skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Made-up repellent title, looks like an interesting article actually. Proper title is "Ascend: An exploration of mobile phone usage in refugee situations".

Title was "Could FrontlineSMS make it easier for refugees to communicate with UNHCR?" when I wrote this. Sounds like worthless bait.
I'm glad you linked to that; I think it's a great study.

Personally, I think there are probably goals more suitable for using social pressure for, and goals more suitable to keep secret. But I've still kept most of my goals secret until I have at least an MVP so I don't fall victim to the short-ciruiting mentioned in the article.
Some people deliberately miss the point. Oh well, replace "nil" above with "()".
Furthermore, what is to stop them from selling out to advertising companies if it got popular? This seems like an obvious flaw they never solved...
The food I buy, the tools I buy, the clothes I buy, everything I buy, and all the things I don't buy - says a lot more about me than the random posts on Facebook I might Like, comment on, or share. VISA knew I was having a baby a LOT sooner than Facebook. Oh, look she's buying pregnancy tests...

You're right that ephemeral is the future, it's also the past and present. Any insight one may surmise from mining Social Data is just as ephemeral.
The site does not include mixed-content.

However the page does have a form for a mailing list via MailChimp, and that form submits over http:// which triggers Chrome to state that give the mixed-content indicator.

The detail of the error is that the form itself should be submitted via https:// (I agree), but to my knowledge Mailchimp only takes http:// and the destination page itself would submit over http:// and show real mixed-content if you tried to POST via https://
This method: http://www.kaij.org/blog/?p=98

Although SWIG might work better now.
XKCD creator answers ‘What if?’
> You're declaring a conclusion that goes against the outcomes of several pages of heavy argument. When you do this, it's customary to attempt to support your position with arguments. :)

The argument is the conclusion from the bottom of the page, which I quoted: much ado about nothing.

Then there's a long discussion about how machine code is not homoiconic, which I absolutely disagree with. In von Neumann architecture, and modern CPUs data == code, otherwise you couldn't make a JIT compiler.
No such requirement in the USA (at least not for private companies, some public companies may report a few accounts with high business concentration).
Show HN: Deploy your websites from Dropbox
Maybe not in the US generally, but in Silicon Valley yes. For the same amount of effort in fundraising, companies raise a greater amount.

If they're smart about spending this (not all in San Francisco at those wages and rental prices) then you can buy far greater resource (either pure headcount, or more time for the headcount you have).

Either of those scenarios would have enabled us to bring a better product to market sooner, and to have raised awareness with more of the market... without already being on the fundraising treadmill.
Yes, I'm incredibly interested if you can provide text from a past entry. Please save the day!
Quite straightforward to find out who runs this, the about page is still up - http://ohlife.com/about
As a consumer, how does an absence of price competition lead to lower prices for me?
Interesting, so I'm presuming there's several VPNs involved between the load-balancer and all the discrete servers. I wonder if they use a VPN provider with a static IP and no-logs policy or if it's simply yet another VPS.

I'd love to hear a little more about the architecture.
>> Commuting from Bristol to London on a daily basis is borderline ridiculous
>> by train it's probably a three hour trip each way

Its 1 hour 30 mins from Bristol Parkway to Paddington. If you have to cross London, then yeah, it will suck.

edit: I'm not recommending commuting to London, kind of the opposite. I'm using it to illustrate the geographical distances. A Silicon Valley type hub is needed in the US because of the continental distances between major cities. In the UK, we should be exploiting better connected cities to make a UK hub rather than continuing to ram everything into London.
Well Andrew Ng can work on pretty much anything he wanted to in search. It's not as if he is a random product manager assigned to this job. He picked this. He put his money where his mouth is. I'd think that would give him more credibility on the claim, not less.
I'd definitely be interested if you add the past entry -- that's the most important feature for me.
If one is looking for degrees of homoiconicity, a useful question to ask is how hard it is for a program to modify its code and execute the result. In Lisp, it's very easy, so Lisp is meaningfully homoiconic.

For a C program to modify its code, it needs access to its source code (which it might not have) and a compiler (also not necessary) and the programmer has to write rather contrived code to modify the source, compile it, fork, and start executing the result. So C is not meaningfully homoiconic.

Or I suppose the C program could modify an executable directly, but that is even more contrived since it requires the programmer to work with a completely different representation (machine code) than the language of the original program.
The idea isn't to completely eliminate cross platform rewriting (which may sacrifice efficiency), but to make it minimal (and flexible).
They seemed to be going ok as of a year back:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/flubit-london-start-up-aiming-next-...

