skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks - just thinking on the message handling front:

432 councils in UK, handling 22m households with avg 120 interactions per year : ~2bn transactions or 40m per council per year. As a shared infrastructure that's on the order of 40m per day. It's big - yes I could see how you could spend 100M usd, but that shared infrastructure approach is a big leap of trust - put it this way, Kent the council I live in is spending 40m on shared Citrix and shared firewalling for police, councils, fire etc in the area.

I just think we could do the next layer up a lot cheaper
Uber got popular in SF even when they only had towncars (which cost more than taxis) simply because their drivers would actually show up. They shouldn't be skimping on insurance, and that's not the only reason they exist.
Nature article with a lot more detail: http://www.nature.com/news/first-synthetic-yeast-chromosome-...
Care you explain how you arrived to that conclusion?
Teaching and acting (or, why I don't sell recorded programming classes)
No one is being banished or burned at the stake.

His suitability for a leadership position is openly questioned by employees in light of his publicly espoused views. Nothing more, nothing less.
I don't follow, what are you getting at?
I do know founders who've said as such. Wouldn't say it publicly, I'd imagine.
I don't know much about this, but is it possible that Mt Gox simply stole the bitcoin themselves and blamed it on hackers? I imagine the coin is supposed to be cryptographically protected, but I don't know where users stored their keys. Bitcoin is so new that we all seem to have bought the malleability loss claim, but it could have been a red herring.
Disclaimer: That is all speculation, I know nothing about this.
I'd like to see an easing of the "prohibited businesses"[0] restrictions for Bitcoin payments, since they aren't beholden to the credit networks for these transactions. I have a business in the works that tangentially falls under category #2 so I may not be able to use Stripe as it currently stands.

[0]: https://stripe.com/prohibited_businesses
The Vibration API
Drivers are not employees of Uber. Before you say "that's just a technicality" consider also that freelancers are not employees of 99designs.com, freelancer.com, or crowdspring.com - even though that's how they negotiate and get paid for work. The idea of a clearinghouse for matching freelance drivers and customers is something new.
Eric Schmidt was on their board.
The best and worst games for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4
> But as a company who employs these drivers, shouldn't at least part of the onus be on them to ensure that their drivers meet these requirements?

No, it is the job of law enforcement to enforce laws. Uber should fire drivers that are known to be breaking the law, sure, but requiring that they screen up-front for lawbreakers is the same as requiring drug testing or other such nonsense.
There's a lot that would need to be done. I don't think the answer is just "oh tell companies to hire more minorities/older people/{insertGroupHere}". Something needs to be done to change the perception of intelligence & ability in our country/world, and it probably starts on the individual/family-level. From the time we're born, we have these images crammed down our throats "people who look like this do this", and then many of us subconsciously internalize this and treat this as "the norm". We set our own expectations (internally), and then this gets reflected out externally.

I can only speak from my own perspective as black male in his 20s (so not the age problem described in the article), but it was the fact that I was raised to NOT buy into & instead be critical of stereotypes of "what black males are supposed to do" that I even allowed myself to believe that I could start learning C++ — when I was 10 years old.

Had I spent most of my time watching/INTERNALIZING what's on BET, the news, TV, I would probably feel like there's no chance for me in tech, and I wouldn't even consider it as a possibility — therefore never apply for the job, or apply to college for a CS degree, or subconsciously set myself up for failure.

Mind programming has subtle, but POWERFUL impact on the young developing mind. I'm realizing this all later and all I can say is "holy shit, I'm grateful. Thank you, parents. Bullet dodged."
We already have write access: Subliminal stimuli and it has been used for a while now !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli
"Its kind of like the argument for the minimum wage - conservatives would say its not needed because you can just choose not to work for a company that isn't offering enough money, but sometimes you don't really have an alternative."

Not a good analogy, because the full "conservative" (and libertarian) argument is that if you find yourself in such a situation, minimum wage laws produce a discontinuity in the labor market: if the current value of your labor is less than the minimum wage, you won't get a job at all.

Associate with this is the idea that it's better to have a job, any job ... the fate of the long term unemployed we're seeing right now as they lose general job skills is telling.

Completely related, if you're just starting out, and the value of your labor is not yet at the minimum wage, you never get into the job market in the first place. You never learn those implicit general jobs skills and discipline, like showing up to work on time. (OK, you just might find a place in the underground economy, but forcing people into that is very, very bad.)

It's the successful pulling up the ladder behind them ... something people like us rarely see (well, until we're 35-40 and unemployable for standard salaried programming positions). And therefore utterly evil.

Any way to bring this back to the general conversation?

