skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only time (as far as I am aware) that a similar lawsuit was successful was when AOL had to pay out $15 million to their moderators.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program

Some key reasons they were able to win were:

1) they had training
2) they had supervisors
3) they had to file reports and meet goals

If they were operating autonomously, or even given some incentives (at the time they were given free AOL which was not a flat rate, so it had significant value), then the risk is low, but some of the things AOL did in running this program put them at risk.

Even with the very specific things AOL did that bit them later, the lawsuit still dragged on for a long time.

Yelp is unlikely to be at any risk at all here unless they were treating these reviewers like employees. Just contributing content is definitely not enough to put them at risk, and if the people are bitter about their contributions they have the right to remove them (I think).
The sad part is that there are people who insist that one can hear audience members laughing at that moment in recordings of the speech. Nope, just cheering.

People hear what they want to hear.
Probably not but that's not what I'm suggesting at all. Think of something like surrounding the star with giant solar panels.
That may hit an upper bound, above which you have to rewrite in a different language. That upper bound may be quite low.
If anything "Mozilla herds its Firefox users" into using the auto update system inside Firefox, which is very convenient and helpful.

You're talking about a very small number of people who will update the way you described.

Most Firefox users will update by having Firefox automatically update in the background and then be prompted to restart.

I just downloaded the latest version (in my language) by going to 'About Firefox' and hitting the update button.
It would be incredible to do a meta-analysis and see if you could create a prediction model of mortality based on healthcare spending on individuals. It could be that as the slope of costs begins to rise you can actually figure out the mortality based on that alone and not based on disease mechanism.
> They let your potential customers browsing your site know "hey, we're not a scammer there are real people who bought and loved our products and services, here's a authentic list of them."

More like "We will annoy you with social network notifications, sell your data, and pollute your facebook page".

EDIT: Certainly not everyone, but if you ignore the downsides you're not spending your money well. Being polite with respect to interacting with your customer is value in itself, and you cheapen your brand by including social buttons. Even the choice of button matters: including a share button treats me with more respect than like buttons AND provides a much higher quality recommendation for your brand per click, even if the clicks go down. If you're advertising on Facebook without testing which provides better numbers at the end of the quarter, you're probably not spending your money as well as you could.
Isn't WebRTC awesome! I created https://github.com/imomin/videoChat to get my feet wet with WebRTC.
But does it? That's the rationalization, but does it actually? I see a million likes on a page and I think "someone paid for a million likes". Does it actually translate to sales? Or is it all just the ol' 90s hitcounter?

And since I acknowledge that it must work for someone (just like Nigerian Prince Scams work on someone), the more important question is, "and is it worth the effort and cost?" I could spend weeks building a social following for a local business, or I could run a coupon deasl.
While interesting, it was only (!) the index feeds that froze up. Stocks continued to trade normally.
I think it does depend on the cat, though. I've had several cats that are just fine being in a carrier and like sniffing the air and looking around outside when they're in one (they don't get outside normally get more outside than looking out the window here in NYC).
Hopefully these won't be the same disinterested experts that granted the contracts to build healthcare.gov.
And his just like client side moving things from the cache directory to the download directory...
But that's so much hassle, I have to click on the link and then navigate a whole bunch of folders, and possibly know what version and language I need! </sarc>

Users of VMs are more than likely power users at the very least, and if you want to test different versions then you should probably also be testing beta and even nightly. I don't think a full exe just to install in your VM really needs to be "homepage" visible.
I didn't have any that came up... too bad.

To be fair, it is the first day. Looking through the selection of matched books that are available, it looks somewhat similar to the titles that were in the Kindle lending library when it first started. Admittedly, the library is still pretty sparse but they have built it up over time.

I'd expect the titles to increase more quickly than the in the library. Once they see how it starts to work, they'll probably jump on board. Afterall, this is a pretty attractive value proposition from the perspective of the publishers. Kindle Matchbook brings incremental sales that would have probably never occurred without this program and have very little marginal cost (Amazon's cut being the only thing that comes to mind).
:) Thanks for the comment.
Having learned more (see the additions to my reply to his reply), I wasn't even vaguely harsh enough. He should have done some jail time (a few weeks, a misdemeanor is enough), and if he reapplies to get back into MIT I hope the Dean he has to talk to doesn't go softhearted absent a major attitude adjustment that has yet to occur a solid half year later.

Of course, I'm also one of those members of the MIT community who believe Aaron Swartz should have done some serious time in Club Fed (> a year, i.e. felony), am not in the least swayed by his exit from a mess entirely of his own making ("If you aren't willing to do the time, don't do the crime.", incalculably stupid for someone who suffered from depression), and am rather perturbed by all those taking the side of a criminal again MIT to the point of committing even more crimes against the community, like this one.

