skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A startup’s first stage is much like a gymnast’s vault.
No, but really, hear us out here.
You'd be surprised how much money can be made solving real problems for clients with money with boring but stable solutions, and still work 40 hours a week.
Well, it's retail. Retail jobs are a dime a dozen. Employees and employers both treat each other as completely expendable. That's why Costco swears by their approach of paying above market rate - it makes sure that their staff actually value their job, because it's not instantly replaceable by walking to the next high-turnover purgatory up the street.
Give me something that

* is a simple and logically consistent as Markdown

* has the ability to embed LaTeX formulas

* has a functional #include for larger documents

* can refer back to headings, equations and citations

* can compile to PDF or webpage

* compiles FAST

and I will give you a lot of money.

LaTeX is a horrible language, inconsistent and badly designed and unpleasant to look at. TeX is good at what it does but the whole system is horribly slow to compile documents. Documents will compile fine with some frontends but not with others. Markdown is not feature complete enough.

The scientific community is unfortunately stuck with LaTeX for the foreseeable future. Seems like every day someone asks me how to do something that should be very simple, which inevitably involves loading some obscure package.
I think he's asking about ethics. Just because this could be used for money laundering doesn't mean it must be used for money laundering.
Flat World (e-textbooks) expands to personalized, mobile learning
patio11 is right, you're about to have a major problem with gift cards going bad, which were bought with stolen credit cards. Happy to give more advice, you can reach me via my HN profile. Source: In a similar business for 16 months. (We sell gift cards for $ or BTC, but don't buy gift cards with bitcoin)
Yea. This headline has to be troll bait. NodeJS is not faster than Java, and it's also not Concurrent. It is single threaded. It makes efficient use of that single thread with an event-oriented model.

That said, I tend to prefer building in NodeJS because it's fast enough for most (unanticipated) use cases.
85 people have half the worlds wealth

I carelessly posted a story with a headline like this a week or two ago, but a more accurate statement would be that 85 people have as much wealth as the poorest half of the world's population.

that's still a pretty startling concept though - that you could make half the people in the world twice as well off as they are now by disenfranchising a mere 85 individuals, or that each of those on average holds as much wealth as 41 million very poor people. Of course there would be a knock-on effect that would hurt all the people who work for or do business with those 85. And as a statistic I'm not sure how valuable it is; even my averaging comment is misleading because the distribution of wealth within those 85 individuals likely has a rough Pareto distribution.

Like the author I'm not entirely convinced that this is bad, for the same reason that I don't consider elephants and whales to be in opposition to ants or plankton; Pareto distributions seem to be a fact of the natural world and so we shouldn't be too surprised to see them appear in distributions of wealth. Of course there are lots of natural things that are widely considered undesirable, so I anticipate increasing political pressure to alter such imbalances.
I'm a little sad to see that nowadays there's a strong sentiment of "just use the pre-packaged tool", whereas when jQuery was still in its infancy, there was a lot of lively hacker-minded chatter on the down-and-dirty of getting things to be cross browser.

It's as if there are now two "levels" of people - "regular developers" and "framework designers", and only the latter are really supposed to know about the nitty-gritty. The excitement of finding out about standard, cross-browser gems like insertAdjacentHtml is all but gone :(

I get it that people are focusing more on the entrepreneurial side of things now, but I miss the banter of aspiring tinkerers.
I've had prime for many years now -- seven or eight. We order enough that it is well worth it, plus we actually take advantage of Amazon Prime Videos. So, for me, an increase for the first time after so many years isn't really a concern.

It reminds me of a deli that was quite popular in Mountain View years ago. Incredible food, great employees, very loyal following. Around the time he was finally considering retirement, the prices went up from at or below Togos/Subway prices to what you would see these days at any of the popular New York Jewish delis. He justified it in -- "I can and it was about time." People still kept coming, it was a much loved institution.

