skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I see incompetent IT processes and a lack of mandated data retention policies.

Having worked in government for well over a decade now, I can tell you that this is undoubtedly the case. That is not to say all departments have poor practices, but on the whole there is no standardization and each organization does things differently.

I have worked in offices that have NO server archive and everyone relies on PST's, and others where there are server archives but they are limited to 500MB or something small and they just start deleting items by date.
[video] Primer on List Comprehensions in Python 
http://youtu.be/Ft3HS37hWpc
Outstanding execution could be smoother in terms of getting to the booking.

have you considered an I'm feeling lucky function?

Do you have an API that other developers or designers can extend?

Have you considered other verticals such as cruises and tours?

Hope it goes well guys love to hear from you what the conversion rate from users.

hutch
Thanks, is the project abandoned? It looks like there aren't any recent updates and the demo link is down.
Same here, this is closest to the good old Google Reader experience, with no bullshit added.
Seems like an application of Hanlon's Razor[1], with an important extension:

> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, unless that stupidity is adequately explained by malice.

I'd like to coin this extension Hanlon's Exception.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
Do you mean the blond college girl with a backpack? I wonder what being the face of spammy parked domains has meant for her.
You're just being pedantic. Adding the words "in existence" to my quotation would have changed nothing at all about my argument. I left it off precisely because it wasn't relevant to the point I was making, which was that you were attacking a very obvious straw man.
Presumably the optimal strategy would be to gradually lower your standards the further you go. It's easily proven that the optimal strategy for the second-to-last candidate is to select the candidate if the candidate is above average. So the algorithm as described in the article seems to be missing something.
But good performers today don't have a flat compensation model they have no downside risk and merely need to increase their assets under management.
"I don't know about others, but I don't want to live in a world where my only option to control my house, car, and life is to go to an Apple store."

Me either. Even so, I still believe Apple got the model right. If only we could live in a world where we have a healthy competitive ecosystem of Apple-like companies. Then you would have many options at hand to control your house, car, and life.
If billing rates were by volume of data transferred, just like every other utility, that would incentivize ISPs to maximize data flow. But as things stand they're not incentivized to increase bandwidth because they make the same money whether you check email once a week or stream Netflix 24/7. This seems obviously broken to me, but apparently most people can't stomach the idea of paying by volume, so we're stuck with the current system.
>I feel like we're living in a constant world of incompatible systems whose (nearly) sole purpose is to "own the market": VHS vs. Beta, GSM vs. CDMA, Canon vs. Nikon lenses, and so on.

It is almost always the case that a company desires a monopoly on its market - despite whatever thin endorsement of "strong competition" they espouse.
My understanding was that Maclemore et al actually challenged this model by hiring parts of a label to do the parts they themselves could not do and in that they ended up retaining more ownership.

...which makes it sound like they have a lot of business sense. Many don't.
Once again, WWII did not get us out of the depression, it was the changes in government spending and tax policy between 1946 to 1948. Roosevelt was a disaster just as much as Wilson and Hoover. Truman was overruled by Congress who cut spending and taxes when Truman wanted to keep it. Reconcile the war lovers with rationing that occurred.
I see Parked Domain Girl for the first time:)
Happy people are less likely to start risky ventures.
You are arguing hypothetical outcomes, I'm arguing applied force.

We are kind of talking past each other.
I already aknowledged Amazon has a fine IaaS in AWS, but that's not really what we were talking about. The cloud we were talking about is the SaaS part.

Apple doesn't do IaaS anyway (at all), so it makes no sense to compare offerings in this area with Apple's.

For the SaaS that Apple does, it has huge successes with iCloud and iTMS and the App Store.

We might find them klunky or whatever (compared to what? Google Play? Kindle's sync?), but if it was a third party company called iTunes that had the #1 music store in the U.S, it would be hailed as a huge success in itself. And for Apple it's just a byproduct, and coming from a company with no roots in the music business at all when it started it.

>a certainly deficient experience with devices owned by others with whom you may want to share an experience, Apple will always be second fiddle.

At least Apple has the "seamlessly between Apple devices" right. There are platforms that even between devices of that one platform the sharing experience is subpar.

But, as someone who works with Windows and Linux too, and has an iPhone and a cheap Android phone, I really don't see any platform that does this cross-platform sharing thing any better ("first fiddle").

How's sharing from Android to iOS or Windows Phone or PC any better?
Not sure how useful this is, seems like it would be pretty limiting without spending a significant amount of time customizing assets.

If your in the market for low-end art, there are offshore studios that produce decent stuff incredibly cheaply. $15-$25 hr range. Mid to high end stuff is more difficult and expensive to procure for indies since most really good video game artists have full time jobs at the larger studios and not much spare attention for freelance projects.