It's a little odd that they've gone invite only
The PS3 had OpenGL. Nobody used it because it was vastly slower than libgcm. The PS4 has OpenGL. Almost nobody outside of indie-land has even looked at it because there's no reason to when libgnm is right there and you still pay a significant performance vig, in an industry where you do not get the luxury of ignoring performance, for an only marginally better API. The Xbox One, on the other hand, does provide what appears (I don't have access to any of these consoles, I just know a lot of game devs who like to drink) to be a complete DX11 implementation...and it's plagued with perf issues you don't see on a PC because the assumptions of the API don't map to the actual hardware--which, I understand, the lower-level constructs of DX12 will address.

The future of non-indie game development seems very much to be going towards hardware: Mantle, Metal, libgnm, DX12. If you're on a console, you can afford to actually develop for the console. If you're not, you don't matter. (Indies don't care, but few people care about them, so that tail wouldn't wag the dog. Nobody cares about Steam Machines, so I don't know why you'd bring them up.)
The problem with speech search is that talking can be disruptive.

But if they could do accurate speech recognition with a very quiet whisper (maybe using lip reading technology too) then I could see it completely dominating text searches in usage.
using dependency injection on #titanium #alloy #TiDev
I'd agree with this. He doesn't want a low-level graphics API, which is what OpenGL is. He wants everythng else around it. For what it's worth, I totally want that too. I'm just not blaming OpenGL for being a leg when I really want a tail.

SDL2 is cool, and so is @icculus. It isn't everything he wants, by a long shot, but it's good at what it is. I used SDL2 for a while when writing my game engine in C++ and didn't port to Mono for any reason related to it (just a burning desire to have a scripting layer that wouldn't make me put my head in an oven.).
Revisiting DRM: What about Books?
The fact that OpenGL on consoles has poor performance is the fault of console manufacturers, not of OpenGL itself. Also, their release schedule results in outdated hardware in comparison with regular computers. I.e. developers are forced into mentality of writing on a very low level to squeeze performance from a dated spec. More frequent updates could solve this situation and that's what Steam Machines aim to change as well. There is no valid reason why OpenGL can't be made to perform well on consoles except the lock-in mentality which plagues consoles market.
Founder here, would love to get feedback
House Rules
Sure, you can treat HTTP as a transport mechanism, which is what we've all been doing for the last 10 years because opening ports on firewalls sucks.

But HTTP is a resource manipulation mechanism: GET/POST/PUT/DELETE/... It's not optimized for transporting data.

Postgres, however, does provide a protocol that is optimized for transporting data [1]. It's also very simple to use, and full of thousands of features that are bug free. Which is why I find it odd to try to recreate a stable and efficient protocol into something less optimized, just so that a minority of developers can use http requests...

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/protocol.html
All companies in the UK must file annual accounts. They are available to anyone willing to pay the one pound fee per set of accounts.

Smaller companies don't need to publish P&L and cash flow. They can just publish a summary balance sheet. However, if you have the summary balance sheet for two consecutive years, then you can calculate the profit or loss.

About 60% of companies file accounts electronically using XBRL/iXBRL (rather than paper), and these accounts are available for free via daily/monthly zip files published on the Companies House web site.
In a libertarian system if some hospital routinely billed excessive hard-to-understand charges, somebody else would open a hospital across the street to compete with it. The new hospital could advertise open, transparent up-front pricing (complete with price comparisons), more sensible policies on consultation and out-of-network services, even money-back guarantees. Because the new hospital is so attractive, the old one would lose customers and ultimately either improve its policies or go out of business. This is how the market works with every other kind of firm: if you see an opening to provide a better supermarket or restaurant or department store you can just create it, with no regard to the impact your entry to the market might have on existing providers.

Sadly, hospitals are not legally allowed to compete on price. Or compete on service. Or compete at all. You generally can't make a new hospital or expand an old one unless you can convince regulators that doing so won't hurt any existing players. Which means the existing players have no incentive to improve.

Open the market to competition, and we would see vast improvement over the status quo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need
I Had a Stroke at 33
The LinkedIn article seemingly discusses every possible issue except security and privacy, which seems rather important when handling customer data. Access control in Kafka seems to be work in progress:

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/Security
What I would like to see more in these discussions is the possibility of using computers for triage in medicine...too often, these kinds of "will computers replace us" discussions focus on the computers doing everything...but how about a computer being trained to do as much of the "mechanical" work of a doctor's judgment as possible? Leaving the humans to focus on the 5%

An example I have in mind is Apgar's score, an almost stupidly simple index of a newborn's baby health, but a system devised by an anesthesiologist who realized that doctors' traditional method of judgment (check to see if the baby is crying "weakly") left many babies at risk of dying needlessly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apgar_score

I think if the profession stopped worrying about "replacing" doctors and rather, augmenting them, I think the discussions would be more beneficial.
There's a basic problem with live coding, which is defining the problem domain.

