skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some good points at the beginning, but then I got to this gem:

"The 1 percent preys on the 70 percent of U.S. illiterates, not because they are poor but because they don't know enough to make informed decisions."

Since when is taking advantage of people's ignorance an ethical defense of one's behavior? This is crass victim-blaming. Sure, one could argue that most profit in most businesses directly results from some sort of information asymmetry, i.e., between the two parties to any given transaction, compounded across all parties in all stages of any given value chain. But this is different. If you're offering predatory financial services and products to underinformed people who are ill-equipped to bear the risk of what you're luring them into, you are acting at best amorally. And amorality is a generous assessment in many of the cases that have come under scrutiny in recent years.

One can mount plenty of credible, justifiable arguments for banking and finance. "People are suckers" is a pretty lame one. Yes, more people ought to learn about personal finance, and about the basics of finance in general. This is partially a failure of our education system, which used to teach these things in now-ridiculed subjects like "Home Economics." (Which we ought to dust off, update, add some additional rigor to, and bring back into the standard high school curriculum. But i digress.)

No matter the case, this sort of sentiment does its author no favors. It undermines the rest of the piece, which makes legitimate points.
The U.S. is full of people that can barely make it to the next paycheck, but they'll have an iPhone, a car, cable tv, cigarettes, etc. Unless you are taking public transportation to your 2 jobs without all the consumer goods I've mentioned, then you aren't poor.
I'd like both if I'm heading to space--I want my vehicle to not explode, and if it does explode I want a way to get back down to Earth reasonable safely.

At least several of the Challenger crew survived the explosion and were definitely conscious and functioning for at least several seconds afterwards, and oxygen use records indicate they were alive for the fall to the ocean (whether they were conscious or not for the whole fall depends on whether or not the cabin depressurized, which is not known).

So, parachutes for a Space Shuttle crew are not prima facie unreasonable. There are engineering issues, which ultimately were determined to make them not worth it.
I was at a company once that had layoffs where the company said that they were going to lay off managers. An old timer succinctly summed up how it would go as follows........

You have a tree full of monkeys. So you shake the hell out of the tree to get the monkeys out of hit. How many monkeys do you have in the tree after your done? The same number, they are just in different branches.
Education quality varies wildly from district to district. I'm not using "level" to refer to formally declared years, but the quality of the classroom and the outcomes achieved within. It's very hard to learn in a poor classroom in which the teacher is interrupted constantly.
Do YOU understand how the following INFO can be used to IDENTIFY your INFO. DEPRIVERS & to FLACIDATE "your" members of the GLOBAL CORPORATE ECONOMY?
*
SECRET TPPartnership, CETA & C-CIT TRIBUNALS due INSIDER TRADING; corp. Canada fears China may Blow "Arrangements" between Can. Lobbyists' Clients & Parties' Executives (W.A.D. Accord*)? NON Shareholders HAVE TO PAY the arranged PENALTIES. Repatriating off-shore; profits, goods & services contracts, financing, etc. and co-manufacturing still not on the table? LINE UP to "PREFERRED" IPOs SHOrtens.

What the TREATY of VERSAILLES was to the 20th century PALES in COMPARISON to the TPP, CETA, C-CIT, NAFTA, et al, in the 21st.

(CAN) - Prime Minister Stephen Harper's attempts to maintain the secrecy provisions in the Trans Pacific Partnership, the Canada - China Investment Treaty (C-CIT; FIPPA) & the Canada - European Union CETA may be unravelling by way of the threatened Canadian Senate, et al.

