skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've heard UK contractors forming a co-operative and employing an accountant. The co-op is purely for the accountant, everything else is kept separate from it.

Not sure about the US but in the UK accountants are trained, qualified, registered professionals. The tax and legal systems are complex so it's usually a good spend of the money. You either save money by knowing what is tax deductible (for example) or you avoid fines by not claiming for things that you shouldn't. It allows you to concentrate on the fun other bits of the business.
Actually, I only saw Carlsbad desalination plant and it isn't done. It seems like this article http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Desalination-plants-a-pri... shows none completed.
Yeah, you are either fundraising, or you are not. If you are, then go have lunch with the wealthy investors. If not, don't bother, it is a waste of energy.
My buddy and I bought these metal desks from IKEA http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/40115532/ matching legs are there somewhere. Two of them in an L configuration does work.
This will eventually (hopefully?) get integrated into Glass, and provide that kind of HUD some have been waiting for.
So within a day, they'll have 100 resumes of people as qualified as Tim Bray? That seems sort of like a stretch. At that level, those people can work where they want to, no?
Because it's kind of like flying on instruments, which you need an instrument rating for? Because you are supposed to fly by visual reference to the horizon, which you can't see at night? I find it a bit weird myself.
Very sad news. RIP.

He died at 57. My retirement plan starts at 65 and and I'm in the same physical shape he was. Why should I continue putting money in my 401k if chances are I'll never use it?
Warning sign of a heart attack is a 300 pound belly.
"the perfect place for people who enjoy a small social circle"

I think this is absolutely spot on. I'm pretty surprised about this line criticism from this forum. Nerds (or "hackers" in this case) are a generally introverted crowd, no?

It's not a good city if you're a brogrammer who wants to party like a rock star every night. That's totally fine by me. :)
Its future offspring could be the pinnacle of AR (Augmented Reality), add data as an overlay to the existing world, but in such a way that depth and perspective is preserved. In your case, seeing Stay Puft peek through my bedroom window would probably unleash a very real sensation.
Looks like the datacenter is in Kharkiv, about 400km/300mi from the fighting in Kyiv/Kiev.
Dude, I'm obviously speaking hyperbolically, i.e. rhetorically. Relative to any big city with cosmopolitan aspirations, it is a hick town. The number of coworkers I had there who owned rifles and hunted, who drove pickup trucks, who brewed their own beer, who had difficulty with non-Americanized ethnic food puts it a lot closer to a small town than to cities like San Francisco, Chicago or New York.
And Erlang is great and building and managing a horizontally scalable architecture - about building repeatable work units and co-ordinating them. So how many engineers did you have? What were your ratios?
ATM locations are a funny thing. I realise that there are many Allpoint/whatever network ATMs near me, but I really value just not having to care. I usually get cash out when I remember I don't have any and see an ATM, rather than hunting one down.
And that's as it should be. State-allocated capital without a private finance sector has failed miserably, like in terms of millions of people starving, everywhere it's been tried.

There's a middle ground here. "Well-regulated market". Communists don't understand the market part (see Great Leap Forward) and Libertarians are idolators who think the market will automatically settle into the best thing for society if only we didn't have a government (see Somalia).
The more people are willing to pay for something, the more beneficial to society it is. You have 0 idea what you are talking about. Efficiently allocating resources and taking losses when mistakes are made is the engine that makes capitalism go.
What a compelling way to demonstrate an argument I've been having with people over the years!
They log queries but in an aggregated way not tied to specific users or sessions (not even pseudonymous user IDs or IP hashes): https://duckduckgo.com/privacy#s3
Declawing Speed Traders Is Goal of Stock Market Revamp Proposal
As an ex-Vancouverite, I think it's more accurate to say that Victoria is a nice place to retire rather than a place to live (i.e., make a living).
You can continue to put money there and try to change something about the physical shape? I think accent should be not on "oh crap I won't even use that money" but rather "hey, I WILL use that money". Fitbit and walking is a good start. I am a fat ass too.
GOF Design Patterns: #1 Pattern Recognition Book on Amazon?
I would say the flaw is more fundamental.

...which companies and industries will shrink and which will grow.

If there's no demand for the product or service, where is the business and financial model?

The financiers don't determine what will turn a profit. They only predict what will return a profit. A market that signals growth and large profits will attract more investment. Investing in a market that doesn't return a profit is something financiers try to avoid. The market shapes the investors decisions, and the decisions shape the market.
Hm, Wikipedia says "California has also begun producing a small amount of desalinated water, water that was once sea water, but has been purified." That may need a "citation needed", at least - at a skim I'm not seeing support for it.
I wouldn't consider w3schools a good search result, ever:

http://www.w3fools.com/
While you will have to deal with this pain with Simple, it can be significantly mitigated. You can delay ordering the new card because Simple lets you instantly block all transactions on your card—and unblock them just as instantly. Effectively, if you see a fraudulent transaction or are worried, you can pull your phone out, block the card, and only unblock it when you go to actually swipe the card. Then, when the timing is better, you can go ahead and order the new card. After also having withdrawn cash to cover the time difference, or having sent yourself a check, or whatever.

