skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to be roughly saying the same thing as josh but I noticed a few examples. Paragraph #1 is barely a sentence. "The thing is.." used more than once and paragraph 4 spurred this comment. That much in parenthesis likely shouldn't be.

I'm only commenting because I myself do this quite often. I'll be very verbose and break into parenthesis for almost no reason. I've noticed a trend lately in my writing that may help you: my verbose emails get largely ignored. I can ask for 5 things that are clear as day to me and get barely a response for one. I've often said the same thing in emails multiple times until the other party finally understands. This is as a full time employee talking to coworkers and partner companies. I would likely blow my brains out if this occurred with every customer.

It still happens now but I take the time to prune every email. I may take 3x as long writing multiple drafts until I can be concise and clear. One of my biggest pet peeves is repeating myself, second is getting a response confirming something I said 5 emails ago. The amount of wasted energy is soul crushing when I think about it and this is a daily struggle. I do write for myself but when that point comes when no one is really reading the response you give, you start to question responding in the first place. That's a terrible place to be.
That's the elimination of server hardware costs, though I can't imagine just chucking stuff in the cloud with no local backup. (Amazon has lost data before.)

There's still a client PC cost...

There are also the times when either Amazon (or Google Apps & Docs) or the network goes down and you have the odd thousand people sitting around wondering what to do. That's always lots of fun.
I agree -- I'm starting to think all social media sites have a half-life. I guess I'm too old to understand snap chat. Like -- isn't it just text messaging w/ pictures? Aren't there already a million ways to do that without ads? Any youths want to weigh in?
if you decide to distance yourself from the government election process, you can't complain later about it
The paper he cites is by David Romer, but it definitely does not say you should go for it 100% of the time.

http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~dromer/papers/JPE_April06.pdf

"Teams’ actual choices are dramatically more conservative than those recommended by the dynamic-programming analysis. On the 1,604 fourth downs in the sample for which the analysis implies that teams are on average better off kicking, they went for it only nine times. But on the 1,068 fourth downs for which the analysis implies that teams are on average better off going for it, they kicked 959 times."
Soapy water contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Practically every time you cast a vote, you're voting on multiple races, propositions, etc. The chance of casting a tie-breaking vote in a local election (say for City Council) is probably better than 1 in 10k. If you have several such questions, then there are some tangible odds that your vote may make a difference.

Keep in mind that in those rare cases where a race is one by one vote, _everyone_ who voted for the winning side cast a deciding vote.
Innovative Pen Printer Concept
Having more than passing familiarity with this, the mechanisms to close down a factory due to pollution are long, agonizing, expensive for the city and its people, and unlikely to succeed.

Part of this is an ever moving, never quite enough demand for "actual studies" and evidence. If you provide an epidemiology study, they'll demand clinical trials. Clinical trials? Not generalizable, bring on the epidemiology. But you haven't done a proper toxicology study....
Another person with the exact opposite experience here: Uber has great customer service here in Seattle. Everything from lost items, bad drivers, bad routes – these happen rarely, but every time I've had a prompt customer service response. And the occasions that warranted a refund were taken care of without even requesting it.
I can't use this app unless it loses 80kb. Too bloated and heavyweight.
One of the local bike shop owners has 18 shops in two states and does well over $3 million dollars in revenue every year.

They use custom Apple/Mac software for all their POS equipment. You know how many people run an IT department that is charge of that much equipment, people, inventory and software?

TWO.
It's not just football where the strategies popular at the moment are probably sub-optimal.

Consider ice hockey. Most coaches, if down by a goal, will pull the goalie for an extra attacker with about 90 seconds left in the game. It turns out that pulling the goalie significantly earlier, with about 3 minutes left in the game, would be more likely to result in a win:

http://people.stat.sfu.ca/~tim/papers/goalie.pdf

However, coaches are understandably reluctant to pull the goalie so early. When they're down by a goal near the end of the game, they're probably going to lose regardless. The public accepts that. However, if they lose anyway after employing an unorthodox strategy, the critics will be vicious, much as described in the football article.
The Romer paper mentioned in the article uses NFL data.
Even if you don't do support via phone, you should have a phone number so one can get an actual human being in realtime interaction in case your system gets so fucked up that normal procedures break down.

As far as i'm concerned you're not a company that takes business seriously if i can't call you.

And this is echoed by many people i know, even though we prefer most of our communication to be online.
Kinda tangential, but I think this social hacking that happens in the search of customer support is really interesting. I've used and seen it used over and over, normally following something like this:

1. There's a problem. Generally it's a pretty big deviation from normal service involving a non-trivial loss, like paying an order of magnitude more for a cab than is necessary.