Live coding systems are only really good for building teeny tiny little toy automata, which usually do simple stuff with note lists, and maybe apply a bit of randomness or some simple repeating functions to a parameter or five.

Weapons-grade commercial music is much more complicated. The sounds are richer, the arrangements and mixes are immensely complex (even for simple songs), and generally there's a ridiculous amount of care and detail.

But... if you start building in machine learning, database searches, and super-complex DSP patches, and the stuff you really need to make non-trivial music, you're not really live coding any more - you're plugging pre-existing modules and data together by typing.

Also, watching people typing is kind of dull.

I think there are solutions to both problems, but REPL-music systems are only ever going to be a step on the way to them.

I'd be surprised if live coding ever makes it into the mainstream in the way that (say) eSports almost have.
Simulation of light passing through a raindrop
IRS: Partners' Share of LLC Income Is Subject to Self-Employment Tax
Giant glass marble might revolutionize solar power
"No one but Rust nerds is going to grok this"

This is the first rust code I've looked at, and I grok this. As someone currently doing C dev in my day job, and who's done a lot of C++ historically, ability to enforce lifetimes sounds outstanding - particularly as it probably combines marvelously with RAII.
Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
I think that's only true if the company has a decent sized win. As the CEO I actually feel pretty much unemployable. You're the ultimate generalist in a world where companies need specialists.
the mechanisms I mentioned have been replicated many times, by different researchers

Could you offer some references?
Ask HN: PhoneView or iExplorer
PhoneView is OS X only for $30, iExplorer also supports Windows for $35; other than that, which one do you recommend and why?
Well said. That's pretty much what I'm trying to do with my new startup, Enlitic: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530261/a-startup-hopes-...

Furthermore, the things the author of the NYT piece complains about are exactly the things that even the simplest machine learning algorithms handle easily. I'm worried articles like this will hold back the adoption of effective analytics in medicine, since doctors have no understanding of modern machine learning technology and as a result make wildly incorrect assumptions about the limitations of our ability to use data to support clinical decisions.
I think it's a bad idea, if i'm not mistaking... You are going to contact suppliers / authors of Amazon and say: hey, i have a buyer for your book for 9$ instead of the 9,99 on Amazon.

The author will just delete your email, why would he spend one minute on confirming the deal for a lousy 9 dollar, he doesn't care and he already has his lowest price on Amazon. If he agrees with you, then Amazon will also want a lower price (and then it will cost him a lot of money)
Yet another reason to avoid choosing the partnership tax election for LLCs for organizing your startup.
Misunderstood accounts to mean customer lists... Got it, that's not too bad if its limited to financials. I guess the intent is transparency for trade partners/employees/etc. Thanks for clarification.
Can you elaborate? I fail to see why this is dynamic - it still determines at compile time if/when to run destructors. I was under the impression that dynamic destruction was when you determine when to run destructors at runtime. Garbage collectors or reference counting, in other words.
You also don't have to pay for their holidays, and often not for their equipment (IR35 even suggests that contractors should use their own computers, in fact), for their attendance at company events, expenses (in some cases), etc.

In theory a contractor should be able to hit the ground running with no training required, too. Obviously in the harsh bitterness of reality that's often not the case...
Why would they use a VPN provider? It's trivial to set up your own if you control the systems at both ends.
Atul Gawande wrote about 'non-human' tools in medicine [0]. He advocated using checklists but he has also written about other tools. One I remember was a flow chart to predict some sickness. It outperformed humans solidly.

The biggest problem with checklists, flow charts and software (one older example is MYCIN [1]) is adaption. If the medical practitioners don't want the systems they are going to fail. He also writes a lot about that in the book. He tried to introduce it into hospitals but the professionals often ignored the lists or just checked the boxes without actually checking the condition.

I personally imagine that a practitioner with a good system works the best or like Frederick P. Brooks said [2]:

> If indeed our objective is to build computer systems that solve very challenging problems, my thesis is that IA > AI that is, that intelligence amplifying systems can, at any given level of available systems technology, beat AI systems. That is, a machine and a mind can beat a mind-imitating machine working by itself.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Checklist_Manifesto

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin

[2]: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~brooks/Toolsmith-CACM.pdf
>The reason is that much more research is needed to determine whether or not VR headsets are safe for developing eyes and brains. When you are using a VR headset, you are continually focused on infinity, which is not natural.

It's not natural for humans to move 60mph either, but we do it all the time. Before that, when cars were first invented, they thought that going that fast would just kill you instantly.
I'm a one man bootstrapped business (at the moment). Judging by my help@ emails, most customers perceive my company to be a bunch of people. I don't hide it but I don't shout it out either.

My customers tend to be small too, so it has been much more of a positive if they find that I'm similar to them. I can't always respond to email within a day in which case I'm up-front about my limitations.