Like the deli, there are many Amazon Prime users that love the convenience and will probably not really bat an eye at the increase. Those who joined more recently or do not use things like Prime Video, may feel otherwise.
There's the catch, don'tcha think?

We've reached the intersection of cheap/easy development boards combined with a business philosophy of "slap this API on this premade stack glued to this other stack running on this VM and we're ready for our Series A".

Adafruit and Sparkfun and the like with all the cheap and easy-to-connect modules have enabled us. They've led us to believe that hardware hacking is easy. Just wire this camera to this accelerometer to this Rpi and we're in business!

Does anyone really expect to be etching PCBs in a hackathon? Is a simple breadboard setup good enough to win?
Prime to me means "Free 2-day shipping"

I am a heavy Prime user.

I understand and accept the price raise, but as the article quotes "The more expensive Prime is, the more they are going to have to live up to their promises."

One promise that I feel is broken every day is on display with the "Add-On Items"

These are just annoying.

They show up in "Prime Only" searches and are typically <$5.

Which I understand Amazon really can't ship for free.

But there is literally no way to check out with just that item until you add up to $25, and it's typically stuff I actually need quickly.

Take thumb tacks.

They show the first result as $2.48 "add-on" for 100 of them.

Or you can select another package of 100 for $6.05 that IS actual Prime and shipped in 2-days.

The "add-on item" is just a confusing concept, that makes me - as a consumer - feel like Amazon's "2-day free shipping" promise is broken on a daily basis when I see these results.

Hide the results from me, show me how to hide the results, or charge me $2.00 extra to ship "Add-On Items" and problem solved.

But otherwise it's a constant reminder that Amazon hasn't kept their promise that I originally signed up for, even though I believe their intent is to offer more selection to consumers.
Well the answer as to why is because the Model Rules of Professional Conduct prohibit said conduct. Specifically Rule 7.3, Direct Contact with Prospective Clients, reads as follows:

(a) A lawyer shall not by in‑person, live telephone or real-time electronic contact solicit professional employment when a significant motive for the lawyer's doing so is the lawyer's pecuniary gain, unless the person contacted:

(1) is a lawyer; or

(2) has a family, close personal, or prior professional relationship with the lawyer.

Now you may be curious about the justification of the rule...ever hear of the term ambulance chaser? It is a nasty term for attorneys who preyed on prospective clients in very vulnerable states who otherwise would not be able to make a voluntary and informed decision. The rule is meant to protect the public and profession from said behavior.
Yet you don't lose, because you can recoup that investment.

The alternative is to not make any money at all. As long as that drug produces you a net profit in the long run, which I imagine would fund additional research after recouping anyone investing in the project, then the fact someone else can also make money is irrelevant.

Think of it from the alt-companies perspective: X is sold at $0.06 a pill, but I could sell it for $0.04! There is demand, I can create supply, and everyone benefits except X.

But I don't buy that selfish interests wouldn't still invest heavily in medicine even if it is a risky investment - nobody considers the emotional fact that rich people do get sick, and are likely (in the absence of big pharma research) to directly invest to see the diseases they suffer or are concerned about cured or abated. Think of how kickstarter works - you throw money at a project that may or may not succeed, but it happens all the time because people want the outcomes regardless of the financial risk associated. Same could easily happen with pharma.
Web2c is typically used these days. The issue is not as simple as "It needs to be written in C".
Yup, I debate renewing at $80, at $120 I would likely be pushed over the edge to canceling.

But I wonder if this is intentional beyond increasing fees. Maybe Amazon is trying to reduce their growth rate a little bit to help ease the rate you need to scale support infrastructure. e.g. something with slow real-world constraints like acquiring leases or real estate for warehouse space.
Good list of initial resources:

http://www.cloudera.com/content/dev-center/en/home/developer...
>countries crying for help

That's a huge stretch. The 'cry for help' isn't unanimous by very far.
My excitement is that Mark, who has been extremely staunch in his belief in "Facebook identity" (First Name/Last Name/Profile Pic, Online == Offline), is starting to consider alternatives to that. It remains to be seen what that will ultimately amount to for Facebook's product/app offerings, but it's a huge shift in his personal beliefs.