The only thing to be wary of is that you can't dispute fraudulent transactions way in the future, so your window isn't infinite.
Religion and Science by Albert Einstein [1930]
Yes, mapping geometry/mesh to real world structures/skylines/halls/rooms of real locations, geolocation, orientation of device and local structural data. That is when augmented reality really takes over. We may even see a time when looking at something without some sort of augmented view is strange. Tango seems to be going right at that.

Personally I cannot wait to be chased by Cloverfield like monsters/creatures along the skyline and weaving in between buildings downtown. Movie ads are going to be amazing.
Ad Retargeting != Query or Server Logs
Ask HN: real life examples of working smart not hard
I'm looking for real life examples of people who are the living embodiment of working smart and not hard, people who have done something that didn't take great intelligence or a 80 hour work week to achieve but ended up succeeding at their chosen endeavour.

The only one that springs to mind at the moment is the story of Money Ball (although the statistics that involved does take great deal of intelligence so maybe that isn't the best example, hopefully a bad example is better than none at all)
Wow, this is really a superb way of describing finance concisely. Financiers often get tangled in certain interests in unfair or unscrupulous ways, but fundamentally it is not thievery.
It's not that they're not top ranking - they don't appear anywhere in the first few hundred results. DDG must be filtering them because those sites are at the top of yandex and DDG says it is getting the results from yandex.

As for "perfectly usable", mountaindragon (result 2) and codesinhtml.com (result 3) are atrocious. And makemyownwebpage.com (result 10 or so) looks like a homepage from the 90s.

I think the issue is that DDG is getting crappy results from yandex, then filtering out the good sites to make the results even worse. Weird :)
Cool technology and all, but i find that it is an odd fit for phones. Apart from games and other gimmicky applications, or exceptional cases like navigation for the blind, what are the awesome applications of space detection for a phone? I can think of much more interesting applications in mobile devices like cars.
Silicon Valley’s acquisition fever is bad for innovation
Just because it's unethical doesn't mean a founder who is fundraising should ignore it. It's happening regardless of your feelings on the subject.

This doesn't mean I don't agree with you, but sometimes you have to play the game.
Hardware is Not the New Software
I am not sure this is actually a true statement about libertarians, rather than a standard polemic. Libertarians often come to that belief by being skeptical about any concentration of power... it just so happens that the US Federal government is today the biggest concentration of power, so you hear about that one the most. Thanks to crony capitalism, the line between "government" and "big business" can be a hard one to find. The general solution proposed by the supposedly-non-naive non-libertarians is to... give the government more power. Why it is supposedly so obvious that this is the correct solution to the problem of that we can openly mock anyone who disagrees is, frankly, unclear to me; the evidence that more government power has decreased large corporation's power anytime in the recent past seems pretty lacking, if you ask me. It seems to have just made the purchasing of favors that much easier.
...but Google does do that.
Though this might have been their original intent, it was not the end result, ultimately they partnered with a bank and offered a fairly normal checking and savings account to their customers.

Was it a bank-like experience? absolutely(which is what I would argue is a HUGE part of the problem) but was it their own bank? Absolutely not
Show HN: Automated Discounts on Amazon
Agreed. I live mid-island, which is much nicer than Victoria. However I wouldn't be able to live here if I didn't run my own business.
>> You don't see big investments in new technology, science, infrastructure, or other complex and difficult areas because by and large the financiers do not understand these things.

Isn't this the role of of venture capitalists to understand those things(with regards to science and tech), and they build specific expertise to understand those things(including hiring top notch entrepreneurs )? But venture returns are not that great(average 7% annual) which explains the little money invested in them(less than $15 billion in 2013).
Do they have a good deal on SSL certs when buying or transferring domains? the certs are good, yes?
Google to lease Moffett Field and NASA's Hangar One
Phonegap Build has some useful features for packaging, debugging and distribution that could eventually become available to Firefox OS Cordova apps.
Where To Get Term Life Insurance?
Individual advantage versus group advantage. ("Competition" versus "cooperation".)

It may not have a single, "simple" solution, but it is always worth keeping in mind -- necessarily so, I would argue.

Recently, we've had an extreme emphasis, in much of our (U.S., "Western") rhetoric, on the individual and competition.

However, such emphasis, in the extreme, does not scale too well.

