skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I bet you could detect a lot of candy buyers through their patterns of convenience store purchases. There's also candy stores, fast food, and restaurants that are known for rich food. Machine learning could probably figure out a lot if trained on the confirmed habits of other people whose purchase records are available. You could do customer surveys to get the data, or put what you want to know into the intake form.

What I don't buy is that people's habits will generally predict their health situation. I think this is a report on a press release of what some medical business association imagines that the person that they're hoping to recruit from somewhere will be able to do. I think the benefits will end up far lower than the costs.
How are hospitals incentivized to prevent disease? I thought it would be the insurance companies who would do this, but they wouldn't be allowed to as it would also let them prescreen customers. Perhaps it could be insurance companies who pay hospitals for being good with disease prevention? There's an interesting interaction there.
There's a lot of demand for 3x. I have been working on this for 18 months off and on ... I'll look into 3x very soon.
But when you start your argument off with a tautology, there is no way anyone can possibly disprove you in a reasonable way.

You get to define what you mean by "smart", but others get to reject it.
I hate and ignore those apps which require registration w.o. displaying the main page. Quora is another example to this.
You're right, perhaps...

3 and 2 is 5

7 and 4 is 11

2 seven's are 14

7 eight's are 56

6 by 6 is 36

to get rid of mathy words "plus" and "times".
+1.

The parent talked about fighting evil but the vast majority of people who work in industries like health aren'e evil - they're merely acting in their own self-interest within a system/industry that has evolved, over time, to exploit the vulnerable.
It's legit. The New York Times is people too ;)
Glad to see this is still making progress!

I've actually toyed with the idea of building an indie game by starting with the HTML5 FreeCiv UI and commissioning some professional graphics.
Opening that door must do abysmal things to the plane's drag coefficient.
Money isnt the only motivator. Many doctors genuinely care about health and their patients. Plus, prevention can be a premium add on.
> "Glyphosate is one of the safest pesticides on the market"

Also, its not a pesticide (pesticides kill pests) but a herbicide (herbicides kill weeds).
My guess is an upvote collusion algorithm got tripped somehow. The post is obviously being penalized for some reason.
Why Aaron Swartz was right
Potentially could make assumptions about establishment and value.. $2 at gas station probably isnt gas. etc. Hard to do though.
Oh, I get it now. Yup, I went overboard and then edited it back.

These things always suck so badly that I don't think I've ever gotten a good answer out of one. This, astonishingly, gave me two right off the bat. But yes, the bar could hardly be lower.
to summarize: your argument conflicts with observed reality, but you're nonetheless doubling down on it

find a case, even one, where there has been a significant penalty for incorrectly issuing a dmca request
The article, which presumably was written by the authors on its byline rather than by the NSA, says that. The actual config file, linked from the article, at http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/xkeyscorerules100.txt says:

/*
These variables define terms and websites relating to the TAILs (The Amnesic
Incognito Live System) software program, a comsec mechanism advocated by
extremists on extremist forums.
*/

Linux Journal is listed there, as a ‘website relating to TAILS’, not as an ‘extremist forum’.

Journalists gotta journalize.
Thanks! I'm glad you like it. :)
I know you're probably pissed off but HN is a free service and they have no duty to you. Having said that, mods are usually upfront about things like this.
Yes, you can stack short exposures, but long exposures are better in astrophotography (as a single 10 second exposure has a higher signal-to-noise ratio than 10x 1s exposures). If you take it to the extreme, it's very difficult to differentiate between the signal and the noise if your exposures are really short, which makes astrophotography in cities without a tracking quite mount difficult.
I work in the same building as this kid. Hes a really smart kid but I don't understand some of the things he says in this series of tweets and I think he's full of shit. Would love to hear other opinions
Is it 'full stack' if the frontend is written in JavaScript?
Considering that XKeyscore was designed to slurp all the things, all the time, this code actually just looks like a very small, tor-specific subset of simple tagging rules.

