skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"You can turn all that nagging off, so the only notifications you'll get, will be calls and texts."

Very true.

I think what I've feeling, and trying to describe, is a rejection of expanding my consciousness into the Internet. A large portion of my social groups use those social networks as extensions of themselves, for communication and interaction.

With immediate access to those channels it's difficult to ignore the draw of that technology. And not using those services regularly ends up being the same as not using them at all.
> In a free market prices generally fall.

[citation needed]
Anatomy of modern-day slavery
Two of the top VFX companies, Pixar and Lucasfilm, were part of this same collusion with Apple, Google etc but they settled for $20 million in July. One of the problems that workers face in the VFX industry is that the studios operate globally and unions don't so studios can just shift work overseas. Intellectual property isn't subject to import taxes which would affect tech companies the same way. Which is ultimately the same problem that tech workers would face if they tried to unionise.
I never thought about it as something that can have such fancy name and such broad engineering application. I think my technique is like 1% of what Wikipedia describes.
> Dropbox is definitely a case where a single person's vision was required to create a revolutionary product.

In the case of Dropbox, I think the main factor was (and this is the exception rather than the regular case) the perfect technical execution, not the vision.
This feels like a good place to get some opinions out there about an app I am working on.

Some team members are advocating a very dogmatic approach to our eventually public facing REST API design where each REST end point of /foo results in a response of a list of some ids; each url can then be hit to fully populate the list.

eg

/foo returns something like [1,2,3,4]

I then have to do 4 more http requests to /foo/1, /foo/2, /foo/3 and /foo/4.

Further, if a /foo/1 model contains for example a user, then /foo/1 would additionally contain userid of eg 101.

I would then have to do a /user/101 and ensure the foo model was populated.

This can mean a simple list page with 10 on screen list items can easily create 1 + 10 + 10 = 21 http requests at a minimum. This is starting to add a lot of code complexity to managing the lists for sorting/filtering/updating purposes and managing the async requests in our AngularJS application.

The way I have worked before is to build a single end point of /foo with a paginator offset, and then that would return the entire object in an HTTP request, eg

[
{fooid : 1, user : {id : 101, name 'bob'},	orders : [{id: A},{id : B}]},
{fooid : 2, user : {id : 102, name 'alison'},	orders : [{id: C},{id : D}]}
]

This approach is less RESTful, but presents fewer issues when writing the API consuming code and is much more responsive from a latency point of view.

What does HN think about these contrasting approaches?
>What if you could take the percentage of taxes that you spend every year and choose whom to help with it.

You realise that, especially where I live, one can make tax deductible donations to a wide variety of organisations? I give away thousands and get to write off much of the tax. In fact, I give away a few thousand and can technically qualify for a different tax bracket, I believe.

>We would have charities all over the place competing for this money, competition would produce far better results than the abysmal record of the state/federal social services.

No, you would have charities spending this money on advertising and gimmicks to get their share of your dollar. Some charities today spend large proportions of their budgets advertising and engaging in lawsuits (e.g. Susan B Komen)

What the government does is use it's uniquely large scale to help people. Education, healthcare, housing, welfare - for many countries in the world, having the government provide these services results in an relatively efficient system. I for one would rather pay the Medicare Levy in Australia than pay for private healthcare in the US - last time I was living there, the US system left me about $1500 worse off, and that was a year without any medical mishaps.
I have BS in CS, MBA-FINANCE, neither will provide the real experience in a real hacker world, less will do a Ph.D a total waste of money and a debt that will hunt you for a long time.
Time=Money
https://www.coursera.org/
TL;DR Giving money directly without conditions isn't the best way to donate funds.
Besides vectorjohn's point, which is completely true, there's also a point about upstream speeds. Considering that most of us have asymmetric connections, sharing a big file with multiple people would be a pain if I had to upload it over and over again, while with a intermediary I can just upload it once and let it push to clients at greater speeds (and in parallel).
You probably will be far off the mark. I realized once I started tracking my food seriously that 1) those glasses I have that I though were substantially bigger than those other glasses? They held the exact same amount; 2) the amount of calories I consume could easily vary by 30% or more depending on how full I'd fill my various glasses, plates or food containers.
Awesome! Really great work and it's great to see more success stories from the Indian startup scene. It's particularly heartening that a bootstrapped company can get there. I was working on trying to lay the groundwork for startup in Bangalore last year and was told by many people that I'd fail for the simple reason that government regulation would kill me. There are in fact two spaces that I've been wanting to enter into India: space and education.

On the back of your experiences, I think I feel that maybe I shouldn't feel as discouraged.

Would love to hear more about your journey and the problems you conquered.

