skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In a comment on HN, PG noted that the massive fortunes of the future will be made by "startups in industries that didn’t previously have them."

This requires a myopic definition of the word "startup." I have yet to encounter any industry in which there are no new businesses being formed. Are these new businesses all started by Silicon Valley types, and do they look like Silicon Valley startups? Of course not, but that doesn't make them any less a "startup."

> Many if not most industries can be improved with an injection of technology and the introduction of the startup ethos (disruption, growth, efficiency, data, etc.).

This statement seems to imply that most industries are behind the curve technologically, and that the players in these industries aren't focused on growth, efficiency and the use of data.

From agriculture to shipping to insurance, it's hard to find major industries that are not using data and cutting-edge technology to create efficiencies and drive growth. In many if not most cases, you will find that they have been solving incredibly complex problems and building sophisticated solutions for longer than many Silicon Valley "startup" employees have been alive.

> Most of the economy is still untouched by the methods used by Silicon Valley’s engineering-first companies.

What "methods" are these? And what exactly is an "engineering-first" company? Is a company primarily differentiated by having a prettier website, which ironically seems to make up a good number of the startups the author points to, an "engineering-first" company? If so, why? And why does this matter?

I wonder how the author would describe companies like Exxon, Maersk and GE...
Introducing Login and Pay with Amazon
You always have to guess their intention — natural human language is inherently imprecise. You simply choose to protest in this case rather than allowing your mind to find a reasonable meaning for their words as you would in most other cases.

For example, you use the word "speaking" here, but nobody is actually speaking. This presents us with the choice of guessing your intent or pitching a fit. (BTW, apparently incorrect usage of words is your style. It's OK — occasional lack of precision is actually the entire human race's style.)
Ask HN: Pricing model for our first app
My friend and I just released our first iOS game and are confused about what pricing model to use. There are two popular models:

1. The pay up front model (e.g., angry birds). All level packs are playable in sequential order.

2. Free to play with in app purchases. (e.g., almost every other game). Only the first level pack is playable with a price tag of 99cents on each additional level pack.

There seems to be quite a bit of data implying that the freemium model is the way to go. The idea is that one would release the game for free, get lots of users and hope that a small percentage of those users will spend money in-app.

Articles like this one (http://www.marco.org/2013/09/28/underscore-price-dynamics) seem to indicate that "the market for paid-up-front apps appealing to mass consumers is gone." Then there are the success stories like Clash or Titans, Candy Crush, etc. that seem to be raking it in on in-app purchases. I suspect that there is some observational bias here since we only ever hear of the successful apps that use this model.

It seems that success of the freemium model is largely a numbers game. To get a large number of downloads, one needs to either have money for advertising or some clout/influence in relevant industry journals/blogs; both of which seem dire approaches for small time indie developers.

I think that a pay-up-front model seems to have a longer tail than freemium models since it is less dependent on the initial marketing momentum. Additionally, the benefit of pay-up-front models is that you get the user to commit to pay you from the beginning -- theoretically that means that you can focus marketing efforts to people who would actually spend money on a well-made app instead of a shotgun approach to get the most number of active users.

Any advice/suggestions are welcome.
Alleged Blackhole Exploit Kit Author Arrested In Russia
I have a very nice adjustable GeekDesk provided by my employer, but I haven't lowered it to a sitting position for months. I generally have no problems standing for long periods of time (assuming I have enough padding in my shoes), but my back will complain if I spend too much time prone (due to an injury 35 years ago).

What I really need is more exercise, but when is that study going to come out? I'd love to add a treadmill to my work rig ;)
Never thought I'd see the day where we're talking weightlifting on HN. Deadlifts and Squats are two of my favorite parts of the week.
It’s the year 2023 and a day-old startup just sold for 1 billion dollars
Yes, I disagree.
Sure, but leaping at "lazy slob" vs. leaping at "medical problem" are both dumb ideas, except one is considerably meaner than the other.

This may be a shitty analogy, but I can't come up with something better:

I give you two boxes. Box A has a 50% chance of being a pizza, and a 50% chance of being $1000. Box B has a 90% chance of being a dog turd, and a 10% chance of being $1,000,000.

Which box do you pick?

It's a trick question of course. The answer is: open the boxes up and take what you want (presumably the million dollars).

It doesn't matter what the bell curve looks like on the causes of obesity - because we're not dealing with aggregates, we're dealing with a specific individual. If you want to know where on the bell curve she lies, ask someone. Leaping to any conclusion because of probabilities is idiotic, because you're not dealing with a probabilistic unknown.