Ideally as an indie you want to partner with a really good well rounded artist who devotes their full time attention to the project, when that happens you get unstoppable teams like 2d boy and team meat.
I think this points to Apple's fundamental weakness: when they can't control the experience, their efforts are second-rate.

It's a weird binary behavior that's tied to the pre-internet days. You buy into Apple's ecosystem and you do Apple-y things and you'll have a world class experience, a 9 or 10 on a 10 point scale.

But as soon as you start interfacing with anything else, especially something messy like the Internet, and hold onto your pants because you have no idea what the experience is going to be like, but you can guarantee it won't be better than a 5 out of 10 at best.

As much as other companies might like to provide an Apple-like walled garden (and I'll completely agree that previous attempts by non-Apples have been 3 out of 10s at best), they fundamentally understand that there is a bigger world out there. It's much harder to interface with the rest of the world, it is messy, but you can bring some kind of sanity to it if you work at it. These companies work really hard to provide a 7 or 8 out of 10 experience while Apple provides a 5. And they're rewarded for it. They hit these perfectly reasonable experience levels in-spite of the underlying mess they have to deal with, and they manage to make viable businesses out of it. What's more remarkable to me is that despite Apple controlling 100% of the experience in the Apple ecosystem, they aren't a perfect 10.

I think this magnifies the flaws even more and makes them more damning and I think a surprising amount of it backfires. Otherwise Apple would absolutely dominate the market, but it doesn't.

Where Apple does talk to the outside world, it's an acknowledgment that it's simply cheaper to deliver content through proprietary end-to-end points over the Internet rather than build the infrastructure themselves. But it's such a begrudging acknowledgment and the result is a collective "meh" out of Apple. "It's not part of us, so why really try?" Make no mistake, if Apple could replace Internet connectivity with a global AppleTalk network to deliver music and videos to you and ensure no unclean non-Apple users weren't dirtying up the bandwidth, they would.

The goal of other companies then is to try to hit the feel of this kind of tight vertical integration that Apple has, but to do it across vendors, networks, software, etc...to do it in a non-integrated way. And you know what? It's not bad. It's not Apple-level, but you have to admit the Internet, the Web, etc. all that is pretty bad ass. These things that we take for granted are the result of a decidedly non-Apple, very open, approach that benefits people far more in the balance.

>Apple is second to last in that respect. Google and Amazon both understand the web a whole heck of a lot better than Apple. Only Samsung understands the web less than Apple.

Then again, Samsung and Apple are two of the largest companies in the world. So maybe they're doing something right.
Hey, companies are people too.
it seems likely that it is worth 1/3rd of a coffee, yes.
But you aren't an 'uninformed user' you've gone to the app section of settings and intentionally clicked "I want to install third party apps" and then intentionally clicked "Yes, I know this isn't a great idea".

So chances are, on the spectrum you are more hacker than uninformed user.
Much of the wealth of the first world came through war (and pestilence and slavery and famine), starting no later than 1492.
When I first became a manager at a large corporation, I often felt stressed out and alone. So a year into it, I created an informal "support group" of other new managers. We'd trade stories, tips, and beers.

This was nowhere near the pressure of founding a company, but I took that experience and created an informal support group of founders amongst my colleagues too. It didn't last unfortunately, but I later got into an accelerator and found the same support group.

No matter what the cause of your stress or depression, having a good support system is extremely helpful. It ranges from Mommy/Daddy groups to AA to even a single good friend.

Unfortunately for many people, it's very difficult to find and/or build a support system.

P.S. I vaguely recall seeing an organization (maybe a startup) listed on HN that basically helped people find someone to talk to. Anyone remember the name?
And in the same time, IRS managed to give taxpayer data to FBI. Of course some very specific taxpayers have been included in the data dump:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/irs-gave-fbi-1...
I'd be happy to answer any questions if you have any.
Ditto for LA.
I wanted to chime in here to whine about my founder problems (loneliness, destruction of personal relationships, total chaos in one's life, no time for oneself etc) and I realized that I can't even anonymously talk about this without feeling like a spoiled entitled brat. I feel that no matter how much I lose to this absurd path I've forced myself into, I still have no right to complain about it, otherwise I'm obviously not "founder material".

I think to myself "Well, I've certainly turned my life into a clusterfuck, but at least I'm not like some of these guys who went bankrupt, couldn't afford medical for their children or who died from overworking. Can't really complain, right?"

I guess I find it very hard to whine about my struggles and all the fuck-ups when it's self-imposed martyrdom. Nobody asked me to quit my cushy 6 figures 9 to 5. I was miserable at it, but doesn't mean I needed to do a startup instead.
On Parked Domain Girl

http://www.urlesque.com/2010/11/03/parked-domain-girl/

http://mind--blown.blogspot.ca/2012/05/fascinating-story-of-...
Phone numbers are an anachronism from the days of electromechanical phone exchanges[1]. These days we can name things more sensibly, so you can call Bob at example.com by just entering bob@example.com into your SIP client.