2. The customer tries to notify the company, normally just to recover the loss.

3. If it's a start up, there probably is limited or isn't any customer service. Larger companies will generally put people through a large, automated, slow, and probably ineffective process with tickets and machine answering systems. The issue isn't resolved either way.

4. Next up is a tweet. Some complaint about the issue @somecompany. A lot of companies large and small have embraced Twitter as a psuedo-support channel.

5. If the subsequent tweets get ignored, some will take to writing a blog post about the situation and lack of support.

6. If the blogger has any connections or visibility, aggregators or media might pick it up and republish it. Brief infamy ensues.

Reminds me of when that woman's AirBnB place got demolished. I'm not sure why Uber doesn't have killer support with $300 million to spend (maybe they do and this is an outlier), but I think the lesson for the start up community. People expect customer service, and customer service needs to be easier and faster than complaining publicly to a large number of people.
Sign In Yahoo is broken?
That is on my list of things blekko should do eventually, for example we could set things up for big company networks to run all their queries through an anonymizing proxy that they control. The problem today is that Google's results (for technical queries) and search brand (for all queries) are so strong that a majority of the hypothetical big company users would revolt.

(As an aside, the possibilities for industrial espionage in your typical not-privacy-respecting search engine are staggering. Google knows what the R&D departments of every Fortune 500 company have cooking. Just look at the queries and clicks from their IP addrs. Yow.)
Linux distro hosts web services on Raspberry Pi
Economists Discover the Poor Behave Differently From the Rich
Which is why I'm not besmirching your technical achievement as much as...Excel is widely abused by the ignorant, Big Data is widely abused by the ignorant...Hadoop in Excel...
I've only had to use uber support once, and it was for an extreme edge technical error. I received immediate email reply from the SF CM at 2AM. She followed up twice in the following week to keep me updated on the status without me ever having to write back.
There is no User-Mode scheduling in the Linux Kernel to my knowledge, but the video[1] mentioned the post describes Linux patches that add support for it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXuZi9aeGTw
Google Cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9eL0cMo...
One of the reasons why I've been using Sidecar more lately. You put in your pickup and dropoff locations and are given an estimated donation recommendation (Sidecar let's you pay what you want) before you actually request a pickup. There's a lot to be said for setting expectations like that early.
Bitcoin will become a sentimental Gold while a more robust, efficient protocol such as Ripple will become cash
Interest is taxed at marginal rates, not capital gains rates. (You may be thinking of dividends.) Moreover, at $500k/year, you would be subject to the new higher capital gains rate of 20%...
ATH0++
Clickable link: http://www.shippable.com/
Yeah, sorry about that! Didn't expect this post to take down my blog. I'm working on getting it back up.

EDIT: OK, it should be back up now!
What's an SPA? (I guess FTE are full-time employees?)
You're just adding things that probably aren't within the scope of the project.

For instance graceful fallback is a 'nice to have' but not necessary. If you deny flash or javascript, essentially most sites simply break. I imagine a native client plugin would have the same results if you don't enable it.

As for white listing, why can't it simply be handled with the same dialogs used for whitelisting all the other existing extensions per site?
I am the author of the post. If you want to hear more of our war stories, read here: http://www.tintup.com/blog/how-our-tech-startup-created-a-pr...

In summary, we tried raising money, failed miserably, started asking customers what they found valuable, maximize on that, and charge based on value we provided.
No, but perhaps there would not have been any pages written for netscape for IE to be compatible with.
Yes, Congress now is only ~90% of what congress will be in 2 years.
The Alternative Vote Explained [video]
> so it's a for-profit enterprise.

Or not, given that Motorola has been operating at a loss for quite some time now.
GigaSpaces’ Uses In-Memory Computing to Combat Website Latency
Maybe I'm missing something but this doesn't look credible at all. Correlation vs causation is not mentioned; isn't it a big deal that "[depressed/family stressed/chemically imbalanced] people more prone to bad grades/emotional problems are also likely to not want to go to bed at a reasonable hour"?
There was an algorithm in a certain "Hacker Journal" to generate said numbers. Combine that with some valid prefixes (the first 4 digits, which indicate the issuer) and you'd pass most tests at the time.
OT but the text selection behavior on this page is fascinating! (Or horrific if you don't want to be nice). I've never seen anything like it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4k72g8b2tl3mgzt/Screenshot%202013-...
I've met the guy; he's legit. My wife and I stop by every time we visit KC because it's such a neat shop. I've looked for a store like his in the NYC area without success.
I spent a while there out of college getting my priorities in order and loved it. I was pretty broke at the time but it was super easy to find beachfront hostels that were 5-6 bucks a night. Couldn't have asked for a better experience
Ask HN: How does code get translated to voltage inside a CPU transistor?
In "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" there's a section about how there are these 2 buildings on a corporate campus, housing hardware and software personnel respectively. The hardware people make flip-flop circuits, and the software people work with the software equivalent of the same. But neither group properly understands at which point exactly the software|hardware boundary lies.

