skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. I think this is the same kind of narrow minded mistake that AI made by focusing on getting computers to play chess instead of realising that the hard problem was really building something that could even recognise a single chess piece in different lighting conditions.

A lot of medicine is about perception. Obviously there is a huge amount of physical perception and pattern recognition but also, for example, a brilliant doctor who is not from the same culture as the patient will often miss something vital when taking a history from that patient that a local doctor will pick up straight away. These things are complex and subtle. We need to recognise just how limited technology is if we ever want to really improve it instead of getting too exited about the things it can do.
I'd agree about the parallel with education (I'm a teacher and a number of my family are doctors). Both are fields where the metrics for success (lives/gets better/graduates/etc) come along a road paved with soft skills.

I'm not too interested in getting into (yet) another argument over automating education (or medicine), and I agree with you about the long view on it, but I really do think that it's going to be a lot harder than many people with a "let's solve it with technology!" point of view would like to think (and I came into education with this exact mindset.
Obliviously. When taxes are unreasonable that's your only option.
A great way to look like everyone else!
This is called "crosstalk". It used to happen in POTS reasonably often, and I have experienced it in mobile to mobile calls a few times as well.

Classical crosstalk on POTs is fairly easy to get your head around - signals from one circuit leaking out onto another circuit through EMI, e.g. wires near each other, faulty amplifiers etc.

I never came up with a good explanation for crosstalk in mobile (GSM, CDMA, ..)[1] etc as audible crosstalk doesn't seem to be possible at the radio level. In fact I would be surprised if the actual voice baseband signal is analog at any point on the network.

Nevertheless, it happens.

Most likely, you experienced crosstalk at the cellular end of your Skype call. In theory, barring some pretty severe software errors, VOIP or Skype crosstalk should be impossible.

[1] AMPS networks, sure, but the newer digital systems, no.
Interesting you bring up the chest pain scenario. In 2003, when I was 32, I had crippling chest pains, and, simultaneously, (this is what scared the crap out of me) my entire left arm went absolutely numb - I was certain I was going to die of a heart attack, and so I immediately called Kaiser (in hindsight, 911 would have probably made more sense, but I was overly sensitive to calling 911 for anything other than murder in progress, somebody not breathing, or house on fire).

I was patched through to an intake nurse, described my symptoms, and she asked a grand total of three questions:

"Are you having any shortness of breath"
"Do you feel any nausea or light headedness"
"Can you press your fingernail on your left hand, and tell me how quickly it goes from white to red"

After I answered those three questions (No, No, right away) - she then said, "It probably isn't anything, but we'll want you to come in some time this week" - and set me up for an appointment a couple days later.

Total interaction time - less than 5 minutes, and that was with an intake nurse, not even a doctor.

Clearly, an expert system had done the assessment, and had decided, based on some baysean weighing (32 year old is almost certain not to be having a heart attack) plus a few expert-tree questions, that it wasn't really an emergency.

(As it turned out, I was starting to suffer from some RSI in left arm - Doc made the assessment in 90 seconds of prodding my arm, suggested an ergonomic keyboard and less typing - His analysis of the chest pains were, "Likely stress related, nothing to be worried about.")

BTW - my doctor didn't even suggest x-rays. Just a standard stethoscope/Deep Inhale test. When I asked a physician friend of mine later, why they hand't run any tests, his answer was, "You weren't in pain when you visited, had no trouble breathing, - there were no obvious indications of distress, you are 32 years old - there was very low return on running tests, and doctors (particularly at HMOs) are taught not to engage in "fishing" (testing for the sake of testing)
Get Peter Molyneux to ramble on and on about this, and you might have something..
There are likely a lot more advertisers with money to spend marketing products to sell to 18-31 year old males than to very specifically sci-fi fans.

I can imagine beer, clothing, cars, dating and related (shaving, hair and body care products) would fit 18-31 male audience well. Some of those are likely more valuable markets than straight sci-fi demographic products, I'm imagining.

It may well be that a loose 18-31 male demographic fit is more valuable than a tight sci-fi fit.
"chance favors the prepared mind"
My advice to startups: Hire a designer.

Design is way more than a bunch of generic UI elements put together on a page. This will not help you and only further cloud your understanding of what design is, and it will hurt your start-up more than any good it will do.

Trust me.
I'm not a entrepreneur, but from everything I've seen in products I bought or wanted to buy, the personal edition/regular edition, the price was almost always kept under $100. It makes purchases far more likely.

Make the license "floating" as you said in another post and reduce the cost to $99. Then make a professional edition (extra features) and an enterprise/volume discount edition (no necessarily extra features but can buy in bulk for reduced overall cost).

