skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's an interesting hypothesis: 'Luck' is necessary (but not sufficient) for start-up success.

I agree that 'Hard work' is necessary but not sufficient.

Is it that the combination 'Hard work + Luck' is both necessary AND sufficient? And if so, are there other elements that can replace Luck in that combination - which would negate the hypothesis as Luck would therefore not be necessary?

My personal belief - at this time - is that Luck is necessary, but my definition of luck includes creating multiple opportunities for it to occur. If your definition is only deus ex machina type fortune befalling you, then you may categorise what I consider luck as simply an extension of Hard work. Which would negate the hypothesis.

[Edit] pg has the top comment on the original post, where he says "All successful startups are lucky, but they're never just lucky". Which would seem to affirm that he agrees with this hypothesis and views Luck as necessary (all successful startups are) but not sufficient (never just lucky).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6794612
I suspect the Rift will force an interesting battle between pre-rendered and realtime graphics in film. Because of parallax effects, there is no way to pre-render footage for the Rift while still maintaining the level of geometric correctness the Rift provides. I suspect we'll see some pre-rendered 3d movies for the Rift, but they'll feel pretty weird.... It will be pseudo 3d, like current 3d films, not the true binocular, immersive, persistent-world effect that Rift games provide.

With realtime rendering, however, you will get the complete, geometrically correct 3d images with head tracking. I suspect what this means is we'll start to see 3d films that are rendered in realtime. Essentially like the cutscenes we see for AAA video games, except they'd be feature length without any gameplay in between. If VR really takes off, we might even see companies like Pixar re-release their films for realtime viewing.

I would love to see a company like Pixar produce new realtime 3d films for the Rift, but it seems unlikely that would make financial sense for them. I suspect what we'll see instead is indie shorts first, followed by larger and larger budget films. The same trajectory that CG films took in the first place.

An interesting implication of this is that live footage will be basically impossible to incorporate into a true VR setting. As video resolution gets higher we may see multiple angles of scenes being recorded in ultra-high-def, and then digitally combined into a voxel scene. Probably data from something like the Kinect would have to be mixed in too, to resolve all of the voxels. That could be replayed on a Rift, but the director would have to really constrain the kind of lighting, materials, and motion for that to work well. It would be extraordinarily difficult, and I suspect you'd still have a lot of strange artifacts.

This could actually be a big shot in the arm for pure digital film production!
Hey Michael,

rather than post 'Great Read!', it's best to just upvote the article. Comments are really for commentary on HN, not for Kuddos.
Yep, no disagreement there :)

The blacklist has no chance of defending against malicious users. Luckily (at the moment) we are using this purely internally and the blacklist is really just preventing people from shooting themselves in the foot. We're moving to a read-only user role shortly, and the suggestion to go with a read-only db is a great one.
Mere Words Can't Do Justice To How Awesome The New Oculus Rift Is
Why not have a hashchange listener going to a hash-parsing router function, and make #some-id an anchor to a hash link with slash-separated parameters, or just use Backbone's router to handle your request? Then you don't need to keep track of a bunch of element id references.
While that's not really what they do, perhaps Tor Books[1] employees might have a perspective on this? Personally I think it would be really hard to do a good work of fiction without some help -- it is of course possible to hire an editor by yourself -- but I think the kind of support a "real" publisher is able to give you would be really valuable in this case.

[1] http://www.tor.com/ (For those unfamiliar, Tor was very early with DRM-free e-books as well as offering the first books of series for free download (expecting readers to purchase following books)).
Seems to me that the smartest thing to do is write your application independent of any framework. That way you insulate your stuff from the framework and it doesn't become the app.

That's sort of the big lesson I've learned over the years working with Rails, where too many projects become "Rails apps" rather than apps that use by Rails.
Tried it out yesterday. Really a major improvement, and they're listening to feedback. The method of producing 'low persistence' is quite interesting, and only works becuase of the move to OLED. Really smart guys there.
.. and ranting about Spring is about what, 2006?
This is true, of course, and the prosecution will try to impeach the witness. But testimony without a significant reason to disbelieve I would think would be reasonable doubt if I was on a jury.
I personally think the language is fitting, given the language and vitriol in the OP...
Some martial arts use "practitioner".
I don't think you really can 'De-Google-ify' your life.

Think about it, if you visit a site and they're using Google Analytics, you're part of Google data. Same with sites using adwords. Firefox and Google are partners (hence the default Google Search in Firefox). You can avoid hosting your videos on youtube, but are you really not going to watch YouTube videos? Ever??

