skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't matter to an insurance company how likely car crashes are -- that just determines what the company charges in premiums. All that matters is that the likelihood is well understood and that the company has enough customers to stay solvent.

Insurance companies essentially work by the Law of Large Numbers: that in a large enough number of trials, the average value should approach the expected value. In real world terms, if the chance of a house burning down in a fire is 1 per year per 1000 homes at an average cost of $200k each to repair (totally bogus numbers), then an insurance company can break even by charging a homeowner $200/year to insure the home against fire.

Over a large enough number of homes, that should be reasonably close to the actual amount they have to pay out. Tack on a profit margin, and you have a business model.

Edit: Fixed numbers a bit. Thank goodness I'm not an actuary.
At the time this story was in the news in August I thought it was most likely leaked on purpose by the government in an attempt to shine the image of the NSA.

Now My thoughts are 1) I hope I was wrong and 2) karma's a bitch.
Very awesome and interesting.
Not only does it use the same datatypes, but I know that it uses the same pg wire format such that the java (and I'm sure python) postgres drivers work out of the box.
> My favorite part is the WebKit specific code... Don't be Evil and something about standards right?

Meaning what? Google isn't directly involved with WebKit anymore and can't make them implement standards.
I really want this to be true. I will say that as someone with a corporate job outside the actual startup community, I really miss the days of "Make something people want", and "Ramen profitable" (does anyone even remember ramen profitability anymore?). It really does seem that the community has sold itself out to a process aimed at driving multiround funding toward an acquisition event and that it's lost sight of the fun of making actual products.

But my fear is that, no, "growth hacking" really is the path to success in this world; and that all the ramen was just something that amounts to a marketing gimick to get the bubble off the ground...
This is what Adobe should have created when they realized Flash was going to die.
Despite the poorly chosen name, this is a WYSIWYG tool for animation, not a site design tool. If all you care about is markup, use a text editor and make your animations by hand. Compared with Adobe Edge Animate (which is very similar), the markup is actually very clean (aside from the big script block, which is for ad functionality and also animation / drawing routines). You can see the animations defined as real keyframes in CSS, not overly reliant on javascript, which is good. It means there is a chance of taking those and using them independently of the JS runtime code, and also that execution will take advantage of native browser animation functions, rather than being bottlenecked by JS code.

It would be nice if there was some options for stripping out the Ad specific javascript. But even at ~55k this is a pretty slimmed down codebase considering what it does. Swiffy, which converts flash files to HTML/javascript has a 200k JS runtime.

A tool that designers can use to make animations in HTML5/CSS3 is desperately needed if we are ever going to move to a truly post-Flash world. We can't expect everyone to be an HTML developer, and achieving the same level of complexity and polish is extremely difficult when just working with code.
The tune is blasting in my head now. Title tune by Huelsbeck and level 1 by Whittaker... these two wrote so many great game tunes.
I agree it's very misleading but they do clarify it in the first sentence of the help page.

Google Web Designer is an advanced web application that's built with HTML5 which lets you design and build HTML5 advertisements and other web content using an integrated visual and code interface
I care, else I wouldn't be reading these comments.
Flash was not designed to create whole websites either but that didn't stop people from doing it anyway.
Spring was probably born as a reaction to EJB. And if you've ever written tests for EJBs you're grateful to Spring for providing an alternative.
Expensive? Domains were free up until at least 1995.
I prefer to call myself a link-builder. This seems more accurate. Growth Hacker is loaded with too much controversy and hogwash.
Isn't pretty much everyone moving to custom web applications for internal services? I doubt that in those cases it matters much what platform you're on since it's probably running on Apache on a linux server anyway.

I've seen this model even at tiny companies, and my impression is that it is also how the big ones do it. There are limitations, but the benefits are pretty substantial.
I don't buy this. Why wouldn't people who know that the entire US "Intelligence Community" is focused on them do things like:

(A) Get underlings to regularly generate traffic on all comm channels, so as to prevent traffic analysis.

(B) Rotate accounts, computers, phones and underlying technology to keep the US on its toes?

(C) Randomly (dice, cards, yarrow stalks whatever is theologically permissible) quit using a channel. Occasionally claim the channel is compromised while you're at it.

(D) Act as if all channels are compromised, and poke fun at the wiretappers with "sigs" that thank the NSA for doing what 9/11 airplanes could not do on their own: take away liberties.
Another quote I've heard and liked: "Training is like wrestling with a gorilla. You don't stop when you're tired. You stop when the gorilla is tired."

And the gorilla is never tired.
whoa, that's pretty clever!
That was a long stretch there pal.
Yep, it's embarrassing and really unnecessary as HireArt sounds like a good idea and appears to be well executed. If you look back at many of their posts, there's at least one newly created account and a few reused accounts adding very little to the conversation, just espousing the company.
Since then, each issue of Inspire has offered a how-to section on encrypting communications, recommending MS2 as the main encryption tool.