Similar to what people like Atlassian or Jetbrains are doing, basically ;)

(also kudos for the starter license addition, the "social" license - nice touch)
Landing on a page and having an auto-play HD video as a background, then clicking on the play icon just to have a the same video poping up (and lagging like hell... this is the point where I hope the have a great concept)

Then not being able to figure out what those guys sell...

Then finally figuring out they're selling website design. Damn the irony...
"Quarantine in that direction is pretty easy"

Until unrecognized Martian life jumps onto your happy home-bound spacecraft and starts colonising Earth. We can't even make sure recognised life from Earth is wiped from spacecraft...
Same here, certainly looks like an over the top parody of silly tech startups to me.
Is this project typical of what people are working on at Hacker School?
Nope. It was already there when I moved in 12 years ago.

And even if I did, that still doesn't involve BT.

I don't have a BT phone cable at my house though, so would need to pay for that to be installed if I wanted to go down that route.
That's where you're wrong. There's one thing that amazon and socialist governments have in common.

They don't give a st about the people.

The government doesn't need to be socialist either it can be a perfectly democratic government that doesn't do anything for its citizens interest and the result would be the same.
Previously posted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6914546
Amazon’s streaming data service, Kinesis, is now available
Ha! Nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots? The only mention of 'nurse' in the rant is 'the uniforms carry bacteria'... because a robot wouldn't? Every surface in a hospital carries this stuff. I'd like to see the pricetag on a robot (or range of robots) that can do all the physical skills of a nurse, let alone the social management.

I remember having to hold onto a patient's leg for a nurse to put in a needle in a tiny vein in the foot, as all the others had collapsed. The patient was in an altered conscious state and was moving around - I was keeping the leg relatively still. I'd like to see a robot succeed that task without being explicitly designed for that exact use case. It would be genuinely impressive.
I mean, I think you're just asking me to restate my original argument. That's fine---I probably went too fast, anyway.

Let's say the US retaliates against Iran's threat of force (let's just assume it makes a legitimate threat of force) and kills uninvolved Iranian citizens as a side-effect. Assume the US made reasonable attempts to minimize civilian casualties.

Was the US's force against those civilians retaliatory, or initiatory? I would say the former. Iran initiated the force and is morally culpable for those deaths.

If you agree with me here, we can procede. But this is important. I am saying that when the US (for example; imagine, now, that it is a mininal government) levies taxes to establish basic, necessary protection of rights (minimal police, courts, and military), it is analogous. It is retaliatory. The threat of initiated force being retaliated against is robbers, theives, foreign countries that would invade, etc. We know all these will run rampant without government (at least you can agree with me that that is true given the way society is now). It doens't have to be a specific thief or other rights-violator; we know they are out there, and that government is necessary to protect rights.

So when an ideal US forcibly taxes me, it is retaliating, for the same reason it is retaliating when there is a civilian casualty in Iran.

Anyway, we run the risk here of being rationalistic (i.e. talking all about concepts that ultimately are not connected to reality). There is another way to look at the point that I am making, which is to say: In a state of nature (i.e. if the government suddenly disappeared), force rules. The only way to get out of a state of nature is to use force to elimiate it. That is perfectly moral, and perfeclty practical. It is the use of force that makes the protection of rights possibile. (That would even still be true if government were 100% funded via donations, since it properly uses force against criminals anyway.)

> You cannot justify the claim that taxation is immoral

You said it is immoral "plan and simple" because it's "extortion." Unless I missed your argument. That does not justify the claim of "immoral" because it does not link it to a philosophical theory of morality that itself is, ultimately, logically derived from and necessitated by perceptual reality.

For instance, many libertarians support the "nonaggression axiom." That is just a floating axiom that they arbitrarily assume. Some of them have deeper philosophical arguments for it, presumably, but many do not believe that such are necessary.

The good news it that we actually can rigorously defend liberty using a chain of reasoning that starts from perceptual reality. And we should. Don't be satisfied to believe a good thing when you can also prove a good thing, which is so much better. :)

However, that reasoning will lead to the conclusion that a minimum necessary amount of taxation is, well, necessary, and thus justified. A proper theory of morality does not contradict that. I am willing to sacrifice the ideal of having zero taxes in exchange for being right.
Empresas de Marketing Digital em Portugal
Heck, even without removal, PHP being "the language of sensibly named functions with a bunch of legacy aliases that you can ignore" would still be a million times better than being "the language where every single stdlib function has its own unique form of retardation"

( used in the dictionary sense, not in the able-ist sense)
It's not always about what people are interested or want. Sometimes people give up on their long term interests for short term gain. Mozilla is about the long run.

And if it weren't for Firefox, you'd still be developing for IE6.

I'm sure that they care about those bugs, but right now the major battle for everyone is in the mobile platform area. If Firefox OS doesn't gain a foothold we're basically in walled garden area forever (even though Android is OSS I don't trust Google to not become reactionary once the market is saturated and Android dominates it; and through patents + branding Google can still prevent major forks if it wants to).