So it doesn't really matter if the majority of obesity is caused by poor lifestyle choices, or if it isn't. It doesn't at all matter how many people are fat due to hormones or due to Big Macs - because in the case of an individual we can directly ascertain it for ourselves. Probabilistic decision making when you can simply observe the individual is nonsensical, and frequently simply represents an attempt to deliberately paint an individual as a generic member of their class.
Might as well play the lottery!
I suppose nature didn't intend for giraffes to eat foliage high in trees, but it has benefited the giraffe to be able to do so.
"These systems are entirely built on code, and code is malleable. If you have control over the code that gets executed at every point in the stack (which the operator of a web app certainly does), there's always room for the operator to change the code and therefore change the behavior to do anything, including log things that were previously considered secure."

Which is exactly why nobody should have believed Ladar's claims in the first place. He trumpeted the fact that he had not yet developed any wiretapping capability and tried to distract everyone from the hard reality of "encrypted webmail."

This is why real security and privacy require end-to-end encryption.
I suggest you take a look at the perma.cc initative. There's no reason to reinvent the robust shortlink, and you won't be obligated to run this system forever.
They probably load-tested based on the number of sign-ups they expected, and that estimate may even have been accurate. They don't seem to have realized that lots more people would be interested in what's available, even if they aren't ready to enroll. If they had realized that, you wouldn't have to "apply" before seeing the plans, and the plans could have been static content, distributed all over a CDN by now.
Dead and buried.
> the only way to definitively prove you saw content on a given date is to provide the content you saw.

Providing a copy of the content that you claim is the source does not come anywhere close to definitively proving that that content is the content at the cited source on the identified date.

All it does is provide what you claim to be the original source, which, assuming that you do it honestly, provides the content backing the characterizations for which you cited, and the context for any limited excerpts you quoted. So, its useful, but not as proof that you saw the content in the cited source on that date.
What does the report say about it being ethically wrong?
While one can contort your four points to fit a sedentary lifestyle, I agree with you that soda fits them all trivially. I also agree that soda poses more of a direct and immediate threat to personal health, as it's a leading cause of obesity and also a major source of sugar, which itself is a leading cause of diabetes.

That said, there's still one thing smoking has over soda as well: second hand smoke is both annoying and harmful to nonsmokers. There's not an analogue to this for drinking soda or sitting.
I am not optimistic that they'll get it working by the deadline, sadly. Are you?

I mean, let's start admitting that it's _not_ easy to make a site that can handle that level of traffic. It's do-able, but it's not easy.

Once they have it handling the proper traffic, only _then_ are they going to start finding out about all the bugs that are actually logic related instead of load/traffic related. Which I'm sure there are plenty of, because all software has bugs, and because the QA for those (including integration with IRS system or whatever?) isn't trivial either, and I'm sure they didn't do any better with it then they did with preparing for the load.
The best explanation of the Higgs mechanism I've seen so far has been from "minute physics":

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Uh5mTxRQcg

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASRpIym_jFM

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6guXMfg88Z8

(If you only watch one part, watch part 2, it's only 170 seconds long.)
Transposition vs substitution; I'd say F*CK is more likely to suffer the ASA’s wrath than FCUK. But who knows, need more details to be sure of anything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_p...

I remember this happening. Since whoever runs Hushmail didn't go to the press and his blog and make a big scene after being approached by the feds (both for the US and Canada, mind you, since Hushmail's a canadian company). There's a reason why Hushmail was targeted, it was at the time the best way to figure out who's shipping large quantities of drugs everywhere. In the same year, Hushmail and eGold became compromised and Bush passed a law stating police can open your mail in USPS if they think you're a terrorist (previously they needed a warrant which by the time they obtained one you'd already have your package). Coincidentally, this was I believe around the time Silk Road started up. :)

So, Hushmail was involved in the pre-Silk Road days of internet drug trafficking, and I'm pretty sure that is not the position they wanted to be in. We'll never know if Hushmail was "forced" to give up users' information, but I would say that even if they didn't want to, they pretty much would have no other choice other than shutting their doors.
Security of the wifi device and it's connection to the internet.. not enough people are talking about this.

So many "internet enabled" devices out there are poor on security. I would love to hear from the people behind Nest on how they plan to take on internet attacks.
I don't see any statistics in the document you cited that are directly relevant to "the idea that people disable their smoke detectors permanently over nuisance alarms", in one way or another.

