skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: MTurk is no longer available to non-US companies. How are you coping?
As of 22nd August (tomorrow for the hermits among us), Mechanical Turk is giving the huge middle finger to anyone who wants to be a requester and create HITs on MTurk if they aren't a US resident.

I have used MTurk for years and it is infinitely easier than using alternative websites. For example, my startup which is still in somewhat of it's early stage launch (I plan on doing a Show HN next week) has used it for about a hundred thousand HITs already.

I run a vacation rental marketing platform ( edit: www.rentivo.com for the curious) that also builds websites for home owners and agents and handles their payment processing issues. We need to do things like detect watermarks, tag images for inside/outside. Label images. Do data transcription for one website to a strict scheme and we validate thousands of URLs to categorize them based on set questions that we provide.

Being able to have everything returned in a fixed CSV is so useful. We have have dozens/hundreds of workers handle our HITs simulatenously...

But now Mechanical Turk is impossible to use if you don't have a social security number. This is because you need to sign up to Amazon Payments to use Mechanical Turk.

https://requester.mturk.com/mturk/amazonpaymentsacctreqmts

There are no alternatives that exist from what I can gather. You have sites like CloudSource, CloudFlower, ClickWorker etc but all of these are just wrappers around Mechanical Turk and require a budget in the thousands.

The simplicity of MTurk meant that I could create a HIT with 70k HITs and have it completed over the weekend in the format I need.

If I hire someone on Freelancers or oDesk.. it would take weeks to do this!!

What solutions exist to overcome this huge gap! We really need to use MTurk.. and I don't believe that any true alternatives exist.

Edit: Dont' CloudFlower have a minimum spend of $2,500 per month? That's like 5 times our current monthly costs. There is no way we would ever be able to pay this. Plus, I want to handle the creation of the HITs myself. I don't need someone to do it all for me. I typically managed to create HITs that would only cost a $400 at most!
So true. Best to stay clear of those kinds of people.
Read-only filesystem on the SD card for boot, and a read-write USB thumb drive for everything else. It's been a while since I looked, but from memory this avoids corruption on power-off.
nice! seems a bit pricey for a rough draft ebook though. but i do like that it includes polymer and react, which i know little about.

what i find interesting with these frameworks is that they're all moving the templating engine (something like coldfusion from 15 years ago, ha!) to the frontend... part of the ebb and flow of server vs client side computing i guess.
http://data.seattle.gov is powered by Socrata. Here is a list of cities that they support: https://opendata.socrata.com/dataset/Socrata-Customer-Spotli...
It was a feature (a property of the artifact) because it provided a signal about management priorities with respect to purchase criteria such as security. Microsoft eventually removed all Easter Eggs as part of their company-wide effort to fix their poor security reputation.
I think the reasoning would also be fairly similar to the reason that the big players are unbundling their apps.

The most valuable real estate is the homescreen of your phone. A website bookmark isn't likely to get that placement. A website bookmark that you can download from the App Store on the other hand...
Why increase my intelligence or IQ?
There is no guarantee that your data will be around 40+ years from now unless its physically on your storage. I would like to hear from the founders plan to monetize.
I never said I agree with Apple, I think it's a extremely bad default.
It depends on what you want to scrape. What do you hope to accomplish with an answer to this question? Do you intend to study/play around with a bunch of the libraries/tools mentioned? Do you have some sort of project in mind? Are you trying to get us to write a 'top 10 web scraping' blog post for you?
This Is Exactly Why You Should Wear Sunscreen
You could have told Apple. They could fix this in iOS, blocking the apps via a software update.

If it was me, I would have notified Apple and all of the companies who have bug bounty programs.
Unfavinator: A Free Tool to Delete Twitter Favorites
How to Tell If a Woman Is Going to Be Successful in Business
"CLOS allows me to dispatch based on the types of all of the arguments."