There are several reasons for the secrecy ("omerta") of the dispute resolution tribunals. They are:

1) To Protect the parties to the treaty, &/or, agreement, ie. corporate sponsors, from having to reveal to the non shareholding tax payers the existing arrangements that it has with its own government. For instance, the Canadian W.A.D. Accord suggests that corporate Canada's lobbyists pay considerations to the executives of the political parties for two main reasons:

A) to promote corporate Canada's agenda with governing party(ies) by:

i) reducing its taxes & thus, the "net increase" in taxes for non shareholders
&
ii) increase its funding for "economic development" which covers the cost of, among other things, the present & future advocacy, ie. lobbying & the cost of the considerations that corporate Canada pays out, etc. It may be regrettable that given the source of the accessed "economic development" funds, ie. those 95% - 99% of Canadians who are non shareholding tax payers there is a great deal of room for discretionary spending & its abuse
and
B) to protect corporate Canada's agenda by paying the other (non governing) political parties considerations...

...For the FULL ARTICLE, see;
Google: "TPP...INSIDER TRADING; David E.H. Smith",
&
Facebook; "David Smith, Sidney, BC" to the access List of RECENT ARTICLES & CORRESPONDENCES by DEHS.
> they don't really have the right people to contact on their site.

In situations like that, I usually send it by certified mail, return receipt requested, with an address like this:

XYZ Corporation
ATTENTION: LEGAL DEPARTMENT
[street address, etc.]

The "Attention: Legal Department" part, plus the certified mail, will normally get the attention of the mailroom people, who presumably will route the letter to where it needs to go.

Pro tip: Get a certified-mail card from the post office before you put the letter in the envelope. Write or print out the certified-mail serial number (from the card) on the letter itself. Keep a photocopy of the letter, with the certified-mail number on it, in your files. That way, you'll have evidence that you sent that letter with that certified-mail card.

(Long ago at a motion hearing, an opposing counsel told a judge that he never got a certain letter from a colleague of mine, for whom I was filling in at the hearing. The opposing counsel said, "Your Honor, my secretary signed the card, but it must have been for some other communication, because I never got this letter." My colleague hadn't put the certified-mail number on the letter, so I had no proof otherwise; the judge gave the opposing counsel the benefit of the doubt. A couple of years after that, the opposing counsel was disbarred, for something unrelated.)
I don't know if they're the best at everything. I've been using Google Compute Engine extensively lately and I think it is a lot more polished feeling at times than EC2.
I should have stated that a bit better. I meant that many of these situations involving people making poor financial choices have to do with very smart people using their intelligence and hard work to influence them into those choices.

So in effect, the country is listening to them and that is what is causing them to do things like take out payday loans and buy drive through meals when they can't afford it.
Welcome, Facebook. Seriously
Oh, that's right, that's what really killed it for me. I'm used to reading on my kindle and picking up my progress on my phone when I'm stuck somewhere with some free time.

Losing the sync ability basically killed the main utility I get from eBooks. If I have to carry the Kindle around, I can carry a library book around.
The real problem with Web Audio for emulators and other software mixing scenarios is just that the API is broken by design. There are a bunch of known issues with software mixing/audio rendering in the API, especially if you want low latencies, and there wasn't any opportunity for the community to raise them and get them fixed before Google punted their beta version out onto the web and effectively froze it indefinitely.

On the bright side, the whatwg committee working on Web Audio seems to want to solve this problem, but they don't seem to even have a hypothetical fix yet, so odds are it won't be fixed for a while unless one of the browser vendors decides to fix it themselves and then try to push the fix through the committee.

At present there are two main ways to do playback of synthesized audio: one is to use a ScriptProcessorNode, the other is to sequentially schedule lots of small AudioBufferSourceNodes containing your audio.

At present, ScriptProcessorNode is unreliable for this scenario because it runs on the main thread and (IIRC) only buffers a single chunk at a time. This means that if a GC pause or other glitch causes your user JS to stop running, the audio will drop out or start looping.

Queuing up AudioBufferSourceNodes is a good solution in theory but has lots of implementation/spec issues at present. One issue is that unless your mixing rate matches the sampling rate of the Web Audio implementation (unspecified and can vary across machines and browsers! have fun with that.), you get glitches at the boundaries between your buffers due to how they do the resampling. IIRC some implementations also have issues with the exact precision of scheduling where you can get gaps in playback. You also deal with some race conditions here where your user JS can be racing against the mixer thread and that gets pretty hairy.

