skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Side Project Ideas
Hey guys I'm looking for a side project to build, get creative, try out new things #pitchToMe
Post the ideas here to get community feedback. If you are not comfortable sharing here email me kevin@launchunit.com

My current tech stack for anyone interested (Web, Mac App, currently not very comfortable building mobile apps)
1. Nodejs - Express, Sockets etc
2. MongoDB, MySQL, Postgres
3. Redis for caching
4. Backbone, Angularjs
5. Less for CSS
6. Rabbit MQ or AWS SNS+SQS for messaging
Outbrain, Taboola and the other "content recommendation networks" are selling clicks in the $0.05-0.15 CPC range. Those prices are going higher and higher, but publishers are buying up all the traffic they can at those prices to arbitrage against their direct-sold inventory.
Obama is a total idiot.
Make Something Addictive
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Actually, a cyst meets your definition of unregulated cell growth. It's just slower / less greedy. The distinction between a benign tumor and a malignant one is generally ascertained by the process of "let's watch it and see what it does", so I'm not convinced that "cancer" is defined more usefully than "illness".

In my opinion, and my medically-educated mother's opinion (really, I get it from her), people don't look for "a cure for cancer" because they think they can make progress from that viewpoint. They do it because they're looking for funding.

edit:

You might compare "died of cancer" to "died of old age". Old age used to be an accepted cause of death. When autopsies started happening, it was quickly noticed that people who had died of "old age" always had some other, more immediate cause of death. But it turns out that if you take an old person and do your utmost to prevent / cure / treat all of those more proximate causes, eventually one will get past you and they will die.
> Sort of insinuates that ID theft is not meant to be a core focus of Experian.

The post is saying that a service that aids scammers purchased data from Experian.

Seeing the title, I initially thought it meant that Experian sold data to an ID Theft-prevention service, which would be less bad.
And yet, the Japanese government and officials involved will keep on denying that there is a problem. These leaks have been going on a lot longer than just recently, ever since the original tsunami happened and caused this situation, the authorities have failed to truly stem the flow of radioactive materials into the ocean. This has gone beyond just a Japan problem, ocean currents are carrying the radioactive water everywhere, it's a global problem now and some real action needs to be taken.
Socially liberal young people are an even worse fit with the rich and white or white, old, and socially conservative Republican coalition than they are with the Democrat's immigrant, urban, and public sector coalition. The phenomenon described in the article is one of the interests of the elderly being in direct opposition to those of the young, and the GOP has only further entrenched itself in favour of the former and against the latter.

The only large demographic shift I can see happening in American politics is if the GOP sheds its anti-immigrant elements and embraces a browner base than it currently enjoys. Immigrants tend to be more entrepreneurial, more distrustful of government, and more socially conservative than the average American, and so it would be a good fit if the GOP can shake the veiled racism expressed by many of its louder members.
The complaints I hear centre around grading, lesson planning and of course bureaucracy.

Now, I believe that the education system of the majority of the world is fundamentally broken - and I am cheering on the likes of coursera, khan academy and the like to get to fixing it.

But in the mean time...can we take the first of these...grading. At the risk of trying to find a technical solution to everything this sounds like it should have a nice technological solution to it...

I can see some of the issues in English and the like where answers may not be 0 or 1 but if google can instantly translate English to Swahili...someone should be able to find a way to grade English assignments of high school student efficiently.

Or is this a money issue? The technology exists or could exist but there is no funding, so instead we are wasting hundreds/thousands of teacher hours a week while they repeat the same manual chore over and over again?

I would be interested in hearing some teachers comment on this.

Reminds me of this: http://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_canada_our_failing_schools...
“It didn’t work” VS. “It’s working:” A Secret of Positive Discipline
> Eliminating corporate income taxes would actually encourage companies to realize and distribute profits to shareholders in ways that would generate substantial tax revenue from the individual shareholders

Only problem with this is the growth stocks, how long was Microsoft making a profit before it started paying dividends?

I believe the US government would be fine playing the long game by dropping capital gains tax, but I don't believe they have the stomach for the short term loss of revenue.
There's actually a legit problem here though where ad networks are counting "clicks" while analytics programs are counting "visits".

Comparing the two always leads to different numbers because they are different things.

Google has this issue even between Adwords stats and Google Analytics stats. They are always billing people for more clicks than are reflected as visits in Google Analytics. Same reason, different things counted differently.
> Given the comments here I think that I can finally understand somewhat why Go is taking off the way it is

The comments here are incredibly biased in Go's favor, for whatever reason. On other forums it does not get the same spotlight, for instance it has been mostly dismissed on reddit and is rarely even discussed there at all (even on it's own subreddit).
> adults who are capable of examining situations on a case-by-case basis and applying an appropriate mix of discipline and direction.