Good luck going international!
That vibrant "YES" rings hollow. Europe is going through a lot of shit with rise of outright fascist parties - e.g. Greece's Golden Dawn (they might have removed Golden Dawn but the resentment needed for another fascist party to form is there, waiting). If one of more powerful states goes fascist (e.g. USA, Germany, France), you could very well see massive bloodshed and wars. And please don't tell me wars are good for anyone.

If social mobility and equality are disrupted, the society is in a bad position.
In Iain M Banks (RIP) Culture novels, the remote manipulation technology is called the Effector.
I'd agree, if each person had equal percentage of control over that tax money. So, Larry Ellison would have as much to allocate as a homeless person. (Otherwise, allocation decisions concentrated in hands of those already with more power over those decisions.)
I would rather not use terms like "evil" in a discussion of policy.

With that out of the way, counterfeiting does not necessarily take wealth away from anybody. In a depressed economy, it could just activate unused resources and stimulate production so that the overall amount of wealth increases by at least the amount represented by the counterfeit money.

That said, counterfeiting is still wrong for the same reason it is wrong for you to hack into your bank's computer systems to increase the amount of money in your account: Society has agreed upon a set of rules that underlie the distribution system of our economy, and both the hacking and the counterfeiting go against these rules.

Addendum: In a way, forbidding counterfeiting is a slippery-slope situation. A single act of counterfeiting does not necessarily take wealth away from anybody. But if counterfeiting were allowed, the whole system could not possibly work.
It generally means you teach it to recognize 3d shapes (a 2d image that moves = a 3d image, more or less. Yes there's a good reason why you might want to call it 2.5d, but the easy way to model a 2.5d object is in 3d). Think of it as the difference between recognizing 2 points and recognizing a Feynman diagram.

This is one of the things people don't often realize you can do with algorithms. You don't need to look at the world the way it actually really exists, and there may be very good reasons not to. Training algorithms to actually recognize moving images is incredibly hard, because it requires things like memory, fade-outs, recurrent networks, all that very advanced stuff. Obviously time exists as a continuum in the "real" world. But that's bloody inconvenient. So just look at big "quanta" of time, collecting all data points during the quantum, analyse it, then shift the quanta/window ahead 0.1s and do the exercise again. This is so much easier you wouldn't believe it.

Teaching an algorithm to recognize, say, a car collision, given 100 frames. It doesn't require any change to the algorithm (just a change in training data). And obviously your backend system needs to be aware that, over time, the "isColliding" output will look like ......1.....11.....1111...1111.1.1.111.11..11...11.11...11...1.....1...1...... when a collision occurs and this of course doesn't mean you've had 20 collisions.

It does mean a bigger network, slower training, and more resources needed. But not as much as you'd think. Keep in mind that a "temporal" network will need more hidden layers. Also please consider building "redundant" networks for temporal data. When people ask why, I have no better answer than that it's the same technique our brain uses, so frankly if it's good enough for God, it's good enough for me.

Doing the temporal thing means you're back to using trivially simple algorithms, running on more data.

Cracking captcha's is not very impressive. I've done it as a weekend project, and exceeding "average" human captcha'ing ability is easy. I actually got it to the point where my algorithm was slightly better at captcha's than me, where I was allowed to take 2 minutes for difficult captchas. If I wasn't allowed to take more than 10 seconds, my algorithm easily beat me by over 10% (my captcha performance, when measured, shockingly is only ~83%). I didn't cheat : I used an external site's captchas (from dns.be).

The algorithm used was dead simple backpropagation.
If you want to find a conspiracy, the best place to look is a conspiracy theory.
Ssocial media automation versus interaction
Internet is pretty good in most of India, though we would all love a little bit of extra speed ;)

Though more than the speed of Internet, the telecom regulations play a large part in the solutions provided. For example, VOIP is still not legal in India for end to end communications. So, depending on the regulations our market size may vary.

And since many SMEs in India who are our target market are not Internet savy, our marketing efforts do become slightly harder and we have to rely on more traditional sales.
And have you "hidden" a dash of syrup or 100g of nuts under the milk.

But it'd be useful for rough estimates for things like restaurant meals, with the aid of a menu.
"I'm not arguing for more regulation" the way I see it this ideology is the sole reason for the creation of this problem. Having a level playing field is not optional and batter and more regulation is the only solution.
Right, but it did not effect the site, it effected the site's downtime (the downtime is the result). I believe the usage is incorrect.
> Eventually, the spammers will make a bot to analyze the distance between dots, group them into letters, and the race will be on to use other methods. I see this as a never ending virus/immunity battle. We're pretty much at the end of Captchas. Other methods like mouse movement, surfing time, scrolling, etc... can all be mimiced as well. Computers can or will be able to simulate humans very well, even our imperfections.