One might argue that we are failing at scale, for some fundamental reasons.
I'm curious about the apparent decoupling/lag between net-rent and gross-rent that begins sometime in the mid-90s. For most of the chart's time series, they correlate fairly well.
Syndicated Yahoo/Bing ads at the top, and affiliate links on the eBay + Amazon results: https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates
This isn't a complaint about markets and investors, it has nothing to do with the companies or how any financiers determine the destinies of those companies.

Its about the unbearable amount of money they extract for the service they provide.
Sure, startups will pay for consulting. Most valuable thing at a startup is time. If you can convince a company that you can validate their current approach faster than they can by themselves it's a great value proposition.
Perhaps. The whole system would need some redoing as well, such as providing everyone with basic necessities. Part of the negative interest could be used to help provide those.
Great job on launching the private beta. It's a amazing switch from the previous communication play. Given most developers needs a platform to host lightweight web apps. Plus, there is a massive opportunity there to build the Heroku for mobile optimized site for mobile web or embed webviews.

Cheers

- T
(Ugh... I remembered it as being a tachyon, so I typed that too. A tau neutrino is of course not a tachyon.)
Banks are broken
Collusion is a pretty big charge. If investors are upfront about the fact that they talk to each other (and, hey, it's right there in the blog post) then investor A calling up investor B to verify he has made an offer to a startup isn't collusion. It's just due diligence. I'm also unclear about the analogous situation in the public markets that you alluded to.
Yeah, but then nobody would ever deposit money in the bank. Much more clever to call it something seemingly unrelated, like "inflation".
The HFT Arms Race: Frequent Batch Auctions as a Market Design Response
20 Clever Inventions You Probably Didn't Know Were Made By Indians
Forget the phone, this is technology is ideal to merge into Google Glass.
I know Tim (he and I worked together at Sun) and like him a great deal -- but I take exception to his labeling of the Bay Area as "racist", especially from a Canadian. Indeed, the only time in my life that I have heard the n-word used in earnest by a white person was while I was living in Canada (Ottawa, 1995). Not only was I gobsmacked to hear it, I seemed to be the only person who was horrified. (This was at a corporate retreat, and there were about 15 people gathered in a circle casually drinking beers.) As bad as that was, I found the attitudes toward indigenous Canadians to be worse: the racism there was broad -- and seemingly accepted in polite society. So while there may be many reasons to prefer living in Canada over the US (and Vancouver over the Bay Area), in my experience the lack of racism in Canada shouldn't be among them...
Linux 802.15.4/zigbee sniffer
Any interest in Linux? This looks like a Skype replacement, but our developers all have Ubuntu machines.
That 16% asian population mostly arrived in the last 20 years from SE asia. They and the black population is highly segregated compared to New York or the Bay Area. No one here is holding L.A. as a great example. Try Vancouver (from the OP), San Francisco, or New York.

http://www.metafilter.com/65711/Segregated-Seattle

https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/maps_2010.htm
There are kinds of taxes that don't have penalties for non-payment?
I don't see a need for any of this. Banking is ugly, but who cares? Interest > UX niceties.

Get a better interest rate and I'm in.
Really cool. I love how this could help the blind (my first thought when I saw how it worked - glad it was acknowledged in the video as a use case). The stuff Google's working on (and the face they're making it public is really exciting me (this, Glass, contact lens etc.). The more I see the more I think I'm going to spend more time developing for Google's platforms and less time developing for Apple's. I'm sure Apple has a few cool projects they'll be sharing this year but Google seems to be the one pushing the boundaries.
that is asking for

XML - It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
Cordova is wonderful if you know how to use it. It allows for cross platform apps with a single codebase.

The problem lies in how it is used. Our project tried to incorporate a ton of native UI/UX conventions that screwed us over royally. CSS transitions, layered divs, swipe gestures, all of these were far too complicated for a little phone to handle. Stay away from these, and do simple hides and shows. Or go the hybrid method of having barebones native wrappers and web-views inside of those views.

The web (i.e. HTML/CSS/JS) promises a lot but mobile browsers are nowhere near where they should be in terms of pure processing power. As of right now, native is still the way to go.
It isn't rocket science -- Look up asset allocation models. If you don't know where to start, buy Money magazine or something similar and read it for 6 months.

One strategy is to use a target-date mutual fund. Another is to pick an asset allocation model that makes sense to you and buy no-load index funds or ETFs.

Paying some dude 5-10% is buying a shoulder to cry on and maybe some tax prep help.
"Imagine measuring your room by just walking around in it." Yes, and imagine transmitting each of those footsteps in real time back to Google, so they can have a map of your room, too, in case they, or other parties, ever need it.

