skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some 87% of world population lives below the "poverty line" as defined in the USA.

Without everyone sharing a sensible consistent definition of the word, the discussion will come to nothing but blows.
I've experienced the same bugs. Also using underscores, or asterisk breaks everything silently. No error or attempt to tell you not to do it.
The reason I mention this is that in 45/45/10 the 10 has as much control as either of the 45. Control is what matters. The author's hardball for 67% gave him the appearance of control so long as his friend didn't treat the business as a passive source of income.

And treating his third as a passive source of income is identical to the extra third the author won. Deciding equity based on work done in the past is a mistake. Equity should be decided based on sharing the work going forward into the future. That's why 50-50 is good - it is focused on the future.
The author also claims the Gini coefficient doesn't take into count population growth and so skews the number. That is completely wrong. It's calculated using the Lorenzo curve which which is a per capita calculation.
For those caught up in what I think is a cause-de-jour, income inequality, I'll pose these two questions:

1. Is anyone worse off because Mark Zuckerberg is very rich?
2. If policies to reduce income inequality made the poor worse off, would you be in favor of them?
Find my iPhone is the safest solution to your device 
IPhones are the best smartphones in the world, so we are quite stolen by thieves and people who you want them. Moreover, they are small and light, very practical.
Much of true and much of false. E.g. that Stalin is the cause of starvation. Note that starvation was at Europe and America too at that time.
> Minified jquery is like 32kb. That means literally nothing in modern web. Unless you are from 1995 using 2G connection, this doesn't matter.

Or on like better than 80% of all mobile data connections in the world. But mobile is so niche, right? No need to worry about them.
I frequently prefer FB Messenger because it is both desktop (web) and mobile, and it handles media. There are other cross-platform messaging services like Google Hangouts (GChat/GTalk), but I still can't attach a photo. Or there are ones like WhatsApp that focus on mobile, and are missing desktop/web. Apple iMessage is good, but it's only usable on iOS devices, which is not always what I'm using. And other cross-platform messaging products don't really have much adoption.
It really doesn't anywhere except after that particular event.
awesome comment, if I could upvote twice I would.
I can understand 'Saga' because their grand plan is to have 25 x-saga games (like Zynga did with -ville)

I think that people can see that's their grand plan, but it's a bad plan that deserves neither respect nor trademark protection.
I think it's highly dependent on the firm. In my experience, some of the larger ones will tolerate people at 3-6 months (or more) of "bench" time. I would think it's because of the size and they can't babysit everyone, but automated reporting sure helps catch these instances (and mid-year or annual review time too).
Aww. Just as I started watching their expensive TV shows!
Alpha House season one was really good.

I also liked the shipping - but now that I have seen Paris at $75 will I want it at $110?
I would describe a typical kitchen table knife as a "dull knife", and trying to use that for tasks to which it is not suited can certainly lead to injury.
Join Clever (YC S12) and help hundreds of EdTech companies stay DRY
Yeah, these medieval brutality scenes show how desperately the government wants power and this fact reveals that Ukraine is fighting not against Russia or supporting joining EU, but for their human rights. Apart from being obviously political it's also an anti-corruption revolution. The whole legislative body is corrupted to issue laws dated by Jan 16 2014. The whole judicial system is criminal to put people to jail for carrying a Maidan badge with them or wearing a helmet. There are no good words about local police and special troops who arrest, torture and kill the innocent. There are 2 main questions to ask: how did this massive criminalization happen? and is there a peaceful way out?
Yeah, his Gini definition is backward.
Also check out ltrace... Shows the calls to other libraries the process is making...

I'd also like to point out that a key to using strace successfully is the result column... Programs that fail often make system calls that fail right before they exit... You can often tell what the program is trying and failing to accomplish...
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/perspectives-ukrainian-protes...
> “They don’t think they will lose customers,” Mr. Munster said. “They are doing this from a position of strength.”

I don't see how they think going from $80 to $120 per year for Prime will not cost them customers. We just subscribed last year (after being customers for several years), and I was still hesitant to do it then, because we only take advantage of it when we spend < $25 (we rarely use Prime video).

I'm thinking there are many in the same boat, and those are the customers they will lose.
This has already been on the front page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7154716
Beyond having it backwards, gini over persons looking at timescales going to the 40s is probably distorted by women entering the workforce massively increasing the baseline equality.
From a quick read of the census website linked, it appears that what unemployment data there is comes from the 2000 Census, whereas income data is much more current and numerous. That's rather concerning.
It's also the case that unemployment numbers are always underreported, something which gets worse during periods of extended unemployment. The government bases its estimates primarily on unemployment benefits filings. People who are unemployed beyond the period of available benefits don't get counted.
So, the unemployed are somewhat factored into the study, but it doesn't seem like a very clear picture of the situation.
That's my prima facie judgement at least.
Ongoing actionable feedback for your startup
New Relic has custom metrics: http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/features/custom-metric-collect...