In the end, though you can cancel your Google Accounts, and not 'actively' use their services, you'd have to block adsense and analytics in your browser, but if you're doing that, you're really harming the site-owner more than google (I suspect).
> He is a Keynesian

As is pretty much every economist. Neoclassical economics (which borrows many of Keynes' ideas) dominates modern economic thought. 'Austrians' seem to exist only on the internet...
Study Finds Lions are Nearly Extinct in West Africa
Cool, thanks very much to you and the other commenter.
The Australian people pilloried the government when it tried to get a fairer share of the mining dollar. The government watered down their efforts. A few years later, when the people realised that that mining wealth was being funnelled directly into private coffers, they then pilloried the government for not being harsher in the first place.

I wish people didn't have such short political memories.

The other thing to remember is that Norway doesn't have much other than oil in terms of natural resources, while Australia has a strong agricultural sector (including the most fertile rice-growing acres in all of asia). It's not an excuse, just that it is worth noting that Australia isn't so reliant on one-time resources.
Interesting to see where the likely/not likely voting scales are. It would be great to see this data in a few weeks.
A similar approach could be used with a typical webcam. In their case it's probably a camera with a filter so they can isolate their IR LEDs. That's kind of a nice to have but it's not absolutely necessary. It's neat how they can get by with a single camera. Note the pattern of LEDs, as you move around they can use the pattern to locate you in 3d space.

IMO the downside of using a camera is that you automatically get some latency as part of the deal. A full frame has to be read out, digitized and the 3d position derived. Some other systems could have better real time characteristics. The cost of this system is presumably a factor.
I'm not sure unmapped (on google/OSM) cities are rare at all. My daughter was born in a town in Ethiopia and it's not on any map that I've been able to find while it is listed (without lat/lng sadly) in wikipedia.
Put that in your site :)
You're off by a year. Digg v4 was the end of summer 2010.
That is missing the point. Arrests are not that common either, but the mere possibility of them does change behaviour. The chargeback is an important part of credit card transactions - it makes the card-holder more likely to spend, and it makes it more likely that the payment recipient is going to deliver.

I have both issued chargebacks for non delivered goods, and had chargebacks raised against me as a merchant. Generally fraudulent chargebacks are easy to defeat if you run your business well. Generally chargebacks are easy to win if you are a sensible consumer. The costs of chargebacks on consumers and vendors alike are vastly outweighed by their benefits.

Going to a commerce system where that layer of trust is removed is going to be more difficult to do.
Annoyingly this causes me to have to "accept" that I won't rely on the cameras every single time I start the car. Without doing so I can't access the radio, nav, etc.

Proximity sensors and cameras can be invaluable when parking though.
it is in pgs interest to create a worldview that hard work and dedication are the crucial factors that lead to success and downplay the effect luck has. it allows him to invest in startups very cheaply (less than a nice new car), have the founders work themselves almost to death, then cash in if they sell their company. this is because part of what the founders take as investment is their expectations for future returns. less money now is ok because with their hard work and dedication they will be xillionaires later.

put another way, if founders believe that luck plays a large part in their success, then there is less incentive for hard work at such low prices because their expected future return is lower.

hopefully I explained this clearly. if not, ask and I shall attempt to clarify.
Interesting. Will definitely give it a try.
Thanks for posting.
Nebraska Legislature Takes Up Nebraska Patent Abuse Prevention Act
If you are tracking a moving object, you are using 'smooth pursuit' - your eye movement actually is smooth, not illusory. If you're moving your gaze along a stationary object, that's when you get saccades, a series of short, jumpy movements.
Ask HN: Comfortable, noise-canceling headphones.
Here at the house, my roommates and I have 3 loud dogs and it can get pretty rowdy while trying to work.

I've been using Audio Technica ATH-M50s for several years; unfortunately they called it quits so it's time to invest in a new pair.

I'm looking for headphones that are:

- comfortable for long periods of time.
The ATH-M50's beat the sides of my head up
after half a day's use.
- sound good, and will last with guitar practiced
through them ( GuitarRig / Logic ).
- don't have any blatant design issues (common
parts breaking after 6 months, etc.)
- sub-$250 is ideal.

Thanks!
>If one staple food disappears, the country won't just starve; that would be stupid.

shortage of staple food will cause price spike with related economical/political/social effects. Staple food isn't just a whimsical choice of consumer. Beside some exceptions (where people moved and brought their tradition with them), a staple food is a result of hundreds or thousands of years of evolutionary optimization for that population in that region. Milk in Europe is exactly such a case, and is a very important one to the population there. (see my other post in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7034795). Specifically, in case of milk in Norway any issues with its availability, in addition to short term price-spike related effects, would in long term affect negatively health and well being of children whose body/skeleton would be forming at the time.
Interesting items you wish you had
This does not mean that you don’t have some or any of these items. If you do that’s good for you. But generally not all products are supposed to be purchased but at times we wish we own some of them. Sometimes while walking through a street you come across such items that you wish you had. I have a drone is that list ;) whats yours ? Check these items if you have not figured it out yet! and you can definitely have them if you want.
It's just data for ractive.js to display on the DOM. There's no assumption on whether this is a Model, a View Model or whatever pattern you adopt for your app.
The leaflet:
"Details that could identify you will be removed before your information is made available to others, such as those planning NHS services and approved researchers"