I was just having a discussion yesterday with a friend who works at Google about what data they store when you query their search engine. Every single keystroke, including backspaces, is stored. They don't just know what you ask. They know how well you can spell and know how well you type, not just in general but down to specific letter sequences. With this data, they can tell if you are regularly more impaired (fine motor control) at some times than at others, or if you're growing more impaired over time and match that against the content of your queries, etc.

"Phones that don't limit their boundaries to a touchscreen", meaning, we're not satisfied limiting our knowledge of you to just what we can extract from what you enter and how you enter it and when on a touchscreen. We want to know every step you take, when you sit, when you stand, how and where you walk.... SO much more data about you and your world that we can mine for treasure!

I'm not saying that Google is evil. My friends at Google certainly aren't. It's just that they are like kids in a candy store with unprecedented access to data and so many great, new algorithms for extracting information from it that they are just loving it, the way geeks would. But we're really going down a rabbit hole here.
I am techie working in the banking industry for last decade for some of the top banks in Canada. Here is what I have noticed from a micro perspective: In these lines of businesses --commercial banking, online banking , retail banking -- the pay is shit, the work is heavily outsourced and the PCs are crappy and stifling bureaucracy . Where as in capital markets Line Of Business, the pay is awesome, the PCs/notebooks are best of class and there is virtually no outsourcing and little bureaucracy. This leads me to believe that banks value capital markets operations more that commercial banking. However, it is obvious that commercial banking provides more value to the society as they enable businesses to borrow to grow and expand . Capital markets and trading activities of the bank earn more profits but I doubt they have as much impact on growth of a business.

Finance will always rule ; however society should make an effort to discriminate between different sub-sectors of finance industry. Short term trading is not as valuable to society as giving $100mm loan to a businesses.
This kind of technology will lead to very big changes in the surveying industry, which is big. Also will lead to open 3d city models (the next openstreetmap will be in 3d and textured - IMO gmaps and apple maps will lose out to this eventually) and real-estate models (see your apartment without actually visiting) which will lead to lnock-on effects for a range of other property industry fields. Academically - urban studies (a field mostly based on experience and conjecture) will benefit hugely from realistic 3d modelling...
What? It's meant to be an easy way to do A/B testing by editing the UI without code.
Why WhatsApp is worth $19 billion
WhatsApp may be "cheaper" than most rivals: Facebook paid just $30 per Instagram user at the time (the service had 33 million users when Facebook bought it, compared to 150 million today). Facebook is spending $42 per WhatsApp user.
But given WhatsApp's enormous user base, its purchase price might be a bargain compared some of its competitors. LinkedIn's (LNKD) share price values that professional social network at $153 per user. Twitter trades at $140 per user, and Facebook is at $123. Even at its latest $2 billion valuation, Snapchat trades at $50 per user. (And Snapchat reportedly turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook last year.)
I can see tech like this being used in the next Bond film. Every day, the advances in modern technology surprise and impress me. I love our line of work, where we can set our mind to something and just make it.
Sure, from a very sheltered perspective, it's quite "hick". I'll accept that.
Same. Ever since they ticked under the 1% interest rate, I've been looking for a better alternative (ah I loved the 6% back with ING in '05).
All systems are go over here. Was the site not loading at all, or just loading slowly for you?
From the article:

"WhatsApp may be "cheaper" than most rivals: Facebook paid just $30 per Instagram user at the time (the service had 33 million users when Facebook bought it, compared to 150 million today). Facebook is spending $42 per WhatsApp user.
But given WhatsApp's enormous user base, its purchase price might be a bargain compared some of its competitors."

"LinkedIn's (LNKD) share price values that professional social network at $153 per user. Twitter trades at $140 per user, and Facebook is at $123. Even at its latest $2 billion valuation, Snapchat trades at $50 per user. (And Snapchat reportedly turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook last year.)"

This reminds me of the dot.com bubble era where prices were justified by comparing to other over inflated stocks.

I'm surprised WhatsApp didn't go IPO. With the relative lack of new tech IPOs, I could have seen WhatsApp IPO at a $50 BLN or maybe even $100 BLN valuation, after analysts hyped it up using the same analysis as above. A case can be made that WhatsApp would have kept growing much faster than Facebook and eclipsed Facebook in a few years time.

Facebook FB 69.63 +1.57 +2.3% closed positive today after opening lower. ($64.50 in afterhours trading)
That's right: The spec will never be revised, not because it already defines the ideal programming language (is that really your argument?), but because the effort and expense is so great.
Open-sourcing Facebook's internal branch of Thrift
This is a great compilation of wisdom passed on while participating in YC, plus lessons learned I can appreciate 1.5 years later. Well written Sam.

My personal favorite on this list is to focus on what you're most passionate about during your pitch. This should drive the entire conversation. Investors do not expect you to know everything from day one. Don't go into a pitch trying to have the perfect answer for every question, focus on what you do know and can speak passionately about.