skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if other people got confused with this question as well.

I understood it wrong initially - I thought the question was asking "how do you know this will be huge?" (as in "How do you tell whether there's a path out of an idea? How do you tell whether something is the germ of a giant company, or just a niche product? Often you can't" )

Then I realized that's not the question at all, it's just "how do you know people need what you are making?" Literally. I.e., the specific / niche-y thing that you are making first.
Maybe fructose really is a problem and we should be really careful with it.

But when we look at people who are obese their problem is not that they eat fructose containing foods, or that they regularly eat a couple of hundred extra calories per day. Their problem is that they regularly eat thousands of extra calories.

When you get 4,000 extra calories it doesn't matter whether it's glucose or sucrose or fructose - the person is going to gain weight and be harmed by the sugar.

The reason that Americans are fatter than Europeans is not because the US uses more fructose, it is because Americans eat a lot more than Europeans. But Europe is catching up. The UK has plenty of obesity and we don't have nearly so much fructose use as the US.
How on earth is it promoting sucrose? It's just saying that fructose alone is much worse than sucrose.
"DigitalOcean is currently under maintenance and will be back shortly!" is all I get.
It makes me think you shouldn't allow only a single person to monitor something like that...
Oh the other amazing thing we used to have - a system that generated so many alerts that everyone just created outlook rules to automatically delete all the alerts. I mean really? I wondered if we should modify the system to only generate messages when there are actual exceptional cases? People looked at me like I was an idiot
Don't humans also make similar large scale mistakes? Merill Lynch's infamous London whale comes to mind. Also. I could be wrong but aren't most of derivatives a zero sum game: don't I have to lose money on my puts for you to make money on your calls ? Didn't so many people lose money on securities because they misunderstood their exposure ?

The Knight computer error was spectacular and catastrophic but us humans have a longer track record of making catastrophic financial decisions in the market.
Check out http://learnxinyminutes.com/. Loads of languages/tools to learn.
For those of you interested in paleo or other low-carb/non-sugar approaches, I suggest Dr. Kurt Harris' blog: http://www.archevore.com/get-started/

I went off paleo for a year or so, now back on for a few months and have gone from 178 to 162 lbs. without doing much else than cutting out sugar, gluten grains and plant oils. It's strange this time; when I occasionally eat these things, I feel slightly, but noticeably ill for about a day afterwards.

Anyhow if this type of diet interests you, I want you to check out his blog because it is a slightly different approach than other "paleo". You need not eat super low carb as long as it is the right type of carbs and you don't have a ton of weight to lose. He also suggests cream if you don't have leaky gut (I drink tons in coffee every day).

These are a couple tidbits from his entry on glucose: http://www.archevore.com/panu-weblog/2011/2/5/no-such-thing-...

"Glucose is a necessary internal fuel source and metabolite and it is also a food and the building block of foods that have the longest evolutionary history of any food that mammals use. It is a fact that we do not require glucose in the diet, and that we can make it from amino acids if we don't eat it. However, rather than viewing this as evidence that glucose is not important, we should view this as evidence that glucose is so metabolically important that we have evolved way to make sure we always have it." ...

"Like glucose, there is no dietary requirement for fructose, but unlike glucose, we do not require fructose for use as an internal fuel. There is no organ like the brain that has an absolute fructose requirement. In fact, our body has mechanisms that evolved specifically to keep most cells from being exposed to too much of it." ...

"To keep fructose out of the general circulation, it must be immediately burned or stored as fat. Fructose is related to the spectrum of serious diseases known as NAFLD (non-alcoholic liver disease), including fatty liver and cirrhosis."
You know how if the first 100 times a dialog box comes up, the correct response is to click 'ok', then people start just clicking 'ok' on every dialog box, and then the 201st one comes up "Destroy everything? [cancel] [ok], and they click 'ok' too, and don't think anything of it?
Google unveils uProxy to bypass surveillance
Yeah, that's all well and good except that fructose make you really hungry which is a large part of why Americans CONSUME more. Avoid fructose unless you are building up your fat reserve for a fallow winter.
I assume Canada is spied on, but Canada also appears to be an active spyer. Leaked NSA documents have revealed that Canada has been participating in industrial related spying on Brazil.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/08/brazil-accuses-...
While I agree that puzzles and mind games are silly ways to appraise coding skills, they do give an insight about a person's raw intelligence, or knowledge, or potential. As CS is an application of math and programming is an application of CS, being good in math does not necessarily mean proficiency in it's application; same goes for CS. IMO, a good programmer must, at least, have:

+ knowledge - generally mastery of math/CS concepts and can be thought of as the potential

+ application skills - modeling a real world problem into a theoretical, computable, and (ultimately) programmable form

+ execution skills - implementation (coding) of a solution including the ability to utilize requisite tools/technologies such programming languages, DBs, OS, and so on

That said, hiring process should cover each of these areas and programmers should work on all these as well.
How is it fake?
Every time the "fructose is evil" thing gets brought up it seems to be this same scientist talking about it.
More alarmism.

