skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm on other side of this. While I understand the need to keep pension plans afloat, when my mother passed away in 2011 the value of her pension left to my brother and I was ~$60,000. This was split between the two of us.

While no small sum, the mortgage was not paid off and I have been paying it since. I have no idea if HP took out an insurance policy on her, but if they did it was most certainly WAY MORE than $60,000.

This shouldn't be a vehicle for profit in my opinion. Unfortunately, she only had an accidental death policy. So if her corporation had a general life insurance policy in the $400-500k range - as her heirs, we should be entitled to some of that money.

Yes, we as consumers/employees have to take responsibility for our choices. So some might argue it was her fault she wasn't covered well. I would disagree. There are a lot of companies that aren't honest about this practice. So, if the company has you well covered, if they are a good company, shouldn't they extend you the same courtesy and offer to let you buy in to the plan?

The point being, why are they only looking after their best interests? It's bullshit to say they are just keeping their pension plans afloat because of the payoff amounts.

There is an ethical dilemma because a lot of companies hide what they are doing. That and the certain return when the employee dies.

It should not be an investment vehicle, period. It is profiting from death. Of course you can have your own life insurance. Just because someone is my employer, shouldn't give them any right to take out insurance on me.
Oracle’s Deal Won’t Do Much for Its Cloud Computing Efforts
WOW! I never expected they would do it. Shame it's still Opera 24.
I've also seen this done with founders where the policy is used to buy out a founder's estate, as well as being used to cover the business risk presented by that founder's (or senior staff member's) death.
Licensing of libgmp does.
Am I the only one who thought the obvious thing to do if the company wanted to make this problem go away is to give the employee's family a reasonably cut?
It's not a gender issue, it's a U.S. bureaucracy issue. They're all little tinpot dictators who like making up rules on the spot - and U.S. bureaucracy design takes away many avenues of recourse, so they get away with it.

I've experienced them when immigrating to the U.S., at the DMV, when getting inspections for contractor work. The little $*(#@ get off on making you feel helpless.

Who picks on you seems to have to do with what vibe you give off. I did notice that both my partner and I attract a certain class of them, but thankfully we don't overlap. So by now, we know who gets to deal with which idiot.
It has a ton of useful features that never came back when they rewrote the browser using blink.
Finally A School You'll Want To Go To
Right. It's just distracting chefs, artists, ecologists, photographers, etc. Clearly these people neither have engineering talent nor could contribute in any other way to McCann's chosen causes.
>energy, food, water, health, education

The problem with those problems is that they are very hard. Much harder than starting a Yo.

It's a false choice. Even if the founders of Yo were working on important problems, those problems might not get solved, because they are very hard. The world is big enough to have people working on big problems and people working on Yo.
None of the above. After studying McCracken's Fortran book, and Weiss's Lisp 1.5 Primer, I was finally introduced to a real computer: a Honeywell H-200
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_200
where I coded in Fortran, Cobol and QueasyOdor (um, "EasyCoder"). That was in 1969 kids.

(Oh yeah - and get off my lawn.)
Picture me this, Jenkins: Capturing test failures easily
It's a bit disappointing that I have to sign up for an account, there doesn't appear to be a free-tier that is completely signup free (e.g. like tryruby.org, or a plethora of similar sites). I'm not denying them the opportunity to make money, but there is a user friction issue here to even take a peek.

I wonder if folks would be less cynical about this if they gave it a name other than 'the Wolfram Language' (how about 'Sym'?)
If the firm also took out a policy for the same amount and under the same conditions, paid for it themselves, but named a beneficiary of my choice, I'd be OK with this practice. Sure it doubles their premium costs (absent a quantity discount), but in my mind it would resolve any ethical issues since my heirs would also receive a benefit from my demise.
And, more importantly, enormous government restrictions on where it's legal to build anything other than single-family homes, even in big cities like Chicago:
http://danielkayhertz.com/2014/01/27/zoning-its-just-insane/
http://bikeportland.org/2014/04/23/maybe-this-is-why-you-can...
But I don't know many people who think that we need to spend all our time tackling the world's biggest problems.

It's hard to see what the point of such a thing would even be. Isn't the whole point of solving the world's problems that we'll have more time to waste on frivolous pursuits like the Yo app?
The photography of an individual can constitute harassment even in a public place - there is no implied consent involved. Even if it were, as you implied, perfectly legal in all cases then this in no way makes the act ethical. This is especially true when concerning a new technology which makes it trivially easy to perform. I'd expect if Glass, or some descendant of it, becomes more ubiquitous, then social guideline and laws would eventually prohibit it's use in certain situations. Would you, for example, be happy with someone recording you in a public restroom?

You're also repeatedly missing the argument I've already made twice in this thread with your second paragraph,
"Totalitarian"?