I wrote up some thoughts on Snapchat's mainstreaming of anonymity/ephemerality a few months ago -- and believe there are huge opportunities out there for people who will go where Facebook/Google won't: http://chrishateswriting.com/post/67378144174/ephemerality-g...
Ask HN: A question about ethics in Computer Science
I work for a university, programming software for a certain discipline. I inherited the software only in the last month, and it would be generous to call it poorly programmed. I am confident that I can improve it however, given several months.

Nevertheless, some faculty and I went to a nearby company with the intent of selling the software. The demo went fine, and indeed, it has the ability to perform as advertised, but not without many bugs and crashes (demo was fine because we knew what not to do). The company was mildly impressed and is considering splicing/replacing their software with ours.

It is my personal belief, at this point in time, that doing so would be a bad idea for their company, with them potentially sinking a lot of money into a risky action. (If you think any weight should be given to how successful the company is: they are a small, financially stable consulting firm that sells software on the side, that is all I know.)

While we by no means have lied about the integrity of the software, I feel like we've hidden important details. The company has a third party programming their own software, so it's not like they asked us the important software related questions.

Should I personally email the company (behind my employer's back) and tell them the truth: that's it's janky software? Or should I just leave the software sales to the appropriate faculty member, it's their problem? Should I care more about the company's position because it actually affects people with jobs instead of tenured faculty? It brings up many questions and this is the first time I have had to deal with ethics in CS.
> In Q1 2013, average connection speeds on surveyed mobile network operators ranged from a low of 0.4 Mbps to a high of 8.6 Mbps. Only nine operators demonstrated average connection speeds in the aforementioned broadband category while 64 more operators showed average connection speeds above 1 Mbps.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/07/23/akamai-average-inte...

My 80% number was hyperbole, but I do think the data supports that on world-wide average, mobile connections are drastically lower, and so making assumptions about a file size downloading quickly on fast broadband is ignoring an increasingly important part of the web traffic, which are years behind wired connections in terms of speeds.
Income inequality is not a bad thing. People are very different in what they are capable of producing.

If you want to produce paper napkins by hand 10 hours a week and someone else chooses to make them by machine 40 hours a week and its the same product, why should you both take home an equal income?

"Oh" they say "we just want to make it less unequal than it is, not equal." Isn't that why we pay all these taxes and have all these government programs?

It literally never ends.
Opening the site in Firefox avoided the redirect to login issue for me.
I'd actually be okay with this if they also stopped using LaserShip. They're part of the reason packages take "significantly longer than the advertised two days" to arrive.
How exactly does it (BitTorr..) sync data between my mobile & my laptop? If I have 100 Gigabytes of pics on my laptop. Will it attempt to copy it on my phone or does it cache a small portion? Does that need internet connection or will ad-hoc wifi work?
TeX is written in WEB, a "literate programming" language designed by Knuth, which a pre-processor turns into Pascal. There should be nothing inherently slow about Pascal. In practice, it's compiled using "web2c" which does generate C code.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEB
I've shared my Amazon Prime membership with three other people for years, it is an amazing deal even at 120 for us. If they cracked down on how the family sharing works it would be more of a hit for us.
It seems like most of the people I know who use Prime fall into two categories:

1) Those who use it for the free shipping

2) Those who use it for the non-shipping services, like the video offerings and the Kindle lending library.

There is probably a healthy percentage that use it for both, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's below the majority.

I think the people in Category 2 are more likely to be willing to accept the higher fees than those in Category 1, for the reason you mention. Compared to, say, Netflix, this is still a decent deal.
That's smart. When we did it (Summer 2007) investors we talked to still didn't even know you guys did that. A couple asked, most didn't. I won't lie, we used it to our advantage.