>Fizzy drinks can have a 'serum fructose concentration of six micromolar, enough to do major arterial and pancreatic damage'.

You're telling me that if I replace my blood with fizzy drinks, it could do major arterial and pancreatic damage? Wow, who knew?
YC Video on Application
I am wondering can YC base a decision on the video alone, consciously or sub-consciously. I think so... good thing or bad?
> Why port the Linux kernel to Lisp?

For many of the same reasons people started writing OS kernels in C rather than assembly: Less scut work, wrong code looks wrong more often, and more opportunity for code reuse.

Other reasons include being able to provide a higher-level API, which only kinda happened with the move to C. A Lisp API would enable things like system-level garbage collection and possibly things like a single-address-space OS where the kernel is responsible for fine-grained memory protection and multiprocessing becomes as cheap as multithreading without becoming as unsafe as multithreading.

But that wouldn't be Linux anymore, I suppose; it would be a Linux-compatible system with extended features beyond what the C kernel provides. On the other hand, is Linux 3.11 the same as Linux 1.0 or is it merely mostly-compatible with Linux 1.0?
It's for this reason I feel that Bitcoin itself is a failed experiment. To the extend that people come to rely on it, we will see increased volatility.

Other crypto-currencies such as http://freico.in/ have seemed to at least tried to address this issue.
Or better call it virtual money.
(but we all know theres also "fake" money made and destroyed in that system, too)
The standard answer to this is that they provide liquidity. Whether that benefit outweighs the drawbacks is a subject of debate.
> How can it be otherwise? You'd need scheduled downtime to do it any other way.

Roll out the code in advance, and have the production machines switch to it at a defined, synchronized time?

I mean, imagine you only have one production machine. If you're willing to admit that you can have it switch from version X to version Y with no downtime, then synchronization is the only barrier to doing the same on n machines. Why would you need scheduled downtime?
If you care to do some research on the topic you will see that there is strong evidence pointing to chronic consumption of fructose damaging the metabolism in such a way that people no longer experience satiety the way a healthy person does. Over time this contributes to overconsumption as well as increased fat deposition which is a vicious cycle.
Should Crazy Be in Our Vocabulary? (And some food for thought)
Yes, the more people monitoring the better.
But in this situation someone has to be in charge and make a decision. And nobody wants to be that guy.
I don't even know why I'm replying...

But anyway back when I was living in France I've had the chance of studying and then working with a lot of great engineers (electrical engineers mostly) coming from Africa: Marocco, Tunisia, Togo, Cameroon, Rwanda, etc.

This is neither a rare nor surprising occurrence: engineers coming from african countries are plentiful and very competent. Maybe you didn't find them because they are not waiting for you to give them a chance: turns out they are as hard and expensive to hire as anyone else...
Bitcoins: Liberating Organic Farmers
But then we saw a team get accepted on stage on Saturday, so there is definitely some anecdotal evidence for advantage of early submission :)
There really are 50 Eskimo words for ‘snow’
Options are complicated. At their most basic level they are no different than a bet, so yes zero-sum. However when used in a spread or as a hedge or any other way to avoid risk or when sold against stock you own as an income generator, it's tough to call them zero-sum.

Puts and Calls are confusing as they are both something you buy. It's not like a sports bet where you're betting on the team to win so the other side will lose if they win. You can buy a put and a call in the same stock and profit on both if your strike prices are aligned properly.

The opposite side of buying a call is selling a call. Just like shorting a stock, when selling an option the most you can make is 100% and your loss potential is infinite. As an option seller, you're hoping the option expires worthless and out of the money so that you can keep the initial outlay. Most brokerages require a high level of clearance to allow you to sell naked puts and calls as it's generally a bad idea if you can't cover the potential upside.
I would rephrase as N customers, where N is enough to earn some significant percentage of your costs. For many kinds of businesses N might be only a handful, it completely depends on your market. For others 30 is nowhere near enough I'd imagine.

Of course, determining significance is left as an exercise for the reader.
jet engine model made on a 3D printer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rX4xv5-NvE
You're likely wrong.

On June 10, the federal government served a court order on Lavabit issued under 18 USC 2703(d), a 1994 amendment of the Stored Communications Act.