From the article:

"We need to think big, see the real problems that are out there and go solve them. For my part, I hope to stick by this philosophy and play my part."
How about if you want something done, do it yourself.
Hi Nikki

Consider one more roll of the dice, this time in the UK. We speak English and we have a postal delivery network.

Rather than chase the $$$ consider taking your idea to Oxfam - a British charity known for selling donated clothes. Your app will enable them to introduce a younger audience to the work they do. They also have people to pick up the phone, a marketing budget and that network of stores.

From a customer standpoint they really might be pleased to pay a premium to Oxfam if their clothes are going to a good home. It is a different 'doing good' proposition. Things that don't sell might as well go to the Oxfam shop as a donation - the app takes people half way there.

If not Oxfam then there are plenty of other charities that might be interested. You might not make money for the VCs of the valley but you will be able to make the thing work, perhaps to feed a few of those in The Global South as a spin-off benefit.

As far as acquiring new users, the idea of an 'Oxfam app' definitely has intrigue, people would do marketing for you by word of mouth. Plus they would 'excuse' themselves to get their next fashion fix.

Just to clarify, I think people should still get some money back, but with 10-25% or so going to Oxfam. Sure there would be postage to pay that might mean people are making pennies on outfits that cost pounds, but this would be psychologically okay if money is going to Oxfam.

You could also pimp the app to show the user/customer how many mouths they have fed through their trades.

This charitable outcome might also work well for those that have put money in your venture. To them they might not have earned $$$ but they will have done something for the greater good.

The UK market is small compared to the US but the geography is a lot tighter. Crack the UK with a partner such as Oxfam and then the other markets will follow, maybe with different partners. I should also say that charities do pay a living wage :-)

Regardless of what you do next, well done for giving it a go and I look forward to hearing about what you do next.
Google does indeed have customer support, for paid products. Very good support in my opinion, I've called them for Google Apps support and Adwords, they were very helpful and hold times were super short.
Ask HN: I Have No Idea How to Get to my Target Market
We perform searches to help people get the product they want for the price they want. People just have to submit a link to the product and the price they want to pay for it, we take care of the rest.

My issue is not a matter of who I am targeting but how to get to them. I am initially targeting shoe-buyers and electronics-buyers. These people usually don't need that product RIGHT AWAY but still want it. They generally experience a ton of frustration trying to find a good deal because there are simply too many websites to search through, and they must do this everyday to get the price they want. We want to solve this frustration and perform the searches for people over a pre-determined period of time. I just finished building it yesterday and though rough, it's ready to go.

So now the big question, how do I get to more of these users so I can ask them to try us out? Any and all suggestions/feedback would be greatly appreciated.

http://skanout.com/
You don't need to make your developers work a 24 hour cycle to do off hours maintenance. You plan ahead, give the team doing the update the day off before and give them a reasonable window to work with.

Maybe I'm wrong but if a deployment goes wrong at peak hours it's going to amount to a lot more lost money for the customer than it will if a deployment goes wrong at off hours. If you cost your customers money with an outage they're not going to care that you scheduled a developer-centric maintenance window.
Love Gandi. I can't say if their customer service is good, though, because I have yet to have any issues.
In college I didn't have a car so I walked/biked/bussed everywhere. Going to the market was still a hassle and I only had to buy for 1 person. I still had to go often because there was only so much I could bring home in one shot. Now, when I go to the market, I'm buying at least a week's worth of groceries for a family of five. I would need a pretty big bike trailer to get all those goods home. And since it would take quite a bit longer, I'd also probably need to add something to handle the frozen/refrigerated things. So, I bike for leisure and not for utility.
Technically, it should have filtered her out of the application process

Why do you say so? Surely that's just one signal among many, and not an absolute indicator of anything?
I think "disease" would be a decent description. "Virus" carries way too many implications about things like communicability and origination that clearly don't apply.