But can it dispatch based on the return value?
Newsblur Down
This is very nice. More engrossing than most games I play. Instead of starting over every time I lose, I would prefer if I was penalized and allowed to continue playing. For instance, if I lose round 5, then I will also lose all the points from round 4 and continue playing from round 4 instead. It's just something that I thought would make it more interesting and playable for me.
Zillabyte Relaunches to Provide Infrastructure for Data Apps
What happens if he sells 4 to your 1 and never does anything else? is that worth 40% to you? You also need to work out some kind of salary arrangement for either of you that goes full time once the sales can support it. Also your not leaving any equity for the first full time sales person you have. Plus your going to need 1-10k to turn it into a busness with lisences etc.
I doubt anyone DJing stuff from Youtube is getting paid for it.
Student-run grocery store thrives in western Nebraska
Utilizing GPUs in the Cloud | ScaleScale
Lisp is a multi-paradigm language. It can be functional, but it doesn't have to be. It can be OO, but it doesn't have to be. Classifying it as "being" any of these is asking for argument, unless you have very clearly defined (and agreed-upon) definitions of what it means to be a member of one of those categories. In particular, does membership mean that you require programming in that style, or only that you allow it?
Demoing the multicluster setup and simulating the failure to various people was the hardest part for me. This will help so much. A video will be nice.
Just wanted to say thank you for creating such an app! I hope to use it in upcoming trips!
It's good to want to find a solution to the hunger problem, however the problem of chronic hunger is not lack of access to food. It's lack of money to purchase it. Dumping free food on economies that are predominantly made of agricultural workers further exacerbates the problem rather than helps it. What you propose could still be helpful perhaps for disaster relief situations, but that's the minority of the problem.

More facts here: http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20f...
As long as both sides agree that the percentages are OK, you're fine, as long as:

(a) You VEST EVERYTHING (including your own shares)

(b) You know how you'll legally handle control after one of you leaves

(c) You have a serious conversation about responsibilities, one that confronts all the ways you can see things not working out; at this stage in my career if I was doing this I'd turn that conversation into a simple, bulleted MOU

(d) You remain observant about what the equity split is doing to morale. Frankly, sales of a new product is very hard, and it's more likely that vesting and termination are going to be your problems, but if they do really well, you need to remember that, again, sales is hard, and you don't ever want to lose someone who can perform in that role because they think they're getting an unfair deal.
Now this will get dragged down to what can and cannot be considered the true Left :(

I won't discuss China, the Soviet Union, Che Guevara (where is that quote from, btw?) or anything of the sort here. It simply is not possible or suitable to debate this in a forum like hackernews. Call it a cop out if you want :)

However, I'll say I disagree with your fundamental assertion, that the Left is willing to tolerate open racism when it suits their needs. Racism stands directly against what the Left stands for. Of course corrupted leftist movements, often leftist in name only, are free to forget leftist ideals, just as religious organizations sometimes forget their founding principles.

But let me place emphasis on this: if a leftist movement turns racist, this is a serious contradiction that must be pointed out. If a rightwing movement is racist, there is no contradiction and its intended audience will applaud it; racism and discrimination are cornerstones of rightwing thought. It is a mistake for a leftist movement to tolerate a racist ally when it would temporarily help heir cause, but this is never a mistake for a rightwing movement because racism is often part of its core ideology.

By this definition, which I think is mainstream, it's impossible to consider the Nazis a far left movement. I believe there is an ideological intent to conflate the two extremes, left and right, which says less about them than about the people doing the conflating...
Blink Launch Process: Deprecation
Are there any Noise Cancelling earmuffs that aren't headphones? Is that even possible?
GoodUI FastForward – Highest Converting UI Templates
There are a million things that had to go right for him to take the drug (no transportation problems, no attack, hospital didn't catch on fire, medicine didn't get compromised) science and Man control none of them. So it makes since that he thanked God.
I love simple things, this gets my +1, look forward to learning more.

I can't see why this is browser only, am I missing something?
actually, no. wearing sunscreen is a great way to block production of D3 which is absolutely vital for health.

in fact, there is a direct correlation between low cancer rates and distance away from the equator (the less sun you get, the more prevalence of cancer)
How about direct conversion of C,H,O,N to carbohydrates and proteins using electricity and nanomachines? Farming is an elaborate, fragile system.
"the problem of chronic hunger is not lack of access to food. It's lack of money to purchase it."

The idea is exactly to think of ways for money not to be necessary.

It's been done before, albeit not by us.

Our atmosphere is one grand f*cking infrastructure project, and it's all free-to-breathe for everyone.
I agree, but Product Hunt has a very, uh, rareified air of user. Probably safe to assume they all have the latest iPhone with 64GB storage.
> I don't see any Lisp in the Go space (native compilation, great networking features)

What?!?

Proper Lisps compile to native code, both JIT and AOT.

Plus there are quite a few code commercial compilers with networking libraries.

http://franz.com/products/allegrocl/

Don't judge Lisps by the open source alternatives.
I think I'm missing something. I see how this would be great when it's build time but during development I don't want to have to keep running build commands each time I want to use a new package I'm development. Using Grunt and Bower may be a little time consuming up front but once things are set up its very easy to keep a separate Dev and prod environment in sync between different contributors. I only see the value at build time with Duo which is why I'm sure I missed something.
How trustworthy are the sources for these statistics? I don't know anything about how reliable numbers from the China National Coal Association are, but I was under the impression that data from the China National Bureau of Statistics should generally be treated as suspect. Is there a way to independently verify that consumption actually fell?
So earlier this summer I learned how to use RequireJS + a smidgen of Grunt, then I felt the need to move towards Gulp and Browserify (which I've just recently started), and now I'm excited about Duo.

