skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In 2013, Gmail was available 99.978% of the time, which averages to less than two hours of disruption for a user for the entire year.

Does anyone understand why they use the term "averages" in this statement? What is being averaged? Isn't it just 0.022% * minutes in a year.
It's difficult to fault a company for parsing its own servers to stop corporate espionage against itself.
Imessage on android
i seek reliable info on how to use imessage from my pc or android 'phone. This is my first post. the above title is from a url so the first question is, is it safe (dustin), or does it go through cn servers etc. I should have chosen "amiageekoragook" as my username - i'll save that for next time but that's a secret.
Thanks, Andrew
> Specifically, Page is a technically-minded person who's showing not to be able to see outside of the strictly technical realm, so choosing between a charitable organization and a technological one, is not really a choice, because in his perspective, there's no such thing as the first option.

Or maybe he's actually smart, as you would expect from a technically minded person, did the math and realized, that there ain't many good charitable organizations to give, nor that the for-profits are worse than charities in pursuing goals beneficial to mankind.
"this could be rephrased as"

Could also be rephrased as "I'm talking out of my ass because if I gave it any serious thought I would realize there was a big problem in putting all my 'change the world eggs' into one basket".

And to those who say "well he didn't mean that literally" then apply that same logic anytime any famous person says something w/o thinking it through.
I tend to treat such demos as nothing more than glorified screenshots. For example, Mailpile has a demo similar to what you described and I spent maybe 10 seconds in it clicking on a couple buttons. That said, I'm sure it is very useful to some other people. I'd recommend getting in touch with some of the Mailpile guys or anyone else who can relay their experiences about how useful it is.
If they're going to do free advertising of the cinema display just like any other hipster website, they could at least fix the perspective of the screen stand.
My chemistry teacher pulled a much better example of "Wisdom of crowds".

We were told to measure exactly 25 ml of both water and alcohol, mix them, then report the volume.
It was a competition to see which team got the closest to 50 ml...

So we all reported our values on the board at the front for comparison.

At the end, the team closest to 50 was declared "A Liar" because alcohol and water do not mix to the same volume as their constituent parts, thus the final volume should have been closer to 46ml and the team closest to 46 was awarded as the winner of the competition.

Blew my 15 year old mind and I never biased my answers towards my bias again.
I know what most my colleagues make. So when I look on those sites it always seems low. If I wanted to brag I wouldn't use a throwaway. My father did finance his whole life, I've been brought up on it. I'm curious what people make outside my box.
Yeah, but you probably want a mix for your team.
given that what is fun is actually purely subjective, i don't think it would be too generous to read a statement like that with an implicit "i think".
> You have lived twenty-five or thirty years without making a profit on your life; how can I expect that you will be a profit-maker for me?

Well, imagine that I have all your noble qualities, but I just couldn't get the $20,000 that was paid out to you in your sophomore year.
I take it you haven't tried PHPStorm then? We used NetBeans for a long time until we tried out PHPStorm and it is amazing how much better and faster it is.
The Canadian version of the Leaf has a battery heater.
There is a lot of truth in the idea that doing something like colonizing mars could do more good for humanity than giving people enough money to eat for a day or a week.

A lot of "truth"?

Far-flung speculation is more like it.
Working at a startup helmed by a "brilliant" man as mentioned in the article, I wholeheartedly agree. So much hand waving. So little execution. One month, we were doing one thing that "had to be in the app". Another month, something else. Neither would get the actual attention that needed for them to be implemented properly, and nothing of value was produced.

Society places too much importance on the buds of ideas. True, an idea can change the world. But what gets lost in the shuffle is the fact that what truly matters is in those ideas being executed and turned into something tangible.

The charismatic idea men are a dime a dozen. I'm sure everyone here has worked with some hand-waving, smooth talking salesman who wows investors, then fail hard at meeting promises. It's those who can execute that are truly transformative.
MongoHQ Elastic Deployments now with Oplog access
I like it. It is like one of those gawker headlines. You get curious and want to find out.
NetBeans is pure Swing, so you can do some tinkering to pretty it up to your liking.
I update my resume.
I didnt mean to sound like I was bragging, sorry if it came across like that. I am considering changing industries and want to know what to expect. I was asking very broadly intentionally
The title will probably be reverted to the original, but the current one [1] is much clearer.

[1] "YC nonprofit One Degree (YC W14) is breaking the cycle of poverty"
My take on this that Larry Page is more of a "find a cure for the disease" rather than a "treat the symptoms" kinda guy. To be honest, I can find myself in a statement like that.
Love when people play code ping pong. There's too much talk and not enough play in these threads. But I have to ask you, do you really think that splitting out those two classes improved things for the example? Or was this just future coding for possibly-maybe extension points? Because from where I'm sitting, it made things less clear and harder to follow with no additional upside.
I was just using it ("+3 sigma") to mean "high-level" creativity and could have just as easily said "99.9th percentile" or some other number. No, I don't know of a good way to test for it.

