skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dealing with urban sprawl is effectively the first step. There are ongoing movements to reinvent suburbs into communities, which could theoretically attract localized businesses to reduce the amount that people need to commute.

It's important to recognize that the long commutes came about because of cars. Because it was possible to take the open road to get to work, sprawl was a reasonable option. And then everyone joined in on the fun and the open road vanished. It's a bait-and-switch.

This doesn't mean that getting rid of cars will automatically fix things, but deliberately removing our dependence on them will absolutely help because part of that action is fixing things.
The extreme risk to them is zero. If they run you over their insurance goes up, and they can complain to their friends about how some "hipster, commie, hippie biker" was in the wrong for even being on the road.

I know someone that was run over by someone that ran a red light. Her arm was broken, and the lady in the car was in the wrong. The lady that hit her had the gall to call her up later and complain to her that her auto insurance rates had gone up. No shit! You run a red light and hit someone, what do you expect?
Out of curiosity, I see a lot of "negative" articles here. What you shouldn't be doing for metrics, how you suck because you don't collect metrics, etc. but I've seen very few great articles on constructive metrics and how best to collect them.

I'm sure this is something we all struggle with and, having done a couple startups, I feel like I have a pretty good idea what my investors and fellow stakeholders expect to see. Does anyone have any great articles bookmarked on what metrics SaaS startups should be collecting, formulas, etc.?
nobody get's spoon fed computer knowledge.
This post is possibly one of the best cautionary tales I've ever heard for "choose your battles wisely". I'm not even kidding- in its own way, it's up there with Napoleon in Russia and the Microsoft Kin. If one is prepared to stand astride the world in open defiance of universal opposition, fanny packs may not be worthiest of causes upon which to blow that particular wad.
I Killed my speakers on Dell Latitude 6330 when increase the volume to 200% (i got them replaced cause its my work laptop)
> I also think she might be rather narrowly defining the personality type of a "hacker", and dismissing behaviors that she doesn't find valuable (in her words: "ephemera -- popularity, beauty and fitting in").

I read that more as "where do your passions lie?" People have many interests, but few passions, and passions demand sacrifices. When push comes to shove, hackers will give up popularity and fitting in for the sake of hacking - not because they don't care about those things, but because they'd rather be hacking. Girls who are told that the most important thing for them is to be beautiful and popular are deprived of the opportunity to develop a passion for hacking, because their passion for popularity chokes out other competitors.

I don't think it's harder to be a hacker if you're interested in social media or graphic design, but if you'd rather be tweeting about your latest logo design than figuring out how to fix a bug, you might not be a hacker.
I'd also like to point out that most software projects are in maintenance mode right now. Startups focus on creating new products but what do you think every company on earth is running right now? There's infinite amount of work for a good programmer in the world, getting bogged down by trying to keep up with the latest cosmetic changes isn't the best long term plan.
Growing up watching shows like "Dexter's Laboratory" and "Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius" definitely shaped me as a child into the tech freak I am today. Girls getting barbies thrown at them when they are 12 does not help put girls into the tech sector. We need television shows like "Diane's Laboratory" or "Jennifer Neutron Girl Genius" to get girls interested in tech. Hit 'em when they're young.
What did he say?

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2014/02/8539961/...

He shouldn't have mentioned specific cases. If he felt the company had to cut elsewhere to compensate for high medical costs, he should have left it at that level of detail. But I don't see how you get from what he actually said to

I'm utterly appalled at Tim Armstrong's attitudes towards
the lives of his employee's children. Apparently it's possible
to pay a programmer $100K/year, but spending ten times that to
save the life of one of his employee's children is absolutely
unacceptable.

Frankly, posting and upvoting that sort of comment is the behavior of a lynch mob.
Yes but what are the unintended side effects & are they worse than what you are curing? Removing the pits in exchange for electronic trading is a huge win. It's unclear how to keep that win & skincare hft.
On the other hand... give a student python in the first semester and he'll get hooked.
In the second semester you can start the approach you proposed.
One #hashtag to rule them all
Some of it is undoubtedly yak shaving, where it is more fun to write the drawing code than to click the mouse hundreds of times.

A real advantage is that a prototype will be a 'living figure', where changing a couple of values can completely shift the figure (which enables cheap experimenting with how different parameters look or whatever).
Resisting the Urge to Build (My New Startup Checklist) (2013)
Reinsurance policies can be pretty bespoke; you could for instance get a policy that only covers you in the event that a tornado hits corporate HQ (=> driving corporate revenues down and healthcare costs up at the same time), or individual payments above a certain amount, or N% of aggregate claims above a certain level. You still preserve most of the benefits of self-insuring while protecting yourself against outliers, in the same way that you come out ahead if you skip insuring the loss of your refrigerator, but do insure the loss of your house.

