skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oooh Momma, Elliot Zaret! 'It works like this: The entire Web is constantly downloaded onto Google's computers, where it is aggregated, indexed and prepared for searches. When a user types in a search, Google performs a complex computation -- solving an equation that has 500 million variables and 2 billion terms -- to determine the best results on the "most important" sites. That equation takes into account many factors including how close the search terms are to each other, and whether other "important" Web sites point to the site the terms are on.'
Settling just means that PG&E did a risk analysis on how they thought a jury might respond. Yes, the Chromium was high, but high-Chromium combined with a cancer cluster is still just a reasonable outcome from random probability.
Pakistan Railway website hacked
Multitasking Damages Your Brain and Career
Game Boy Emulator GBA4iOS Is Dead
Being able to observe behavior and predict results is clearly good. At a young age, avoiding angering strangers is probably good too. At any age, it's probably best to know in advance when you are likely to anger strangers, even if you choose to anger them.
Thanks, this looks great.
Apparently they also have colocation space -- asked them how much it'd cost us. Will post here once I hear back(if I hear back soon :) ).
The breakfast in Istanbul is pretty elaborate. I'd like to live there if I'm eating, but not if I have to do the cooking.
> I want to know why they think a particular date. What analysis have they done to reach their conclusion?

Kurzweil is terrified of his own mortality and counting on "The Singularity" to allow him to upload his immortal ~soul~ consciousness into a computer.

That's why he's predicting a date within his lifespan.
I would very much like to see the deck that Larry and Sergey showed Kleiner Perkins in 1999. It would be interesting to match that up to the historical record.
Elon Musk Just Made It Way Cheaper to Live Off Solar Power
All things considered, no surprises here. Extreme majority of Google's profits depend on how well their search works. Same is not true for Apple with siri, or microsoft with Bing.
>For all you know they could be doing stock trades based on all the insider info they can glean from their chat traffic as their business model.

From the Slack TOS:

>Your acceptance of this TOS gives us the permission to do so and grants us any such rights necessary to provide the service to you, only for the purpose of providing the service (and for no other purpose).

They _could_ be breaking the TOS (and thus the contract between you and the them), but I doubt it.
Then the device manufacturer can make an international version. The US Congress could pass a law requiring all of some certain class of devices implement something to allow law enforcement to decrypt, but that wouldn't prevent the device manufacturers from selling a different version to their international customers.
Well, I don't agree. CEOs take in an enormous amount of stress and give their 24/7 for the company. They earn it.
>"Obviously, we're going to build an interesting business about it"

It's too bad they couldn't come up with anything better than advertising.
An Extended Conversation with Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak
> Yes, that's part of a decent protest - telling the company what they can do to get you back as a customer - and Mozilla could've chosen to ignore them and potentially lose them as customers and community members. That's fine. That would be their choice. Many companies have done so and succeeded - Chick-fil-a, as one example.

Chick fil A pulled back on most of its homophobic donations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick-fil-A_same-sex_marriage_c...

I still don't eat there, but only because Bojangles is closer and better.
"now we’ve [sic] allowed to get past that dogma and I think it really came partly from Steve Jobs not wanting things done differently than he could design and come up with himself."
Going to Startup School this weekend and getting ready for a YC submission, a similar question is very much on my mind, the only difference is that rather than early 30s I'm in my 40s! I think that the age related difficulty factors you cite increase exponentially with age.

The real problem is not a failed startup but finding out in 1-2 years that you're really not cut out for this type of life, due to many factors, some of which you listed.

Starting startups in your 20s and even in 30s is a no brainer: even if you want to go back to the corporate world in 3-5 years you still have many years assuming a cut off competitive employment age of around, say 55 (not the same thing as retirement); yet, if you're in your 40s you're getting dangerously close to the age where it becomes difficult to apply to large companies. The remaining options become starting another startup and freelancing. This means that an important lifeline that's available to young founders is not there for such older founders.
Show HN: Whenever – a sticky notes app with date countdown
I think you're over-thinking this. I mean, yeah, the point about how (some) people in their 30's (or later) have dramatically different life circumstances (family, mortgage, etc.) is true. Other than that, I don't think it matters much.

Is a failed 30 year old founder viewed differently than a 20 year old one? I don't know, but I doubt it, and - more to the point - I don't think it's relevant. Speaking as a 41 year old founder, I know that I don't give two flying fucks what anybody else will think about me if we ultimately fail. I mean, why would I? Why would you? Why would anybody? "Do what thou wilt shall be the sum of the law" and all that. Don't worry about seeking approval from strangers, life is too short for that shit.

Since job prospects are changing way too fast , how difficult it becomes to get job in 30s after failed start-up especially if you have family?

