skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ding ding ding! It's not really health insurance, it's a protection racket based on the threat of price gouging and financial attack by billing computers spewing paperwork. But if you're just willing to pay this monthly fee, then they'll be so kind as to only require you to pay the actual cost of your services.

If healthcare reform was to fix anything, it should have mandated up-front all-inclusive pricing for well-defined services, set a percent-above-average cap on emergency services, and eliminated all of the parasitic billing middlemen that bring only opacity to the system. It needs to be reasonable for people to pay routine costs out of pocket, and only then can you have actual insurance for the unexpected. Instead, it just created a penalty for failing to patronize the existing protection racket! Although this wasn't too surprising - it's the expected fate for any grassroots movement that gains traction with professional lobbyists.

This Surgery Center of Oklahoma looks fantastic, but I'm nowhere near Oklahoma and it doesn't look like they do routine care etc. Is this one isolated voice, or perhaps part of a larger trend that I'm just out of touch with?
It's a bit difficult to tell what the experience will be before you jump in, and it's not very fun when you do. Screenshots of the experience would help a lot.

Also: After seeing it, it's not going to work very well for HMF-level people since most people don't know what an HMF looks like.

It might be better to randomly swap extracted features them around with other people so that you can tell how you're measuring each feature. You might find some features deserve drastically higher weights to correct for people's subjective "feelings" about how much someone should make.

I like that it tells me how other people guess (after I submit my own guess), but it only tells me the mean (and it says average). When it had collected guesses for my salary, I watched for a few guesses to pile in and it seems to be taking the mean of them. I don't think this is a good idea, for example someone guessing very low repeatedly will drag down everyone's score.

It might be useful to collect "what do I think this person makes" separately from "what do I think this person could be making".
Isn't there also the global decline of english quality because of it being broadly used on internet by non native speakers? Many people (including me) get influenced by what they read on the net, to the point of accepting some of the strange forms you describe further down. There's also a global lack of proofreading all across the web, people editing content through web interfaces, on devices not supporting even simple spellchecking. English on the multicultural web is a strange melting pot of english forms and foreign ones being shoehorned in english. How much is (the)[1] american english influenced by spanish for instance, given the growing incidence of the spanish speaking population for the last few decades?

[1] Here I'm not even sure if I need to use "the" there. In my native language I would have to use it, but isn't the expression "american english" specific enough to avoid the need of it?
Teller Wins Lawsuit Over Copied Magic Trick Performance – Hollywood Reporter
I think the best way for this to work is for you to pair it with a more professional algorithm (e.g. Payscale, Salary.com). I am not sure I would ever trust what a bunch of random unqualified people say my salary should be.
OpenFL is not a plugin.
Why not just make it so you post the url of your profile and that's that. No way I would ever consider giving my linkedin credentials.

Instead of people logging in why not just use public profiles and scrape them to build your db?
MySQL or PostgreSQL. Exactly what we did at my new startup.

We actually did something that's quite unpopular here but it was the right choice for us.

We started with Postgres and eventually ran in all sorts of performance problems after hitting a certain scale. We realized that nobody in the company knew anything about PG and that good consultants were extremely hard to find.

On the flip side, everybody had good to excellent knowledge of MySQL and we happen to have a friend who's one of the best MySQL guys in the world. Pretty handy.

We switched from PostgreSQL to MySQL and couldn't be happier. I think the lesson for us was: go with what you know and master, and with what's easy to fix, rather than what people on hackernews tell you to use.
Could a massive effort to generate large prime numbers weaken cryptography?
Is diagnosis really a problem for health care in the developing world? I would imagine that in places like sub-Saharan Africa, they have a pretty good idea of what the symptoms of malaria look like, and they don't need microscopes so much as they need medicine.
There's a major bias to guessing in the 70-90k range. People likely to earn far less or far more than that are being pushed toward the middle.
I read your original well-thought post, really insightful. My counterpoint is that you perhaps failed to address if noise is even the problem. IMO noise is not the problem on HN, it's the dilution of signalling on HN.

There are two ways to identify signals on HN, upvote and downvote. In order for this to work, you need a (1) mechanism for the an individual to tell the community that a particular story or comment is worth it to the community (we have this, but it's partially broken on stories since you can't downvote, only flag) and (2) you need a community that is motivated to protect the community.

The problem I see is number 2. The community is now full of people who don't want the community to succeed - they want themselves to succeed. Are there people who want to see the community as a whole progress, sure. But as the community grows it means more people trying to climb the ladder (karma) and gain more influence. Influence is powerful here, we can't simply pretend it doesn't exist.

> But if somebody puts a paragraph or more of time into a reply, well, that is not noise. It is signal.