The biggest issue is the principal-agent problem - it costs some amount to insure against once-every-20-year claims, and by that time the CEO is likely to be retired, so why buy the coverage?

That's one of the reasons why insurance companies per se are highly regulated.
Customers come in cars because there's no other way to get there. Cars, being hugely inefficient uses of space, actually decreases the number of customers who can get to your store. You can take a fully-packed car and compare the space used to people on a sidewalk: that's the difference in customers you're losing out on.
Ironically there was a time when a coding error could lead to physical damage to the screen, even the CPU or other electronics.

Also ironically, breaking things is not only half the fun it's maybe 75% of the learning.
IANAL, most of my knowledge of HIPAA compliance comes from Business Law classes and required trainings when I worked for a healthcare/hospital system.

However, AFAIK that would make them a covered entity. As a payor, they would have direct access to their employee's medical records. Whereas under normal circumstances, the payor/insurer only provides the employer non-PHI data such as enrollment/disenrollment info and summary data (at an aggregate level) to support pricing discussions, which is why they aren't usually a covered entity. You can find a good write-up on HIPAA requirements for self-funded insurance plans here[1].

[1 - pdf] http://www.nixonpeabody.com/files/155838_Benefits_Alert_20MA...
My default is to suspect arguments that support dismantling social programs now because they might be insolvent in 60 years. Especially when insolvency here means not paying out as much as people expect to receive right now.
Single point of failure (or how important is your data?)
WRT the "Each one of those chairs cost $1,500 (USD) new." whats the productivity cost of those open plan desks? Thats the really expensive part of that pix.
"shows us directly what the upper class actually thinks of us."

#1 - Tim Armstrong is an ugly man and doesn't speak for the upper class.

#2 - Many many many readers on HN are upper class.
He chose to make it specific, rather than just saying 'employee medical insurance costs were higher than expected.' By using the specific medical problems of two families to cast management in a positive light and also to justify changing the firms pension contribution structure to be less generous, he made the decision to present these issues as a zero sum game in which the beneficiaries of medical insurance - something which is part of employee compensation to begin with - were presented as the cause of a reduction in the pension compensation of everyone else.
Unfortunately, Easterbrook is coasting on the reputation he built up from this one magazine piece from 34 years ago. It's basically impossible to read anything he writes nowadays without finding something either wrong or infuriatingly contrary-for-the-sake-of-contrariness.
Remember, recipients of GPL code (companies in this case) are not affected by the terms of the GPL until they redistribute the code themselves, until then they can add proprietary code all they want, run it on servers and never release a thing. They are completely free to USE the code however they wish.

So in this example, no cloud company has to release changes to their running linux kernel because it was never distributed to end users, or at all.

Same for all other GPL code running on servers, users of the service, loading web pages and using APIs, are not recipients of the code under the GPL, so they have no rights under the license.

If some company decides their changes to the kernel, or nginx, or apache, or php can be released because it won't destroy their business, they frequently do so. Otherwise you'll never hear about it and changes silently remain secret.
The interview is hosted on infoq.com and Adrian (the one being interviewed) is discussing Netflix's architecture. Not really related, though a bit ironic I suppose...
- Hackers tend to do things sequentially. First get really good at something, look around, become good at something else. Compare that to people who just try to be "good enough" at (a limited scope of) everything.

- Hackers tend to have their own path in doing things.

A teenager hacker might look stange and alien to his peers because they do everything in the same way, extremelly conformist. Same thing for beauty: teenagers care less for beauty, more for copying things they understand.

This means that even social and stylish hacker might seem a freak in their teens.
> If the child lives to 80, she only needs to contribute $12,500 worth of value to civilization per year for this to make economic sense.

No, that's not correct. You're not thinking at the margin.
Ghost is great. Wordpress is not.
Yes, currently our USP is parsing ghost themes. Ospari is faster than Wordpress and I would say even more secure than Wordpress. Not to mention the code quality ;-) and we have just released the first version.
> If everyone has one or less children, the population does not grow exponentially.

False. An exponential function, and a growing exponential function, differ only in the value of the exponent.