Text in my text editor gets converted to 1's and 0's which then get converted to electric signals inside transistors in my iPad's CPU.

What's the mechanism by which 1's and 0's turn into different voltages? Can someone point me to a resource (preferably a video) that explains this?

(How is mere text able to control what happens inside an inanimate machine?)

(In other words, what happens at the software|hardware boundary?)
Open Source: A Platform for Innovation
What happened when my co-founder quit the night before our YC interview
If Thomas Watson, Dave Packard, Ken Olsen, Bill Gates, Bob Noyce, Ben Rosen, Michael Dell, Jim Clark, Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison, John Sidgmore, Ross Perot, Steve Case, Steve Jobs, Irwin Jacobs, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, Jerry Yang, Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Williams, and Ben Silbermann all thought like that, I don't think our industry would even exist today.
It will drop, but you would not have guts to buy it at $50, because you would be scared of the downtrend.

My recommendation for you is to stay away from trading (whether bitcoin, stocks, FX or anything else).
Keep reading Grantland. They have great weekly columns, particularly for the NFL and NBA, that have broadened my understanding for and appreciation of the sports I thought I knew. Honestly, they're the best.

You could also try fantasy sports, but they don't teach you much about the game - they just encourage the sort of singleminded obsession that makes learning any subject easier.
So, really the NSA business is not relevnt.

Until the industrial espionage and insider trading leaks come out. Then all hell will break loose.
Ahh what are you viewing it on?
lol this is so ignorant, a forced head-in-the-sand.
Shame. mmap is so handy, but blocking on page faults makes it annoying to work with.
That's not at all true. I decide to distance myself from it, and I complain about it.
Just because two can, doesn't mean two can do it well. It takes just one curious or nefarious person to crack the veil. Bike shops just aren't highly visible or obvious targets when weighed against other potential marks.
That's probably because it's not asian.
The BIOS in old Sun machined used to run some kind of Forth interpreter which would run code from your expansion cards to initialize them (not sure if that was meant to make this cross-platform/cross-architecture).

I vaguely recall trying to get an old SPARCstation to boot and figuring out how to work the Forth shell (which is similar to what Grub is now) -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

That was one of the first "small factor" pizza box machines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_box_form_factor
Hey, good question.

I actually started out building stock prediction algorithms, then realized I had no idea how to do that (~October 2011). I was mainly coding in C# and Ruby, and picking it up from books.

I then found Kaggle, which has a lot of great machine learning competitions. They will post something like "predict bond prices accurately", or "score essays automatically", and lots of people get to compete to create the best solution. The leaderboard format really motivated me, and I met some great people and did very well. I learned a lot of the stuff I needed from online books, Khan Academy, etc.

Concurrently with Kaggle, I started a consulting business, and got a lot of clients through there.

After I spent a lot of time doing machine learning, I was found by edX (edx.org), an online education company that was looking for people to develop ways to grade essays at scale. I thought I knew how to program before, but I actually didn't (I was coding mostly in R for Kaggle, and not using classes or building resuable code, etc).

At edX, I actually learned how to test/deploy and develop properly. I also ended up doing 99% web development, which is fine, as I learned that skill, but got a bit bored due to not using machine learning at all. I learned Python, Django (the main web framework), and a lot of server deployment and other skills. I can't emphasize how invaluable working at a startup that did things the right way was in terms of my learning.

I recently left edX to work on some of my own projects. Currently, I am working on an android application, Happsee (www.happsee.com) that helps track, visualize, and discover what makes us happy (and can do a lot of cool machine learning with). I have also worked on an open source learning management system, Movide (www.movide.com).

The key for me to learn programming is to de-emphasize the programming. I don't actually care much about programming. I care about making things. I get a similar joy from snapping legos together and making something and from coding. So find a problem you want to solve, and start thinking of things you could make to solve that problem.

For me, data is insanely cool, and I have done a lot of random explorations on my blog. I just did an analysis of happiness (http://vikparuchuri.com/blog/what-makes-people-happy/), but I have also analyzed how much characters on the Simpsons like each other (http://vikparuchuri.com/blog/how-do-simpsons-characters-feel...).

Small projects like that are a great way to learn, and can get you exposure through presentations, blog, etc.