Everything seems inexpensive or easy when you don't consider the details. Finding an adult with those qualities is uncommon, rare even. Besides, how would someone without those qualities hire someone with those qualities? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. They would need to hire a consultant or professional arbitrator of some sort with those qualities to start the process.
I read it the same way, but that would have been pretty bad in and of itself. Why should an ID theft prevention service have data on me unless I have a business relationship with them?
> I believe that for Google, Android started as a strategy in search of a goal. It was a smokescreen to prevent Apple from taking a dominant position by default

Impossible. Google bought Android years before Apple sold a single phone.
You're right. Seeing as I've been using the term 'histogram' in place of 'bar chart' all the time, that's some life-changing information right there.
The flow control one does make sense. For the multiplexing, I must have missed the fact that multiple tabs need to be loaded simultaneously. It makes more sense to allow ones from the same host to load concurrently over one single connection than to keep one connection per tab.

Thanks for the explanation.
The Korn Shell Story isn't an appeal to an authority, it's a punchline: Not only are you mistaken, the arrogance in your mistake is humorous to onlookers.

You can discuss whatever you like. What you can't do is make unsubtantiated claims about someone else's level of understanding, based on your inability to distinguish between what a specification says and what implementations do.

There are 2^32 strings of the form [0123]{16}. (16 base-4 digits) Does that mean that they are all valid IPv4 address? Can I type http://1230123012301230 into my browser and have it resolve?

And by the way, given the choice between "A investigated the phenomenon in detail recently" and "B has been interacting with the phenomenon for years without consideration for how it works", A is a more trustworthy source.
> What's impractical about spending a little time to read?

It's impractical because people live a finite amount of time and this is a terrible use of it
It makes a lot of sense, there are lots of things that you could do as a friendly helper that would steer the long term direction of an agency or program towards a particular vendor.

If you were a Linux specialist, for instance and setup some system that ran solely on Linux, you would in effect be picking a platform and preventing vendors like Microsoft and IBM from competing.

Obviously, paying some government contractor bazillions of dollars doesn't necessarily result in a great outcome, but these rules are there to stop the casual corruption that impacts the faith of the public in government.
Other cool RMS hacks: http://www.stallman.org/photos/hacks/

I guess.
Going back a step, why should Experian have data on you?
What did anyone really expect? Sounds like a typical government contract.

I can only imagine how these conversations go...

"We need more QA! STAT! It's going to take at least $50 million to test this system... it's awfully broken!" chuckle

face/palm

That said, I think there should be a lot more concern about the security of this site if there's been such a mishandling of the basic functions and operational flow.

Seems only reasonable to suspect this will be leading to a horrible leak of many people's private records at some near point in the future.
>Apart from missing a good meal I felt pretty good, lost some weight and didn’t even feel hungry.

Emphasis added.

I wish people wouldn't treat this universally as a good thing, when talking about food replacements. The goal in consuming nutrients is to sustain your body. If you're losing weight, you're either losing water weight or not eating enough calories.^1

Now, certainly for many, losing weight would be a good thing, but we also need to ensure that these products can actually keep a body healthy. "I've been on them for two months, and I'm staying at a healthy weight" would make me feel better about them. "I've lost a few pounds" means I can't discriminate between healthy weight loss and a product that is putting you into starvation.

[1]Not a doctor, not a nutritionist.
Searching the iTunes API asynchronously with Angular JS
Nintendo sent out 491 DMCA notice as far as I can see on Chillingeffect, while I can only see 26 DMCA notices from Namco. I guess not every DMCA notices ends up in Chillingeffect, but it sounds like Nintendo has been bit active.
I've been a contributor since 2010 [1]. My first contribution was to create the NuGet package manager article [2]. Since then I mostly fix typo's, undo vandalism, fix or delete dead links and other wee odds and sods.

I avoid controversial topic stuff because I just don't have the time or energy to argue the toss about whether something should be in the wiki or about the content of a wiki article.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Teh_klev

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuget
... Because they are one of the three major credit-scoring agencies that maintain records on every person with a credit history?
Microsoft Surface 2 Pro Review
> Around 1980, when the news media took notice of hackers,

Some context from ancient history: When I arrived at MIT in 1982, there was a glossary in a book given out during orientation (How To GAMIT) with defintions of "Hack" and "Hacker", and it provides a snapshot of how the words were used before it was associated with cracking:

Hack - n. A trick or prank. For example placing a nipple on the Great Dome (...) (1) To goof off, talk randomly, just hang around. (2) To apply oneself, work hard, try earnestly. Example: a computer hacker. Also connotes fanaticism.

Hacker - (1) One who hacks. (2) One who does a lot of some activity, e.g. pinball.

[HoToGAMIT XIV]
I'll counter your anecdotal evidence with my anecdotal evidence. I know a few systems guys who have three or more decades of experience with statically typed languages who prefer Go. :-)
No it's not.