One would assume that those tags can be used to later analyse the data to pluck out things like "find users from syria who visited tor/tails websites and is related to xyz".
The HN moderators have been very transparent about things like this. I expect you'll get an honest answer before long, without any need to lobby for one.
We started on this one a couple of weeks ago, a few days after ISIS took Mosul, and it became clear that this was going to become an ongoing story.

The main way we (in Graphics) have been trying to keep up with the crisis is through this frequently updated stack of maps and charts:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/12/world/middleea...

... so, this piece is intended to contrast with the stack, and be a bit larger in scope, a bit less news-item-y, and a bit of a deeper dive into the rich background of the situation.
"What is the dollar to yen conversion rate?"
> Sorry, I don't know.

"Where is O'Hare?"
> Sorry, I don't know.

"What time is it in Japan?"
> Sorry, I don't know.

Needs a little work...
This is an MMO, it requires registration, but we display information, screenshots and video about the game on the main page. This link is also the guest view, which lets you see inside one of the casinos live without needing to be logged in.
They should force sales and claims to be the same person. Problem solved. Right now, its good cop/ bad cop. Insurance only works in this framework if you have a lawyer to advocate for you...otherwises its endless dark-pattern fighting. Its truly atrocious.
That's an @dwtkns special. Mike Bostock helped with getting a D3 Rotated Transverse Mercator projection exactly aligned with our particular stitched-together crop of Landsat photos — so a lot of the geographic stuff in the graphic (the label placement, the city outlines, and the locator map) are powered by geographic coordinates instead of pixel positions. The "X Miles to Baghdad" works in the same fashion. Makes it way easier to place / resize / redraw things for all of the different widths this has to render at.

Edit:

Because this is a programming site, after all — let's share Mike's projection:

// φ is the central meridian (e.g., 45° for UTM Zone 38)
// θ is the screen rotation
function rotatedTransverseMercator(φ, θ) {
var π = Math.PI,
cosθ = Math.cos(θ = -(90 + θ) / 180 * π),
sinθ = Math.sin(θ);

function raw(λ, φ) {
var x = λ,
y = Math.log(Math.tan(π / 4 + φ / 2));
return [
x * cosθ - y * sinθ,
x * sinθ + y * cosθ
];
}

raw.invert = function(x, y) {
return [
x * cosθ + y * sinθ,
2 * Math.atan(Math.exp(y * cosθ - x * sinθ)) - π / 2
];
};

var rotate = [-φ, 0, 90],
rotation = d3.geo.rotation(rotate),
projection = d3.geo.projection(raw).rotate(rotate),
center = projection.center;

projection.center = function(_) {
return _
? center(rotation(_))
: ((_ = center()), rotation.invert(_));
};

delete projection.rotate;
return projection;
}
> Hold on folks, it's now #181. It seems as though some form of exponential decay has been enabled by moderators.

Time-based exponential decay is the norm. Per the FAQ [1]:

How are stories ranked?

On the front page, by points divided by a power of the time since they were submitted.

Also, from the guidelines [2]:

Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm noticing some incorrect pronunciations here searching Polish names. At least one Englishy 'W' and some that sound lot more bizarre than they should due to recording issues. Any way to flag these?
To the point on upvote collusion, I think the mods really need to rethink things a bit. I utilize HN on a daily basis and check it periodically throughout the day. If I see a post of a friend's site, I upvote it. The notion of being flagged because friends or acquaintances familiar with your startup being happy for you is by no means a reason to degrade a post.

What the OPs are really saying is they'll let it slide for their friends and network, but not for those they're unfamiliar with. This is outright unacceptable behavior and I think methods of accountability should be added. If a startup didn't have friends, fans, and followers, than what do they have guys? Nothing. And I'll be damned if I don't work for an awesome startup doing awesome things that earned it's spot on the front page. It's a shame.
I'll second the motion for Moom. Great app, but I'm really glad to see some viable OSS solutions in this space. Environment hacking FTW.