This is debatable, but my experience has been that if you have "in demand" skills and are good at what you do, finding a job isn't difficult even into your 40's - at least for a developer or other tech role. Maybe it's different for other fields, I really can't say. What I can say is that at least here on the East Coast, I've observed plenty of older developers (even more than a few who are quite older than me) who had no issues with age discrimination or whatever, so long as they had current skills.

My overall take? I look at working on a startup as a chance to learn new skills, broaden my horizons and learn a ton of valuable lessons. IF Fogbeam fails someday, I believe the experience will have made me far more employable, not less so. YMMV. shrug
Massive Betteridge fail.
Hangouts and Skype are good for instant connections to somebody for a quick video chat. Slack is for long-length conversations which require a good historical record. They're aiming for different use cases.
From Terence Tao:

"The funny thing about AI is that it’s a moving target. In the seventies, someone might ask “what are the goals of AI?” And you might say, “Oh, we want a computer who can beat a chess master, or who can understand actual language speech, or who can search a whole database very quickly.” We do all that now, like face recognition. All these things that we thought were AI, we can do them. But once you do them, you don’t think of them as AI. It has this connotation of some mysterious magical component to it, but when you actually solve one of these problems, you don’t solve it using magic, you solve it using clever mathematics. It’s no longer magical. It becomes science, and then you don’t think of it as AI anymore. It’s amazing how you can speak into your phone and ask for the nearest Thai restaurant, and it will find it. This would have been called AI, but we don’t think about it like that anymore. So I think, almost by definition, we will never have AI because we’ll never achieve the goals of AI or cease to be caught up with it."

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rinL25rC8LnMTzZcGjg1axT-...
Why is Virginia Postrel writing an article to posture with no substance? Author of "The Substance of Style", she writes an article representing the over-inflation of stupidly half-aggressive titles filled with not much at all, and to top it all off she threw in commercials at the end.

Yes, half an article to refute not a real point Thiel has made so that "Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future". Does Virginia Postrel think that 'countering' points that have not been made with

"People are justifiably wary of grandiose plans that impose major costs on those who won’t directly reap their benefits. " should validate such a title?

MetaMed & MIRI do not have a chance to improve people's lives? Contracts that are not completely recursive to violence based on the blockchain(Ethereum) cannot change peoples lives?

Palantir to improve law-enforcement while having personal liberties hard-coded in do not count? In an age where surveillance has become industrial? When before the greatest protection was being locked in file cabinets?

but do not forget that all of Thiel's relatively nuanced views are countered by....

"Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the series depicts decidedly flawed characters living in an exciting but brutal period and improving surgery through clever, risky and -- by today’s standards -- often-high-handed medical procedures." OhMyGod.

Ah yes. Now I can see the point that was being made. Not really. When you are going to write articles with sleight posturing, it would be good to have direct quotes about statements that were actually made and then getting to it.
They also claim that they can't play when the grass is wet. Am I just a crazy Englishman for thinking that's bizarre?
Slightly OT, but in school I remember a teach talking about how good voice to text has gotten but was stuck, stating it was roughly about a 70% accuracy, but that we were pretty much at a wall there and haven't moved much in the last decade.

Has there been any major advances in voice recognition other than just growing your speech corpus?
It seemed to me that Cortana returned the most correct answers without any extra fluff. The google results seemed to have the same accuracy but the phone said so much extra information in that monotonic voice that the clarity of the result was lost in the noise.
Hackhands.com deducts from tips?
Hackhands keeps 20% including 20% of your tips.

Hackhands gets around gratuity laws (such as the one linked below from California) by stating that their experts are not employees and that they are simply connecting user and expert. If that were truly the case, it would make more sense to pay a flat commission for the connection.

By paying a percentage of gratuity it seems that Hackhands is asking for compensation based on the quality of the content and service the expert is providing. This seems like a potentially problematic behavior.

Can anyone explain to me why they should deduct from gratuity instead of just having a fixed fee?

http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=LAB&sectionNum=351.

"What is the HackHands service fee?
Our service fee is 20%. This amount is deducted from the total amount charged/earned including tips. This service fee goes to our operations, enables the infrastructure for our platform."

https://hackhands.com/create-account
I never heard of a Myo before this article. However, I am extremely intrigued! The idea of magically waving my hand and doing actions is awesome. What if I can make a fist to take a picture, or touch my pinky with my thumb to answer a phone call?