To answer the rest of your points, it comes down to character, and his actions and most especially his responses afterwords conclusively demonstrate he isn't worthy of the trust which is required for this sort of access to people's health information.

I don't "dismiss his work" so much as "don't trust him or anyone of such poor judgement to work with him" with a service handling sensitive stuff.
Revenge Porn Is Bad. Criminalizing It Is Worse
AI in the News
The directive is optional so I don't see why Apple would be forced to comply.
Well, I think Facebook would have a hard time making the transition from advertisers being their customers to users being their customers. They'd have to listen to their users if they did that. That sounds expensive.
Blatant claim, stupid reporting. Shameful from the Hindu, India
This was a letter that actually prompted the newspaper to look into what they had published
https://docs.google.com/document/d/148zwzQbZn6ytFwW0bn98CE9UAvYPNKHQNIgkULxnWKE/preview?pli=1&sle=true
A Wiener might be a person from Wien, Osterreich (which translates to Vienna, Austria in English).
The laws don't say you have to use micro-usb, they just suggest it.
How do you ignore it? Ignoring it means accepting cryptic bugs that result from signature changes.

You say "use to your advantage", but what's the advantage? You could have a "*args" like Python, and get the benefits without the (huge) drawback.

The typing debate is mostly about how much effort we should exert to catch errors at compile time rather than run time. In JS, it is much worse: It defers error catching forever, and never even catches them at all! It converts them to silent bugs, instead :(
It's obvious to me that compensation should come in the form of ownership in yc companies, pro-rated based on total karma.

I think tptacek and patio11 will back me up on this.
"It is Known": electrical engineer culture shock in webdev land
Daily Goals Calendar [Google Spreadsheet]
An aside, according to the lawsuit:
Writers can receive "Elite" status and are given titles such Duke, Duchess, Baron, or Baroness, the complaint states."

Really? Oh man, what people will do for "achievements"! Personally, I think the lawsuit is bogus.
This suit has no merit. If it did, then every FB, Twitter, Google, Amazon, etc. user would have to start getting paid at sign up. It doesn't make sense. The point of rating/reviewing a service/product is that you want to share the ups and downs with other people, so they make an educated selection. I personally enjoy reading reviews of restaurants and always give a place a chance if there are few unfavorable reviews. I also like writing my own reviews and even though I might have once thought that I should be paid (like a good wine connoisseur) I know that that I would've never reviews anything from the start, if getting paid was the goal.

This blog post reminded my of that one commercial (has anyone see it?), which I find very annoying, about joining someone's list. Perhaps these Yelp users should pay to review as they don't quite deserve the Yelper title.
>> Facebook has very little worth selling to a young audience that will never click online ads.

The numbers have shown that this is provably false.
Social media is a more traditional form of communication than network news
@KillSwitch, "active" ad-avoiders use ad-blockers and "passive" ad-avoiders ignore them, leading to the same output, i.e. no revenue (CPC, 2/3 of all online advertising compensation methods, and growing). Now let's take the case of Gmail, Gmelius gives the possibility to its users to hide ads but does NOT block the parsing of messages by Google and so the gathering of information used by Adsense to propose "customized ads" on other domains.

Now, you don't seem to take into account the fact that this overflow of ads we have to face (more and more) on a daily basis actually encourages people to become active or passive ad-avoiders, decreasing then the income generated by ads. I clearly think this kind of business model is not viable over the long-run...
None of my US purchases (i.e., all of my purchases) are eligible
> The only thing that would 'solve' the abortion debate is clarifying the legal status of unborn fetuses as rights-bearing humans

That is the debate. Your statement is tautological.
Motorola Wants To Make Modular Smartphones
> Here are a few of the most important lessons I learned:
Eschew Tradition...Find Flexibility at Work...Have a Personal Passion for Your Work

She missed an important one: "Don't Care About The Little People You're Hurting."

I wish I was being sarcastic. Bitter, maybe. Not giving a shit about the real-world consequences of your work (narcing out harried, abused clerks, in this case) is in fact a valuable trait if you want to succeed in business.

It's certainly relevant to all our modern success fables: Google and Facebook devastate personal privacy; Amazon treats the warehouse staff, its hardest-working employees, like shit; Microsoft stifles innovation and competition; Apple does too, and their illustrious founder once lied to his best friend to cheat him out of a couple thousand dollars. Be a sociopath and you'll go far.
Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/750/
Even if apps using Web Audio didn't do user-agent detection, many of them would need to be updated anyway because Web Audio (as it shipped in Chrome, at least) is a steaming pile. It's incredibly poorly specified in areas that matter when it comes to compatibility - for example:

You can't reliably detect the audio formats Web Audio can decode, and they vary both across hardware and software configurations (because the spec doesn't specify them), so your only choice is to download an entire audio file, try to decode it, and if you fail, download another and try that. Worse still, the <audio> mechanism of handing the browser a list of sources (so it can try to aggressively reduce wasted bandwidth) doesn't work because Web Audio requires you to download a full file before it can be decoded. Oops!