It would be interesting for someone with more expertise to do a compare/contrast further down the line of all three.

"...I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes" - Morpheus

Also, does someone know how the Closure compiler fits into all of this? It might be totally unrelated but I'm trying to learn more about JavaScript application architecture, and I'm not sure where that fits in.
"We have hundreds of A/B experiments running at anytime" which means you have a very big attribution problem.
The business model is going to be freemium. We're currently evaluating different features to decide which should go into a premium bundle. So we're always happy to hear from our users about their problems and limitations of the app. but basically the idea is to charge for additional storage. hth
It benefits both groups to to enlighten G. Since G is so much larger, that's how we would increase the library count from 2727 to 27280.
I think we're probably talking different orders of magnitude and decision-making levels here.

Boards are very happy demonstrating a desire to achieve strategic change over the long term by making large capital investments. They have authority over the management accountants who can create a special budget for those exceptional items (and amortise capex over a long period of time), access to external finance if they need it, and responsibility for deciding exactly what their targeted return on that investment is and when its forecast to happen (sometimes after the fact...)

Much of the operational expenditure comes out of the budget of the responsible department which has annually or quarterly targets the Board has set for it based on existing recurring costs and revenues, so any new items of expenditure had best yield revenue pretty quickly or else cut costs in other areas. Of course, if that department truly believes there will be a longer term payoff they can always go to the Board...
Also you need to validate this with customers that aren't partners.
I'm currently using Fluxxor[1] which reifies the Flux architecture with Stores and a central dispatcher. I did some research into Backbone.Model bindings but eventually decided to go "full Flux". I've yet to regret my decision even though my app has grown quite complex.

The best part is, thanks to React & Flux I'm building a large scale web app without jQuery for the first time in my life :)

[1] http://fluxxor.com/
He probably also credits his doctors with enabling his recovery. And the drugs he took. And his own decision not to just give up and die. How can he possibly handle all these crazy contradictions?
The Seattle PD is very open about their data. Every single beat has it's own twitter stream of dispatches (delayed by an hour, for obvious security reasons): http://www.seattle.gov/police/tweets/

Whenever I hear a bunch of sirens driving by, it's great to know that in short order I'll see what was happening in my Twitter feed.
could they be a picloud replacement?
to quote an old quip: you have a problem. common lisp has a clunky solution that's built into the standard, and scheme has a beautiful one that doesn't work in your dialect.
Won't people with dyslexia and poor eyesight have trouble reading the code as well?
That would be "as good as it gets" with current science, I guess, so it's great if we can get to that, but I think it's a little farther down on the technology horizon.
Thanks for the feedback! Will look into that issue immediately. Find my answer on monetization above.
While it's not the same kind of silence, getting out into a desert is the next best thing. I did production sound for a film last year where we spent nearly a month out in the Mojave and the quiet environment more than made up for the extra physical challenges.
That was my thought as well. I'm sure the decision was made to connect as seamlessly as possible, without the user having to stop and click a dial confirmation.
Actually, there are lots of other online whiteboards that have all of these features without requiring a download or plugin.
Rescale (YC W12) Is Looking for a UI/UX Designer
Rescale helps engineers and scientists develop products faster by running simulations in the cloud. Think Heroku for engineers and scientists.

Rescale is looking for a talented UI designer who is willing to take on the challenge of building an intuitive, easy-to-use platform for the complex process of configuring and running HPC (High Performance Computing) application workflows.

This is an on-site/full-time position in San Francisco. Please attach your resume and portfolio with your contact information.

Responsibilities

* Transform complex ideas into beautiful and intuitive user interfaces
* Work with other developers to turn mockups into web pages
* Be on alert for any possible design improvements for the company (e.g. document templates, email templates, office decorations, etc)

Qualifications

* An eye for clean and artful design
* Demonstrable design skills with a strong portfolio
* Ability to present your designs and sell your solutions
* Proficiency in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, or other visual design tools
* Web Development Experience (HTML/CSS) - JS is a plus

Interested? Contact us at des-jobs@rescale.com
6 Reasons Google Hates Your Restaurant’s Website (and How to Fix It)
They say it was difficult to get a high performance DB running on a 700mhz chip with 512Mb of ram. Perhaps its just the wording but that sounds like the opposite of high performance to me.
Personally I think I'd much rather have my dependencies be explicit rather than inferred from what I require across my code base. The idea of a tool which supports both Bower and Component packages is quite nice though.
We definitely will. I am lining up a couple more pilot customers.
Don't you already have to run some command to install the new package anyway? Not really sure I see how this is different in that respect.
Very good points. Thanks for the feedback.
You inherently need a build step when working with remote dependencies or even any dependency. Especially when you're working with various assets like templates, css, images, etc...