I'll also mention a feature I adore from FlexiGlass[1]: the ability to map <modifier>-<1/2/3 finger move> to move the window under the mouse. For example, I use <option>-<2 finger move> for this mapping. No mouse click & hold required, and the entire window is the "hit zone". FlexiGlass can also resize similarly, but I tend to just use my Moom bindings to snap windows where I want them.

I find this to be incredibly pleasant to use for window moves because it's a very immediate experience, more like arranging paper on your desk. Even better, the window being moved doesn't have to be in the frontmost application. This makes it even faster to move background windows. The usual window movement via titlebar or window snapping app requires the moved window be frontmost/focused, so there's a switching back and forth required. Between the giant, whole window, hit area and less focus switching, FlexiGlass' approach is a huge win IMO. I still feel a bit self-conscious about having this app installed for one feature, but it's really that good.

[1] http://nulana.com/flexiglass/
Yeah, when the lists are sorted, you need the intuition that you can merge two sorted lists in less than n * log n time. Like you say, the best you can do for merging several sorted lists is (sum of lengths) * log(# of lists).
While I understand this, we had a direct comparable front page item I mentioned that goes entirely against the decay. This is a case of accelerated decay enforced by an OP IMO.
Wish more people knew this. A lot of professionals on here might personally have a stellar health insurance plan through their employer that covers almost anything no questions asked, but those same big insurers will administer cut-rate plans to the majority of plan-holders and deny payment at the drop of a hat, or pick and choose what necessary care / medications they will / won't pay, often after the fact, seemingly arbitrarily or if submitted paperwork isn't flawless.

It's a pretty good racket really; provide quality, hassle-free coverage to the high income, professional class, or anyone else that might have any say or sway or influence in government, and then for the working class majority refuse to ever pay out more per person than you are payed. That way you can cost-save like crazy and make obscene profits, but no one that matters cares and based on their experience it just looks like belly-aching and blowing things out of proportion.
Surgery can be used (as mentioned above) as a last resort to relieve persistent vertigo and dizziness, but it's very risky in terms of preserving remaining hearing, can cause total deafness.
Cool idea, but I immediately left when I saw the only background process option was DelayedJob. With greatly advanced options like Resque and Sidekiq, I fail to see a need for DJ personally.
One of the absolute worst attributes of smart people is their willingness to argue over the semantics of a word rather than simply accept the overall premise being communicated by the other person.
Show HN: The Chris Uphues Sticker Page 3000 (iOS app)
What are you trying to achieve? How is this useful?
Show HN: PM2 a process manager from the future
I'd love to see a page that just had the "What is $STARTUP_NAME" responses for all the startups. Some way to easily browse and discover. A grid of logos and names really doesn't allow me to anything other than jump around randomly.
Porting Linux To The Apple Macintosh (1999)
I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed for an answer.
Would you consider making Show HN posts text only? That way the submitter provides background info / context, why they made the service, what they hope to do with it, etc. I think requiring text-only for Show HN will help minimize people spamming their own links and more about people contributing the experience building their Show HN item.

Thoughts?
By not being exclusive?
I've had a ton of success with Slate, FWIW.
There is too much art, because former amateurs now have the tools to make something that's good enough to pass within their chosen splinter of culture. And give it away free. http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthe... Artists are now directly competing with their fans.

Or, more directly: I have a disk with literally terabytes of media on it. It is still more convenient for me to find stuff on YouTube and play it from there.
One Degree - Find a Photographer
This was not a prediction,its them showing you what the elite had in store for the people.
>'I take contention with your first sentence as if you find a good enough mechanic, you'll be able to ask them to see what their cost is with parts.'

Sure.

I think we're talking about totally different things.

