking about. I'll have to give it another read to ensure I'm not just placing my own biases on the words.

I have about a decade worth of sales experience. Sometimes not very successful, some very successful. I've also succeeded with convincing investors. The two were very similar for me. I've also worked with many other people in sales roles; of the ones that were successful only a small handful sold in the way Paul writes about.

Moving forward I won't be working with, or hiring anyone who doesn't. It's better for everyone.

Thanks for the essay, Paul.
I disagree. Penalty clauses* have been unenforceable at common law for long before actual consumer protection legislation was even thought of. I'd be pretty leery of destroying such a good principle, backed by centuries of common law contractual tradition, just to single out banks and make penalty clauses enforceable against them.

*Penalty clauses are ones that specify excessive damages, to punish someone who breaches a contract -- as opposed to "liquidated damages" clauses, that specify damages which pre-estimate the loss that you'll suffer if I breach the contract, which are allowed.
I dont know what tricks this page is doing but vertical scrolling is really choppy on that page.
Bloomberg bets big on the Ubuntu Edge
Create your own adventure software
Hello, I'm looking to create some software to aid in the creation of gamebooks/choose your own adventure stories/interactive novels.
It gets hard to write these kind of books and I am looking for ideas and feedback from anyone who has tried to write this kind of thing before and may have fallen into problems.
OK, Glass: I Can't Walk, So Help Me Explore
Huh? I can set up this stack myself and I already have a custom RoundCube theme.

It doesn't matter how much OSS you use. Google uses a ton too. I can't tell what code you're running, so it's pointless.

Can't someone just release a set of docker configs for a mailserver, dovecot, etc so people can go run this on their own VPS of choice?
Yep.. As I said, I can see the "Login Requests" page for that account and it says "No Pending Login Requests".. Plus I had to use the iOS app to set up and enable two-factor auth in the first place.
It strikes many, me included, as an overreach of executive power.
If HN ran ads I would no longer use this site.
I feel like this may be a tech-centric phenomenon, unfortunately. In a lot of industries, omitting the right keyword from your CV will exclude you from interviews.
Thanks for this; I look forward to giving it a go tonight!
Will this one stop working after 3 months like the Nexus 7 I bought in January did?
I agree the design is great, but they are still having issues with @2x images in the dropdown menu with a >768px retina device. ;)

see: http://imgur.com/t9ofYe5
Really, the "it's both ends of the week" thing? When Americans say "how was your weekend" do they really just mean either Saturday or Sunday? Or do they alternatively say "how were your weekends?", referring to both ends? I suspect the common response to the first is still a list of things you did on both Saturday and Sunday, even in the US.
Inform 7 is a popular piece of software for interactive fiction: http://inform7.com/. It might give you some good ideas.
Yet our pets can live long, active lives eating the same dry food every single day, I don't see how it's especially difficult to imagine a similar solution for humans. Might be a bit more complicated, but not impossibly so.

Soldiers mostly live off an engineered diet; last I checked they tend to be healthy. Hospitals serve engineered meals. Just because they're using whole foods doesn't really change the fact that they are deliberately building a diet made to supply every nutriment needed by a human being.

And the alternative, the status quo for the majority of the population, is even worse. We're just prodding at random without even thinking about what nutriments we're eating, hoping that somehow we won't forget to eat enough of one crucial nutriment.

What is important for Soylent is that it is clear for everyone who decides to use it extensively to listen to their body. People who die due to bad diets don't go from healthy to dead in 5 seconds. People die when they believe that feeling bad or weak is a normal effect of their diet. They ignore their body when it tells them that there's something wrong. As long as everyone on it knows to stop or see a doctor if they feel in any way worse after starting Soylent, the danger is minimal.
Android is usually considered open compared to iOS because developers can distribute software directly to consumers, without permission from a third party.

Source code licensing is a different topic.
That is idealistic yet doesn't address the needs of the workers. The reality is these jobs are terrible for the workers, gives them no stability and no benefits. The whole point of the move towards temporary workers has nothing to do with "flexibility" and everything to do with costs, it is done solely to allow the employers to skirt offering them healthcare, vacation, and retirement benefits.
Everybody has volume discounts; Twilio is nice and scalable and their rates aren't bad at all.

Putting my marketing hat on, I'd strongly suggest Patio11's blog on inbound marketing. He's really good and the points he make are dead on (the big marketers are basically doing the same thing except paying Marketo and Hubspot for automation).