All states were supposed to have their own exchanges. 14 ended up doing it. New York after all sorts of political machinations agreed to run their own exchange at the 11th hour. (Supposedly "unprecedented" traffic also screwed up the NY exchange, which was also built by some big government contracting firm -- CSC)
Why not just come up with a new term? Languages change. When enough people agree to use a term to mean a certain thing, its meaning changes, regardless of the intentions of its original creator.

As a philosopher, it annoys the hell out of me that people use the term "begs the question" incorrectly, but I've come to accept that at this point its probably not incorrect anymore.
I think 3 really good programmers, 2 sys admins, 1 non-clueless PM, and 1 person to arrange their travel would have gotten this done faster.
Those are all half-assed phonetic attempts. Revised Romanization is unambiguous: 떡볶이 = tteokbokki.

Arabic is considerably worse because there's no standard that's even close to accepted, and the dialectal variation between different regions is so vast that they might as well be separate languages.
How is it going to scale, since it's using package-by-layer (as opposed to package-by-feature[1])? Most systems like that become highly annoying to work in with even a moderate amount of complexity.

1. http://www.javapractices.com/topic/TopicAction.do?Id=205
I'm just starting a new SaaS project. Google was immediately checked off as a source of anything for the project as it is too hard to know if the service will exist in a year.
Experian is one of the big three credit reporting agencies; their databases are used to determine whether you qualify for a loan. They are your credit record...

So, yeah; this is pretty bad.
This is much better (the best I've found): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx9zgZCMqXE
Wallet supports month-to-month subscriptions. If Wallet shuts down without those subscribers being migrated to something else, that could be very damaging to a company.
haha, I am at work and I get blocked...

"Your request was categorized by Blue Coat Web Filter as 'Hacking'."
It's my thing...drop me an email, it's in my profile. If you're in the Bay area we should meet up.
If you know better, do better.
I can't edit the original.

Tightened version has been put in the right place: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6553774
It seems like you missed a lot of the other things he said, such as "testing is built into the language," and "binaries are statically compiled and will work on any reasonable kernel." These may not be sexy features, but they are features that you need to actually make reliable programs.

And frankly, yes, Go's approach to handling errors is a Big Deal. It's counter to the tendency of the last few years to move more and more error handling into exceptions. In retrospect, we can see that that was a mistake, similar to the "natural language programming" dead-end that led to COBOL and HyperCard. Challenging the exception-handling orthodoxy is absolutely something interesting and new.

What makes Go so special other than the lack of deep class hierarchies?
This is an "other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" type of comment. Go's type system is absolutely huge in terms of making it special. It would never have attracted the attention it did if it were just another Modula-3 rehash like Java, C++, D, etc.
Well, is it fair to say that the credit system in the US is fued up? Oligopoly of 3 agencies have pretty much entire control of your fate. Yes Fate. Purchasing power means cash and since credit = cash these companies control the cash that you have at disposal. Which means your FATE. Its insanely difficult to pierce oligopolistic structures and Cartels because of obvious reasons. But some day some startup needs to tackle this. The system works for most but doesn't work for many.
What is impractical is that something like brakes not working is not something you want to find in the manual on page 54. You don't want the car to start without that feature unless you enter a special code, and confirm you know what you are doing.

A database that has default configured that ends up corrupting users' data silently is like buying a car with the brakes disabled.

Well except that in the car case may brakes disabled won't make the car go faster, but in case of MongoDB I remember fans strutting write benchmarks around comparing it to Postgres, Couch and other database and telling how it is webscale. The reason that design decision was made is shady. That was my initial point.
How To Get Half Of A Wharton Education For Free
That's not really how evidence works.
To be honest, I like the word hacker as it stands in its nebulous state now. It serves as a reverse shibboleth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth) for geeks. Signalling to those who understand it, that they are part of an "in group". That is a useful social tool.

For those that don't understand, it doesn't confuse them that much, the difference between the two competing definitions is subtle enough at an introductory level as to not sound awkward.

I find that people will never really be confused if you used RMS's definition, so long as they know that competing definition exists, even if they don't agree with that definition!
I think it would be interesting to see where people were born as well.
I think that will correspond to countries like Colombia, Venezuela, Peru or Ecuador, perhaps Brazil?
This one doesn't even seem that bad yet. I mean its not like the new bay bridge which was a decade late.
Even the Republicans are a shaky coalition of big business, religious nuts, and quasi-libertarians, along with the racists (though the generation that swung with the Southern Strategy is aging, and most of the segregationists are out of Congress now, thankfully).
I mean Safari might be rendering it wrong by default. The fact there are few settings is a limitation which may or may not impact the rendering...