The OP: "can and will be released in an indentifiable form to organisations"

Can anyone with more knowledge about this shed any light on the seeming inconsistency?
Be Evil
Personally while Google is not perfect, regardless of your opinion on this I think overblowing this distracts from the real problems.
I respect that, but unfortunately it seems like the only way to get a response.
Oh sure. I would even say a "credible threat of murder."
I have the iPhone app and under my account when I log in via the web, it says API is disabled. I don't recall it requesting to be enabled for access when I set it up originally before the app was pulled.
You are by no means forced to participate in any government activity (at least since the draft ended).
You should check out http://reddit.com/r/headphones and ask there for suggestions. That's a pretty good subreddit with helpful folks who seem to know their stuff
Random question: why is there a random-length HTML comment in your blog post?
2 years old: http://priceonomics.com/headphones/#headphones-for-hackers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3630011
nginx + pagespeed should be better way of doing it
Listing Microsoft products as an alternative to Google.
Why bother?
Awesome. The golden age of VR may finally be upon us. It's been talked about for probably 20 years but now all the technology to support this at a reasonable cost seems to be converging. I think in 10 years we'll look back at this in a similar way to how we look at Wolfenstein 3d, when everything changed.
You probably don't realize it, but the interstates were built over an earlier system of federal highways (heard of Route 66? That's I-40.). Before federal highways, you could buy "maps" along the lines of "when you see an intersection that looks like this picture, turn right." That thuggish federal jackboot stomping on your face forever can be kind of helpful, eh?
Not particularly, even if you could get the entire range of vision that mirrors give you into a screen, you'd still not get any parallax (either between your two eyes, or between one head position and another.)
>they are on Apple's payroll. It's like a blind fanaticism, one which doesn't retain even basic logic and self respect.

The latter has never required the former.
In Kuwait, education is free, all the way through university and there is no VAT (sales tax).

Kuwait also engages in slavery. Life ain't so good for those folks.
How does this type of question go during a phone screen? Does the candidate send the code to you afterward?
:) I was attempting a more politically correct version of: http://www.lurkmore.com/wiki/Newfag_Summer

I heard about eternal september last year and figured that eternal summer was a play on it.
"I'm a programmer at Hacker School" sounds like they're employees of Hacker School.
So after being reminded of this, they should just call it the NY Hacker Apprenticeship and have their logo be a young female hacker. Too good?
I was about to suggest ‘apprentice’ as a reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnons_du_Tour_de_France
but then again, I realised I had little idea how Hacker school approaches their role. A similar binomial role is found at the same period (i.e. early Middle-ages until now) among some monks, generally travelling ones: the younger ones are ‘novice’.

(For geeky reference: either presumably inspired the Jedi/Padawan structure.)
that's how we stay l33t,bro.
There could've been. Our Future Fund, if that is a reasonable equivalent to Norway's fund, stands at roughly $4k per Australian. Meagre!
If anyone is interested, the proposal for Rust is detailed in http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2013/10/24/sing...
I recorded a video of myself doing this, and I certainly can't see any obvious eye movements. But if I think about the number of degrees that my eye is shifting between the 's' and the 'y', it's probably one degree at most. It's not clear to me that even if my eye was moving I would be able to register that movement in a video.

I'm assuming you've seen some peer reviewed research that fixed peoples' heads and used high resolution eye tracking to support your hypotheses, though?
Hong Kong has a ccTLD (and an ISO country code, and a currency) but is not a country, while still mostly working like one.
How much are you asking for it?

With regards to IR, I suppose it would work with a regular webcam.
Or possibly that agent wasn't really an FBI agent but rather was somebody who wanted to test them.
https://github.com/omab/psa-allauth looks like it might have the best of both worlds.
https://github.com/meldium/breach-mitigation-rails
I usually just ignore this sort “I hate Google and so should you” post that pops up every now and then, it’s just a waste of time to bother with it, I thought this might be different but it isn’t. I stopped reading after the author recommended Hushmail so I didn't waste too much time.

Because even though I could almost tolerate the generic anecdotes, the overbearing tone, and the mandatory simplistic “NSA” invocation I couldn’t deal with the author suggesting shitty services with shitty privacy record and claim the opposite: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/

Also I think that members of the HN community by enlarge are perfectly capable of seeking alternatives by their own if they wish, so I don’t really get who is this post is supposedly for.
Fair enough, I tend to use something very restrictive like Django templates (I made/use an Erlang port of the language as well: https://github.com/oinksoft/dtl) or something very flexible like Mako if I have the choice and need it.
I don't disagree that Carmack was a huge win, but it's a little insulting to Palmer and the rest of the team to suggest that he's the reason for their progress. He's only been on the team for a few months. A lot of what they're doing has been in the works for a long time.