The Stored Communications Act (SCA, codified at 18 U.S.C. Chapter 121 §§ 2701–2712) is a law that addresses voluntary and compelled disclosure of "stored wire and electronic communications and transactional records" held by third-party internet service providers (ISPs). It was enacted as Title II of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA, Pub.L. 99–508, 100 Stat. 1848, enacted October 21, 1986).

(emphasis mine)

Users generally entrust the security of online information to a third party, an ISP. In many cases, Fourth Amendment doctrine has held that, in so doing, users relinquish any expectation of privacy. The Third-Party Doctrine holds "…that knowingly revealing information to a third party relinquishes Fourth Amendment protection in that information."

It doesn't follow that a private individual can be compelled to install a pen register on his/her own infrastructure.
Most startups don't have the resources to deal with the legal hassle of hiring an international candidate. However, if you have exceptional talent, you might be worth the extra hassle.

Try your luck applying to larger and more established startups (like Dropbox and AirBnB), they are more used to dealing with visa issues.
If the source code is so terrible, and if we still need to rely on it, is it really such a good idea to release it as open source? How will that help? Will it make healthcare.gov more reliable? More secure? Less vulnerable? Faster?

Perhaps the source code should be audited, if only to figure out what happened to the $600,000,000, but it's not clear that that requires open sourcing the code.

Now, the taxpayers purchased the codebase and the codebase could help states that did not offer a state marketplace create one. So I am very supportive of the idea of making it available to various states. But until the thing is running relatively smoothly, I don't see open sourcing it as doing anything but delaying the rollout and making it less reliable and less secure.

Update: it turns out John Oliver has taken a look at the code:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=2Qt...
This could be titled. Google launches Microsoft MapPoint Competitor.

MapPoint never had any marketing but is an amazing tool for doing neat things with maps and data.
Reposting on Facebook. This is great. I've always wanted to do this on Amazon but found I had this great inertia in finding out just how to go about doing it. It seemed like a big hassle, but it really isn't. This article simplified it.
Why Facebook NEEDS TO Hire Teenage Girls
Seconding this. I've used it for more than a year, very happy with the spartan no-nonsense interface.
Interesting read. Did you write it?
Sorry, I saw tun and tap and confused it for a configuration I've used in the past.

I'll test the 3G connection within the next few hours, however I suspect the providers have moved to block some kinds of tethering.
do you really take that paper seriously? In human systems epsilon of the best approximation is pretty relevant. If N (time scale) is millions of years and epsilon is tenths of cents for the reduction to work then it is functionally irrelevant.
Future of Collaborative Consumption
Every time God plays dice with the universe, it seems to be that same scientist talking about it.

Maybe it's always Robert Lustig because he's the name people already recognize. Maybe he's the one doing most of the research in the area. Sometimes, the public need a figurehead to keep explaining something to us until we get it.
But what do you do when your you suddenly want to migrate your startups big data?
Related link for others and for posterity:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6589067
By itself, that fact conveys nothing. You could've said, "Every time the "NSA is spying on everyone" comes up, it seems to be Glenn Greenwald talking about it".

When it comes to Big Food (or Big Pharma, Big Insurance etc.), I'd prefer - at the very minimum - taking any claims against them at face value instead of dismissing them outright. Of course, follow it up with your own research.
From the article:

> the privileged position held by money compared with capital goods, which is the underlying cause of the boom/bust business cycle

This is far from accepted wisdom.
Wow, this could have been prevented at so many 'checkpoints' that it reads like an almost cautionary, fake anecdote rather than a real story.
Yes, these criminal masterminds found a way to swindle honest hard-working themselves out of 440 million dollars and "get away with" a cool extra -12 million.
Bitcoin autonomous corporations could use prediction markets to choose code changes.
As a practice, I turn off all location services on my phone and only briefly turn it on when I need to use Maps. May seem paranoid, but don't find myself suffering too much by this change.
You're wrong on the internet.

The fructose being talked about isn't the nice one in fruits. It's corn syrup or sugar in soda. Yes, obese people consume incredible amounts of it. A gallon a day. Those Texas sized doses of soda you can order with your meal actually get consumed.

It's very difficult to consume even 1000 extra calories from proper food, like potatoes. They fill you up. And I can barely get a layer of fat. With soda you won't even notice the consumption. And it screws with insulin in the blood like fruits and potatoes never could. Makes you absorb more.

Some powerlifters eat junk food precisely because it contains more calories per stomach stuffing material. Ruins bloodwork but gets results. So do steroids.
Introducing uProxy - a safer path to the Internet
You can also get dietary advice from world renowned experts at Www.health.gov/dietaryguidelines
That paper is probably using a bogus definition of "efficient" (albeit probably one commonly accepted by economists---those people can be very slippery).