It depends on what you're measuring. A paragraph of time doesn't mean the post isn't any higher value to someone. If I'm at a rock festival and the stage that Nickelback are on is louder than the one that Rolling stone is at, it doesn't mean I necessarily want to hear Nickelback. IMO, without curators, it's pretty much impossible for human beings to even discern their own signal-to-noise ratios. Maybe I might hear that one Nickelback song and fall in love, I don't know?

EDIT: grammar
People value unique skills, not cookie cutter graduates.

I'm hoping to be able to work in Seattle next year at either Microsoft or Amazon and the main requirement they look at is whether the applicant has a degree in Computer Science or related field. Only after do they begin to look at personal projects/past accomplishments etc.

Not trying to say a university degree is for everyone, but for people like me looking to get into a top technology company, it's a requirement.
They refused to give us per incident support because they figured we could afford the yearly support plan (this was post acquisition at a public company)

We eventually just gave up on the whole thing.
Sounds like you've already taken the biggest and hardest step; which is to simply initiate the change.

My #1 piece of advice, while you're setting goals and scheduling activities, is to understand the organic rhythm and cadence of growth for each goal.

Work brings an inherent cadence of 9am-5pm, Mon-Fri and success is often calibrated every week/sprint/quarter.

But learning guitar, body building, and understanding new programming languages each have their own organic cadence and process for achieving mastery.

Sometimes taking a break from learning something new and simply reflecting is better than grinding away for 5 hrs per day, as that pattern tends to reinforce bad habits rather than develop new and better habits.
> I wonder if YC applications are gender neutral (names removed)?

That could eliminate unconscious bias during the application screening process, but it would be hard to run face-to-face interviews without revealing the sex of the person doing the interviewing.
Really? What kinds? Nuts high in protein and fat should burn slow and not give that lethargic feeling.
Targeting Huawei: NSA Spied on Chinese Government and Networking Firm
...get a girlfriend/boyfriend that complains if the food is always from 'the roster'. It is much easier to cook exciting stuff if it is to be cooked with love and shared.
Creativity vs. Quants
It would be tragically easy for each credit card company to give each retailer a different Curve25519 public key and keep all of the private keys.

The retailer could immediately encrypt the CC number using Curve25519 and AES-256 as soon as they got it, requiring 48 bytes of storage. One or two more bytes (or a variable-length integer) would store which credit card company the token is good for. That way, each merchant can generate its own tokens without having to interact with the credit card companies, and any stolen tokens can only be used to make fraudulent charges with the same merchant from which they were stolen.
Almost all of my money comes from client services. I didn't finish college, but often wish I had, if only because it took me just as long to sort out how to self-learn.
Of course there's a way to fix it: send an email, as the guidelines say.

Your comments have evidently not been disabled!
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CleanUpGitHub – What You Need To Know
Pardon my ignorance, but how does this differ from an earned income tax credit?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/03/buffett-minimum-wag...
Yea, I haven't played a game for like more than 30 minutes in the past 15 years (since I was 12 or so), but I am very excited about what Valve is doing.
You're almost never liable for any fraudulent charges made on your credit card or debit card. Provided you notify your bank, the standard procedure is to issue you a new card and reverse the charges. While it's not convenient, I'd gladly trade the convenience of paying with plastic over cash.

Additionally, any situation where you COULD pay in cash, you're not providing billing information to the merchant, so there's no risk of information compromise (aside from your name).
A relatively minor error in an extremely large body of quality reporting on an immensely important topic. On the balance The Guardian deserves many accolades for their reporting in this area.
How are you guys managing tens of SaaS? Isn't it a problem to remember, configure, update etc?
Avoid sweets, fizzy drinks, pastries, as you are less physically active than before.

Sorry, had to laugh about that. If the guy is coming from a high stress, high-paying law firm job, he probably wasn't very physically active before...law firm gigs don't usually leave a lot of free time. Most likely, he'll finally have the time to actually exercise now. But other than that the advice is definitely sound.
That video is the perfect response for why this is a silly idea. A clever chat bot can beat the Turing test, but in a TED talk you don't even have to deal with probing questions. All you have to do is babble on about something vaguely inspiring.
What's an HMF?
Then it gets really hard to implement your own text box, if you cannot catch things like Backspace, etc. I think those things are relics because the web evolved rather haphazardly from a document display environment to an application development environment.
The entire thrust this of the article seems to be that growth hacking should just be building a product people love and share. This in itself is completely obvious.

Even though growth hacking has become a silly term, all the points Andy Johns makes about reducing friction is exactly the philosophy that drives faster growth. The point of marketing or growth hacking or advertising or whatever you want to call the space is growing faster and acquiring more users with the product you have.