Shipped demos out there rely on Chrome-only Web Audio features that never made it into the spec, because Web Audio was written first as a non-portable implementation and then haphazardly turned into a spec while people were already building code against that implementation.

The spec changed after Google shipped it to the public (without putting it behind a flag or otherwise versioning it) so there are corner cases (albeit mostly small ones) where two spec-compliant implementations (Firefox and Chrome's for example) will produce different output. The only way to address some of these is update the application.

On the bright side, devs from both Mozilla and Google (among others) are working hard on addressing the issues, so it'll probably be fine in a year or so.
Image search: duct tape dress
Well I would never have imagined that people could have sued AOL for volunteering to manage message boards; community leaders. Yet that was investigated by the Department of Labor and settled in 2010.

Does the act of encouraging people to comment on your site, where the services you comment on require investment of your money, somehow incur a debt on part of the review site to the reviewers? What if the review site has a monetary relationship with the sites being reviewed?
We found Facebook PPC ads to be about twice as expensive as they are worth, and well under-performing Google. We shut it down. But that was based on direct conversions; I guess if you're doing branding you might have a different calculus.

But I'm not surprised to find that other companies don't find it worthwhile either. I'm not putting much effort into the "free" art of FB marketing either.
Many aspects of US society today are organized under the assumption that if every individual pursues what is in his/her best financial interest, the "invisible hand of the free market" will produce the best possible outcome for everyone.

Yet here we have reputable doctors acting in their self interest, and the result is that they are ordering unnecessary surgeries for financial gain. Meanwhile, patients are essentially unable to protect themselves against this travesty.

Maybe in this case the invisible hand cannot be seen because it is not there?
> and would therefore have rights protecting it from being killed.

So what about the rights of the mother to suicide? Don't those rights conflict?
Facebook advertising has been a massive win for us, and we are seeing > 80% of our Facebook customers are new. It's simply a huge piece of the internet that we were not hitting, because, while the intent piece of Google search is great, there are many people who don't even know our product exists. TV advertising has developed the way it has for a reason.
Interesting article, but the last premise is fairly disingenuous. He lists 6 reasons why healthcare is expensive, then claims that Obamacare doesn't fix any of them, but he's entirely wrong on at least 5 of the 6.

1. Medicare / insurance fraud --- The author obviously hasn't heard of the Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT). HEAT led to the record number of fraud charges in 2012. In addition to that, ACA standardized fraud convictions, so any provider convicted of fraud can no longer claim any federal money (Previously, a provider convicted of medicare fraud could still collect payments from medicaid et al).[2] These are only 2 provisions of the roughly 50 that directly address fraud. [2a]

2. Massive amounts of Paperwork --- This paperwork is moving to EHR / EMR systems that will file it automatically for the vast majority of patients. ACA mandates that the systems must use a standard format, so that any system built can communicate with all federal / private insurance carriers. [2]

3. Since doctors have direct contact with patients, and insurance companies don't it's easy for docs to blame insurance companies for unnecessary procedures --- I'm confused by this point, it seems a bit confused and contradictory toward his other points.

4. Doctors perform needless tests for fear of being sued --- The author has clearly never heard of ACOs. One of their primary goals is to limit the number of tests and procedures done. Insurance companies and the government will provide fairly significant bonuses when the cost of provided care comes in below average. [4a] In addition, the ACA provides research grants to study best practices and patient outcomes, having published, peer-reviewed research for common diagnoses will greatly limit the ability to sue for stuff considered CYA. [4b]

5. End of life care is insanely expensive --- This would've been addressed in the ACA, but Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and their dimwit followers torpedoed the 'death panels' to score some cheap political points.

6. Life is prolonged without living will --- Again, thank Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and the Fox News brigade for their insane rants against 'death panels' which would have directly addressed this.

[1] - http://www.npr.org/2011/12/30/144491419/doj-posts-record-for...
[2] - http://www.healthit.gov/policy-researchers-implementers/stan...
[2a] - http://www.btlaw.com/files/ALERT%20-%20Healthcare_Health%20C...
[4a] - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/29/o...
[4b] - http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hsrinfo/cer.html
[5 & 6] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_panel
I'd say it's worse than a default behavior, since there's no sane way to reverse the default. Are explicit arg list checks really an option, when you want to opt out of the default? I'd say that's not practical at all -- so it's really worse, as there's no practical opt out of this.
"According to government estimates, each neurosurgeon at Halifax Health was generating more than $2 million a year in hospital profits. The hospital charged fusion patients an average of about $80,000, according to Florida records on Halifax Health analyzed by The Post, ranking the procedure as one of the more expensive."