So for your own long term sake, you'd better wish that they do make it, even if they have to postpone a few CSS bug fixes.
Octopress is more fun :) No offense
Once again, you are confusing nominal rates with effective rates, and simply assuming that corp. tax was paid at that nominal rate, which has a statistical likelihood so low as to be indistinguishable from zero.

Effectively, a quarter of corporations pay zero corporation tax. Considering that the whole purpose of these constructs is to reduce the tax burden, I'd wager a guess that the rates paid tend towards the low end of the scale.

(http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/10/23/big-...)

Of course tax should be paid on income that was shifted off-shore for tax reasons, but of course the monied interests are lobbying for a "tax holiday", which they have "successfully" done in the past. "Success" in quotes because the policy failed to achieve the things that were used to peddle the ludicrous idea: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405297020363310... It was highly successful in avoiding taxes, which is why they are lobbying for it again.

What do voluntary charitable contributions have to do with taxes (apart from him not deducting some of them in order to not have his tax rate look even more ridiculously low than it already is)?
CSS animated loading indicators
The law is literally a set of rules.

And when you implement them as a simple set of rules, you end up with ridiculous outcomes. The politicians who make the rules don't (and can't) cater for corner cases. "The law is a hammer, not a scalpel"
PowerPoint Web2.0?
Good answer above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6919928
Even better, get a designer as a co-founder. Specially for startups bootstrapping.

Really good designers are hard to find/likely already occupied or juggling multiple projects at a time. IMHO, design is a never ending process.

You'll hire a good designer if you get lucky at your early days but then retaining them becomes exceptionally hard. I've found that having them onboard as a co-founder seems to be the best way to work through this.
We added a FREEBIE keyword today for commits that are small enough the author doesn't think they should get a reward.
Anyone who says "case closed" is asserting that science will never find evidence to disprove their theory. Given the previous history of scientific research (especially in biomedical research), that's a very arrogant and ignorant statement, and they should probably read John Ioannidis' paper:

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327

A less technical discussion of Ioannidis' work can be found here:

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-dam...
(The author:) This issue is all about interfaces. To "use HTML" does not mean "write your papers in HTML". It means "present the final result in an HTML-compatible format", so that any user could view it seamlessly and fluidly. Fluidly means they should be able to click on a citation and see it appear e.g.

The HTML standard, which expressly makes room for foreign
technologies, when viewed as a standard is immensely more powerful than good old Latex. And in fact, if typesetting is your concern, you will already find JS libraries addressing this.

The big thing is: the HTML standard allows for future technologies to be embedded in your docs. The Latex linguistic ecosystem does not.

This point is only made clearer when one realizes that the end goal "to have a paper in my hand" is an artifact of past technologies. Going forward, "having a paper in your hands" will not stand as the end-goal of intellectual effort. Most certainly, intellectual work will have to be presented in a (a) standardized and (b) highly accessible and (c) highly interactive manner. Only HTML fits the bill.

It is clear that academia will switch to HTML. I am just saying: Get on with it. Why wait.
Other monopolies have produced great things: Xerox's PARC labs, IBM.

But not always: Standard Oil, East India Company.

Maybe opportunity (as you note) plays a part.
What hardware are you on, what browser are you using? Because I have a retina pro and loads of websites scroll much worse than this (f.e. http://foundation.zurb.com/learn/features.html). It also worked fairly well on my WP8. I'd say this is just a tradeoff between graphics and performance.
import web

urls = (
'/(.*)', 'hello'
)
app = web.application(urls, globals())

class hello:
def GET(self, name):
if name:
return 'Hello, ' + name + '!'
else:
return "<form><input name='name'></form>"

if __name__ == "__main__":
app.run()

upload into your web server's cgi-bin folder, or have the server configured to exec all *.py files as python

ED> yeah, this is a few more lines of code than PHP and it requires a teeny tiny amount of knowledge about how the web works - and that "takes 5 minutes to get started" vs PHP's "takes 2 minutes to get started" is a big difference for someone who doesn't know what they're doing but wants results immediately :P

EDED> Actually now that I think about it, that's how /I'd/ start a simple webapp as it has the structure in place to grow easily and elegantly -- if you're willing to do things the quick and dirty way, you can go without a framework and just print an HTTP response to stdout - in which case the only difference with PHP is that the python version requires "print 'Content-type: text/html\n'" at the top
Another silly HN headline. The actual quote from the article that was cherry-picked and butchered this time round was:

"The latest studies on vitamins have some medical experts saying 'case closed'"

These HN headlines really annoy me, because you/we should know better.