The question isn't whether you can get one mechanic to share with you or even drive/call around and get dozens to share. It's how to get large numbers of them from all over to share continuously in some hands-off fashion so that you can present recent, accurate data to a site user regardless of their location, year, make and model without loads of legwork.

Obviously, narrowing the scope could help with that.

>'You can easily look up the cost estimates for a lot of stuff like this...'

Again, the issue isn't how to fact-check an estimate or haggle for a deal as an individual with a car or two. It's how build a service out of it in a way that scales for large numbers of people and all manner of vehicles - in the US that's 200-300 models per year.

That implies automation and building any sort of business from it implies using legitimate, reliable, legal sources.
especially through youtube and the gratis availability of so much existing music you never heard of. just listening through the stuff created between 2000-2010 will take years. and then youtube carries all the older stuff.

add pandora, spotify, etc. and you don't need to purchase music, at all, anymore.
still, logic is simply a system of thought, it's philosophy, nothing more (which is why Mathematics is considered a branch of philosophy).

So the idea that logic isn't reality is a completely valid idea both because logic is simply a system of thought, and because logic cannot reasonably take into account perspective.

you can reason about perspective, but reasoning by itself is not enough for logic, logic dicatates that you reason in a specific manner, and sometimes it's better to reason in other manners.
I'm not affiliated with these guys, but they're a Capitol Hill startup that's reasonably well known: http://hark.com/
So is Indiana University.

They use Shibboleth as an intermediary authenticator across their data servers. Saying something regarding Shibboleth means you get someone who knows 4 languages (at least). And usually, when that layer fails, you NEED someone from the data center.

Last time that happened, the rack was on fire...

https://kb.iu.edu/d/bdag
http://shibboleth.net/about/index.html
This actually worked really well for me for factual information, for example, I asked "When was the World Trade Center Built?" and it gave me the correct date. For a lot of factual stuff, it worked well.

There are some catches with word similarities, for example, "What is the lifespan of a turtle?" worked fine, but "How long can a turtle live?" and various re-phrasings result in very different answers, most of them correct within the context of the content they were scraped from, but some resulted in no answers at all.

Separately, the system doesn't handle preposterous questions very well, like "Who won the World Cup in 2009?" it says Italy won it, but I think it was some other thing referred to as a World Cup.

There are a lot of questions on Quora about personal experience like what it's like to have a family member die of cancer or what it was like to be in the WTC during the 9/11 attacks, and questions about these kinds of experience return nothing for the most part, despite being available via other resources (it's not all locked into Quora).

Very great first go, I'm really interested in seeing how this progresses. Like you say, if you could scrape a lot more data, this would produce a very interesting spectrum of information.

It'd probably be good to scrape some of the "How to" sites too, I asked "How does a gasoline engine work?" and the responses were... funny? :)
Where's the button to compile .pas modules though ?

bootstrap === csszengarden 2.0
On the space of all valid questions, there are many it can't answer. Judging from my logs, it's still doing pretty well on most questions. Even though people are trying hard to trick it with impossible questions.

Strong AI is not there just yet; this is but a rough implementation of a fairly simple algorithm: http://www.sphere-engineering.com/blog/quickanswers-io-a-new...
At my job, the lack of high reliability/availability options for Redis was why we chose DelayedJob. This may have changed since we made that decision, but at the time there was no consensus on a solution in the Redis community.
What is the difference to Secret?
By my manual count, 6 of the 16 comments in the discussion are by you and you are also the person who submitted the piece. I have tried to tell others this and people think I am being a bitch when I do so, but commenting too much in your own submission seems to not be a good idea.

I wrote about my own experience/observations here:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/so-you-made-...

Can't be bothered to read it? The main take away is: Submit your piece, allow yourself between one and three GOOD comments, then stfu and let other people talk about your thingamajig.
Show HN: Persian poem illustrator (weekend project)
Also isn't CyanogenMod in Pioneer Square? Or is it too big to count as a startup?
I'm with Zen, but if I wasn't I'd be with A&A. They are the only two ISPs in the UK worth spit.
> What the OPs are really saying is they'll let it slide for their friends and network, but not others.