Awesome, Inspire has a 2600 how-to section.
I had no clue domains were available before I was born... that's quite a strange thought. For some reason, I was thinking they wouldn't have been around before the web.

A dumb question, but what exactly would you do with a domain name before 1990? Email is all I can think of.
Google and Apple are the reason we are back to this mess again. They need to fix the problem not facilitate it with tools like this.

Microsoft and FrontPage did the exact same thing back in the days.
comes with rootkits. a typical googleware
What scenario would be good for a car insurance company? If cars never have any problems, then no one would buy car insurance (perhaps other than the government-mandated minimum). So is there some happy medium where the insurance industry would thrive?
5 Life advices from Adam Cheyer founder of Siri which I got at Startup Weekend
A CEO who resisted NSA spying is out of prison
Google's Web Tracking Plan Could Give It A Monopoly Over Facebook & Apple
I never thought flash was all that easy to use. I could never get the timeline to cooperate with what I was trying to do (drag/copy/paste frames etc)
I don't know when I cross that line of someone who's done work in lisp-like languages, but I've made two or three small hobby projects in clojure and contributed a bug fix to http-clj and am well versed in the source code of seesaw. I don't usually see code like that in those projects.
It usually happens when they buy something that's already non-linux ready.
As someone who happened to use Linux on their PC while coming across this submission, I was confused for a while as to why the download button was disabled. ;)
Specialization leads to the big bucks, it's also easier to dodge crap code that is outside your specialty.

It has nothing to do with boring/exciting, that depends on the project/company/coworker.
If Chrome is the host Google will be perfectly happy to move back to desktop apps with a cloud storage back end. It's easier to corral users that way.
If I recall you used to have to fax a form in on company letterhead to confirm your domain registration.
Great composer, no doubt, but slow (Estimated delivery: Dec 2012) going with the Turrican Soundtrack Kickstarter [0].

0: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chris-huelsbeck/turrican...
Why can't the people be simply exactly and fully quoted instead of having something else put in their mouth?

Why can't we see Einsteins quote from 1954 in the main article about him

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text"

instead of referring to "pantheistic" "Spinoza's God" out of his letter 1929 to interpretations of which he referred also in 1954:

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

Even where the quotes exist (the separate article) they are intentionally shuffled to appear that he at the end it's important that he believed in "Spinoza's God" (by placing that quote after the later ones and hiding the context).

The answer is: those that win edit wars are religious, and they try to obscure his words "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses." If the "smartest man" says that, and they do believe in God, they feel "stupid," and they simply can't accept that, facts be damned.
This is the same for Haskell where it's also convenient to develop in the repl (ghci).
For anyone looking for a brief, accessible explanation of the proof itself, I cannot recommend the Nagel and Newman [1] highly enough.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Gödels-Proof-Ernest-Nagel/dp/081475837...
Agreed, I donated without a second-thought. But for $30k, we should have a clear explanation (more than a one-liner on HN) on where the money is going exactly.

Online donations are notoriously lacking transparency. Nearly as bad as the FBI/NSA (:P).
But multiple examples provide only a skewed dataset.
An Xtreme Scooter XM-3150, which is identical to (many? most? all?) Zapinos.
Insurance is the opposite of gambling. You take a guaranteed loss instead of risking a huge one. Not having insurance is a bet that nothing bad will happen.

If you can afford to replace everything you own out of savings, good for you, but most people can't.
Installed. Tried it. Uninstalled.

Interesting, but unless you're designing ads, this release is probably not worth your time.
Nonsense.

The language shape the minds, define the boundaries and the kind of solutions that can/can't be done in a reasonably time.

Look as pretending enlightenment to say that languages not matter, that only matter the man behind them. Well, is that is true, the mans behinds the languages mean nothing? Is only the work that create the ones using the languages that matter but not the work that make THAT possible?

The tool matter. You can build a city with only a hammer. But is stupid. Some languages ARE better than others. Some ARE faster. Some ARE more legible. Some ARE more performant. Some ARE safer. Some ARE more productive.

Maybe two languages too close in his objective give small returns, but surely exist order of magnitude improvements between different groups...
My insights from talking to app users. Share yours too!
Nah, he'd got it made flipping houses.
Hmm.. Maybe after a heavy dinner.
Ok, the war is on. Does anyone know of a good HTML5 ad blocker?

Flash was awesome. It made it really easy to block animated ads. My browsing experience had been wonderful ever since I installed a Flash blocker a few years ago. Also did wonders for my battery life.