We can still stop using the term growth hacking though.
that's the same reason i discount any of these type of things from mongodb.com, which are pretty well resulted in the search results.

especially because the only reason I can see for everybody using mongodb is because it's popular.
You should read the Quantum Physics sequence I mentioned above. There is no Royal Road, and the whys and hows just cannot be explained in a few lines[1]. If you want a short-cut nonetheless, try here[2] to understand what is a configuration space, then proceed there[3] to understand what "no identity" really means. I won't repeat Eliezer here, you really have to follow the links.

Now I did made some language abuse.

First, there is no such things as a particle at the basic level. I mean, there are particles, but in the same sense that there are houses: particles are not the fundamental stuff, they are made up of the fundamental stuff, just like houses are made up of bricks.

Second, It is possible to test whether two situations are the same, or not. And I don't mean "nearly the same", I mean exactly the same. The difference is rather drastic: in one case you end up with |x|²+|y|² (where x and y are two complex numbers), and in the other case, you end up with |x+y|².

Third, there are no labels attached to particles. The universe is not like "photon A here, photon B there". It is more like "photon here, photon there". We know that because of my second point: there is just no difference between "photon A here, photon B there" and "photon B here, photon A there", it is the same configuration.

Now, when you move a particle from point A to point B, those are certainly different configuration. (So you do have a point). On the other hand, the way you move the particles doesn't matter in the slightest, as long as the end result is the same: having the particle at point B.

Well, the same goes for a human. Flying from London to New-York doesn't destroy your identity. The only thing that matters it that you end up in New-york. So, whether you took the plane, or have been wired across the internet just doesn't matter. You end up in New York.

Now, sure there is some difference: locally, you are the same. But the world around you is different. So this is a different configuration[4]. The plane didn't fly, computers did some more work, bandwidth got consumed… But that doesn't sound like the kind of difference that destroys your identity, even intuitively. I mean, by writing this text, I have a much greater influence over your than the motion of a plane could ever have (unless you're in it, or watching it). And I don't destroy your identity.

Now that's about it. Those who hunger for more should really read the whole Quantum Physics Sequence.

[1]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_dista...

[2]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/pi/classical_configuration_spaces/

[3]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/pl/no_individual_particles/

[4]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/pf/distinct_configurations/
This is pretty cool, but I do have one question:

How do you account for the fact that many of your users may not be familiar with the salary ranges in a specific area?

I understand the goal is to get a large amount of estimates for each user, to compensate for that, but my guess is that locations where larger amounts of users are located would have far better estimates. I just saw a couple of Vancouver (where I live) people, in positions I have trained and hired people in, but the estimated salary seems to be quite off considering that Vancouver salaries are noticeably lower than San Fran in reality.

Edit: It seems most of the profiles for me are Vancouver/Toronto/Ottawa, so I'm guessing that's their way of getting locals to estimate salaries.
My bet is still on Apple creating THE device to collect data. I don't think it will be a watch in the same way we think of these "watch" devices today.

They are probably the ones best suited to make a great product, combined with the iPhone/iPad. They could benefit from owning both platforms in a way that even Google can't with Android.

I might be overestimating Apple's abilities sans Jobs, but in an amazing coincidence, this is a category where Cook has deep personal experience and connections. He might be the perfect target user for this product, much like Steve was for everything that came before it.
There's an altcoin based on time-based demurrage fee called Freicoin[1].

[1] http://freico.in/
> I've been a stalwart Flash developer for 15 years, so nothing bothers me more than greatly exaggerated reports of Flash's premature demise.

...

> I've learned my lesson -- whatever my next platform is, no-one should be able to take it away from me.

There's an interesting side discussion here. It seems to me that the rate of substantial changes in technology/frameworks/ui design/etc is increasing such that the expectation of finding a platform that you can hold on to for 15 years is becoming untenable.

I worked with Flash (via Flex) for several years and found it to be one of the best UI frameworks I've ever developed with. I have yet to find an web framework that matches the productivity of MXML and databinding for standard sorts of UI's.

I also use emacs daily, which is a piece of software that's older than I am and still going strong.

That said, when it comes to staying on top of technology rather than being made obsolete by it, I have yet to find a better strategy than to try to "ride the wave".

HTML5 addresses a lot of cross-platform issues and has a lot of attention today so it's worth learning, but I don't expect what I learn today to last forever. If/when VR takes off, we might all be focusing on 3D frameworks and a wealth of new UI primitives to support that ecosystem. Or, maybe some other technology will take the dev community by storm and it'll be worth going that direction.