I think if you're willing to tolerate extreme latency (like, mixing 200ms in advance) and can mix at the native sampling rate of the Web Audio implementation, you can more or less do software mixing like JSMESS wants to right now. Of course, I don't think anyone would tolerate 200ms of audio latency for something like an emulator. :-(

One future path for this would be to run your whole emulator on a JS worker, and then run the audio core on a separate worker. The audio core worker would be isolated from most GC pauses and it could periodically schedule the appropriate audio events.

At present as far as I know you can't offload Web Audio trivially to JS workers, though the committee had said sometime last year that they planned to add threading support. IIRC AudioContext is only accessible on the UI thread, so you are vulnerable to GC pauses no matter how you actually feed samples to the mixer because you have to run code on the main thread to actually get the samples there.
Both tests work, but there are issues with glitching and tempo. Seems also that pretty small audio buffers are being used due to the sound of the glitches.

Possible future workarounds for JS's lack of realtime guarantees for low-latency apps were discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7906674

But I think for now the only solution is "use bigger buffers" (or an easy way for users to experiment with the latency/safety tradeoff knob)
We spend less on food than ever before.

http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1009/50-years-of-...

We spend less on food than any other nation.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/03/daily-c...

It's debatable that food deserts are a thing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/health/research/pairing-of...
Well, I have to say after reading the Monday Note piece decoding Satya Nadella's public email to the employees: http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/07/13/microsofts-new-ceo-need...

... This doesn't come as much of a surprise. His main message seemed to be 'Shape up or ship out.'
Is the "paradox" explainable by the fact that satiety is not a true signal about nutritional needs being met? If you are forced to eat foods which provide more than enough calories/nutrients, but don't tell your body "Hey, that's enough!", then you could theoretically be gaining weight while remaining hungry.
Every single one of the things you mentioned is a prototype, research project, or poorly performing product. The only success in that list is Nest, which Google just bought.

Yes, it's true that one or more of Google's "moon shot" projects might become massive successes. But it's also true that they might not.

Elon Musk, like Apple, focuses on products that actually ship and sell. Tesla sells great cars with great efficiency. SpaceX flies great rockets, for pay, with great efficiency. Musk came up with the Hyperloop, but (unlike Google) he's not spending any time or money on it.
You'd need to adjust it like you would a normal clock. But in theory you could make one that could do it automatically; the angle the sun is at also tells you what time of year it is.
Tried the trial version of getsimplesite.com. It looks quite fast and cheap. Models look wonderful to accept/display content on website dynamically.
Jibo's "expressive orb" color screen reminds me of the colors used by drones to express mood in Iain M. Bank's Culture novels:

http://zrajm.org/nerd/drone-colours/
Understanding the Docker Cache for Faster Builds
Ginkgo Bioworks (YC S14) is Hiring
Ginkgo Bioworks is a YC biotech startup. A young company out of MIT with the mission of making biology easier to engineer, Ginkgo designs and builds microbes to address fundamental challenges the world faces today. Ginkgo bioengineers make use of an in-house pipeline of synthetic biology technologies to build new organisms for making natural products, pharmaceuticals, biofuels, and more.

Ginkgo is looking for motivated software engineers to create and improve computer aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) tools for building and testing new organisms. You will be working closely with our bioengineers, so your tools go from conception to deployment in hours or days. You will be responsible for improving our Ruby/Rails based lab automation platform, writing new algorithms in Python or R for our data analysis platform, or creating easy to use UI in Javascript to help our bioengineers navigate our knowledge base. You don't need previous biology experience; Ginkgo is a great environment for amazing programmers to learn to hack biology.