Please, please help my browsing experience remain wonderful. Thanks.
Show HN: A Raspberry Pi + NodeJS-powered talking robot head
Github login wall.
Crawlers are one of those projects that's honestly best left to someone else. Fun for a hobby, but a nightmare to get right, and someone has already done the work for you. The exception is limited-use tools like Wget that can give you practical results for small-domain retrieval, but then kill you on CPU and memory and is impossible to scale; use a better tool or customize an existing one if you need to support large-scale crawls.

Some of the "little things" matter much more than your content analyzer or HTTP parsing - DNS performance and multi-homing being just a few that can have drastic effects.

Just as an example of how complex it gets, here's a brief overview of some of the features all crawlers should take into account: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler
You know what would be useful? An app like this from Google that outputs Google index-optimized code for SEO purposes.

In one fell swoop Google could educate the masses as to what search engines consider "good" code and simultaneously destroy the "machine-gun-the-fish-in-a-barrel" approach marketing people use for SEO.

Instead, we get Adobe Motion 2.0 HTML5 Street Fighter Edition Now Featuring Blinky-Movey-Thingies.
I made far more gold in WoW as a middleman than I ever did with "labor" alone.
FWIW borrow was correct in this case
> Could more data have prevented that terrible day when I had to fire an under-performing employee--and maybe prevented hiring her in the first place? I'd like to think so.

This sounds like a poisonous way to approach hiring; to me it reads "let's add lots more bureaucracy so that hopefully I can avoid an embarrassing situation".
Cheers! Would love to see how it comes together!
The ideal scenario is that the public hugely overestimate the risk of car accidents.
It's going to be trickier as just blocking a single plugin is no longer viable.

I think an domain blacklist a la Adblock is probably the best idea but that won't help you with ads that are already present in the DOM on pageload.
Fair use? US stamp featuring photo of monument nets sculptor $650,000
You seriously don't think there is a political motive behind this and the other French Google issues? That and the grasp the copywrite lobby have on the french government are certainly influences behind creating an atmosphere behind this.

Not to mention the unrealistic and technically infeasible nature of the demands. The french government are a madman loose in the room. On many levels and issues.
Beyond that, given the perverse 'market' for health care in the US, even if you can (theoretically) afford to self-insure, the pricing mechanisms and negotiating power of insurance companies practically ensures that they can offer you premiums for less than your out-of-pocket cost for even fairly pedestrian services.
This appears to be a fork of the Ninja Authoring Tool which was made by Motorola Mobility over a year ago as part of the Montage project. Now Google owns Motorola Mobility.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/ninja-...
Glad to hear you only have minimal side effects from the Strattera.

I tried it for a while several years ago, and, while it worked wonderfully (first period of my life where I actually had any reliable sense of time!), the side effects I had were unacceptable.

The mild dizziness, occasional headaches, and minor dry mouth were not a problem, but the main side effect was ... more troubling. Let's just say that, while the Strattera enhanced performance in some areas, it degraded performance in others.

Still, I heartily recommend those diagnosed with ADD or ADHD to give Strattera a try. Side effects went away within a week or so of discontinuing the drug, so no real risk.
Opening files from pull requests and branches
When your self-hype-double-speak stops paying the tabs for the checks your work can't cash, change the name, it's all the same... a sucker a minute, so you better sugar up another stick. Follow the money behind a dream. Suck it dry. Rinse, repeat.
Security is hard and (to most people) boring. Do you really doubt that Snowden's leaks prompted internal discussions about securing communications channels? After all, they prompted the exact same discussions right here on HN.
When IBM "woke up" to the Internet in 1990, think.com was registered by Thinking Machines. When TM folded in 1994(?) we (IBM) were still just getting an Internet group together and I don't think it occurred to any of us to grab think.com (if it was even available).
The Flash timeline was counterintuitive but once you grokked it, it was super easy and super efficient. I came to Flash from After Effects (much more intuitive keyframing) and hated Flash until my brain clicked with it.
You wrote:

> Of the two major alternatives, the CA system ... and the web of trust ..., of these, the former is clearly more reliable.

That is, you wrote "the CA system is more reliable than the WoT".

I'm pretty sure you didn't mean what you wrote. It seems to contradict the rest of your post.

Elaborating for the benefit of other readers: we have lots of evidence that the Certificate Authority system has been repeatedly compromised, certainly by state actors and probably also by (other) criminals. There are semi-solutions, like certificate pinning. One alternative (the only alternative I know of) is not trusting any Authority to get good certs, but rather getting them yourself, or from people you trust, or from people trusted by people you trust, etc... thus the Web of Trust. This alternative is pretty poor, but it might be less broken than CAs.
Seriously. It's like me complaining a computer game shouldn't be called a computer game because it's not available for the Mac.
My (with the help of a couple other geeks) first attempt to combine a Raspberry Pi device to a custom-made robot all powered with a NodeJS server as a go-between.
The web is just port 80 (& 443). There are 65533 other ports out there, not to speak of whole other protocols such as UDP - what are they used for?