And who likes the copy/paste responses you get from many SaaS, especially the likes of PayPal/eBay/Amazon/Google et al? You have a massive advantage to build loyalty and relationships by stamping your personality and approachableness on your comms.

That said, maybe if you're shooting for monthly subscriptions from enterprise clients $1k+ it can hobble you. Patrick at Kalzumeus seems to know that area well.
Are you proposing a reverse market, such as Zaarly initially did? If so, Fishbacks quora post about their pivot may explain to you why it's unlikely to work:
http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Zaarly-pivot
I forgot to add, you're always going to run into smug people who haven't walked in your shoes.
Ask HN: Pledges for SaaS startups valuing sustainability and ethics; any interest?
I'm sure we're all familiar with the regular posts that pop up here about startups shutting down on their users, often with very little notice.

As a potential user, this often makes me uncomfortable investing a lot of time into products I come across. It's difficult to tell the difference between a sustainable business model with clear vision and values, vs the typical "hypergrowth" startup which a year from now will probably have either shut down, completely pivoted, or been acquired.

An idea I had which could help alleviate this problem: a set of standardised "pledges" which startups can commit to, which outline some mututally agreeable obligations between the service and the end user.

This could of course cover many areas, but the ones that I think would make a good start are: Long-term service (X years minimum of guaranteed service), Personal data integrity (no selling data to 3rd parties), No data lock-in, Transparent subscription pricing, and Privacy-first (user data always private unless opting-in).

Draft for the more detailed conditions of the pledges here:

- https://github.com/jamesisaac/pledges/blob/master/pledges.md

Advantage for users: easy to recognise at a glance that the company is following agreeable standards (don't have to scrutinise marketing copy / terms of use / privacy policy). Advantage for providers: clear focus on values could be a USP over competitors.

I've created an example of how this could be presented on my product's landing page: https://nachapp.com (scroll to "Our values")

So, is anyone here interested in this? I think it would work best as a group/community effort where the pledges are finalised by consensus. So, if you're either a user who'd like to help define what constitutes a good product, or a founder who'd potentially be interested in committing to these pledges, it would be great if you could drop me an email (contact details in profile) so I can coordinate the effort and keep everyone updated.
Doctors are expensive. Computers are cheap. The more we can replace doctors, teachers, taxi drivers and other baumol workers with machines, the more consumer surplus is generated.
With a 100 active users at any one time? No it's not expensive since over the course of the month you would have hundreds of thousands of users. If you have 100 active users for your app you most likely could use the free/$100 option as it looks like it scales to requests per second which to be at 800 requests per second you would need a LOT of traffic. Highest I've worked with was 500 requests per second on a site handling 250,000 users a day and they only had that at peak times when they got 50% of their traffic in two hours.

I think you would need to look at your http logs to see how many request per second you're currently getting, I highly suspect it'll be nowhere near what you think it is.
Download DoulCi bypass Activator
I agree with both of your points. That being said, there's also the matter of the less low-hanging-fruit, street lighting for instance. I know in densely trafficked areas the street lighting is sufficient to completely obfuscate the sky, up to a few tens of miles away. Perhaps we can improve how we do said lighting but I see a lot of resistance in scaling it down until as I said, our capabilities are improved.
From an Android devs perspective, I will say that the Parse Android SDK is really well made. The API allows for idiomatic, fairly concise, and consistently patterned code. It also adheres to a lot of the coding conventions that android devs are used to like callback functions for asynchronous operations. Set up is super easy too. The offline caching feature is really easy and useful.

That being said, if you have the skill set and time as a developer to be able to implement all of those features and a server/db component, I would. It may not be as robust or clean as the Parse API but hey if its your code it shouldn't be terrible to work with. If you do it yourself, then you get the added benefit of just having to pay for hosting of your server and db.
It depends on what you mean by that. The only way to prevent a codebase from being seen by an adversary with physical access when the server is on is to not have the sensitive data on the server in the first place.

Encryption (with the decryption key being gotten at boot from, say, a particular .onion address) would work against backups, but won't protect against an adversary with admin access to the server when the virtual server is on.
Note that writeup caveats that the rule of thumb generally works for SaaS companies with $1mm+ in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Assuming at least one side isn't under a NAT, true. Otherwise it gets... "fun".
From the article it sounds like they aren't provisioning for fluctuating traffic and have a fixed set of VMs. Most providers can get you hardware within a couple hours in any case.
I like this - you can make sure something isn't named in subsequent code while still allowing it to be used. Ideally there could be some mechanism to statically assert that it is destroyed by some particular point, though I'm not sure what that should look like (I guess that's just making the lifetime explicit?).
Ask HN: How do I set up a HIPAA-compliant server?