That SIP client (or a server it is connected to) will then look up the SRV record[2] for _sip._tcp.example.com, connect to the SIP server it specifies, and ask it to be put in touch with Bob.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strowger_switch

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record
Using a 3rd party doesn't absolve the first party of responsibility for customer experience. In the iTunes case, the experience was bad, and incongruous with the rest of the iOS experience, which is usually good. That's why I reach for my iPad instead of my Nexus 7 more often than not, because I don't have time to waste on Android bullshit (and anyway, usually the Android's battery is dead). But if I pay for a TV show and then can't watch it until 40 minutes later, that's a terrible experience and it put me off iTunes for TV shows, forever.
Its odd to imply that Apple iOS has a worse developer experience than Google. IMO, MS is far and away the best but if I had the choice of targeting Apple's 5 devices vs Android 1000, I'd choose Apple. I have not heard spectacular things about Android development, especially with regards to fragmentation that would lead me to believe that from a developer POV Google is better than Apple. Granted that this is only for mobile.

Doubling down on mobile, say what you want about the walled garden, but it seems in "developer" experience Apple also wins when you consider the size of their developer eco systems. The App Store simply makes more money and it still seems that the iPhone still gets preferential treatment.

In the end open vs. closed or single OEM vs multi OEM doesn't seem to matter.
It's madness no matter how you look at it: Ten years of war on the far side of the planet isn't major? Trillions in all-up costs isn't major? Risking comprehensive economic collapse by incurring the heaviest costs just as the ibankers went bonkers with derivatives isn't major? The wars and the derivatives bomb are why our growth prospects suck, not the lack of war. The authors starts with "The world just hasn’t had that much warfare lately, at least not by historical standards." What rock has he been living under?

On top of the economy-breaking expense, there hasn't been the usual technology upside from military spending: more surveillance, militarized policing, and ex-PMC cops aren't nearly as much fun as SDI spin-offs.
8) FileSearchEX for searching through source code files
I like the idea but in the last 5-6 years it feels the government is putting itself completely above the law. IRS-gate, Solyndra-gate, Benghazi-gate, ... It just doesn't stop: the Administration lies again and again but nobody get prosecuted for that.
Let's extend that even more, why should doctors have to put their patients' interests above their own? It should be your responsibility to educate yourself as to what procedures are good for you and what is necessary for your conditions.
Apparently this is the back story on Parked Domain Girl:

"The photographer is Dunstin Steller, and he snapped this photo of his little sister, Hannah, and tossed it onto his iStockPhoto portfolio. For a few cents, Demand Media scooped up the photo and was then licensed to use it throughout their web properties. Thus, every time a website goes dark, Demand Media scoops up the domain registration and parks it, with ads and links around this photo."

http://mind--blown.blogspot.com/2012/05/fascinating-story-of...
Maybe they were. . . or maybe they've figured out something others haven't. Some sort of shorting-type scheme, perhaps.

Normally I'm not so inclined toward conspiracist thinking, but considering all the different capers that have put Bitcoin in the news over the past couple years, in this particular case I'm inclined to make an exception.
Their resources are managed, it seems to me, to maximize the number of employees required.

I had to give them money once and they literally have different people to record a payment and another to look up your balance.

But they do give you the phone number that will get you to that other employee. You just go through the phone tree and you eventually get the person who can look up your balance.

Its the dumbest way to do things I've ever seen for an organization in the US.
> Those choices would be good if they actually delivered a better experience than Apple's vertical integration.

"Experience" is not the only axis of a successful strategy.
Does this mean Android apps, like NetQ[1] are essentially done?

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sporadicso...
> What a sad statement, there is no need for this corporate-drone talk.

I've always wondered if PR-types think that people "buy" stuff like this. It's somewhat expected from "old" companies but you would think a company like Netflix would be different.
It's not "blindingly obvious": Or, for one, for some, or for all?

And there are many more symbols undefined than just n; just read the document. E.g., there is k. Now what is k? "Blindingly obvious"? Nope.

The author actually did say a little about his x; not saying what k was was poor mathematical writing in any sense.

And there were many more symbols.

I'm talking about rock solidly, standard good mathematical writing and not "dogma".

You are refusing to acknowledge or learn a simple and elementary but important lesson in mathematical writing, and your excuses are not serious responses. You are just angry and fighting. As much as it irritates you, I'm fully correct, and my remarks are fully appropriate.

Yes, computer science and practical computing have a lot of difficulty in such writing lessons; as fields, in writing, computer science and practical computing have quality way, way below that of, say, math or physics although the document of the OP is not nearly the worst example. For the worst example, the competition is severe.