Wow.

The image of the physician as somebody who is there to help relieve suffering is cemented as a meme, but the way the system seems to have evolved in the past few decades is towards help as a secondary duty if any.

Unfortunately, anyone who seems to want to speak out against the system is immediately rebutted with cries of "Why do you hate doctors?" and "They saved my babies!".

It is very hard to have an honest discussion and self-introspection in the current environment, especially with so much money at stake.
I wish the US legal system would make changes to discourage these types of frivolous lawsuits. It seems like many suits are intended to force the defendant to settle even though the suit itself has no merit.

I wonder if the # of frivolous lawsuits would go decline if the suing party were forced to pay the defendant's legal fees if the suing party lost.
I totally get that the comic (which I sat and read the entire thing) was a worthwhile read. But I suppose I just come here for Hacker News. I don't want it to become a catch all for anything I might find interesting. But, I appreciate you sharing your opinion, so thanks.
"political feminist porn". That's a thing???
It's a bit off topic according to guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I agree and would like to add 2 more point ...i.e "population" and "education" .... countries with high population has high corruption because gap between rich and poor increases along with heavy unbearable weight on providing food, housing, education and other infrastructure ....

same goes with literacy rate: highly literate society has low corruption ...
And to think I've been making all those Reddit memes for free!
I've been using this for a little over a year now and on the occasions that changes have caused issues, Florian has fixed them quick enough for there not to be any real hassle.

Now that it supports the old compose interface too, for me, it's incredibly useful.
> They'd have to listen to their users if they did that. That sounds expensive.

You know what else is expensive? When everyone hates your brand.
Our experience has been that FB ads for a particular service/site work well for about a week, and then the cost quickly rises to the point where it's no longer worth advertising there.
Building a marketing center out on a barge makes no sense.
Our quick "solution", was just tar cvf up the dependencies and use that.

Alternatively godep as noted below, or you could get creative with git submodules or clone the repos to a local cache.

The reason go is simpler is you only need to deal with this at compile time, and thats what the ci server is for. My goal is removing runtime checks for crap and dealing with package versions every time I update things.

Go is more akin to c really here, and in my not so humble opinion it is a simpler task to sort out dependencies at compile time than on every system I need to deploy to.
Except having a single-payer system doesn't mean you'll have a panel of disinterested experts evaluating the cost/benefit of a given treatment. This isn't speculation, either. I've experienced the results of a "panel" going against the consensus of experts. It's the reason we left Quebec to come to the US, as at the time (2011) Quebec's policy for children with Autism was horrific. It hasn't changed.
Apple wins by gaining a new figurehead. Tesla wins by gaining access to capital and Apple's talent. Except...

- Apple already has a charismatic figurehead. They could put Ive in that role if he wanted it.

- Tesla seems to be doing quite well with the capital and talent they already have.

It's also not as if Tesla needs Apple's brand name; "Tesla" already means "innovative car company" to a growing percentage of the population.

I'll admit it: part of me would be giddy if this actually happened, but it's the kind of giddiness that I'd experience when Marvel and DC announce a crossover movie. It's a nerd-out moment, but then when I think about it critically, I can't see how this would help either company.

Tesla could arguably "need" Apple, but it really doesn't and Apple certainly doesn't need Tesla.

So if someone on here could play the devil's advocate and explain to us how this could be the most wonderful thing since sliced bread, I'd love to hear it. But for now, I'm going to chalk up my momentary giddiness to the irrational fanboy in me and just leave it at that.
This was a letter that actually prompted the newspaper to look into what they had published
https://docs.google.com/document/d/148zwzQbZn6ytFwW0bn98CE9U...
Gmail is finally using Responsive Design
> The numbers have shown that this is provably false.

I'd love to be proven false! Hit me.
Nope. This article's main point indicates that government should further expand into the healthcare business.

Obamacare sets the vital, initial steps into the industry.

Conservatives love to jump on this line because it bashes Obamacare. IN REALITY, it means it didn't go far enough.
Makes no sense to me. The guidelines are clear: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

The NSA stuff seems to have given us a critical mass of political whiners. Can't wait to see a Show HN for "HN minus politics."
A few things:

1) Facebook allows you to do some ridiculous targeting, that when combined with retargeting can create some powerful stuff. Check out Marty Weintraub and your head will explode.

2) Our Facebook ads (esp. retargeting w/perfect audience in the news feed) work far better than Google and Goog retargeting.

3) We've found Facebook ads to be great re-engagement tools. People who created an account but have been in-active or didn't complete setup are re-engaging via Facebook ads, leading to more active users.

YMMV of course, and being dumb with any ad dollars is always a bad idea—regardless of platform.