Just look at the first dozen or so lines of /etc/services and you'll get a very good picture of what services were important in the early Internet.
I think you overlooked that in GTA we have a
> 100-year-storm of destruction

In the game world, insurance companies wouldn't have predicted the level of claims.
"The big surprise to me is that they're not all just tech companies. In a sea of domain names that built the internet sits... Alcoa!?"

Yeah, Alcoa is an interesting case. On the surface, one wonders why an aluminum manufacturer would be on the early domains list. But Alcoa has been (and still is?) in the fabrication business for a wide range of industrial uses: aerospace, defense, etc. Since the early internet was largely subsidized by the military-industrial complex, it makes some sense that a major supplier would be early on the bandwagon.

That's just a guess, though. I have no particular knowledge of why Alcoa was there early.
The library looks very nicely done, however, personally I think it is better to avoid such query string parameter formats completely. So to use an example from the Github page:

http://www.stretchr.com/?name=Mat&company=Stretchr#?comment=123

should become

http://www.stretchr.com/companies/Stretchr/users/Mat/comments/123

The URL now looks much nicer and more readable, and it also leads to organized hierarchy because of predictable URL patterns. So maybe the user wants to see the list of all users in the Stretchr company. So just from the URL they can determine that a good way to do that is probably by removing the end of the URL so that it is:

http://www.stretchr.com/companies/Stretchr/users

Anyway, that's just my personal preference, but I think that query string style URL's should be avoided unless absolutely necessary and nicer REST style URL's should be used instead.

If you have a one page app you can route all requests on the domain to one page, and then use Backbone logic to look at the REST style URL and show the correct view based on the URL.
I'm not sure convincing my government would make any difference since I'm connecting to an american server right now just to type this (I'm also working in the US). It's like saying that if you're connecting to a german server and they're violating your privacy then you should fill a complaint with your own government.
You know, you could just actually practice concentration exercises.

And to echo what others have said: procrastination is itself a symptom of deeper issues.
But you'd have to go out of your way to get your hands on it since the Download button is inert unless their javascript can confirm that you are in fact using Windows or so. Doesn't seem to work with wine's built-in browser, and I couldn't get past the clickwrap EULA with an old chrome-based browser running under wine either.
I can indeed. Unfortunately, that fact is completely unrelated to the discussion.
Does DNB increase working memory? It need not increase IQ for it to be effective.
Increased access to capital is usually a good thing
that you know, are there any other games with an auction house/ any other sort of market(that is available in the browser) with the same depth of WoW. When I used to play it, the last few months I remember I spent more time in the armoury than in the game...
"In recent months, senior administration officials — including the director of national intelligence, James Clapper Jr. — have drawn attention to the damage that Mr. Snowden’s revelations have done, though most have been addressing the impact on national security more broadly, not just the effect on counterterrorism. "

Is it just me, or do they just not get that if they hadn't been walking way outside their charter in building a surveillance state that Snowden wouldn't have leaked the information he did? Can nobody see the cause and effect here? None of their infrastructure would be getting forced exposure from their own employees if they had not gone down this path? Ok, enough ranting.
The KGB is no more, now there is the FSB. Whether or not that means anything in practice, I cannot say.
It was almost always more effective to gobble up debt and then invest the money in productive capability if you were looking to earn a real fortune though.

The balancing act was to not overdo it - depressions was not fun if you were overly indebted.

Shorting the stcok of competitors were always good fun though, but mostly since they were so horribly bad at building which resulted in that it was sometimes a good idea to shorten stock.

Sigh - how I wish for a spiritual successor to Railroad Tycoon 3.
Make it fun! Music, news etc. Be proactive about your inspiration!

Programming is one of the only engineering fields that has a quick feedback loop between Hypothesis -> Results. And I love that! Also the open ended difficulty bar inspires constant accomplishment. I love it by every character typed! I have to stop myself cause I have some coding to do
;^p
Well if you take into account the cost of 'hiring, total compensation, eventual severance pay, and other factors like legal fees' (which is heavily weighted towards 'mistakes, failures and missed business opportunities') the number can be as high as you arbitrarily make it.
Oh man, I thought it was just me!! Sat here for a while in quiet shame after I realized it and thought there must be something wrong with me :P
Answer: because there are plenty of things you simply can't express in SVG with its current level of support across browsers.

e.g. no blend mode except "normal" really works reliably across browsers yet. And just a reminder: it's 2013, everyone.

Next question...
Google Launches Web Designer, A Visual Tool For Building Interactive HTML5 Sites