Here's an equation that predicts future population based on the value of an exponential term:

The equation: pt - p0 e^rt

pt = population at time t

p0 = present population

r = rate of population growth, 1% = .01

t = time

A result at 40 years for a population rate of change of -1.7% per year:

e^(-.017 * 40) = .5066

This result says that, for a population growth rate of -1.7%, after 40 years the population will be about half its present size. It's an exponential result, it's even an exponential growth rate, but the growth rate is negative.

In this image:

http://i.imgur.com/LW6bk8t.png

The red trace is an exponential rate of change for r = +1.7%, the green trace for r = -1.7%. Both are exponential results, and both reflect what a population would look like for given r values.
> But with unlimited net access also comes extremely violent videos, social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around etc...

Those are all there in the real world, too. You can't protect kids from anything harmful or scary, nor should you. Stumbling across a porn or horror site is probably more traumatizing for the adult, anyway. It's like people have forgotten what it's like to be a kid! You've been told your whole life what to do, so there is nothing more amazing than the freedom to be treated like everyone else on the internet.
Multiple studies demonstrate that customers who arrive by car come less often and spend less in total than customers who arrive by any other means. Why? Because it costs the customer a fortune to drive and park their car, so they are spending more on transportation and less on whatever you are selling. The same studies have demonstrated that business owners do not know this. This is why the small business parking delusion persists. This is why small business owners show up at city council meetings across the country to argue against their own best interest.

Here's one and you can google for the rest: http://kellyjclifton.com/Research/EconImpactsofBicycling/TRN...
I don't understand - doesn't insurance pay for such costs? Why is it an extra burden for a company if one of their employees needs money from the health insurance?
> skj was trolling by changing the common definition of exponential by saying the exponent could be 1 or less than one.

That's not trolling. It's called "mathematics."
Maybe not carpooling, but proponents of self-driving cars often talk about how their efficiency (i.e. algorithmic efficiency in how they drive) would greatly ease traffic congestion. Much of the issue with traffic is just bad drivers (inefficient merging, accidents causing backups to name a few examples) but also current traffic controls like stop lights could essentially be removed if cars could reliably communicate with each other.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU7EHKFNMQg
Principle of charity requires me to imagine that you just have had the bad luck to be only exposed to outdated ideas... Plenty of places to start, maybe here: http://m.fastcoexist.com/3021074/making-the-economic-case-fo...
Oh, I think I know. You are saying that ACA increased their costs, so they had to cut benefits to their employees because the federal government demanded that the company pay more money to the insurance companies so that the insurance companies could subsidize healthcare for unemployed and underemployed people? And Armstrong said he was cutting 401k benefits because of these cost increases?
...so, Starbucks paid some guerrilla marketing company millions of dollars to stage an absurd publicity stunt.

Supporting Facts:

1. All publicity is good publicity.
2. All branding is identical, verbatim, (e.g. no
use of small, medium, large; instead branded sizing
parlance is used) forcing the customer to closely
inspect the imitation for flaws. This forces a level of
psychological engagement in the customer that would not
occur in regular, legitimate establishments.
3. Starbucks, for all it's popularity, rarely experiences
negative press. Thus, their brand can easily tolerate
examples of light trolling.
4. Dubious "news" coverage offers vectors for market
penetration into sectors that represent the Lowest
Common Denominator, without cheapening Starbucks'
brand. In other words, they can speak to an audience
that they'd rather not be associated with, without
having to directly engage them. They can inject their
brand's presence into the daily lives of people who
would not ordinarily pay attention to their usual modes
of advertising.
5. Without an entity to claim credit for this activity,
this parody only serves to provide increased exposure
to Starbucks. A well executed parody without an author
will provide no alternate context to the premise of the
joke. If there is any meaning or theme to the parody,
the audience can barely guess at what it should be, if
the intent of the performer cannot be discerned.

6. Hypothesis: The "Dumb" shop will only stay open for as
long as the minor local news publicity lasts. It's
there only to make people use the word "Starbucks" as
frequently as possible, in as many sound bites as
possible, trigger some water cooler conversation for
about a week (word of mouth buzz), and then die.
Dungeon Keeper on Android filters out 1-4 star reviews
"C++ is a grotesquerie more suitable for a carnival horror show than something you want to introduce to new programmers."

In my experience TAing an undergrad course that used C++, almost all of the things that left students scratching their heads were things that are present in C. No garbage collector, no built-in way to determine array sizes at runtime, no way to determine if a pointer has already been deallocated, no requirement that non-void functions actually return a value on all control paths, etc. The worst thing C++ does is to amplify these problems (particularly that last one -- yes, I know, use -Wall, but someone who is just starting to use a language would not know that, and having to teach compiler flags is an even worse distraction from the subject matter of the course).