I'd say it's more like cancer: lots of stuff influences it, and you can make yourself a lot safer, but it's ultimately fairly random and anybody can fall victim to it. You can't catch it from other people, you can't get vaccinated against it, surviving it doesn't give you any immunity for the next time, better surgical and other medical techniques are making it more survivable.... One big difference, of course, is the age factor.
There is already a notably successful example of this strategy in the form of Thomas PM Barnett's http://www.wikistrat.com/ which has gotten some attention such as this article at New World Notes: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2005/10/the_second_life.html. Interesting projections include the ascent of Turkey as a middle east power player, which is something not predicted or emphasized by most traditional intelligence agencies including the CIA.
Also temporarily assuming his premise, I disagree with your conclusion that this article itself becomes a waste of time: if he convinces a couple people to work on those things he finds important by way of having written and published this article then it may be more beneficial by the stated metric of doing good for the world than directly working on those important problems. I'd instead try to question the value of the post (again, assuming the premise, so in the eyes of the author) by asking this question: "if someone actually finds Yo worthwhile enough of their time to work on, maybe they aren't the kind of person who would actually come up with useful solutions to actually important problems anyway". Then again, the cost of writing this article is so low that even if the potential reward has very low probability, it has sufficient value (the productive output of another individual working on important problems) that it is probably still worthwhile (again, if you agree with the basic premise).
Also, this attitude is an example of the well-debunked fallacy that time and effort are fungible and/or exchangeable goods (i.e. that the creators of Yo could just as easily have been solving more difficult problems instead).
Are you being sarcastic? Although it might not be well-known, Google actually does have excellent customer service. Google Places, Google AdWords and Google Analytics all have excellent customer support. My only complaint is that Google Analytics isn't as clearly listed if you're not an AdWords user.
The site/page is designed for people who clearly understand retargeting and segmentation. So you're likely targeting "switchers" -- and I'm not sure your messaging is designed to address the inertia of staying with an existing solution. There's also very little about your company and team... stuff that I believe matters to many.
Is meditation the perfect antidote to our tech-filled lives?
Why do people insist on linking to slideshare?
http://files.meetup.com/1455470/Why%20C%2B%2B%20Sails%20When...
auto y = std::move(x);

Is this good code? How do you review it? What's the type of y? Usually I would ask for at least one type statement per line. For example this seems ok to me, because the type is on the left.

auto* x = new Foo();

But this doesn't seem ok:

auto y = std::move(x);
I really like Deis so far. Can't wait for the Docker / CoreOS / Deis ecosystem to become more mature.
>> You rarely hear the raw stories of startups that persevered but ultimately failed — the emotional roller coaster of the founders, and why their startups didn’t work out.

I feel like I've read this sentence, or a version of it, so many times that it self-refutes. You hear plenty about people who failed. Not as often as the next big thing (since no one puts in the effort to send out press releases about how their failure happened - although that actually might be an interesting strategy for figuring out a next step if the post-mortem is honest enough), but it feels like once a week or so a post like this hits the front of HN.
What would drive me insane is being exposed to hundreds of multi-ton hunks of steel zooming around that could squash me like a bug if either I or they make a tiny mistake.

If there were zero cars, there would be more injuries, but they'd be less serious.

If there were zero cyclists, there'd be fewer injuries, and they'd be less serious. (Talking about crowded city traffic, not high speeds.)

When there are cars, and enough cyclists to cause problems, there are more injuries, and they're more serious. Cars and fleshbags--I mean, bikes--do not mix.
I don't think new users can sign up for Postini, but they're still supporting it.
Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7933870, which has a large discussion going already.
Exactly! Heroku should be building that 24/7 operation so I don't have to. Isn't that the whole point of PaaS?
Macs come with Python (and Idle is included), Ruby, PHP, Perl, BASH, Apache web server, git, Vim, Emacs, Pico, Nano etc and XCode with clang for C/C++/Objective C/Objective C++ is a free download (used to ship on OS DVD but OS is no longer shipped on physical media).

Java used to be bundled too out of the box, but Apple has deprecated their JVM. Of course Oracle has up to date JDK for OS X now.

Really getting compilers and dev tools for Unix OSes is trivially easy. Almost everything is free if not open source.
If I were designing such a system, I imagine that I'd only apply it in a certain throttle range that could be described as "cruise" or so, and disable it near full throttle, maybe with a bit of additional input that sees if you're currently adding throttle and takes that as "I don't want to stop right now, really". I have no clue if that's how they really build it....
Heroku support options have always worked to shelter their employees from customers and as has been pointed out, despite the steep decline in costs, their prices have not changed. It's a shame because they were a trendsetter, but they are quickly being surpassed by players like DO, Linode and Poppup.
Strange as it might sound, I'm rather envious of Nikki.

Although the business didn't work out, to have gained so much life experience at such a young age is incredible.
It looks like it's possible with a Dokku plugin (https://github.com/statianzo/dokku-supervisord). But agreed, definitely basic - but I think it has a ton of potential.
Accounting seems to something that is easy to offshore. Two companies I've worked at moved the low level accounting tasks to India and Macao respectively. Much of it is mechanical in nature and once the grunt work is done you can have someone local crosscheck it if needed.
Yes, because you're on HN, where a lot of startup founders hang out. Statistically, there will be a lot of failed startup founders in HN.

However, you won't hear about those guys in Forbes Magazine, on the evening news, or in your business school classes.
I learned FOCAL on a PDP-8/L, the first computer I'd ever seen that didn't fill a basement. Fun little language, where arrays were undeclared and sparse. I think every array element you wrote to probably created a symbol table entry. Sure did take a long time to load FOCAL's paper tape on an ASR/33. Maybe a load would fail 20% of the time and you'd have to reload. Ah, the glory days.
When I lived in San Diego, my route for my bike commute to work included Interstate 5[0], because bikes can legally take the interstate shoulder in California where there's no practical alternative route. Y'all handling that edge case?