Either way I doubt it's any sort of ploy to fuck with iOS users...
> Part of the original attraction of Android was its openness, if Google is now closing off substantial functionality, to head off competition, then it's not unfair for people to re-evaluate their enthusiasm for the product.

Very well put! Its not a legal perception that theres something wrong about what they are doing(and nobody are saying that they cannot do it in the legal aspect).. its a betrayal of some part that make people defend android for what it is, a open source project.. its the ideal behind the project that is being broken

If its not like that anymore, the same people that support it for its openess should be aware of it.. and see that things are actually, gradually and silently changing..
Why does deflation worry you? It's a good thing.

I would like my healthcare to get cheaper and better over time just as my Android phone does.

> Don't conflate "zero growth of the money supply" with "zero inflation".

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, according to Milton Friedman.
This probably doesn't really qualify as a failure yet in government contracting. People haven't been fired for much more twisted projects, like the F35.
The Metrics of a Bestseller and the “Oprah Effect”
Well, sure, that's a description of what they do, but it doesn't explain why they should have access to this information. In a marketplace, perhaps there doesn't really need to be a "why". But the same "why" should apply to Experian as it would to an ID Theft-Prevention service (the hypothetical thing that we were discussing in this comment thread, and the reason I asked this question in the first place).

That is, Experian's longevity and importance makes them more reputable. Their function as a business, certainly, is to collect, analyze, and repackage this data. But these things should not give them a free pass on the "why" question that greenyoda posed, if the question is going to be asked at all.
What I find interesting is that people who are, essentially, libertarian-leaning are consistently found attempting to make the Republicans more socially liberal and almost never found attempting to make the Democrats more fiscally responsible.

The Republican demographic skews older than the Democrats. I would have thought the younger demographic would be more inclined to support sensible reforms of social security, like converting it to a basic income for everyone eligible to vote.
I actually have seen complaints about Go's performance relative to other compiled languages, like C++, D and Java. I don't think it's coincidental that most of the Go converts come from a dynamic-language background. If you're porting from Ruby, 2-3x slower than Java still seems blazing fast.

For me, Go misses the sweet spot entirely. A year ago I was curious about both Go and Clojure, my interest piqued by the strong concurrency support each has. I picked Clojure and have grown more and more confident in that choice.

Why not Go? In a language with nil pointers (Tony Hoare's "billion-dollar mistake"), no generics, and sub-JVM performance, static typing just doesn't seem worth it. Also, poor interop with other languages means Go can only draw from its own small community for libraries (contrast Clojure which makes using mature, well-tested Java libs trivial).

When Rust is more mature, it may be what I hoped Go would be: the safe language, with lightweight threads, that makes me never have to write C or C++ again.
500 strangers
as someone who in her time did millions in "damage" to the rail network your average writer has decent opsec besides the fact they almost all use burner phones on a day to day basis. they wont take phones with them on missions. last thing you want is your phone to ring when your hiding from the transit police. (what banksy opsec is like IDK ) also stencils are for people that cant actually paint.
Not for me. I had previously done Haskell work, and I find Go to be awesome.

And I still think Haskell is awesome.

Weird, eh?
The idea of "conflating all saving" is itself wrong.

Saving is a matter of time preference, specifically, preferring to consume in the future. That implies carrying forward surplus value from today to be spent tomorrow. Let's say you have a choice of how to go about it: G, or W.

Strategy G is to stash gold in a mattress. Strategy W is to buy stock of Webvan/Amazon.

Let X = present value to save
T = timestamp at present
d = value delta
t = time delta

Now at time T+t you want to have X+d value where d=0 is okay, but (d < 0) is unacceptable.

Now the choice between G and W is as follows: W has to offer you a higher rate of return than merely holding the gold in strategy G.

Gold will increase in value (price) if more produce is offered in exchange at time T+t, assuming stock of gold is constant (which it is, to an approximation).

So what Webvan/Amazon must offer a rational investor is a better return than the rest of the aggregate efforts of human-kind. They must have high productivity.

This is precisely what makes capitalism and free-floating interest rates so efficient, capital is allocated to the most productive enterprises.

The ratio between spending preferences now and in the future determines the interest rate. A high interest rate implies that only higher-credit (in the sense of faith in their success) companies will get money.

The highly risky investments will simply not happen. There won't be any bubble mania.

In your conception, the idea that stashing gold is not productive is merely another way of saying "gold stashers don't fund Webvan" when looked at through this lens.

But it is good they don't! Everybody should have the right to sit on the side-lines and watch.

When the word "unproductive saving" and "hoarding" are used, they usually refer to this leave-me-alone strategy.

In periods of hard-money we saw great advancements in the standard of living of peoples around the world [ref Thiel?].

The free market always beats a planned economy. It doesn't matter if the planning is overt like the Soviet model or merely a plan to distort time preferences.
Is This The Future of Investing?