Indirectly (on p. 8 of the first document), it looks like 8% of fatal residential fires had smoke alarms that definitively "failed to operate". A much higher percentage are ambiguous, with it being unclear if the alarm operated or if there even was one in the first place. That is certainly compatible with the notion that people disable their smoke detectors because of the nuisance.
Optimizing Linux Memory Management for Low-latency, High-throughput Databases
To answer my question, apparently the viewing angles are a lot more forgiving on the HP screen.
Insider trading by itself is not a trumped up charge - probably none of the charges possible by the US Code are by itself. What makes it trumped up is the particular circumstance - the details of the case. And the details look definitely very fishy.
Yes, I wasnt talking about starting a foreign company. I was talking about doing the work on behalf of that company from the U.S..

If you still live in the U.S. I assume you are connecting remotely to your servers and then writing and executing code that the U.S. might consider illegal behavior.

I'm not putting you down- I am glad people are pushing the boundaries. I just wouldnt feel comfortable taking that risk personally.
>"We all recognize the importance of fire safety, but there is no excuse for the design of smoke and CO detectors to be so painfully obnoxious. If it motivates homeowners to disable them, it is a bad design, isn't this obvious?"

If you're being woken up by low batteries or disabling your smoke alarms - no, you don't recognize the important of fire safety.

>"When one of these things has a low battery, it chirps intolerably - but only every 30 minutes!! So when this happens at night, and there are several of them in the residence, you are literally kept awake half the night, waiting by one after another, just to figure out which one needs a battery."

The battery backup in a typical residential fire alarm can last several years. Spend a few minutes and few bucks replacing the batteries once a year and it's unlikely you will ever have this problem.

I certainly expect a $130 alarm to offer something over the typical $20-30 counterparts and it appears this one does, but I certainly don't consider support for handwaving or delayed alarms to be among the benefits.
Shut up and stop giving away the secrets of life! People were supposed to find those on their own!
We really ought to be investing more broadly in fusion technologies. Please spread the word to scientists that they can back this recommendation if they agree. http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?option=com_l...

Supporting broader funding will increase the richness of the science in the field, which gives us more angles to understand what works and what doesn't. I support funding an array of approaches instead of going all-in on ITER that seems to have no future, but I'm not a professor.
It can't, I would have deleted it immediately. The real requests comes in snail mail and are the only ones I reply to.
The official story right now is that they underestimated. Medicaid has had at max 30k users; they doubled the estimate for hc.gov, but instead of ~50k users they're seeing 250k. From what I'd read (in a story linked from this hn page) they did test for load, but nowhere near 200k users.

FWIW, I don't think the issues right now are load so much. I think there's some insanely bad logical pieces that are messing things up, and possibly have corrupted accounts that were created early on. I base this on a few things.

1. The "username" requirements.

The username is case sensitive. Choose a username that is 6-74 characters long and must contain a lowercase or capital letter, a number, or one of these symbols _.@/-

Really? I know some systems use case-sensitive usernames, but given that you're already forcing some odd characters and whatnot in there, why not normalize to lowercase? This just feels like it's going to cause more support problems (mobile safari automatically uppercasing a username that should be lowercased, etc).

Also... the English description of that username is nowhere near intuitive. "A lowercase or capital letter". As opposed to what other kind of letter?

2. Multiple accounts with a single email address.

I've been able to 'successfully' register multiple different username accounts with the same email address. When I do a password reset based on email (the couple times it worked) which username was I resetting the password for? I say 'successfully' because no login attempt has ever worked. And now trying to register yet another username with the same email address doesn't work, but the error message is so vague ("there was a problem" IIRC) that I can't tell if that was a factor or not.

OK... 2 things. That's about as far as I've been able to see in to the system so far, so that's all I can judge it on. But it seems that they've probably allowed some logical inconsistencies in my own signups that may be causing more problems now, and I don't think they are related to load.

Of course, I could be 100% wrong, but it doesn't feel like load is the culprit right now.
Learning to Just Do It
How you can have Mayday for iOS today
> if you've never had to deal with a traffic spike, you probably aren't going to build for the scale issues you will have.

One question would be whether they hired people/firms who had had to deal with that level of scale before.

I'd assume not.

But apparently they hired someone who didn't even know enough to know that they were not qualified to do it.
URL as User Interface Design Pattern
What's surprising to me at this point is that nobody has published the actual plans, separately from this website. Best thing the government could do right now is get those plans and their rates out to news organizations, so people can see them without going to healthcare.gov, which could go back to being just the enrollment application that they seem to have intended.
HN Bug: Title field can be 80 characters, but error message requests 
As is evident from this title.
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Gaming jobs salary reports
> Before the release of Firefox 4 we decided that Firefox needed a set of high-quality built-in tools.