What they are lacking in comparison to running your own NMS (e.g. NetXMS or Zabbix) is making custom views (the Dashboard feature in NR is pretty useless).
I'm guessing it's saying that the new 'data scientist' is more an actuary than a statistician. Just a bunch of predictive models trying to enhance a bottom line more than anything else.
I am not a Prime subscriber, but do buy from Amazon a lot (usually orders are over $35 so qualify for free shipping anyway).

One thing I'd like to say about Amazon's position of strength is that if you look at a competing service like ShopRunner -- to which I was given a complimentary one-year membership, which just ended -- Amazon is a beast in comparison.

I mean, even with the free ShopRunner subscription, I was still buying from Amazon more than from ShopRunner merchants, simply because Amazon is a huge department store with practically every retail category well represented, whereas ShopRunner is largely a collection of specialty stores.

Is this necessarily a good thing, though? I mean, the more power Amazon has, the less competitive it needs to be, right? That's why I have mixed feelings about using Amazon for most of my online shopping needs; I don't want to be contributing to a situation where all of the "little guys" are edged out.
Putin's main concern after he quits politics is his personal safety, not rebuilding USSR. Nobody in Russia wants back into USSR, an attempt at rebuilding would be futile and suicidal.

As for "bribing" the countries to join CU - that is the whole point of CU, which implies deeper integration, lower trade barriers, lower prices for gas etc. If you don't want to be "bribed", it is simple - don't take the money (and don't blame corrupt politicians, as if there is any other kind). We may question the motives - some countries are natural fit for CU, like Belarus or, potentially, Ukraine. Some, like Armenia come cheap and are more for the show to create an image of successful regional integration. EU does the same thing - Greece is going to be the major headache for years to come, the role of countries like Bulgaria and Romania in EU is entirely unclear (does EU "bribe" them by transferring money to their budgets?). While having core European countries in a union makes perfect sense.

I hope you realize that Ukraine is never going to be an EU member, which makes the whole argument surreal.
JessMeetKen Launches Innovative, Personal, and Brilliant Take on Online Dating
Yahoo Mail hacked; Change your account password immediately
Institutionalized theft isn't an acceptable solution. Such class jealousy does not, historically, end well.
I signed up for the free prime trial during the Christmas season this year and let it lapse (didn't cancel it) out of apathy. Granted, I use Amazon enough where it probably makes sense. Without prime I would often purchase additional items to qualify for "free" shipping. With prime, however, I make more impulse buys.

I don't use any of the other prime benefits besides shipping.

Anyways, I probably can't justify $120 a year even though it is not really much more than the $80 I am paying now. I believe when prime first came out it was $50.
> Clients were increasingly respondent to my emails.

This is tangential, but the word you want here is "responsive". "Respondent" is a noun, and an uncommon one at that. It means, "a person who responds", similar to how "dependent" means "a person who depends".
Thanks, updated post. Conclusions were based off looking at the numbers the correct way.
they arent hard - you know whats hard?
Realizing the winners always already had a prototype (software or hardware) and really just practice their sales pitch for two days for the win

But hey - we now all know you dont win by actually starting the day of the hackathon
> As a side note attorneys can not contact you, they can send you advertisements or return your calls but they can not directly contact you,

As someone who does not have much idea about laws, why can't an attorney contact him?
How things are phrased gives important cues. Language is rarely innocent, especially when it becomes fashion and everybody uses the same words.

Plus, it's hardly "that one word". The terminology and job description copy for startups and modern companies in general revolve around lots of similar words and notions (from "passionate" to "ninja") and the pressure he describes is very much a part of corporate culture.

Heck, it's an industry where "addicted to caffeine" is taken as a good thing.
One tricky bit is that I think a good solution medium-term will need to handle both media. Right now, a typical academic paper's print format transfers relatively poorly to the web. But the reading experience you get when you print out a web-formatted document to paper is also typically pretty poor, especially with things like figure layout.

It's possible e-readers will someday obsolete print entirely, but I personally still find it difficult to read longer-form stuff on a screen, so I'd like to see better options for print layout of web documents. Technologically these are possible, e.g. PrinceXML shows quite a bit of print-layout stuff you can do with the web-technology stack (though it's unfortunately proprietary), but the bits and pieces don't quite plug together well yet.
Are you sure that 80% of all mobile data connections in the world is like 2g? Mobile speed in developing world isn't actually that bad.

http://www.diffusedonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/pag...
There is another problem.

Some time ago, I thought about integrating LaTeX into user-facing software, not to render an entire web page but to generate a few formulas and images containing formulas in real-time or close to real-time. It breaks my heart to say that it seems impossible to do so, because LaTex is soooo slow.