It defines "efficient" as: "current prices fully reflect all information available in past prices."

Well, all information available in past prices, is not all information available. So, even hypothetically, this is not true "efficiency."

Of course, asking for "efficiency" to be that _kind_ of thing is wrong, anyhow. When I invest in bitcoin months ago, all the information available to me was available to everyone else.
The field is wide open for mobile messaging — here’s what it takes to win
i know nothing about turbofans, geared or not, but i would guess that any kind of 'failure' of a gearing system at jet engine speeds means the entire thing is exploding, not just failing over to a backup system.
This is true and it also worries me. I always go, good article that agrees with my belief system, who wrote it.... Dam the person who put me onto it in the first place.
Good point. There's an assumption in talking about losing weight that it's a good thing because for most Americans, at least, it would be a good thing.

I wouldn't see this as a problem in a week-long test though. The reader probably understands that the lost weight is most likely water. Don't know about the calorie content of Ambro but it's likely to be quite high since it contains nuts.
The Question That Ruined Generation Y
I'm just as concerned about BigContrarianism and BigFadDiets.
Nope, he got nabbed in Sihanoukville, which is the touristy beach destination in Cambodia. It's a small enough town that all the expats know each other, so I've met many people who ran into him a few times.
Since these companies (or at WikiPR) are refunding the money when things don't work out they should just hire these PR companies directly via friends and family and watch those accounts that are editing the pages they paid to edit. Once they catch the people, they ban the accounts, revert the changes and then demand their refund. It's a basic honeypot.
Where is the line between a coding test and a "work-sample" test? Does a coding test become a work-sample test just by virtue of resembling a task you would do on the job? Is it a function of scale of the task?
It looks like they saw positions accumulating in one of theirs accounts, but couldn't identify the source. And maybe they saw positions too late, because of lag. Here's a description from that SEC report, onto what went wrong with their monitoring system:

"Moreover, because the 33 Account held positions from multiple sources, Knight personnel could not quickly determine the nature or source of the positions accumulating in the 33 Account on the morning of August 1. Knight’s primary risk monitoring tool, known as “PMON,” is a post-execution position monitoring system. At the opening of the market, senior Knight personnel observed a large volume of positions accruing in the 33 Account. However, Knight did not link this tool to its entry of orders so that the entry of orders in the market would automatically stop when Knight exceeded pre-set capital thresholds or its gross position limits. PMON relied entirely on human monitoring and did not generate automated alerts regarding the firm’s financial exposure. PMON also did not display the limits for the accounts or trading groups; the person viewing PMON had to know the applicable limits to recognize that a limit had been exceeded. PMON experienced delays during high volume events, such as the one experienced on August 1, resulting in reports that were inaccurate."
It is like the lottery rush hours before the draw.
Sure. Like the guy who said smoking is bad for you, or the guys who said excessive fat and cholesterol are bad for you. They stood up to Big Agro and fought the good fight. Who were those guys again?
Kinda shameless self-promotion here, but I've doing exactly that in long-form (basically a cross between a let's play and a fanfic) at honorablenord.com

Excuse to play lots of Skyrim and creative writing exercise all in one.
This is about informational efficiency, very different from the physical efficiency he is talking about.
>Their problem is that they regularly eat thousands of extra calories

While I appreciate the response, you're not providing any reasoning as to why.

By your logic it's equivalent of saying "he's an alcoholic because he drinks too much."
This is a completely backwards view of the economy.

There is a reason there are rice futures: those that depend on the price of rice, which is people that _sell_ rice, can hedge.

There is a reason India is constantly running out of onions: Online futures are illegal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act

There is a reason we need to have a global economy for food production. Bad weather in one region? Import from elsewhere. (Same applies to all commodities and services.)

The economy works quite well naturally, but for massive government invervention, such as what you are proposing, which would have massive unforseen consequences (such as improverishing people, which punishes the poor the most).

By the way, were it not for abandoning the gold standard, the US would not be able to finance a perpetual state of war. (It would have to pick wars with terminal conditions and actually win them.) It would also be much harder to finance 1984.Net.

The typical response to this is for me to get screamed at about how I am obviously wrong because all economists disagree with me and because it's just obvious. I don't think that's a legitimate response.
Yeah, I should check it out with my own research in my own lab. That's how I figured out the truth about vaccination and microbes on Mars.
Why low-interest account?
In case you don't know: Don't rely on the integrity or security of PPTP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPTP#Security
What are the key differences between their internal services and what they provide via AppEngine etc.?