Anyway, favourite quote from the article is:

"The message is simple: Most supplements do not prevent chronic disease or death"

I don't take supplements, nor do I have any particular views on the subject, except to say that I think a lot of people probably get a massive dose of positive feeling from the placebo effect alone, which is proven to be a genuinely good thing.
What irks me about a lot of startups is that they put a lot, i f not all the importance on Engineering talent — which is great, but if your attitude towards Design is "Oh we'll hire a contractor" or download something like this, then you will watch your competitors race past you.

Companies like Square, Stripe value design, and it shows because they ultimately make better products that people want to use.

If you have a startup, find design talent. They are out there and itching to make the next big thing.
This discussion is about standards of presentation. Not technologies for rendering. An HTML document written today, will benefit retro-actively from better font rendering in your browser in 1 year. However, a Latex paper written today, will not benefit in any way from technologies invented after you typeset the paper.
> multiple cohesive templates (web+email+business cards+letterhead+banner+tshirt+etc) with a good way of customizing everything at once (colours, fonts, spacing)

That's an interesting idea... Does anyone provide such a pack?

I typically pick something from ThemeForest and adapt it myself, that would save quite some time.
24 ways is the advent calendar for web geeks...
These frightening robots give a glimpse at Googles post-ad-future.
Yeah in a way they are just doing A/B testing and getting a more profitable result.
"He knows what to look for and recognizes how to make money out of pump-and-dump scams without doing any pumping or dumping himself." So, just a parasite on others' scamming in a sewer of a market.
The real reason Dark Souls 2 is so hard
Dont' know if they gamed it or not, but I submitted same url without the crappy end a few hours ago before this one. HN is not able to detect doubled URLs?
Thinking about 'meta' torrent file format
SensioLabs, creator of Symfony, closes its $7 million Series A financing round
I don't know what the few years after the transistor's first appearance actually seemed like, but we've got 65+ years of perspective working for us to appreciate it.

Those "papers" do represent actual inventions, no matter how condescendingly you say the word "papers". And inventions only a handful of years old at that.

I'd venture a guess that many of AT&Ts inventions were (or would be, given a wider audience like we have today) looked down upon in a similar way - there were probably people who said "Ha! A toy like that? A couple of screws and some silly wires? We've already got _____ that can get that done, that clunky thing will never be practical."

---

Then again, I also think its a good thing that with more resources at our disposal we can take such a critical eye to work being produced by capitalistic companies, and as practices and inventions enter the industry, more easily take them for what they are really worth.
I started using e-cigs about a month ago and I have no interest in quitting. I enjoyed smoking cigarettes previously but felt guilty about what I was putting in my lungs, now I use an e-cig and it brings me more pleasure than smoking with none of the guilt. However, let's get one thing straight, this is not cheaper. If you let it, it quickly turns into a hobby and you want to spend all of your money on new equipment and flavors.
If it's a quick and slick marketing-site you're after, try looking at http://modulz.co for 49,-

(disclaimer, beta-tester).
well. I shouldn't have said pain, it's more like don't want to wake up pain... How I might explain it better?
I never have the issue on Firefox on my Linux laptop, but I always run into issues with not knowing to scroll on my Mac/Safari, simply because the scrollbar doesn't exist. On Linux, a quick glance to the right and I know that there is extra content that I can scroll to see. That doesn't exist on Safari. It's annoying, even if it is pretty >_>
Just wanted to say thanks everyone, we really appreciate your thoughts. The open, honest and thoughtful discussion is what makes this community great.
حالة الطقس ودراجات الحرارة الاربعاء 18/12/2013
Is it considered acceptable to post affiliate links on HN?
Making of Disney’s Frozen Realistic Snow Simulation
Also, preventing chronic disease or death are not the only valid reasons to take supplements. For example, if some hypothetical supplement made people feel happier or more energetic, or prevented a non-lethal but unpleasant condition like the common cold, it would probably be quite valuable.
Just if you're interested, it appears it did. 23,000 hiroshima bombs worth of energy:

http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2004/12/1227_04122...

From what I can tell that's a lot more than the global supply.
Agreed. Mozilla, Wikipedia and the Internet Archive keep alive the Web as it used to be, before getting commodified.
An amazing framework, a great step forward, beyond all the existing frameworks. I guess your main trump card is design…
The 10 Most Important Metrics In A Startup's Financial Statements
It is strange that the author attributes the eight-hour workday to Henry Ford's business strategy. It had been a demand raised by workers themselves from much earlier: “Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
But it's really not a silly conversation. You are comparing (assuming it exists) the only extra terrestrial life we have ever found. Literally alien life.

Mouthwash bacteria doesn't mean a thing when you kill it because it's bacteria and it originated on earth. Bacteria that originated on Mars would be completely different as we'd study it for years just to find out how it originated and survives.