If you have any questions, I'm happy to help. vik at equirio dot com.
US advertised prices do not include sales/VAT taxes, which I gather are quite substantial in Brazil.
Fight Complexity. Triforce your Javascript
Camon, I understand being upset because of the overcharge, but it was just 3 days ago!! You definitely didn't pay the bill yet, if I buy a custom Macbook it will take 3 weeks to ship, I asked my bank for cheques it took 20 days, I contacted Kobo support it took 10 days to get a reply, just be f*cking patience.
It's amusing that various local taxi regulations, which Uber and friends have long decried as being unfair, inefficient, outdated, etc. are pretty much the sole reason taxi pricing is transparent.
Chrome 31.0.1650.48 on OSX
for sure. make your projects private. and then you will be discriminated against for any future job prospects. you're welcome.
He just moved and lost his team. Both of these are traumatic.

Then he lost YC - the whole rationale of both.

Of course he's a bit shellshocked. I would be. Great tale!
I definitely don't buy that interpretation. Unless you can point to some true mechanism by which my choices remotely affect the choices of other brains (beyond the obvious possibilities like verbally persuading people), I consider it to be pseudoscience.
You'd expect so. But the buyers are looking for a greater fool to flip the real estate to at a higher price later.
I agree with you, but not everything can be done pictorially.

FWIW, an animation of the quadratic formula/completing the square: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Completing_the_square.gif
I'm the OP. This happened two years ago, but I figured I'd post it now since YC interviews start tomorrow, and I already heard of one person in this batch who's going through the same thing. Good luck to everybody interviewing! If you have any questions, I'm game.
We all use criteria as proxies to judge a specific part of someone's competencies or personality.

Is the competency we're proxying for that people "like" programming? Or is the competency that someone is "good at coding"?

I would much prefer someone who's good at the latter than the former. I could care very little whether someone enjoys coding in their free time, I need to know they are competent and work well on a team.
As I understood it, the point was for games which should be always-on. That said, A heavy gamer on a WOW-like game could be 120 hours a month, which would be on the same order of magnitude.

What I mean by fair price is that this is not an easy thing that they're proposing -- enough bandwidth and hardware to play a game. It may cost more than you would expect to deliver a high quality experience. However, the value to consumer isn't there for 83 cents an hour.
Mathematica finally gets undo?
Apple still sells the 4s, which has half the RAM and a slower CPU. And I wouldn't call the 4s a low-end phone.

Basically, the days when a <$200 Android was painful to use (click, wait for the UI to figure out what you just did) are past.
From a business writing standpoint? that whole sentence is superfluous. The whole thing is an insertion of humility, something that is important when speaking about yourself to other nerds, but is essentially social fluff.

My takeaway is primarily not that I did verbosity wrong, though certainly that comment wasn't right, but that the verbosity itself is the problem.

Take, for example one of the bits of writing I'm most proud of:

http://www.nostarch.com/download/xen_ch7.pdf

We had a real editor, and my co-author had significant writing skill, but even so: Look at the Scheduling for providers section; that was mostly me.

This is about what I had been aiming for in my business communications, and while I still think it's a reasonable bit of writing for a semi-technical audience, it is far too verbose for a business email.

If I was sending that same passage to a business person, I suspect the optimal format would be something like:

"We will allocate CPU based on how much ram the user purchases."

The rest is technical details and fluff. When dealing with a businessperson, the technical details are my job, not something they care about.

I think that my primary self-destructive impulse here is that I want to throw out technical details, in part to prove that I actually know something. I need to restrain that bit of ego, as worrying about the technical details is what I'm (hopefully) getting paid to do.
I think you would at least need to take a fairly broad view of "innate" that extends past the literal moment of embryo fertilization. How someone's raised in childhood can have a huge impact on what seems innate by the time they get to their teenage years. I've been "good with computers" since a young age, for example, but I also had an Apple //c in my house since I was 3 years old, and parents who encouraged me to use it. I don't think my teenage computer proficiency would have been the same if that had not been the case.
I think at some point, his reaction is more about him than the video or culture at large.
But then you're just an outside observer and not a participant. It doesn't carry the same weight.
Doesn't Uber do that? After each ride, I get an email with the breakdown of the costs of the ride, map of the route taken, average speed, time taken etc.
How do destroyed buildings lead to such craziness?
This reminds me of a PandoMonthly talk with Chris Sacca:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqUG2_cmZ6I

He talks about his "aha!" moment when he was broke and then realizes the people he meets would rather see him as a part/leader of a team, and not an individual.

The moments I refer to are between 32-36 minutes.