OP? Usually, when I've seen that in a forum, it means "Original Poster", the submitter of the post to which the comment thread is attached -- but clearly that's not what you mean here. Do you mean the mods?

And, no, the voting ring detector is, from everything that has been said about it, algorithmic, so its just as wrong for anyones "friends and network" as for anyone else's.

> This is outright unacceptable behavior and I think methods of accountability should be added.

I'm sure if you ask nicely, YC will refund 100% of the HN membership fee you paid if you are unsatisfied.

> If a startup didn't have friends, fans, and followers, than what do they have guys?

The idea of HN is that things should be promoted in visibility based on the interest to the community at large based on the content, not based on collusion of groups to promote them. Hence the voting ring detector. There's plenty of venues for promotion that don't work that way, but I don't see why anyone (other than YC) is entitled to demand that HN change.
I see a lot of people asking about how they get the data. One way is through huge data brokers that buy and sell data from retailers, merchants etc. One big company that has a huge trove of customer purchase information is Acxiom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acxiom
It probably would have been a lot smarter to post this somewhere inside the continental US.
I agree that it is strange that we always provide the written form of a name although you cannot unambiguously determine its pronunciation from it (classical take on this: http://youtu.be/tyQvjKqXA0Y#t=0m19). Still, it sounds a bit over the top to have a service dedicated to the purpose of giving links to pronunciations of names.

I just provide the IPA for my name on my website, based on the unrealistic assumption that people who need to will read it.
I really resonate with your first paragraph.

I also think it's ok to look back and believe you made the best decision you could have given the information, and that you simply got it wrong (and that it's ok and understandable). And that while you may have gotten it wrong, going another route still wouldn't have necessarily been the best decision due to risks vs rewards.
People just won't pay for it. I pay £25/mo for Zen (A&A offer a similar plan for the same price), but TalkTalk and Virgin are a third of the price. For a third of the service, but SHEER CHEAPNESS is actually a marketing point.
More likely, doctors are very averse to lawsuits, and would sooner provide care to one patient at a loss than defend against a lawsuit, especially when it doesn't seem like a bluff because you seem like someone who could afford it (not typical btw).
Pronounced "author of Flow"
I think recommending Python 3 would be good in this tutorial. Since the people that read this are probably starting a new project and both recommended frameworks support it.
Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad to hear it sparked a Wikipedia quest for you...

The idea here was to try and find some sort of larger set piece graphic we could bring to bear on the crisis in Iraq — and after a couple of days of staring at lots of maps of the desert, it struck me that:

1. The Euphrates is both very long, and very straight for its length. Most rivers would have zig-zagged in such a way that you couldn't do a linear scroll.

2. Visually, the river against the desert is extremely striking, and the wide expanses of empty land are perfect for labeling.

3. Because that's where the water is, almost all settlement and activity in northern and western Iraq run along these river lines.

... so that's where the idea came from. It was a pretty lucky combination of geography and news circumstances. After that came the really quite long and difficult process of figuring out the current status of small towns and cities — much of which is uncertain and hard to find reliable sources on — and doing the writing and editing of the piece. Karen Yourish and Archie Tse did a real marathon of reporting to get that done. Towards the end, the Baghdad bureau kindly went through and confirmed the information that wound up in the final piece, and made additional suggestions for points of interest.

The Kurdish region isn't really addressed in this particular graphic, but you can see many of those towns in the northern part of the Tigris image, over on the right (not under ISIS control).
It looks from the comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7985678, that mod(s) thought it was a deceptive post that was more like an advert than a story.

What technically, or in context of startups, is notable about the site/offer? Perhaps you'd be better blogging about pop.co's setup and submitting that if you want to use HN for promotion.