First, the government does not have its thumbs on the scales: you will not go to jail for just trying to compete with Google,

And is it really that impossible to compete with Google in plenty of big places? Companies like Fastmail suggest it isn't (speaking from personal experience). That Duck Duck Go can even get some mind share is suggestive. What about Apple's mapping stuff?

There's also regression to the mean, which I sure see Google doing. I use them only for search and maps (punted Docs when they started going Google+ account name etc. crazy), and their search is steadily becoming less useful/harder to get what I want. I am a ringer in that I've been doing full text search stuff since the very early 90s, but....

So I suggest not making an entirely static analysis of this. Google today: hard to impossible ... to almost trivially easy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7467165). Google tomorrow? Probably better chances. Google in the next decade ... well, the way to bet is that at some point we'll be picking over its bones. Within my expected lifespan, at least.
Or typing
All opinions aside, I'm pretty sure Steve would have respected the dead.
Wonder how astroturfed this comment section is.
Is this the way we kiss our bosses "ego" now? Hay Jeff--since you are so concerned with the customer experience; vet
your resellers more carefully--especially the ones that have
dozens of complains about wrong orders, or counterfit goods?
Put away the flying toys, get the ego in check, and go back
to what made you a billionaire--selling the right product, at the right price. I know it's not glamorous, or stimulating anymore, but it's what the customers want.
There are a bunch of policemen stationed permanently at the street corner, day and night. The daily cost for this is 11000 Pounds, total cost so far is more than 6 Mil[1](video is in German). Is that usually done in the UK?

I don't know what this is, but it sure isn't subtle.

[1] http://www.tagesschau.de/videoblog/london_calling/londoncall...
Has this ever actually happened with an Uber/Lyft/etc driver that was involved in an accident? Or is this theoretical?
It sounds like you're a philosophical idealist. Have you read Berkeley? He argues that it's insane to believe in a 'material' world, since we can never experience that nor have evidence of it. What we experience are ideas.
Looks like the non-tablet iPhone/Android phone versions of Office Mobile have gone free to use as well, forgoing the previous requirement of an active Office 365 subscription:

http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/27/announcing-the-office-you...
The first transparent 3D-printed skull has been successfully implanted
From TFA:

"Working with funding from the Yale Provost’s office, Cowen and post doctoral researcher Brice Kuhl, now an assistant professor at New York University, showed six subjects 300 different “training” faces while undergoing fMRI scans. They used the data to create a sort of statistical library of how those brains responded to individual faces. They then showed the six subjects new sets of faces while they were undergoing scans. Taking that fMRI data alone, researchers used their statistical library to reconstruct the faces their subjects were viewing."

So yes, it will always output something like a face. It's more like they are using the FMRI to select among preset options. It's still potentially a great result, but we need more detail than this article provides.
The following is a half-formed thought, so feel free to pick it apart.

I think there is a class of companies that really do not require outside funding. They could very feasibly bootstrap (grow from cash flow). Often this would be a superior financial result for the founders, and possibly lifestyle.

However that assumes the founders know what they're doing -- have a good business model, and know how to execute it. Sometimes they don't. They need help -- advisors, compatriots, whatever.

If you want certain "elite" advisors to help you, the only way they're going to be interested is with some equity upside. Otherwise it's just not meaningful for them, either financially or in terms of "impact".

So my suggestion is that founders should ask themselves if they really need funding, or if they really need advising, or if they actually need both. If they need both, something like YC is probably a bargain.
>It's my understanding that it's explicitly against the merchant agreement with the big CC players to have different prices for different payment methods.

It was. Then there was a class action lawsuit against Visa and Mastercard brought on by Walmart, Target, Amazon, etc.

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

A part of the settlement that allows merchants to charge fees to customers paying via credit card in order to recoup swipe fees took effect on 27 January 2013. Debit cards and transactions in the ten states that prohibit credit-card surcharges will not be affected. Many large retailers, such as Wal-Mart and Target have opted not to impose surcharges.[6] In the event of a return, surcharges are refunded along with the purchase price of the merchandise.[7] The National Association of Convenience Stores, also known as the NACS, complained that this measure "merely make[s] retailers the collection agents for the banks."[8] The National Retail Federation said, "that card company fees are the problem and the surcharge story is a volume that belongs on the fiction aisles. The real threat to retailers and their customers continues to be price-fixed hidden fees that can only be cured by transparency and competition." [9]

However, the way that gas stations got around the rules at first was they were allowed to offer a "cash discount." So CC price was the "real" price and if you paid with cash you got a discount. Same thing in the end though.
Hi Patrick. I think you should either give some guidelines, or ask for explicit suggestions about it. Great move, by the way. Happy to buy you a coffee and chat about it next time I see you in the Mission.
Oh, look, the word "disrupt" (via "disruption") just got weaponized against the people who coined it. Good work, guys.
> Class-action lawsuits also enrich the lawyers mostly

Many companies love to use the public's negative sentiment against plaintiffs' lawyers to their favor, by invoking precisely the "class-action lawsuits also enrich the lawyers mostly" canard. This is a sleight of hand. The value of class-action suits is deterrence. Otherwise, it can be very profitable to steal a little bit of money or cause a little bit of harm to a large number of people. Look at it another way: if the alternative is the companies keeping the ill-gotten gains, is that better?
> This is such an unfair move

Which unfair move?