Really the problem is not language size at all. Python is a big language too, but it does not have the above problems. Common Lisp is just as big as C++ (in terms of the number of pages in the standard), yet these are not problems Lispers have. Scheme is a small language, like C, yet the elegance and expressive power of Scheme is on a completely different level from C.

The problem is that the few abstractions C presents are hard to deal with, especially for beginners, and the abstractions that C could present are sorely missed. Even the abstractions C presents are unreliable, with loads of undefined behavior and plenty of ways to break the abstractions.

Really, the fact that real-world C programmers have to pick a subset of the language and enforce various style standards and coding conventions speaks volumes about the suitability of C for beginners. If we were going to require students to use a specific subset of C, why not just write a compiler for that subset and use that to teach? The answer is pretty clear: if we were going to write a compiler for a new language that was suitable for teaching students, we would write something better. Why bother when we already have better languages to choose from? Save C for the OS course, and only as long as it remains relevant there.
Sprawl is just a subsidy for cars. Remove the sprawl subsidies and find out just how quickly your 40-mile commuters move to a home closer to the office (or find another job that isn't out in BFE.)
Something such as scraper wiki perhaps
(this is Jeff from ForceRank)

The thing to note about our particular situation is that we're really only a little interested in the #1 result. The app is primarily about helping groups prioritize things, for instance "What features do we need to build next".

Rating systems are a no go, because the whole point is to force people to choose and hence consider the tradeoffs (hence "ForceRank" :)

In this case, some of the voting system criteria such as "susceptibility to burying" play out a bit different than in a regular election. eg If everyone thing "Project C" is a great idea but Frank _hates_ Project C, we want to do what we can to highlight that fact, not just continue on our merry way with the majority vote.
Really? Have you ever seen kids younger than High school, move about in response to that?
>> A square wave has twice the power of a sine wave of identical amplitude.

> 1.41 x

Yes, for a voltage of x, but remember that the speaker is a resistance, for which the power varies as x^2/r (Ohm's law: p = e^2/r), So the original claim is correct.
MPLD3: Bringing Matplotlib to the Browser
> Young women don't magically become technologists at 22.

It depends. There is no strict requirement onto starting at the early age. Yes, there is a correlation, but no strict requirement.

I knew someone, who had really started coding only at around 22, after she had finished a computer science / engineering degree. She was not a tinkerer/nerd, just a regular bright girl, her dad was not an engineer [was an architect]. Only she was really really bright, and she really put in some effort, and just in a few years she became really really good. I've since met many good hackers [having started at 4 and now some 30 years down the line :-/], and I still consider her to be one of the best overall, starting from the love to build things, to clean code and clear thinking, to teamwork...
One per network is fine though, you can run thousands of hosts behind one ipv4 in nat64
Thanks for the tip on the book. It looks like the same mathematician author later wrote a more popular, less technical book on voting, Chaotic Elections! A Mathematician Looks at Voting, that may be of interest to several people following the thread here.

http://www.amazon.com/Chaotic-Elections-Mathematician-Looks-...
Sorry you don't like my post. I don't get how my post is "mean", i did not insult anyone other than offering my honest (but harsh) opinion. Your comment on the other hand is completely useless to both of us. Other than giving you a perverse feeling of self-rigteousness, what else does your comment offer?

(If you meant to offend/shame me, you failed at it)
I totally did look into them, I just didn't think it would matter much for our use case. As a general rule I find that time spent with fun complicated algorithms is rarely connected to actually creating business value..

Just turned out I was wrong this time :)
Outliers are outliers
Settings > Location > Mode > Select "Device Only"

and

Settings > WiFi > Advanced > Uncheck "Scanning always available" (which asked for permission on first boot)

These are user settings, not app settings.
The reason you can't wrap your head around it is that it's not actually true.

People love saying that about America, but it's not true and never has been.

For cases like that there is government insurance. It's called Medicaid, or Chip, or a bunch of other names, and it's available everywhere.

(And it doesn't help that the person you replied to is doubly confused and combined two unrelated things to confuse him even more. The CEO was saying that Obamacare was an added expense - it had nothing to do with the babies.)
Whether it can damage the speakers depends on whether your sound system is defective. Dell deliberately ships defective speakers and doesn't cover the defects in its warranty. But it's not like the speakers will notify VLC of this fact, though.