In short: moving with the major paradigm shifts seems more tenable than trying to find/predict the stack that will last the longest. Very curious to hear if others have similar or alternative thoughts.
I'm employed and i'm a freelancer both. Tough handling both, but i just can't sit idle for even an hr, i have to do something.
My project broke even after around 8 weeks and has done so since. We achieved this by using social media (without paying) in combination with a niche idea being displayed in said media.
I think the problem there is with the first half of that statement,

> Just because physics doesn't have a notion of identity

I inferred that the intended meaning was "Just because the field of physics has no notion of identity". Obviously in philosophical and sociological circles there is absolutely a concept of identity.
$1/mo, sendgrid
Server Certification Study Group
Um. Encapsulating data and operations is exactly what libraries do. It's kinda what they're for.
Curious - what made you decide MongoDB over PG/MySQL in the first place? Was it merely gut (as indicated below) or was it more of a "people say this is good, it fits our use case, so let's try it out"

> We switched from PostgreSQL to MySQL and couldn't be happier. I think the lesson for us was: go with what you know and master, and with what's easy to fix, rather than what people on hackernews tell you to use.

Thank you for this :)
A two player version of 2048
This is the new model for non-petty theft. Rather than target individual credit card holders, just target the watering holes -- which, like credit cards themselves (in the US) have near zero security.
Awesome overview. It's fairly easy to start with. Especially for 2D game. It compiles to JS as well fairly painlessly. Some difficulties occur when your start using oldschool Flash stuff such as "BitmapData" etc. Or fonts. But other than that it's pretty great.
Why applying for a job on LinkedIn can be dangerous
Moar like "artificial non-intelligence", you mean.

On the upside, the people who would lose their jobs to a robot that could actually climb up its own asshole would be REALLY shocked. :)
What do you use as a Dropbox alternative?
I think there's decent advice here for CERTAIN TYPES OF BUSINESSES. But this is not universal good advice for all businesses.

The business in question, in this story, is a grocery store. It's a business with lots of competition and little innovation, where you're selling exclusively to customers who live very close to you. Furthermore, the fictional business owner isn't interested in taking the risks needed to build a massive chain, he's looking to grow slowly and make small, steady profits. For this business, there's no need for brilliance or big risks, you just need hard workers who are going to execute decently day in, day out.

A tech startup (the interest of most people on HN) is pretty much the complete opposite situation. You need brilliant programmers to build an excellent product. If you're B2C, you need those excellent salespeople who are going to dream big and go after massive deals. If you're B2B, you need great growth hackers/biz dev/marketers who can creatively get your product in front of massive numbers of people for minimal cost. When you're trying to grow from nothing to ginormous in 3-5 years, you simply can't do it with the slow grinding approach, the only way is with risk and brilliance. That doesn't mean there won't be grinding, repetitive tasks along the way, there will be TONNES, and you need people who will execute on them (not the pure "idea guys" with zero ability to execute, who I agree are of little use), but you also need to be dreaming big and taking big risks. Always going after small wins just doesn't work for tech startups, you need to regularly go after the big wins.
All depends upon where you want to end up in life. For me I was getting married and knew I'd be having kids. So job stability was very important. Also got my graduate college degree, which at the time opened the doors to corporate dev jobs. Maybe it's not so necessary in smaller/startup places now, I don't know. So, I'm jsut a cog at a big corporation. It's not glamorous, but it pays the bills for my family.

On the side is when I do stuff I (kind of) want to do - I still need to make money to pay more bills (kids are expensive :-)), but at least it's a little different than my day-to-day 9to5 stuff.
This was not phrased as an experiment by pg. Go back and read the "Coming soon" post. It was phrased entirely as "this is the way things are going to be now" with the caveat that he could roll back the change if necessary. But just because you can undo something doesn't make it an experiment.

I feel like you're unfairly giving pg the benefit of the doubt and placing the blame on the people against this idea. When you tell people this is the way things are going to be, it's reasonable for them to get upset by that.
Exactly. Too many news organizations eschew investigative reporting and instead lazily settle for "presenting both sides." And what if there are more than two sides? Well two is enough. It'll do.

To even decide to report on an issue in the first place is to take a stand on its value. News organizations are doing the public a disservice in stopping there.
Consider how most users interact with a page. I personally click to highlight text, use my mouse wheel to set the page just so, and I type. A lot. And I'm a fast typer. And I hit backspace. A lot. Why should I lose all my work because I'm not a cursor focus savant, or someone who never types? Because if you're a typer, this affects you. This happened to me at my job, causing me to lose hours of search and fill-in information, information that is necessary for me to keep my job. And it loses a lot of productivity for a lot of other people as well. Learn to use [Alt]+[←]. I do it one-handed all day long. And if your needs are so specialized that you require a single-button solution, you should be able to get that by changing a setting from the default, and not forcing everyone else to live with the ejector seat button doubling as the turn-signal.
http://www.georgeoughttohelp.com