To learn more, visit www.ginkgobioworks.com. Apply for a position
online at www.ginkgobioworks.com/careers/
Yes, organization development literature is sorely lacking in research and discussion of immortality.
Number of Characters per HN Line
On one page at HN today, I saw a line with 161 characters. Traditionally in formatted text, 161 is way more than usual. In Firefox on my screen, by the time I get the magnification small enough to show the whole line, the characters are way too small to read. Really, for the whole tread, I can't read it.

Please limit the number of characters per line to something easy to read, say, 60. Thanks.
Isn't that last article saying that food deserts aren't necessarily correlated with obesity?
U.S. Needs to Weigh Rocket Engine Options, General Says
Nobody is suggesting "just don't have kids". People are saying plan and save appropriately. (Sure, accidents can happen.)

I know a couple who has had 3 kids by age 19 and both parents have dropped out of high school to support them. What's their endgame? They basically are going to live off the state for their rest of their lives and will always struggle with money and food. If they would have continued with their education and waited 5-10 years, their situation could have been drastically different...
Auto as Category, Applicative and Arrow (Intro to Machines/Arrows Part 2)
Thank you. I almost lost it reading the article and the comments here.

Corporations also heavily use the court system, benefit from a publicly paid education system, roads, infrastructure... I could go on and on.
I'm not sure if your joking, but there is research into managing a business' longevity, such as the book "Built to Last":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Built_to_Last:_Successful_Habi...
> Isn't it the same kind of reasoning that one would use when, say, hiring someone? That is, look for past credentials? And assume that past behaiviour would be a good predictor for the future?

I guess I just don't see the connect between your criteria and behaving well on a flight. In your education/employment example I can see that connection.
A damn shame. ANU just published a study finding the carbon price was effective at curbing emissions too [1]. Oh well...

[1] https://ccep.crawford.anu.edu.au/publication/ccep-working-pa...
How to create an initial target device and graphs in Cacti
Ask HN: Will the net-neutrality be looking to throttle illegal downloading?
It occurred to me, probably a lot later than it should, that this will be a nuclear weapon against freedom of speech and illegal file-sharing. Is this possible?
I still think about FB spending 3 billion on that app?
I think what mickeyouse means is that if the taxpayers didn't step in to subsidize all the financial institutions, then GE would have bee bankrupt (just like most other financial institutions).
And contractors don't get stock options. Microsoft has gotten in trouble before about their use of "permanent contractors".
Competent people need to know the political basics, it's like defensive driving.

http://www.manager-tools.com/2013/04/politics-101-chapter-3-...

http://www.manager-tools.com/2013/05/politics-101-chapter-3-...
Incidentally, if you're wondering "How does one define 'food security'?", you administer surveys, score them, and compare the scores to threshholds.

For example, here is a 9 question survey for children: http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/476115/youth2006.pdf

Typical question: "[In the last 30 days, d]id your meals only include a few kinds of cheap foods because your family was running out of money to buy food?"

Choices are "A lot", "Sometimes", "Never." Score 1 point if the answer isn't Never. If you score 2+ points on this out of 9, you're food insecure.

This is how you get headlines like "1 in 6 Americans doesn't know where their next meal is coming from."
Ask HN: Entrepreneurially-minded phd?
Hey, I'm making a decision whether to leave my current employer to start a phd in machine learning in the fall. I'm curious to hear from people who have gone through phds and later started companies - was it worth it?

Curious about thoughts on the networks you guys built up, the usefulness of your research, and the general time-worthiness of the thing.
In other words, "screw Chinese users".
Apple isn't doing anything that unusual here. Hardware doesn't have to be "consumer" or "enterprise" -- your PC at home and your PC at work aren't that different. It's software and sales that are very different between home and work -- IBM will layer "enterprise" software and sales models on top of Apple hardware and both players should make money.
I will probably receive flack for this, but am I the only one that thinks it is a little bizarre this much branding and visual design has gone into a CSV parser?
Correct.

The questionable correlation in the original article is:

Good food is simply not available in low income neighborhoods >people are forced to make make cheaper choices >they become obese and malnourished.