Love your optimism. I'd like to say that captchas are very limited : they have to be solvable by idiot humans. Captcha algorithms have no such limits they have to abide by. Since the anti-spam side of things is blocked at a certain point in the arms race, the other side is bound to win.

Why not just require, say, a google or facebook login and transfer the "eliminate spammers" problem onto them ?
Economics is not a science. You can't test hypotheses rigorously. Which makes these debates 100x harder.
Thanks for that input but HN is a casual site, not a uber professional one (i.e. place where most people look for jobs). I'm pretty sure we all know what it means.
and the vast majority of those three billion are in the state they are in because of politicians. Whether their own or others. Take the money from those 300 and I doubt the number served with it would matter nor have a lasting impact.
Only because the feature is not in the OS. Were it actually in the OS, people would leave their computers on in order to share things. It makes sense.
I don't think getting a 30% margin of error would be all that disastrous. How big is the error margin on people measuring ?
I learned about the index funds from a great book I'll Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi. Despite terrible title it's quite nice and recommends investing in index funds heavily. I live in Poland where, unfortunately, this segment of the market is highly underdeveloped. I have no more than three funds to choose out of which only one is accessible for a small investor wanting to save for the future. I can't wait for other funds to enter the market!
Hey guys, I'd like to clarify what I mean since I think you're missing the point of what I'm getting at (though I'm sure only a handful of people will make it this far down on a dying thread -- congrats if you did?).

This is the quote I'm referring to:

> "Your web site may be marked as malicious, so anyone trying to post a link to your tool will not be able to do so on Facebook."

As one of the largest websites on the Internet where unfathomably massive amounts of communication takes place, Facebook is in a really unique position. Its user base spans continents, countries, governments, etc., and it's been said before that sites like Google and Facebook have more power than any single government because they have the ability to shape how their users think (no dislike button, for example -- a very blatant design decision), and they are, ultimately, the arbiters of what is said on their network. So when I read that quote, it scared me a bit because the thought of Facebook deeming a link "malicious" because it doesn't like it makes me consider how Facebook could wield this.

Social Fixer clearly isn't a malicious piece of code. Has anyone gotten a virus from it? Did it do something blatantly against the will or desires of its users? Did it mean to do harm? I can't imagine so. So when Facebook calls the tool "malicious," Facebook is really stretching that classification here. Isn't that a little concerning?

This illustrates how blindly we trust Facebook to get these things right. We assume they're being honest about what's malicious and it's typically a positive experience for us users: "Oh! That link was going to give me a virus? Thanks so much for protecting me Facebook!" And we'd never give the link a second thought. It's as good as gone for a big population of the Internet.

So here we are, trusting a publicly traded company (who sells a chance to touch our impressionable brains to anyone who'll pay a dollar) to get censorship right -- to have our same values and ideals and to be responsible with its unique position as a communication gateway.

And I'm not saying I don't trust Facebook -- I bet they're probably doing a good job about censorship. But this is really something we should spend more time talking about. I mean, the US government gets in a pickle about censorship probably every day, and it's run by people we elect! Who knows what's going on with a private entity like Facebook.

I hope this clears things up because I really think this is an issue you guys should take seriously, even if it might sound a little trite at this point.
Government regulation will try its best to make it hard, but it will not kill you :)

Actually, things have improved a lot and in fact the Government is now doing pretty good things in trying to encourage startups, especially the Karnataka and Kerala Governments, where they have setup separate funds for startups.

Space may be a little bit of problem with regulation. But with education startups, you shouldn't have too many issues.

I will write a blog post soon on our learnings in the past 3 years.
I assume you meant life expectancy at birth. That is very different from life expectancy at adult ages.

The former can be skewed downwards much by many babies not surviving their first few days. It would be much more productive to compare the average life expectancy of those who died from natural causes with Marie's, or at least those of adults.
Had a play around on SG and it works really well; nice project. What JS framework, if any, are you using?
Thanks! Looks like I have a lot of reading to do...
Announcing git-fc; a friendly fork of Git
So you downvoted something that you did not even look at?
Don't Snoop Me Bro Tunnel
I've had similar thoughts on social security. It would make a lot of sense to simply require citizens to save or invest a certain portion of their annual income.

You could have enforced diversification (certain percentages allowed for high vs. low risk), and accreditation boards to vet and approve mutual and index funds.

Also, the investment would have a very stimulative effect on the economy, and you could probably also set it up in such a way that it works on autopilot (like a 401(k)) for those that can't be bothered..