Plus, all I've heard about what Carmack has been doing is that he was working on Android stuff in the beginning.
Have you tried it? It can stand on its own without Carmack.
PHP is great for developers and firms because they are always required to stay and make sure things blow up. Most of the PHP I've worked with was also very hard to decipher by anyone except the original developer.
Who's to say coinbase won't add n-of-m escrow transactions in the future?
The point is that we want to like Google, but they're making it difficult. Quit confusing frustration for hate.

You're right that we can delete our G+ account. The point is that we're trying to explain to Google why it might not be in their best interest to add 'features' like this, at least without an opt-out mechanism.
Take it Easy, E
There's some guys in Seattle doing this using motion-capture cameras for the positioning:

I answer that I'm terrified of running into something in the real world while my
vision is obscured, but they insist I'll be fine. It turns out the game space's
virtual walls correspond to the real ones in the admittedly small office I occupy
in meatspace.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/11/on-the-move-vrcade-com...
Different GP practices will have different methods for opting out.

I'm generally in favour of this, but i wish it had been linked to some kind of "must publish" rule. Firms can use the data but they must publish any research.

I am a bit worried about the netflix effect - deanonymization of data.

It's also frustrating that this is easy to make opt out, but MPs refuse to make organ donation opt out.
I think programming even a CRUD application is much more congnitively demanding than any math that your son is likely to be taught before university. This is because math in school is taught mostly in terms of procedures that can be blindly followed. On the other hand in writing even the simplest programs one must deal with freedom: there are many ways in which a program can be structured, and many paths its execution can follow, and you must develop your abstract thinking skills in order to see the consequences. It is only at the university level that you begin to see this kind of freedom in doing math.
Every language in the universe prefers composition over inheritance =P
That's sort of (if I understand correctly) the direction parts of Scandinavia have been moving. Denmark's '90s Social Democratic PM coined the term "flexicurity" to refer to a free-market economy that is as flexible as possible (no onerous regulations on hiring/firing and doing business), but combined with a strong state-provided social-welfare system (the "security" part). Basically the idea is that it should be easy to fire someone, but they shouldn't end up homeless and poor if you do, plus they should have plenty of retraining/education resources available.
I've been working on a mobile application for doctors and healthcare teams the past few months. We are a startup and will be going into beta testing with real users near the end of Q1.

I was interested in your last post on HN, as I've found it nearly impossible to sift through the bureaucratic cruft of HIPAA, HITECH, HL7, and all the other standards. A blog post on the topic would be amazing -- "What does HIPAA-compliant mean?".

The main fear I have about using your service is trusting a brand-new company for hosting. What reassurances can you provide that relying on you for my infrastructure will not screw me over if something happens to your company?
I had assumed that after sending, they could view the 'sent' tab and see the address, opening up your username and your actual email. It seems this isn't the case, but that doesn't make it any less troubling.

How does this help anyone other than people that didn't have the email already?
Pop them out when you turn on your blinkers or reverse otherwise they are inside the car and the camera is there for general purpose monitoring.
A lot changes in two years, but thanks. I knew I had read these before.
What I meant was that we can do a compensating transaction (say a PayPal payment etc), but that it would not be a "refund" in terms of being a refund onto their credit card.
Photobucket Replaced My CEO's Email Signature With a Sleeping Cat
Best practices aside (like NEVER host email images from a 3rd party), this would be hilarious if we weren't trending on AngelList. :P

My CEO, Brian, uses a picture of himself in his email. The image is hosted here:
http://i49.tinypic.com/2uol63m.png
(tinypic is a Photobucket company)

Looks lively, attentive, and friendly... right?

Gmail image cache of the image returns a cat:
https://ci6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/se_iEEzdxzy1wRbMk8xXJhM7C7jqp2RyINhqPoq8Ybbn4P6yi0FqdB9RXMq-iat9ut2pNofWz7o=s0-d-e1-ft#http://i49.tinypic.com/2uol63m.png

Not the same person...

Now Brian's emails (including emails to investors and all previous emails he's sent) contain a cat sleeping on a couch instead of a goofy smiling face.

Dig into the guts of the problem: When you visit the image (http://i49.tinypic.com/2uol63m.png) with a browser, you get Brian's smiling face. Download the same image with wget and you get a sleeping cat! Looks like Photobucket/tinypic is changing what they return based on headers and Gmail image cache doesn't send the same headers as my browser.

IT GETS WORSE!!!!

Another image in Brian's email signature (which used to look like his name signed in cursive), has ALSO been replaced with a selfie containing quite a bit of cleavage!

Lesson learned: those "unique" image file name hashes are actually recyclable!