[0] Here: https://www.google.com/maps/@32.886728,-117.225045,3a,25.3y,... (note the bottom of the Bike Route sign says 'use I-5 shoulder')
Check out http://www.webhook.com. It's not launched yet, but I've been playing with it as an alpha tester for a few months. It's pretty cool.
I really like where the online storage space is going but why don't they offer support for standard transfer protocols? Things like ftp, sftp, rsync, etc. I don't want to install a custom client and uploading via a web browser is tedious.
> [...] "energy, food, water, health, education" [...]

I guess 'food' stands for 'poverty', in this list. Seriously though, does anyone believe that these problems can be solved by an 'app'?
It's not a choice between DataMapper and Sequel, they are not comparable. Anyway, I know it's not maintained anymore, that's why I suggested forking it.
> People who commute 32 miles one way should get a new job, a new place to live, or work from home.

If finding the perfect job were that easy, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Do you even live on this planet?
Is that true? I'm not being sarcastic -- I just have always generally assumed that maintenance was better performed "off-hours".

Also, 1pm and 1am aren't the only options. 8am EDT would have been within the work day but still avoided peak usage in the US.
"Do you take Bitcoin or Dogecoin?

Not through Kickstarter & Amazon Payments (which does the monetary side of Kickstarter). That's just how it is in 2014, funding a film with the platform available to us. If you check out our website (http://coinedmovie.com), we can be tipped using cryptocurrencies, but those are not Kickstarter pledges, and thus they do not give you Kickstarter rewards. We are fully committed to the Kickstarter platform and process, and that means pledging using fiat currency. Honestly, we'd love to see Kickstarter begin accepting cryptocurrency as a payment method, so maybe you can help us demonstrate that there's a need for that."

Presumably because the few cryptocurrency crowdsourcing websites have way too few users to raise the $72,000 they want. Also, I imagine there are plenty of people who don't have bitcoins but might still be interested in this movie. Maybe they want to see a documentary like this before they decide whether to take the plunge.
I'm amazed that Google did not buy godaddy when it was purchased by private equity.
"You can't catch it from other people,"

You might catch memes (drunk driving, reckless driving, street racing) that significantly increase the likelihood that you suffer from it. Still not quite the same thing, of course.

"you can't get vaccinated against it"

The opposite memes from the above would seem to serve a role not too far from inoculation.

"surviving it doesn't give you any immunity for the next time"

Except to the degree that it changes your behavior.

All of that said, I agree. "Disease" is a much better term.
Maybe, Chris, me old mucker, you meant well in this article. You wanted to point out that there are some real, hard, difficult, real-life problems, things that affect people in large numbers, and that it would be great if people worked on those.

I would agree with that sentiment. A million more chat apps, a million more web frameworks, a million more crappy-bird game clones, twatter, farcebook, none of those solve real-life hard problems.

The difficult part then, is how to make solving those problems attractive. Money? Fame? Something else? A good feeling in the stomach and soul, knowing you have contributed to helping? That is the harder part.
People are complicated, their motivations often less so, but hidden away beneath complications and layers of deceit, so as to often obscure them.
8AM EDT is 5AM PDT, which is where web tech can be found in the United States.

I'm sure you can find engineers willing to work garbage-man hours, but it's gonna cost you.
But the actuaries at the insurance company price that added risk into the premiums.

I can see there being a big difference in death rates between, say, an Alaskan crab fishing operation and a suburban CPA firm, but 'job' is one of the questions that's asked by life insurers so that's already accounted for.

How would a white collar office employer legally engineer a higher death rate for their people than an equivalent company down the street? Providing only fries and burgers in the canteen? Relocating to an office block near a chemical waste plant? Nothing really seems feasible or effective enough to make a measurable difference to the performance of the investment scheme. The added investment return bought by shortening the lives of some percentage of staff by a few years would be just noise compared to the tax savings this vehicle provides.
I suppose maybe incremental progress is the way autonomous driving will happen, so maybe you are right. And, all progress is progress and it is good.

At the same time, I simply don't see much benefit and substantial risk in the system as presented. It works on one kind of car in one state. It only works under certain conditions. And it doesn't really do that much. Oh... and it seems a bit risky. I do understand the need to raise capital though, so if they sell some of these and it funds future development, great! I won't be buying one but hopefully someone does.

Incidentally, I saw a device similar to the "brick" for sale in a truck-stop once. It was an adjustable pole that pushed down on the gas pedal and locked into place so the truck driver didn't have to use his foot (big trucks don't have cruise control I guess?). It seemed a little iffy to me to and I can't believe it would be legal.
Mocking out client HTTP requests with Go