I think it would be difficult to do 5000 participants in a conf call on stock freeswitch boxes, but we've done over 20k using Kazoo (Which leverages FreeSWITCH as the media server). Our secret sauce is an abstraction layer and custom freeswitch modules for distributed scaling. When you get over a few hundred participants in a conference call you're always doing some sort of bridging between boxen and when you chain lots and lots of boxes together keeping state across the cluster becomes a challenge. We've done a lot of work handling distributed state in conferences; it was a pain.

If you want us to host something like that for you, drop me a line in my inbox. Contact info in my profile (we're also open-source if you wanna get your hands dirty).

Please note: Kazoo (our stack) is built for carrier deployments, and requires a minimum of 8 servers for full redundancy. You can get by with as few as two but full redundancy requires 8 (and is thus our recommended minimum configuration). But it does have all of the stuff you've mentioned and you don't need beefy hardware to do it either.
So my questions/concerns:

1) (asked elsewhere) Do you guys have particular domain experience in nutrition and weight loss? I know one of you is an MD at Cornell, what about specifics?

2) How will you keep people on the site? Weight loss trends and diets are very fickle investments because people kind of jump from one to another inconsistently. You'll need to constantly get new users.

3) What's the revenue source? How are you monetizing this?
Weilos doesn't sound like whales to me at all.
I would absolutely love to attend this, but I don't think I could justify an international trip right now (getting married in 1.5 months). What are the chances you'll do another one next year?
While the control schemes can be a little jarring, I've not had a major issue with them. For me, it's games that have you accelerate at an incredible pace -- I tried playing HL2 Episode 1, for instance, and have found that to be the most jarring/motion-sickness inducing experience so far.

So much so that I went out and got a Razer Hydra to give myself manual control of the acceleration (well, this was a convenient excuse, anyway!).
This is just a man against just a bank, why do you expect rule of law to be the issue here?

The nature of corruption in Russia is not about that rich easily buy justice to win over poor, or that big companies are preferred over individuals, though that issues exist too, it's about those closer to Putin living by different law than regular people, but I don't see anyone like that involved.
+karma for the balls to disclose the reason to quit, and it being a reason like that.
> But the bank as a company should be expected to know what it signs

I disagree. This is one of those instances where I believe it's more important to preserve an equitable standard rather than penalize someone simply for being bigger.

Let's say hypothetically that the courts agree with you, and that in Russia the legal system is strongly based on precedent as it is in the US (I don't know anything about the Russian legal system).

Would any company be exposed to this manner of small-print tweaking? Would this include LLCs as well as corporations?

What if an office supplier injects ridiculous terms into an agreement it signs with a corner grocery store, imposing 6 figure termination fees, and prices that increase exponentially every week? How about a web hosting agreement between a hosting provider and a startup, granting the hosting provider full IP rights to anything hosted on their servers?

These may not appear to be comparable to the David & Goliath-esque situation of a credit company and an individual, but I'm pretty sure this is not really a can of worms anyone wants to open.
PG led the charge on the idea you should start a company instead of going to grad school or taking a safe job. It's very important that he's now also saying, "your startup, despite needing money, might not be ready to raise money yet" because it adds an important constraint on your decision to take the plunge - either be sure you can reach the goal in a few months or have more personal runway.
b) is interesting. In 2008/2009 I spent a year in Iraq on a small military advisor team. We went out in teams of 6-9 and lived with the Iraqis. Most of our MREs were expired (they expire quickly in 100+ degree heat) so we ate a lot of Iraqi food. I also brought tubs of True-Mass to mix with water. It worked pretty well, even over 1-2 weeks ops.

From this experience, I've always been interested to see how soylent turns out. Even back here in the rear nutrition is a chore. I eat to stay alive, not for the experience. Heck, I go to Costco and pay $3.77 for a slice of pizza, hotdog, and a drink whenever I can.

My major question about soylent is its nutritional value. I work out 2x a day, 5-6 days a week. I have a Syntha-6 protein shake after each workout with some fruit and orange juice. I'm curious if soylent will provide the same level of nutrition I currently get.

If it does, it'd be excellent under demanding physical conditions like combat operations and high performance athletes. I'd eventually like to see different mixes, i.e.: weight loss, weight-gain, distance athlete, etc. Hell, I'd pay a premium for it. My wife pays around $200/wk. for Bistro M.D. meals because she doesn't have time to cook. I'd pay something similar if I could get a high performance meal replacement that I could eat every day, for every meal (maybe different flavors to mix it up), and didn't taste like shit.