I'm sure it only took a couple rounds before people started noticing you (and some alums) in the cap tables and realizing what's going on. Word spread. I have no doubt that now it is considered a signal.

Investing is like dating. You need to be right for them, and they need to be right for you. Just because you don't want to invest in someone doesn't mean they're a bad investment. Smarter angels & VCs probably realize this, but there's plenty of perfectly good money that would not go to companies who might be a good fit amongst the less savvy.
Watching now and I agree. I think it was a step in the right direction, but would have worked better if combined with a multiple-identity system.
These guys are well worth a look https://www.writelatex.com if you're looking for web-based, collaborative LaTeX tools.

Along with mendeley and peerj there's the makings of little cluster of companies trying to innovate in the academic publishing space here in London.
Show HN: 3D sphere with highschool trigonometry
"Institutionalized theft" could be used to describe both sides of the gap issue.
I've now turned them orange, which improves the visibility a ton. Though I want to fix the lighting and color them based on variables instead of making them so plain as they are now.
The usual interpretation has been that UKgov was clueless about technology, refusing to recognize that there were other copies elsewhere. But maybe they knew that it was only "security theatre" and the intent was to only make threatening gestures without really affecting the situation.

It's still a threat of something worse in future, but in comparison with the way things have been going in western/northern countries recently, it was a pulled punch, a kind of ritual or "CYA" move.
is there a video of this presentation by any chance? I can't seem to find the JS tests in that repo either.
From the article:

This table command instructs TeX to put the table in the page, here, where the table is declared (h) AND at the top of the page (t).

PrinceXML, an XML/HTML + CSS to PDF renderer, can do this using a "float:top" style: http://www.princexml.com/doc/9.0/properties/float/

Also, before they abandoned their bespoke browser engine, Opera released an experimental build that could render web pages as paged media (see http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-reader-a-new-way-to... ). It, too, supports floating to top (as vendor-prefixed "-o-top").

Paged media is as alive as ever (it's just moving from dead trees to tablets), so I wouldn't count this stuff out just yet.
This 100%. Every time I see an add on item I need and can't pay extra to have shipped separately, its a time I have to go to a store, and makes me consider keeping Prime a little less.
I wouldn't be so sure with this statement: take a look at techempower's frameworks benchmarks and compare best configurations of NodeJS and PlayFramework (via genius Netty):

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7...

NodeJS is far behind with 55% vs PlayFramework 67% on 20-queries test.
Why should you take home a different income? I don't feel that the fact that I'm a computer scientist, which at the moment happens to pay well, ethically entitles me to more resources than other people. If anything I feel a bit guilty taking home several times the income of the guy who's been showing up at 7am every morning to replace my roof; my job is a lot more pleasant and enjoyable, and yet that in itself isn't reward enough, but I get paid more too!

One plausible answer could be, "because there's no workable way of making it otherwise". I could buy that, although then we're arguing pragmatics, not ethics.
The reason is that that statement is, in fact, a lie.

Effectiveness of any form of birth control is usually quoted as two numbers: an perfect-use rate, and a typical-use rate.

The perfect rate assumes that you are able to follow the instructions exactly every time. For example, perfect use of a hormonal pill means that you take it every single day, at the same time, without ever forgetting; perfect use of condoms means that you use a condom every time you have sex, before beginning sex, that you put it on correctly and that you stop immediately if it breaks; et cetera. Even the much-lambasted "withdrawal" and rhythm methods have really quite good efficacy, assuming you implement them perfectly.[0]

Of course, people aren't robots, especially when it comes to sex, and that's why we have typical-use statistics that reflect the reality of the situation: People forget to take the pill, or take it at the wrong time. People skip using the condom, just this once-- and forget about "pulling out". And people who were abstaining, well, don't.