Google could have gone ahead and hire these people anyway. Nothing prevented them from doing so except their decision to not risk angering Jobs.
And honestly, you'd have trouble convincing many people that wages were kept all that low. What's the median salary of an engineer in the Valley? [1] would seem to indicate a starting range in the low 6-figures is common. I don't know if these things go to juries, but if it came down to that, I imagine that an engineer complaining of a low 6-figure salary with stock options will convince a jury that (s)he is really being hurt that much will be very tough.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/record-salaries-for-valley-pr...

Edited to fix grammar.
"You already were able to contact me, so sure, question me all you like over the phone or over Skype. For quality assurance purposes this phone call will be recorded"
Before the 'loss', their bank tried to cancel all contracts. It's more likely that Gox' accounts were frozen along with the deposit boxes (cold storage), due to an investigation. Maybe Gox is under a gag order. So they tried to find an explaination that would not violate that gag order.
SSDB: A fast on-disk NoSQL database that uses the Redis protocol
Almost certain of it, some places even tack on a fee for using a credit card instead of a debit card.

However, consumer protections for a debit card are nowhere near as good. e.g. in the UK at least, if you experience fraud you have to wait for your bank to refund your account, whereas you don't experience any loss with a credit card. As such I avoid using debit unless the merchant charges for credit.
What I'm mostly learning though this saga is that an uncomfortable number of SV executives are feckless weaklings in the face of a sociopath like Jobs.
Nope - illegal generally refers to violations of criminal laws.

Breaches of contractual obligations are civil matters. You don't go to jail, generally.
Although the general point about lawsuits stands, it's worth being aware that the McDonald's suit isn't actually a fantastic example of frivolous lawsuits. By the time the famous lawsuit came through there had been several hundred claims of coffee-induced injuries resulting in half a million dollars in payouts. The Liebeck case kicked off after McDonald's offered $800 on $10k of medical bills after paying out sizeable amounts of money to other people who were injured. There's still room to dispute the value of the suit, but it's not as simple as it's made out to be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restauran...
Agreed; I suspect our Bitcoin prohibited business list, once formalized, will be more relaxed.
Hi Nawitus. I completely understand that line of thinking, and it should have been especially true for us given that we'd been running for about 1 year and had $1m in sales at the point where we joined YC.

What I can tell you is that we thought about in the same way as bringing on a co-founder or superstar employee. The value of YC isn't measured in their investment, but rather the value they bring.

Even in terms of the boost to our valuation alone from the validation, beyond everything else, YC more than paid for itself. If you look at our growth graph there's also a sharp inflection that starts shortly after we joined the program. That could be unrelated, but it's my strong belief that it was the value of the program that helped us accelerate.
Can someone speculate as to why Jobs would have been opposed to this? The only thing I can come up with is that Jobs was trying to minimize the amount of times that "I know a guy at Google" was spoken in the halls of Apple.
Now I see what pg was talking about comment moderation. C'mon guys. Let's class it up.
Of course. These days though I don't tend to get much closer than something like Properties.load(InputStream). I really would have had to think about it.

I guess I've been stuck in webapps and NoSQL libraries for a while now.
Super Mario 3D World is 1080p (I took your 'REALLY HD' to mean you didn't realize Mario was already in HD), it's also the best co-op multi-player experience I've ever had:

http://www.yoyo.com/p/nintendo-super-mario-3d-world-934466
Unfortunately, Mt. Gox's accounting appears to be nonexistent. For example, they recently revealed that they found 200,000 of the missing bitcoin. I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone analyzing the blockchain had a clue that those particular 200,000 bitcoin were still under Mt. Gox control, let alone traced where any other bitcoin went.
It's a port of Paint.net 3.3.6 from .NET to Mono. Paint.net used to be MIT-licensed, and 3.3.6 was the last version that was released open-source.

Besides, the UI in Paint.net 4.0 has been rewritten to use WPF. That makes it essentially impossible to port to Mono.
But what is a Windows 8 PC?