So how long until we see the ultra-lean startup that forgoes the in-house gourmet chef for a soylent dispenser?
isn't that the spirit of open source? Yep IS IT.
Good call. All of those metrics are fairly low right now. Mainly a small salary overhead. 0 churn so far. Right now, we're still in the process of figuring out what those repeatable processes are for customer acquisition
This reminds me of that one guy a while back who tried suing Google and Microsoft using a very similar technique

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110815/03595515525/guy-cl...

It didn't work
> Technically, the man did nothing wrong. His bank agreed to the altered terms.

I was very surprised that the Russian court system found the contract valid. Surreptitious changing a contract prior to signing can make the contract invalid where I live. It might be a question of ill-intent, and that the court did not find it as such in this case.
Sad to see it not make the Kelly criteria argument for ruin, even where there is a positive scalar expectation: http://r6.ca/blog/20090522T015739Z.html
I think it comes down to who we think the battle is against.

One narrative says that it's murky industrial cooperatives lobbying to stay incumbent that keeps these new startups down. And the resulting laws are/were formed from not-so-good-intentions and are needlessly complicated or antiquated because of that.

But it's worse than that. Some laws are purposely complicated because of special interest pressure, sure, but the big ones--the Goliath ones--are well-intentioned laws passed by regulators concerned mainly how to protect the people. And not only are these on the books, but they've become embedded in common sense. I mean, look at my earlier response, I said it was "obvious" that these laws do in fact protect. The battle is convincing the public that, no, this stuff is antiquated, and that we really do have methods that make this and that regulation obsolete.

But focusing the attention on bad-intentioned industrial groups is the wrong approach and will never win against the regulatory momentum of the democratic state.
PG seems to be saying that the other side "drew first blood".

Of course that is an assumption that because they ask a question they care. While I'm sure they probably do care (because it's a well known fact and human nature) asking doesn't prove that the answer matters to them.

That said in business bluffing and telling lies in certain circumstances about certain things (especially negotiation with an adversary) is a given. There is a line that is walked and it is walked differently by different people according to what they feel comfortable with.

After all if you were at a car dealer and asked them "are you selling me this car cheaper than to any other customer" how do you think they would answer? And if they asked you "tell me the price the other dealer quoted you" how would you answer?

One thing I do know is that if you don't know how to be devious in business you will have problems. This is not to say you should be a thief lying all the time and ripping people off. But you need to have some common sense about what is done in a business transactions and what is generally considered acceptable. And how in some cases you could even be viewed negatively for being "to honest".
Yes and it's funny that the 99% I mentioned are all followers, who look for pattern matches. YC also goes so strongly after patterns and they have also gone for lots of startups with very low scalability recently. What they don't realise is that when you go for startups that match the pattern, you actively sign up to not pursue the outliers and this not the big hits.

Investors should exclusive pursue the outliers and for that reason MUST look for the startups that don't match any elements of the "pattern". (except for a team that executes)

But they dont get that.
Those MTA machines usually have security cameras pointed at them and (at least at the stations I frequent) cops are abound. Of course, I don't know exactly to what degree the readers are tamper-resistant.

This is another reason I try not to use my card in any machines, especially when I'm travelling. Cash can be risky, but it's good to keep a small amount on you at all times just in case.
The insight is that you are afraid of the something which is vital to you, is also incomprehensible.

This isn't a particularly deep insight, lots of people are, but one of the interesting things about Soylent is that if you eat a 'normal' diet (which is to say one recommended as a 'healthy diet' by the FDA) you ingest all of the same chemicals in much the same ratios.

If you were pathologically afraid of the unknown (and some folks are) then you would first sterilize some soil, then put it into a garden with an isolation layer and drainage system, then populate it with a soil biome that you had previously done DNA analysis on to insure you understood which bacteria and fungi were present, and then you would water only with distilled water, plants that you had also sequenced which allowed you to ascertain the lack of tampering with their genome, and fertilizer from fish or chicken for which you controlled all of their consumption.

You wouldn't really do that, because you've grown up and seen people all around you eating stuff. And long before you could reason about these things you got hungry, ate, and got full, and it hasn't hurt you to do so and you continued on your path.