It may be the case, if we ignore certain unpleasant factors, that abstinence, done perfectly, has 100% efficacy for preventing pregnancy. But we need only to glance at the statistics to see that, in the real world, held to the standard we hold any other procedure to, it is the very worst form of birth control anyone has come up with yet. And that makes your "true statement" nothing more than a bald-faced lie.

[0] Look it up. About 5% failure rates, only twice as bad or so as condoms.
Parts of East London can be intimidating, with high rates of racist and religious violence.

Here are a couple vigilantes arrested for "harassing, intimidating and assaulting people on the streets of east London while claiming they were enforcing sharia law".

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/06/muslim-vigila...

While every community has some violent crime, I wouldn't be too quick to indict Snowden as xenophobic just because he sensed a threat in some neighborhoods.
That's not true. An angel investment after demo day is worth a lot less equity than the YC investment. Most YC companies raise their seed rounds at $5 million - $20 million valuations, so it would take many hundreds of thousands or even a couple million to end up with the same 7% that YC gets.*

That kind of money would usually be put in by a larger fund. Most angels write checks for $25k-$100k.

* One difference being that the demo day investors will have preferred shares upon conversion and YC takes the same common shares that the founders and employees get.
Alpha House was really, really good. Even so, I wouldn't sign up for Prime just for Alpha House. If Amazon is serious about it's own content, bundling it with a free 2-day shipping subscription probably doesn't make sense.
> Wealth is built by extracting that wealth from a shared economy.

This is a very old argument, but the economy is not a zero-sum game.
They should call it, "Demonstrating The Stupidity Of Analysts" maneuver.
Sexual Assault at MIT
Wouldn't any capitalistic economy simulation end up with a great inequality, once it's run for N amount of time?

You can't just do a 'reset' and re-allocate everything. And even if you did, the people who are smarter (sneakier?), work harder/more, and are luckier are going to end up winning out again.
Neither is ignoring the fact of negative externalities. One could view income redistribution as a crude method for quantifying the latter.
It's far more akin to a guy who sells guns out of his trunk in a dark alley. Chances are, it's being used for crime, even if there are legitimate uses for it.
This isn't very convincing one way or the other. As the title suggests there are two components to the issue, 'income' and 'wealth'. This argument only looks at the income half and in the process conflates the two terms. Income can't tell the whole story by itself.

For example if you own your home outright, your living costs will be substantially lower than someone who has to rent or has a mortgage. In other words having wealth allows you to substantially lower the income you need for the same standard of living. This argument doesn't account for wealth at all as I'm reading it.
Sell your product but let your customers talk
Writeup of Pinkie Pie's Chrome on Android pwn2own exploit
Build more warehouses, partner directly with USPS. USPS delivers every day, to almost everyone. Just get your shipments to those sorting centers by 2-4am, and next day delivery for vast swaths of the US becomes easier.
yes well, i refuse to wait more than 10 seconds for your blog post to load. you've got bigger issues than your dislike of javascript, like learning how to optimize for the web lol
Well, I gave up when I saw that it wasn't written in anything I could work with, so this is news to me.

Also, having had some bad experiences with to-C translated code (looking at you, Matlab), I'd say that knowing that Web2C exists doesn't cause me great optimism.
No, a marketplace where people are rewarded for what they produce yields more unequal incomes.

Because people in a free society with access to capital and mass production and distribution can be incredible productive.

And others can do manual work with no mastery of technology at all and not sell their work to the world.

Those two extremes are going to get more extreme over time, not less.
This might impact startup fundraising trajectory. Investors may prefer to wait out for 3 weeks if VC partner's investment is a strong enough signal for them.
They really should have started more modest price increases a couple years ago.

However, I'm not sure you're the target audience for Prime. I place a very high value on fast shipping. Before Prime, I frequently paid for 2-day shipping anyway, and occasionally full-price overnight shipping. Their free shipping over $25 is way too slow for me, it's not a viable alternative.