My point is that there's a strong negative correlation, especially at the competitive upper reaches, between creativity and the sort os superficial reliability that (a) tends to determine a person's ability to advance in organizations, and (b) you'd probably want in someone you put in front of difficult clients on a regular basis.
Please come to the UK - my wife and I spend a remarkable amount of time trying to organize stuff to keep our son constructively occupied!

[NB One thing I would love is some way to enter into a discussion with our son about what he wants to do and to rate different options - at the moment we do this through email and printing stuff out, which is dreadful.]
> Some more libertarian-minded folks would probably make the point that the government is never actually giving away money, it got that money by obtaining it from somewhere else.

Almost everyone giving away money got it from somewhere else.
This drone can steal what's on your phone
Yes, but how do we "fund science"? We used to do that through the government, but now government funding of science is so broken primarily due to large segments of the US population being "anti-science" and voting that way thus those who control the purse strings don't see the value anymore. Maybe we need to start crowdsourcing scientific research?
Solargraphy Analemmas
Netbeans has always impressed me. It's a very solid IDE, but I moved away from it after they decided to ditch more and more non-java language support. I'd still pick it over Eclipse though. IntelliJ is my current tool of choice, mostly due to their Scala support.
I like his work and his ideas and what he is accomplishing. And I am certain my approval or disapproval for his character matters not a bit to anything external to myself. Given how he expresses himself and his pattern of prioritizing those nominally closest to himself, I just don't like the idea of Musk attaining a role model status, a direction his celebrity seems to point towards.
Ok, I think the simple version of this is: You are basically constructing a situation where the dominant bias is the same for all of the measurements (e.g. pairs of students). So you have a problem with your method of sampling being biased in a predictable way. So far, so good and this is an interesting lesson.

But they are all using the same estimation method from this biased information, and they are all (by construction) creating the same bias, and that is very much not crowd-like behavior.

Applying this as an example of the problem with "wisdom of crowds" seems to really miss the point to me, because you created a situation where they didn't behave like a crowd.
Very interesting article. I think they capture the way to beat Bloomberg - latch on to it. Add analysis on top of it. Bloomberg's support is solid, but they don't do advanced analytics.

The challenge is Bloomberg is locked in to the hearts and minds of all 320,000 users. Most don't want to change their ways. If you want to sell a trader on a technology, you have to dazzle them in a minute. And these are people who haven't had to change their keystrokes in years. They like the DOS-like interface.

And Bloomberg has billions to toss into R&D every year. Every competitor is nervous about "Is this the year they come for our space, and take us out because the marginal cost of the asset class is 0, since they're already paying for the terminal."
That's only 3000 writes per VM per second.

Now I would like to see how many reads it can do at the same time. Cassandra does mostly-sequential writes, however most reads do couples of disk seeks.
If the human can do the sorting since plastic is already marked with number codes then this could be possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_recycling

Easiest is to just collect it and burn it in a central facility though. Simplified, you can burn everything except PVC (number three).
You can think of wealth as "total stuff+useful services produced" which is approximately the same as "total stuff+useful services consumed".

First, you can go from idleness to producing - if I sit on my ass I produce no wealth; if I assemble an iPhone then I create wealth since an iPhone is more useful&valuable than the unassembled components.
Second, you can have great differences of production efficiency. You can make the exact same people with the same effort generate order(s) of magnitude more wealth per year by making different products, making the same products more efficiently, or combining people with capital(=machinery, automation, economies of scale).
Third, trade generally creates wealth as such. There are classic examples, but the sense is that re-distributing tasks to the places where they're done relatively more efficiently allows both parties to have much more goods&services than if they'd be isolated and didn't trade.

The point is that there can be huge differences of how much wealth a person is generating, and those differences form the differences in national wealth. Simply "giving people fishes" to go on the same way doesn't generate wealth. "Teaching the people to fish" does generate wealth.