For your

"And remember, dogma is always wrong." sounds pretty dogmatic.

Your response deliberately attempts to be insulting, is not really responsive to anything I submitted, and is not serious, constructive, or appropriate, and I will not respond to you further.
So I have a little piece that I've written about this, it is woefully incomplete, but I'll post the abstract.

BEGIN TRANSMISSION----

From the Paratime Economics and Sociology Department, University of New Earth, 2332

Dept of War Studies, University of Mars

Investigation of countries at peace and at war: A trans-worldline study.

Status: Failure

Recommendation: Further study of evolution requested

There has been significant debate over the past n centuries as to whether war or peace is more successful at driving innovation and progress (however measured). Given the recent cataloging of trillions of new worldlines with the advent of our new transworldline sensing technology, we set out to search for the ideal ‘natural’ experiment: two world lines, one where a country was at war, and one where it was not. We initially found practically countless potential pairings, so with high hopes we entered the second phase of our research program. To our great dismay, as we began to filter through potential world lines for a situation where a single country was at war and not at war, we stumbled upon a serious problem--we could find no perfect control! Whenever one country switched from a state of war to another, so did some second country as well!

To make a long story short, despite having direct access to countless possible worldlines, we have been unsuccessful in answering our fundamental question. The state of war and the state of peace, while often considered duals, are in reality ahistorical names we give to the states of societies that come about by long, path dependent processes. We would attempt to account for the interaction effects between society and environment, however our colleagues working in Evolution and Transtemporal studies inform us that they remain decades, if not centuries away from having tools to answer such questions, and they have had a four century head start developing their tools.

We believe that these results would be of interest to researchers and policy makers across the multiverse.

END TRANSMISSION----

tl;dr You can’t possibly measure this.
> If only we could live in a world where we have a healthy competitive ecosystem of Apple-like companies.

That would require these companies to share interoperability specification. Something Apple tries mightily to not do.

All that being said, Apple definitely sets the gold standard on the user-experience axis, and the entire landscape is better for it.
One single bad experience which could have just as easily been caused by your ISP, or even by you (e.g. by using a DNS provider that interacts badly with CDN geolocation), turns you off forever from a service that otherwise acts better than its competitors? That's a rather extreme statement to make.

Besides, do you really think the competing services don't have the same potential for problems with whatever delivery network they're using?
Branching from the original topic a bit, given the human propensity to consume, growth is required in order to rise quality of living globally. You can't eat peace and love.

It's too far a bridge to ask 7 billion people to simultaneously stop desiring things as well - so again the only thing left is growth.
How about Civil Wars?
They won't get the particular contexts and situations. To have this conversation with a non-founder you'll be explaining a lot of jargon, background and cause-effect relationships.
Guilty of conspiracy to have willfully incompetent IT processes and policies for explicit purpose of plausible deniability? :)
We need forward thinking investors like pmarca to drop some of the VC cash on the W3C standards process. We have the most amount of innovations and investible companies when there are more open APIs. The image tag, the current implementation of which was first coded by pmarca, enabled tons of startups, the biggest of which are companies instagram, facebook, imgur, etc.

The one API that is languishing at the W3C that would help us immensely is the Contacts API. Right now your contacts is effectively owned by companies like Google (via Android), Facebook, and Apple (via iOS). Every other company that wants access to your address book for the purpose of a social experience, needs to go through those three gatekeepers 99% of the time.

The ideal gatekeeper of your contacts should be the browser. The term for them is "user agent", i.e. it acts as an agent on behalf of the user. Right now there are a lot of "skills" these user agents lack. Investing in giving them more skills creates more decentralization and debases the power of the giants we resent.
He was talking about "You’ll also be surprised how much you find other founders are willing to listen." specifically.
Thanks for the feedback, I'll add some screenshots.
Surprisingly this file is pretty simple. The learning curve for writing syntax files is definitely something though.
We could travel to new worlds in NASA's starship Enterprise
>One caveat is the board can’t engage regenerative braking when it’s fully charged. [...] I’m not sure why the board can’t just continue braking without the regen.

The power generated by braking has to go somewhere. If not to the battery, it would have to be shunted to a big resister array, and wind up as waste heat that might require cooling fins. This would add weight and cost.

I remember riding a metro car with regenerative braking that dumped the power to a resistive array on the roof that made a kind of buzzing noise when braking.
How is it that you know what GHash's interests are?

They could have short-term profit in mind, or else crippling bitcoin itself. There is plenty of room for them to have interests that are out of line with the rest of the bitcoin community.
Having a public API is about growing new services that can rely on your data.

Imagine if they had never had one, would flixter, etc have popped up?

A public API can save you money in the long run by offsetting the risk/reward of trying new things with the data and diversifying.
[Photo] U.S. B-2 stealth bomber suffers bird strike while landing at UK base