The current things you "trust your health" to have, especially if you buy any packaged food, been engineered in ways that are way more extreme than what has happened to Soylent in order to make you buy more of them. The book "In Defense of Food" [1] by Michael Pollan goes into great detail about the things folks do which make Rob sound pretty mild.

You state "As far as I've seen, our understanding of diet and human metabolism is in the dark ages." Which is an understandable bit of hyperbole but the reality is that you trust in the defensive mechanisms of your body which have evolved over millennia to get as much as they can out of what ever you put into your digestive system, whether it be Beluga caviare or rice beetles.

If you look at the situation non-emotionally (and that is very hard to do), then you see that based on your belief that we're in the dark ages of nutrition science, and the chemicals in choice A and choice B are the same. The predicted outcome of consuming all of A or B as your primary food source is "no difference." However, as most people I know who have gone through this emotional journey, what does change is you start actually being aware of what you are eating and making choices based on that and it does have an outcome since you change behavior when you identify a correlation between eating X and outcome Y.

[1] http://michaelpollan.com/books/in-defense-of-food/
It is, but bear in mind many companies have different architectures or even hosts behind their blogs vs their main site (or even product). For example, a Rails or Django app for the main site, PHP/Tumblr/Wordpress.com for the blog.

There are some proxying shenanigans you can do with mod_rewrite but I'd certainly not want a PHP-based blog anywhere near my main site/app if I could get away with it due to the security risks.
An overlooked consequence of long-term replacement of solids with liquids for nutrition is the fact that dentition is going to most likely change, I'm referring especially to teeth position.

Daily chewing is applying pressure to teeth and keeping them 'set' in the position you're familiar with.

While researching some wisdom tooth extraction possible long-term side effects, I was surprised to find out how much can teeth migrate, start receding etc. if one is not able to chew on both sides for example.

I don't remember the source(s), but I saw real pictures of people with this problem. There were multiple causes too, not just as a consequence of extractions gone wrong.

A lot of people are focusing on the issue of meeting nutritional requirements, but I'm curious on seeing a real dentist's opinion on the possible long-term effects of such a diet as well.
How to Think Like a Computer Scientist - Interactive Edition 2.0
The over-focus on resume is true across all industries. Missing a keyword on the resume can be symptomatic of a bigger problem. If you're impressing the right people (through work, networking, etc) your resume gets put to the top of the pile without going through HR or an on-line keyword search.
What is wrong with Intel ?
A quick note on how the conference calling industry actually works...

1) Most BIG conference calling companies are registered as competitive local exchange carriers.

2) As CLECs, these companies get to charge for inbound traffic.

3) Charge customers per minute in addition for insane profit.

Companies like FreeConferenceCall.com are basically ignoring the subscriber revenue in exchange for only the inbound tariff (that's their industry disruption).

Example: I setup a conference call bridge on FreeConferenceCall.com and I call in. One other person joins me. I call in on my cellphone and so does the other person. Neither one of us pays for long distance so we don't care, but on the backend, FreeConferenceCall.com is billing our cell providers $.30 per minute.

That's the reason GoogleVoice blocks those numbers, because Google is already eating $.004/min for US numbers, they can't afford to eat calls that cost $.30/min; that's nuts.

This is the same business model that powers MagicJack as well. Just a quick FYI. Paying people for inbound minutes is only for folks that don't have enough volume to get a CLEC-level agreement (you can get CLECs to sell you inbound for $0 or even to pay you for the traffic if you have enough volume). The beauty of Twilio's business model is that they get all of the aggregation benefits of your traffic.

Does that help?

Edit: Also the comment I'm replying to has a ton of great advice!
Regardless of David vs Goliath sentiment, realistically one can't allow such a thing in a modern society.

e.g. I sent 3 documents out today requesting signatures from directors - signatures which by local laws bind the company they represent +- irrevocably. If you allow the scenario presented then clause #138 could easily have read "pay Mr Havoc a million a day".
Michael Hastings, Edward Snowden and Barrett Brown: War With The Security State
This man's got spunk! Get him to Silicon Valley with some venture capital and he'll make waves.
Nine Things You Might Not Know About Cord Cutting
Hell yeah! If I'm shipping 10M units to my 5 favorite customers, and my documentation comes in Engineer form, I don't want to waste my time writing up 20K pages of documentation (which is about how much it takes) so that hobbyists can buy the chips and then demand support, 5 units at a time.