Just because a PC is sold with Win8 (because prior versions aren't available) doesn't mean people are using it as such. They had to bring back "boot to desktop" as a configuration option, and 60% of win8 machines launch metro less than once a day (https://www.soluto.com/reports).
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You Can Now Send and Receive SMS Messages from Base
Ah, interesting. Well I look forward to seeing how it pans out. I feel for the people who lost coin. Hopefully we have learned how better to handle cryptocurrency in the future, even if it's learning how little to trust others with it. I'm rooting for decentralized electronic currency, so I hope the lessons learned make it stronger!
Way of a Warrant – How Google Responds to US Search Warrants
I think that it is cool for Microsoft to release Office 360 for OS X and iPad.

I do a lot of writing (I am pretty much addicted to writing books). I use my iPad for lots of casual writing using a good text editor and markdown files in Dropbox (target is leanpub.com). For some writing I like having Pages on both iOS and OS X with iCloud storage.

If Office 360 ends up being a compelling product for iPad and my MacBook Air, then the $99/year is a no-brainer decision.
I'm confused, has "pending comments" not been fully activated yet?
He might not have wanted engineers to carry knowledge of Apple's programs and projects to a competitor.
No one ever "needs" to add DRM. That is just an arbitrary business strategy among many possible strategies which may or may not actually work.
Dogecoin raises $40,000 to sponsor Nascar driver
I wonder if it is because of the new pending comments system that 15 comments in, no one has said, "why don't they just use PostgreSQL?" :-). Not that I am MySQL fanatic but I think it gets more hate on HN than it deserves. It has its quirks but is a good lightweight DB.

Funny enough I think all the hate for MySQL provides good documentation of what to watch out for.
Worked in a cube next to Brendan many years ago, back before the lizard was free from the yolk of AOL. A blue E and an inflatable Lizard were exchanged as pranks. I was recently out of college. Brendan was an approachable, smart, and talented engineer. I didn't work on Javascript, but learned a few things from him during my tenure nonetheless.

I know Mozilla and it's drive for openness, embracing of diversity, etc. So that may be why it is special. The CEO role is definitely a very visible role.

That said, I wonder. If we knew the beliefs of and the organizations donated to of those any of us happen to be working for at a given time, how would that impact our day to day lives? Say someone who was very much anti-H1B/immigration visas, should they not work for Microsoft or Facebook, both of which have leaders that are very much for changes to the visa system? If you are quite liberal in your beliefs and you then end up working for someone that is a member of the tea party?

I realize the role mozilla plays (and it's charter), I know of Brendan's donation (for which I disagree).

I'm trying to understand is this particular issue specific to this organization and individual or is it something that we might see become broader?
I don't know why people are saying that Mt. Gox may be under a gag order. They're based in Japan, so an American gag order seems like it's not applicable. And while the US did seize some millions of theirs from US banks, their bitcoin cold storage wallets were probably based in Japan, not the US, so there's no way the US could seize them. And even if they did seize them, there's no evidence at all suggesting that they could compel Mt. Gox to remain silent about it.

Mt. Gox absolutely could have stolen the bitcoin themselves. It's still one of the more likely scenarios.
It's great to see Office on iPad - hopefully it'll encourage Google to improve their terrible Drive app.

Our company moved entirely to Google Docs about 5 years ago. Being sent a Word file is like being handed a CD ROM - a brief moment for a 'Oh, one of those' mental gear change and a few minutes rummaging in the dead tech box for an external drive. Or in Office's case something that can reliably parse the file
Only if the incentives of the third party align this way, which is very unlikely as many merchants burned by PayPal/eBay can attest to.
UPDATE: iwanttogotocarnegiemellon.com rejected
At least three branches of my family are pre-revolution immigrants. Two are scots-irish and just have the surnames that still exist in Scotland (though maybe anglicized over there way back, I don't actually know).

One is French Huguenot, though,and it's not so much anglicized as just misspelled. It certainly would have marked them as French, but I wonder how much of it is just chalked up to poor literacy on all sides.
Perhaps because they were good engineers, and they would turn a profit for his competitor (Google). If you could make an important decision for your competitor, wouldn't you try to undermine them?
52% of voters, just a hair over 7 million or 1 in 5 Californians, voted in favor of Proposition 8.

Each of those people contributed to the moral travesty of that constitutional amendment. Are we to deny them all the right to a career in the name of moral freedoms? In this perfect world, would removing 1/5th of California's working force be a net benefit to society?

Perhaps instead of vilifying a few of them, we should focus our efforts on repealing the amendment and securing a more ideal future that everyone can prosper in.
Don't forget, by the way, that when Steve Jobs left Apple to found a new company in a line of business perilously close to Apple's he took a number of important Apple people with him, despite giving a misleading promise not to do so.