I don't understand why they did not just integrate Firebug directly. What were the reasons?
You assert that it's a binary choice between obnoxious false positives and life-saving potential, but this is because current smoke detector design is at a local maximum which optimizes for life-saving potential. There's absolutely no reason to think that a fundamental redesign of the smoke detector interface (rather than incremental improvements) can both be less obnoxious and equally life-saving.

As a concrete example, I've been trying to get a friend's parents to install (!) a smoke detector for /years/. They cook incredibly smoky food (lots of yogurt-marinated meats on a dry cast-iron pan) and both they and most of the other members of their immigrant community have removed any smoke detectors near their kitchen because the false positives are so onerous. If it were possible to provide them with a device which they could easily disable during cooking, they would be more protected for the rest of the time.

Additionally, the specific statistics you cite are not designed to determine whether people are disabling their smoke detectors due to false positives, and so have no bearing on that component of the discussion.
"It was the best current technology could offer"

Sure, if we ignore the existence of things like PGP, S/MIME, smart cards, and the dozens of other ways we can have secure email without relying on some trusted third party like this.

"this technology was not meant to deal with the oppressive government that can compel any company to reveal any information"

Then it was not meant to deal with the evil hacker who takes control of the server and grabs valuable information.

"As soon as Ladar..."

There's the handwave. The security of the system depends not on technology, math, or physical laws, but on the whims of just one man. What if Ladar was less principled?
I wonder if the list of available plans is customized, not everyone has access to every plan, and it can't show you the list of plans available to you until it knows who you are.
Unpacking The Smashing Magazine's Mascot: Cody (Office fun)
I've been on both sides of the fence where someone tells me their "super secret" idea and the reality is that it blows...and where I thought that an idea that I had was badass, but when I finally told people, it turned out to be terrible. Even with the ideas that were good, it has taken a long time to develop them. Even if you have a great idea, you still need to get off your ass and execute branding, marketing and product development. Usually, telling people actually helps me talk through the idea and make it better.
I'm saying this in a friendly way: you're being ridiculous. :)

I bet greater than 95% of residential fire alarms are false alarms. Now, perhaps all of those people should call a contractor and get their house rewired. (Even then, false alarms would not be reduced to zero.)

Or, perhaps, the fire alarms should be improved so that people can dismiss false alarms without pulling out the batteries.
We still don't know everything that transpired here, but here's my interpretation of the article:

- The government is granted the right to snoop on Snowden's e-mail from a court. The court implores Lavabit to provide the technical expertise necessary to make this successful.
- Lavabit replies that all traffic is encrypted, and that it would be a expensive to change that. Lavabit offers to make those changes so long as the government covers the costs of the change (in this case, one week of developer time).
- The government balks at the prospect of paying for the change and tries to snoop themselves. They realize that the encrypted data they can snoop on themselves is worthless, and demand the ability to decrypt it themselves.

All of this seems to hinge on Lavabit's demand that it be paid to make the changes necessary to make the pen register effective. Presuming the government was willing to pay him (or he was willing to work for free), there would be a http://fbi.lavabit.com/snowden that mirrored all of Snowden's metadata and it would interoperate with the government's pen register. There would be no need to compromise everyone else's SSL key.

I'm not familiar with legal procedure, but how does that corrupt the chain of custody in a way that other solutions would not?
> the detector comes off the ceiling and ends up in a drawer of blankets to dampen the noise as the chirping takes awhile to die after the detector is removed from power and battery removed.

You can generally hold down the test button to quickly drain the internal capacitance (sometimes with interesting audio effects).
Standing still exercises the leg muscles. That, in turn, improves blood circulation.

Having said that, I think the 'sitting kills you' meme is mostly a fad. Yes, sitting perfectly still for hours isn't healthy, but if the way 'normal' office people sit were as unhealthy as the current fad implies, we would have seen that from life expectancies of white collar vs blue collar workers decades ago.

Also, there are different ways of sitting. For example, a couch potato is quite different from an Italian talking while sitting.

As to the evolutionary claims: most animals are incredibly lazy, with sprints in between. Looking at our close relatives, chimps and gorillas, I see days of sitting and lying with some strolling and an occasional run in between. Looking at wolfes, an animal similar to humans in the sense that is is specialized in long distance running, I read on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_wolf#Behaviour that gray wolves run about 25 km/day on average. At a modest 5 km/h, that leaves them 19 hours to, basically, do nothing.

Maybe, we should bring back the Roman way of lying down on a sofa at a table?
Thank you very much for the breakdown! The connection to the article would be that we shouldn't overgeneralize a percentage of success for an individual?
Amazon Launches ‘Login and Pay with Amazon’ for a Seamless Buying Experience