The times article cites studies that call that into question, citing apparent actual availability in those areas and focusing more on people just making poor choices.

I'm no expert, but sheer economics does not seem to be primary influencer causing current outcomes.
You're right. We really need to work on our pricing model. Thanks for the suggestion!
Free speech is a right. Listening to people (when they are polite and reasonable) is common courtesy. I agree that many communities, especially online communities are lacking in that area.
Certainly lay offs due to post acquisition redundancy would seem less likely to generate lawsuits compared to lay offs due to dead weight regardless of the true reason.
That's an individual decision, but this is really about a decision-making algorithm. If YC asks founders for revenue numbers in this case, that implicitly endorses the idea of taking up founder time in any other case with higher RoI. That can add up really quickly, and presumably YC doesn't want to set the threshold that low.
This is the #1 reason why I won't stay in the US after my phd. I have no interest in being a random CEO whim away from either having to uproot my life and move back home or frantically try to land a new job all in the short period of 15 days.

For those curious the #2 reason is that H1Bs make it hard to do even simple extracurricular activities like writing books or do consulting on the side related to an open source project you contribute to let alone start a company.

The H1B is fundamentally broken and I'm amazed that so many people put up with it. Credit to the US for being such a desirable destination, I guess.
Currently we have this limitation where the new thread has to have a different subject but we're working on removing that restriction. Should be a few more days before thats ready.
#1 unis are non union so picketing would be extremely unlikely.
#2 you'd call the police if someone followed you around and screamed in your face and kept trying to give you pamphlets. obviously theres a line somewhere in between.
#3 protesting / picketing, etc are quite different than soliciting (even if they are ideas). theres a line in there somewhere, and a place and a time for both former and later. they are not without limits, and all a FSZ is sets some of that.

you disagree? why dont you go into the local police station and start screaming some cause while trying to give people pamphlets. see where you end up, heck, try it any government building. and thats 'public' property. universities are private property, and they do have the right to make decisions on how they see fit for creating the best environment for the campus.

guess what? guns are legal, its legal to be registered and to carry a concealed weapon. but you are NOT allowed to carry them on most college campuses.
While I more or less agree with your conclusion, as one of extreme simplicity I think there is a major flaw in your hypothetical. Most people don't regularly deal with chemistry, biology, and astrophysics. Plumbing is rather commonplace and while I would't expect an average person to understand the intricacies of a complex system, they know enough to simply "get by" by fixing small issues if they choose.
Companies should lay off products, not people. How can a company expect to support the same products with fewer people? The hoped for efficiencies from laying off the "dead weight" are probably small. The company should kill its loser products and focus on its winners. "More wood behind fewer arrows."

Michael O. Church wrote more about this in a recent blog post:

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/why-corporate...
This is why I believe in a Semco type culture where every team member receives a cut of the profits and there is a peer review process of who gets to join / stay in the team.

It's the most realistic way a profitably franchise can avoid taking in the political rent seekers. What you spend more on profit share you probably make back on cost savings, and at the very least it buys you a more happy, productive workforce.
Energy efficiency. IoT can bring more awareness to things for finer grain control which can take systems developed over 60 years ago and make them more aware and targeted.

Shameless plug: http://www.flair.zone
We are aiming at lowering HVAC energy consumption by between 20 and 30%. Financial incentives are rather attractive ones.

I will agree that there are going to be IoT whizbangs that are solutions in search of a problem, but there are bound to be a handful of actual problems that get addressed.
Rust for C++ programmers – part 9: destructuring pt2 – match and borrowing
It's more about ISPs acting like cable companies where you are forced to pay for different service tiers. If you want to watch youtube or netflix you have to pay extra otherwise they will throttle your connection to those sites. A lot of ISPs where I am (not in US) already throttle default torrent ports for most of the popular clients like utorrent/bitTorrent so p2p file-sharing is already a target.
The vision here is spot on. It looks like what I imagine an Apple robot might look like. But they're going to need a lot more money and a lot more time to realize it.