The codebase is written in an obscure language (that Knuth created for the purpose?) and would have to be converted to something optimizable such as C in order to become faster.

Since I won't be re-implementing LaTex soon, I'll stick with MathJax for simple formulas and must look for something else if I want to create a complicated formula-containing image.
It sounds like YC serves as a vehicle to bring deals to YC partners, who make a killing funding the most promising candidates from the YC batch. This has made so much money for YC partners that they still want to continue to pick winners, but they don't want to kill the golden goose, so they withhold their blessings for three weeks. YC companies will still prefer the partners for funding over some random VC, so they still get the deals, but now the relative losers from the YC batch will get more funding from the more clueless VCs.
To save everyone a click: it appears he's removed his email from his profile. (Too much interest?)
I was thinking "IP Hypocrite Saga"
Oh I'm sure it'll happen, they'll just ignore the existence of this policy altogether when they do: "PG Prevents Partners from Investing in Minority-Founded Startup"
Honestly, they so thoroughly trounce their competition in so many ways I can't imagine this will hurt them too much. The "Prime" price-cut will cost them new subscribers, but I think most of its existing users are married to the service now. Jumping the minimum-free-shipping to $35 is unsurprising - it used to be that value here in Canada.
I don't think it diminishes incentive for partners - if anything, it gives them a bigger window to decide who to invest in based on a larger market response - though I think for most of them this isn't really necessary as they tend to be forward thinking already (and have spent 3 months with the founders) vs having "herd mentality" and reacting to the market.
I think amazon knows perfectly well that they will lose customers by this. They're doing it so that at the next shareholder meeting, they can point at their declining revenues from prime and say "hey, look you idiots. We know what we're doing. leave us alone".

Amazon has always been very careful to make exactly as much profit as they choose to. Their sales volume is huge enough that they could probably raise an extra $500mm by tweaking their pricing algorithm without anybody even noticing, instead they have increased prices in the most visible way possible. This has to be about sending a message, not about making money.
$6.67 to $10 a month... I think this will still be worthwhile to me. The video access alone is worth that to me, and the free 2 day shipping is just a bonus.

I can completely understand why some people might not feel it's worth it, but IMHO $10 a month for a sizeable video library isn't out of whack with the rest of the industry.
Twitter and IBM Agree to Terms on 900 Patents
BigDataBorat's classic: "Data Science is statistics on a Mac."
The same thing can be said about malloc. It's a matter of degree, and different projects have (sometimes subtly) different requirements.
>The company is worth around $135 billion and will probably become the fastest in history to reach $150 billion

Their market cap crossed 150B yesterday.
dtrace has been in osx since 10.5 :/
no one "needs" jQuery.
That awkward moment when Gmail thought I was spamming myself
Check out Proxxi
Your forgot to include nightmarish commutes in your list of North American time-vampires.
Calling progressive tax systems institutionalized theft is incredibly clever, and incredibly false.

No one who has wealth created it by themselves. You don't print your own money, you don't extract wealth from a vaccum. Wealth is built by extracting that wealth from a shared economy. Asking those who were able to extract the most wealth to help the most in paying to protect this shared system, and help those who were exploited by it, is not theft.

You are being intellectually dishonest. I would not be surprised if deliberately so.
I am assuming that "YC partners not able to invest till the start has raised atleast $500K or 3 weeks after demo day" will mean YC founders follow the rule in letter and spirit i.e. no pre-discussions with YC partners leading to pitching claims like "One of the YC partners has committed to investing after first $500K" ...
Where is this guy getting his numbers? From wikipedia[1]: 2011 had a pre-tax Gini coefficient of 0.477 whereas 1967 had 0.397 (the first year the Gini was actually measured), demonstrating considerable increase in inequality.

There's an Economist article[2] that puts the US's pre-tax Gini at 0.57 for 2013.

So yeah, income inequality has increased astronomically, undeniably, conclusively. The author seems to write off income inequality as a metric because it "doesn't track societal progress" and "isn't helpful for policy making purposes" both of which I would strongly reject.

First, let's explicitly state the axiom that money is equal to political and social power. An increasing Gini means we're moving farther and farther away from an equitable society and closer to feudalism or a plutocracy where the richest control everything via their ability to manipulate the political process with money. I think that it's fairly clear that our current government has been repeatedly bought, sold, and manipulated by a few plutocrats with special interests for the sake of making them and their buddies even more money. If you're looking for an example to support this argument, consider the billionaire Koch brothers and their political empire.