It would be quite a bit less draconian than the government simply confiscating the money. In the private sector, the current setup would rightly be called a ponzi scheme.
Isn't one of the reasons to unionise to have the option of bigger political influence, e.g. trying to force import taxes on the products of their industry?
Yes, everyone knows what it means. But if you make a claim like "effect is correct here" you are entering the debate, so don't call the debate off-topic when you lose.
in singapore you can see the effects of all that economic growth besides the billion dollar gardens and F1 races and casinos...in residential areas many old folks collect empty cans and cardboard for a living. despite laws that compel offspring to financially support parents. you don't see beggars on the street, nor homeless people. and unemployment is super low. its..fairly interesting.
but it's not a quest for perfect fairness - rather an attempt to maximise benefits. $300B in a vault, whilst millions starve is pretty obviously unfair, and actually detrimental to society overall. generally, when inequality grows, so does societal instability and discord.

At some point, we as a society have to argue with the American Ideology of "free markets for ever, for everyone, for everything."

It simply does not bode well for our species in terms of morality, survival or many other metrics to have people dying of thirst while another man washes his collection of Maybachs.

Some inequality is inevitable. Too much inequality is a disaster.
The Economist article talks about someone in Kenya being given $1000USD. That's about 84800KSH.

Minimum wage for Kenya varies, but 4855KSH ($57USD) per month is what a general laborer gets.[1]

That person is getting very roughly 17 months income. That's very different to "winning the lottery".

But perhaps this man is one of the 50% of Kenyans living below the poverty line.[2] ($2USD per day) So, if he gets $1.25USD per day a $1000USD lump sum would be a bit more than 2 years income.

Microfinance is not the wonder that people once thought it was[3], but giving money to people directly seems to work quite well.

[1] http://www.wageindicator.org/main/salary/minimum-wage/kenya

http://www.ruralpovertyportal.org/country/home/tags/kenya

[2] http://c2050922.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/images/172...

[3] http://www.irinnews.org/report/95067/development-microfinanc...
The top two comments are critical (though not mean).

The first comment is pretty interesting.

'My suggestion is to drop the "Throw away your USB drive" tag line and use something else... it will just muddy your vision.'

He's more or less correct. 'Like a USB' is a bad analogy. Dropbox only replaces some of a USB's use cases and does lot of things that a USB doesn't. OTOH, he's wrong because there is no other 3 word sentence that could have done a better job. 'Like a USB' is probably the best starting point even if it only gets across 25% of the message because 25% is better than nothing. 25% (assuming it's the right 25%) might get the user to install it. Then they might get to know the backup, file sharing/sending, versioning, or whatever subset of functions they use.
Not really, unless your corpus consists mainly of hopelessly distorted characters.

They state a captcha solving rate of around 90%.

For OCR to be cost-competitive, you typically need it to be correct on about 98% of characters or more; below that and it is typically cheaper to have a human typing in the text than to have a human correct OCR'd text.

Modern OCR engines typically do better than 99% on text that isn't really badly damaged (my MSc. dissertation was on error correction in OCR, and as part of that I tested some engines with pages that had been crumpled, intentionally damaged with sand and liquids, and even then many of the engines managed more than 99%).
International collaboration finds 11 new Alzheimer's genes to target
Whenever I try to explain this to interrupting colleagues / bosses I always get rolling eyes and "here he goes again", frustrating as hell.
You guys should probably do an AMA.
Great! Thanks for the feedback and looking forward to the blog post! I'm flying out to Mumbai on Thursday and will be in Bangalore for a few days too, so going to use the opportunity to try and figure out how, what, where, when, and with whom. Any tips, suggestions?
LG Reveals G Flex, The 'World's First 'Real' Curved Smartphone'
Your argument about which kind of writing instrument is popular in which country is very interesting, but you seem to think Moleskine is a US company? In fact they're from Italy. Not sure if that changes your reasoning, but it might be worth mentioning since you seem to not be aware of it.
Such a pile of trash even at the time is looked positively anaemic
Combining CS and Business can work well.

1. You would be able to translate between higher levels and the execution team, so if you ever get bored of coding you can have an escape trajectory. HR staff who pigeonhole techies won't have an excuse to stop you from getting into decision-making roles.

2. Most conveniently, if you ever decide to be your own boss, or jump into another field (from making bikes to delivering flowers) you can always do that by starting a business. The degree won't help you much in the beginning, but it will give you a lingo for talking with investors, a network of classmates with money, and the basic skills for keeping your cash in order (you can learn that later too, but having that confidence in your earlier years is helpful).

On the down side, don't get yourself recruited into a warm-body role that gives you a lot of money, teaches you nothing useful, and takes away the best years of your life.