And there are two exceptions, where charity is key - first, if people are starving, then feeding them allows them to keep their means of future wealth generation, instead of eating their seeds and milkable animals, and selling their tools. And second, if you "give a fish" to kids&young adults, then that enables them to "learn fishing" and generate more wealth in the future instead of being stuck in ineffective menial jobs (that don't generate much wealth for them nor their employers) from early childhood till death.
You may be able to find the Ikea Jerker on craigslist or other classifieds. I got mine from a college student for relatively cheap, I think around $40 or $60. It works great as a standing desk but you don't have any motorized mechanism to lower or lift the desk. This is probably a good thing if you are trying to stand but an alternative solution is getting a high-rise stool/seat. I alternate between standing and sitting now.
Scraping Steam for Data using Python + BeautifulSoup
So let's see: dysfunctional government > disease > malnutrition > lack of education > dysfunctional government. How did China, Thailand (or any other developing nation) break out of that vicious cycle? What would the main arbiter of positive change be? If you had limited resources but wanted to effect the most positive change possible, what would you do? My argument was that simply handing money out (indiscriminately - we might be of the same opinion there) is not the most effective way.
"But in fact the main thing driving Airbnb's growth is not price, but that guests are looking for authentic experiences"

Do you think that as the services that Airbnb provides gets more standardized, the Airbnb experience will inevitably get more transactional like traditional hotels?

If so, do you think that their core user base is likely to shift towards more traditional traveler?
oh. sorry. just saw this comment.

and, no. i don't use sat nav for my morning commute. i've written a few applications enabling my phone to read books, news and other bits of information to me as i drive into the office.
Isn't Tango a Jerry Yang project? That might explain why Alibaba would buy into it.
A bit off topic, but I find it odd how the 16-seed teams are calculated at between 1-4%, even though no 16-seed team has made it past the first round in the entirety of the 64-team tournament (1985: 29 years x 4 teams = 0 for 116).

Not sure how any of these have more than a <1% chance, let alone 4%.
New Drone Can Hack Into Your Smartphone To Steal Usernames And Passwords
I can't even fathom how it can be illegal. Those are Microsoft owned servers.

How would you feel about the postal service opening the letters it transports in a similar scenario? Do you think it's morally a-okay for them to unilaterally decide to read your mail without a court order?

I suspect that most people would say "no", even though it all happens on the postal services own premises, using their own resources. At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if most people would think like you expressed when it comes to e-mail.

Clearly, more thought needs to go into this to determine in a reasoned and consistent way whether Microsoft's action were morally right in this particular instance. Value judgments are going to play a role, too. Still, I think it's fairly clear that the answer must be the same for physical and electronic mail.

Edit: I know you were talking more about legality than morality. However, as the physical mail scenario shows, there is already a legal precedent for an actor being prohibited by law from acting in a way that is analogous to what Microsoft has done; and ultimately, the law should follow moral considerations, so those are the more interesting questions anyway.
Love my standing desk. It's actually a drafting table that's raised up and is perfect for me. And I stand on a yoga mat which I also use to do light yoga during my work day. But this looks like a great option also as it's adjustable much more easily than mine is which requires a set of screw drivers and about half an hour.
Lunchy – A friendly wrapper for launchctl
Your $30MM ($300MM) is before taxes, before expenses

yes I'm aware of that. In my OP I was going to also say

"at $300M with a 20% net income margin (which would be one of the higher net income margins but not unheard of) AirBnB would be producing $60M of profit." but I figured most people would be able to infer that.

Anyway, think about it this way. TPG is leading the deal right? TPG is one of the top 5 PE firms in the country. While it's possible TPG is making crazy investments, I think the best base case assumption is the TPG is not making crazy investments. I mean these are seriously smart guys with a good track record.

So if we start from the position that TPG is sane, then we ask ourselves, how are sane people getting to a $10B valuation. And I think I gave the outline of how sane people might be looking at it and arriving at a $10B valuation.

Plus I'm old enough to remember when people thought it was crazy that Amazon was valued at more than Barnes & Noble.
The biggest goal for public spending is to spend it in the representative's state. See various bridges to nowhere, non-sensical military and space projects funded or kept alive over better ones just because a parts supplier was in state, etc.. It's pretty easy to have something with a better goal and better result than that.
Hey there, it's Rey from One Degree. Can you clarify what you mean? Thanks!
> @ville, Our first concern is to perfect the application, making money will come later.

That doesn't sound consistent with the "100% FREE, ALWAYS" banner.

By charging money from the get-go, you'll attract more serious clients, and you won't scare people away when you eventually spring costs on them.
Hey! Actually, I just found out that there were camps in the UK. I met an ex pro-football player who used to run his own programs in the UK from 1999-2009. I'll definitely explore expansion to the UK! I love it there, and drive a Mini :). Good points on the discussion with your child--we'll have camper profiles soon to allow for kids to bookmark their own things
Pretty interesting stuff. Thanks for the dataviz. What kind of coin volume did it take to get in to the top 500?
Right, but I'm saying it's the wrong counterexample.