Next, let's consider what a rising Gini means for policy making purposes. If you are a policymaker whose primary constituents are the rich, a rising Gini is a stat which you can bring out at your fundraisers (a bit ridiculous, sure) to show that you're on average channeling wealth into the right pockets with your policies. On the flip side (and more realistic side), if you're an Elizabeth Warren type, you can connect your constituent's cries for a stronger safety net to a statistic which proves they're not just perpetually hungry for more. If you bring a piece of information like a Gini to the public, it's possible to win over people who may have been skeptical about supporting stronger social programs because they're unwilling to support "deadbeats" or the like-- after all, this Gini thing says that even if they're productive members of society, they're still not as well off as before. Their piece of the pie has actually become smaller over time, and their complaints are not baseless.

That said, I like the author's plug for basic income. The sooner we chop up the concept of capitalism and move on to a more just system, the sooner we'll unlock the underclass from the survival grind and free them to pursue more socially useful ends.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
[2]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/11/in...
It's better to host it in your own home. Everyone has an old computer with more storage space than you can ever afford from Dropbox. All you have to pay for is dynamic dns (which is useful in many other ways). "Maintenance" is a bad criticism. Use some stable distro and run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade once every couple of months.
>starts to eat more money for social subsidies than it produces

>Crimea has been always unprofitable even with its lucrative tourism industry

Not a marker of anything, there are only a few oblasts in Ukraine that are profitable (taxes - government spending), until very recently none of them were in the Western part of the country. This may be not the best way to judge contribution of different parts of the country into the economy. If you give a look at exports structure (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Ukraine_E...), you can clearly see that it is dominated by products of exclusively Eastern industries.
Happy 100th birthday, Leica
I think the most interesting bit is that it decreases a sort of self fulfilling prophecy.

Investors "treat investment by YC partners as an accurate sign of how promising we thought a startup was." So then, the company raises more money - and appears to look more promising.

Sure, partners may have less incentive immediately (as mathattack said) - but the real winners will be more clear to the partners after demo day (and three weeks).

They will have a list of winners (in their mind) before demo day. Then, investors at demo day will pick a list of winners (who they invest in). And YC partners will see the overlap - those who are picked as winners by YC Partners and independent investors.
There are many people who are not in census: illegal immigrants, homeless..
Class antagonism around here has ended pretty well historically. The 19th-century working class agitated against the aristocracy and landlord classes, and after a rocky start, the workers' parties successfully gained power in the 20th century. From around the 1920s/30s to about the 1970s most of the Nordic countries were led by nearly unchallenged social-democratic governments, which used their power to create the modern prosperous society. They did grow increasingly moderate as time went on, the system stabilized, and people lost appetite for more sweeping changes (the 1920s social democrats were solidly part of the socialist movement and much more radical in their ultimate aims, while nowadays they're more like the left wing of the liberal movement, and no longer have much association with Marxism).

The Nordic countries of the 19th century looked much different, and much worse. Huge income inequality, entrenched aristocracy, terrible living conditions for the urban working class, etc.
... or just use NodeJS instead.
I'm not sure you read the article, because you make some of the same points I do.

"There is massive income inequality. Its trajectory isn't nearly as large of an issue as the status quo, which is pretty dismal."
The point of the article is that inequality is itself isn't a good metric.

"The right thing to do is to keep working to solve the core problem....Maybe even consider doing what Switzerland is considering, and give everyone (rich and poor) a reasonable guaranteed income as an alternative to expensive and sometimes ineffective welfare program"
-I suggest this briefly as my preferred solution.
Why I Won't Sign Your NDA (svbtle)
Such class jealousy does not, historically, end well for the rich. Overall the Magna Carta was a boon for the English economy and the french revolution was surprisingly helpful for there economy in fact most of Europe prospered after similar disruptions. People with wealth and or power want to keep it, but concentrated power does not lead to efficient resource allocation.
Just got word from a friend that the entire Zynga Seattle office is being closed. :(

http://www.geekwire.com/2014/zynga-closes-seattle-office/
Ahh sorry for that! I was in the middle of reading and realized that it is worthy of sharing with HN readers:)
Just because someone can do something (technically and legally), it doesn't mean he should do it. I was trying to comment on the course of the discussion here -- there are a lot of comments about regulations and criminal liability but not many about ethical responsibility.

Clearly the most important issue is the factual one... whether there is more than incidental money laundering happening here.

If I had an ad placement business that only placed scammy ads or if I developed software that allowed people to be oppressed, I would also have issues. I would think that enabling criminal behavior is in the same broad category.

As far as cars, there's no issue selling a car. However, if your cars had armor plating and hidden compartment for guns, you have an ethical responsibility to find out if your customers are generally up to no good. If there is still a business to be made from legitimate customers, then maybe there's a way to ensure they're the only ones you do business with.
It's not theft so much as performing your fundamental human directive to be your brother's keeper.

In modern society, we have many brothers who we've never met, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be helping them prosper.
Reward Failure to Encourage New Ideas