Typically, let's say for an app, you'll run a watcher which will trigger the builder, so you can just spin it up and leave it alone. For smaller components that are meant for consumption, a simple Makefile is more than enough and running the command isn't too terribly bad.
This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:

"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

- Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
I would absolutely not use Backbone for anything view related anymore. React.js is a much better choice, even for just enabling small islands of richness.
The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.

- An excerpt from "Stranger" by Albert Camus
Analyzing the Analysis: How Not to Get Fooled by the Data Scientist and Big Data
What Does Y Combinator and the White House Have in Common?
Reading the copy on the page, I wonder if the author has heard of npm init and npm install --save. I haven't had to edit package.json in quite a while.
i think they meant to highlight the high resource requirements.
> I'm really happy that you're extremely confident of the design but I really hope you're going to do the normal thing and run with the regular complement of safety gear on board for the crew (raft, vests etc) because I fear that you may be over-estimating the degree to which oceanside encounters with container sized semi submerged obstacles weighing multiple tons allow themselves to be predicted.

Of course. To do otherwise would be insanity.

> Be safe.

Thank you.
You only need a social security number if you're doing it as a personal account.

If your startup is doing it, it should be a business payments account, which take an EIN, an employer identification number, which the IRS will issue to a foreign entity: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/obtain-tax-id-number-foreign-...

The other alternative would be to integrate payments into an existing distributed work platform like Bossa or PyBossa, and recruit your own audience of participants through advertising.
Sadly, there are no real alternatives to Mturk - at least nothing with near the reach. If you have a friend in the US who might help you, it's by far the easiest way to go. That being the case, here are some alternatives:

https://microworkers.com/
http://www.clickworker.com/
http://www.shorttask.com/
Thanks for the feedback. It's great to hear that you're willing to pay for such a service. If you're interested i put you on our list of testers for freemium?!
Pybossa (http://pybossa.com/) is a great (IMO) and FOSS alternative. NASA and CERN (amongst others) are using it. See some application examples here: http://crowdcrafting.org/
Online Shopping Isn’t As Profitable As You Think
24 Tech Mascots with Eyes, Spikes or Wings
You have a point about Paul, though he arguably evolves in the following book.

The Emperor doesn't take control of spice production partly because of the Landsraad, which exists precisely to keep the ruling House in check, and partly because of the Spacing Guild, which is arguably the true power behind the scenes.

No House can truly do anything without the Spacing Guild because space travel is impossible without them. At the start of the Dune saga, the whole political universe depends on this equilibrium, which is strictly enforced. Navigators are, of course, aware of their dependence on the spice and of the importance of Arrakis.

The Fremen and what they represent is ignored because of racism. This is also a point of the book. Nobody wants to see what's in front of them. This is especially shown from the point of view of the Harkonnen, which only slowly begin to realize the parallels between the Fremen and the imperial Sardaukar.
“Backed by Google…”

Yeah, but so were Google Reader and Google Wave.
It looks like the cli utility has a built in watch flag that can be passed to automatically rebuild on changes
I thought that the question was, why didn't the universe collapse into one black hole right at the beginning?

With the argument I tried to outline, there was no black hole. The reason is, in short, the situation was not like where black holes are formed since then.

The big difference is that, (1), now, the matter-energy for a black hole is in some region of space in our universe where that region is surrounded by the rest of the universe, and (2), then, the matter-energy filled the entire universe that there was, even if it was only the size of a baseball. Then, that matter-energy filled the whole thing. For that whole thing to have created some small black holes, the thing would have had to have partitioned into separate chunks. But apparently what happened is that the space expanded explosively, really before anything could collapse. Or, maybe the expansion was so fast that quarks, as close together as in protons now, soon were being separated faster than the speed of light and, thus, had no choice but to generate more quarks and, thus, more matter. We're talking really explosively rapid expansion.

Or maybe the gravitational field of some matter-energy wanted to propagate at the speed of light, reach out, and connect with more matter-energy, but before that gravitational field had moved even 1 mm, space had expanded so much that the other matter-energy to be reached had already move to a few light years away. We're talking explosive, so fast that speed of light is so slow as to be nearly standing still and irrelevant. At least that is my intuitive understanding.
Introducing the URX App Search API