This is "I got fucked up and crashed my Ford into a tree, so I'm never buying a Ford again."
This makes me think of Buffett giving his money the Gates foundation: The 2nd richest guy in the world giving it to the richest.
Unless they're paying them to goof around on tennis court, I don't think it matters. It's not really important for who they're doing the research (except maybe that Google is the least evil company I can think of), because ultimately whatever they invent will benefit the whole mankind.
To be fair, two of those links are told from the point of view of his ex-wife. The world is full of people that have rather harsh things to say about their exes. Some of it is true.
Sounds like I need to give Scala another shot if compile times are a lot better.
It isn't. Especially not when they did this first :

http://www.ibtimes.com/microsoft-rips-email-snooping-google-...
"IF you're into museums there's also the Computer History Museum"

Even if you are not into museums it is my most recommended place to go in Silicon Valley. I have been here 3 years and never wanted to go walk around Google or Apple campus. But I guess it is something FREE to do.
Well, if you live near an IKEA, you can do a nice one for $200 + tax.

Solid wood top ($79.99): http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50106773/

Four legs ($120.00): http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60261626/
> Even xp users get the latest version of OpenGL.

Only as long as nVidia and ATI keep releasing drivers for you. At some point XP will be abandoned.
Very suitable name for a language then.
There is a policy of not editorialising link titles, e.g. ordinarily an admin would amend the title to match that of the linked item, i.e. "YC-Backed One Degree Is A “Yelp For Social Services” That Helps Low-Income Families"
Well, it's not too exceptional, more like normal

But this lack of flexibility is common. It has a name and I forgot it.
It's a bit of a shame that Fluke uses Facebook for publishing official statements.

Other than that... well, good reaction from Fluke. I'd say all events, from seizing the multimeters to the resolution today, unfolded in the best way possible.
Cool idea. All .gov websites should look like this ;)

What's the future product roadmap look like?
Well I was probably the only one, but I didn't even know you could use valid? with a custom context (which apparently calls the validations on that context).

The more you know...
What's the basis for this assertion? The privacy policies seem to have clauses that allow this type of access. The user wilfully enters an agreement to utilize Microsoft's email servers and that agreement explicitly allows this. Even if it didn't, I don't know of any body of law that would say "the text you're uploading to another person's server can't be read by the server's owners", but I'm not a lawyer. Telecomms are different because their infrastructure is a means of conveyance, not a destination, so they need to file the paperwork to tap the comms between the source and the destination. But in this case, there is no unannounced party in the transaction.

If we assume there are no external legal modifiers, it seems pretty straightforward that the server owners should be able to search their own disks for any reason.

The entire premise of free modern email is that the provider will be automatically parsing the text of your emails, composing a profile of your behavior and interests from that text, and attempting to sell you products based on that profile. Wouldn't that be illegal if it's not legal to search your own disks? How come you can agree to ToS and privacy policies that allow that but not policies that say "we can also look at it if we suspect that you're trying to screw us over"?
How do you propose actually preventing the collection, particularly that by private citizens?

Note, I'm explicitly not talking about making it illegal or other feel-good measures. I'm talking about actually preventing the actions.
> Is there some left/right brain separation that keeps techies from being charistmatic

Nah. It's just that most techies are too busy doing brain things to learn soft skills like how to interact with people.

— a guy who struggled with being pretty awkward in high school, worked hard at socializing for a few years, and now does very well with business meetings / networking / parties even though he'd prefer to be delivering code

P.S.: "So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular."

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
such bulk data release would include information pertaining to criminal investigations, which is privileged from release; and

They also make the argument that the license plate reader data is "investigatory" even if it is not connected to a particular criminal activity, and also claims that these records do not have to result in a "concrete and definite" prospect for enforcement action.

Sounds like the headline is pretty close to me.

[1] https://s.eff.org/files/2014/03/17/20140224lapd_p_as_in_opp_...
The whole title sounds a bit weird. What about "Kayak for childrens' camps and activities" or instead of Kayak, Hipmunk? Since they are in YC, they should totally mention that in the title as well.
Th oplog is probably the most underrated feature of MongoDB. There is all sorts of neat/useful stuff that you can do with it. Using it in Meteor and with River for Elastic Search are just a small part of what all it can do.
This is a great response, as far as I'm concerned. I especially appreciate them explaining why this issue could be more than just "trademark gone awry".
"The continual use of slang expressions is an evidence of mental laziness, and I will not hire a man who depends upon slang to express his meaning. It is a substitute for exact thinking."

I found this to be an unusual warning. Is "proper speech" really just a proxy for class in that time period? I'm now very curious about 1920s slang, especially its frequency of use in business settings.