Is there any chance there's some "killer app" that finds a special use case that dramatically unlocks some potential in people to get stuff done faster, or easier, with a Myo? Can anyone think of one?
> “There’s an automatic perception ... that everything’s dangerous,” Stephenson mused at a recent event in Los Angeles, citing the Stonehenge example, “and that there’s some cosmic balance at work--that if there’s an advance somewhere it must have a terrible cost.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a good thing? We should be worrying about trade-offs. There are myriad examples from the past (DDT, Thalidomide, Chernobyl) of humans racing ahead to use new technologies without taking sufficient time to consider the consequences.
Gonna give it a try sometime.
I think his law needs to be updated as:

Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no', but will someday be answered with 'yes'.
Microsoft Can Now Turn Any Space into the Holodeck
If not DNS, then via Server Name Indication (SNI)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
The article concludes that google is dramatically ahead, which is no suprise

but I AM suprised, anecdotally, how good Siri is vs previous iterations on my iphone 6 and OS 8

It feels close to "good enough" for the majority of functions I actually use eg: dictate an email, get directions, lookup a contact, and dial a phone number.

My sense is that Apple will nail the base functions so that most users, self included, won't notice a difference between the two.
Everyday Statistics for Programmers: Regression Analysis
Hi,

(throw away account)

I've been working in my startup for a while now, it was successful and made money for some time, but due to a big mistake we ended up losing a large amount of money, we bankrupt while being profitable. I'm the technical co-founder. Answering your questions:

> So what happens when such startup with founders in 30s fail ?

You look for a job. I'm not sure this is age/maturity related, but as soon as I was sure we wouldn't make it I moved on fast. Not to another startup, but to something solid where I could have time to think about my next move.

> Does society viewed them as ineptitude ?

Seriously? Society couldn't care less about you. If you are a technical worker, your open source activity, certificates, etc are the only thing that's worth anything.

> Since job prospects are changing way too fast , how difficult it becomes to get job in 30s after failed start-up especially if you have family ?

I got 6 solid job offers the same day I started to look for a job. The market is looking for a certain type of worker, you need to realized that and be ready to supply that demand. I know extremely talented programmers who are unemployed because they are ASM/C/Fortran developers. If your startup was working in something not very marketable, make sure you use your free time to learn, contribute to something the market wants.

> What do you think ?

Go for it, but don't gamble with your life.
-Just because we are correctly critical of some aspects of technological process doesn't mean we have become a bunch of petty pessimists who are just trying to make everyone feel bad.

maybe you stop at those things, i doubt thats the case but lets assume you do. you think these ideas are a tree with the wind of truth and reason blowing through your leaves. however its a tree in a forest of never ending complaining, negativity, and loathing on every step of progress. things like zoos are torturing animals into slavery, panning for gold is made illegal because it might disturb the fish - and they cant take it, companies like monsanato dont produce science and research into better crops to stop famine, they are an evil empire destroying the ecology and sapping humanity for all its worth. space program? forget it, why spend on wasteful things like that when we can spend more money on health and education.

the spit and the acid that people around me say towards those who choose to live in rural or suburban areas astounds me.

although i do find it amusing, they live in their concrete cities that destroyed all the ecology around them, but somehow believe they have special knowledge to tell people (who did not destroy the ecology around them) how they should live with regards to environmentalism.
How Bitcoin Could Save Journalism and the Arts
That's 48 billion in US terms (1 x 10^9).
if you're in your 40s you're getting dangerously close to the age where it becomes difficult to apply to large companies. The remaining options become starting another startup and freelancing

I guess it depends on how you define "large company" but that sounds suspiciously like a "fallacy of the excluded middle" scenario to me. I'd say there are a lot of other options... there are plenty of established - but not large - companies out there to work for, where being 40+ isn't going to be a negative. And there's always consulting where you're getting paid exactly for your accumulated experience and wisdom. Or one could opt for a "lifestyle business" of some sort.

I don't mean to say that age discrimination doesn't exist, or that it doesn't get somewhat harder to find work as one ages, under at least some circumstances. But if one keeps current on the skills and talents that are in-demand and desirable, I have found it quite possible to remain highly sought after at 40+. To use my own example, even though I'm not looking for a job... I get calls from recruiters pretty much every freaking day. And while they don't necessarily know my exact age, you can tell about how long I've been working from my LinkedIn profile and could come up with a fairly accurate approximation of my age without much trouble. But yet they keep calling.
Someone submitted this and deleted it a bit before this submission.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8430202

Anyway, there I was trying to find out which speech recognition software was more accurate. How do these compare to Dragon?

It seems like we're quite close to being able to actually using voice dictation without the frustration.
Not necessarily. GMail, Google Instant, Knowledge Graph, and every visual redesign Google's ever done were all very controversial internally, with a number of people predicting that they'd be the death of the company. (When Instant was under construction, we had a betting pool going on in my team about how long until it'd be rolled back, something I'm glad to say nobody won.) All of those turned out to be quite large career boosts to people who worked on them, and in GMail & Instant's case, good career boosts externally as well.

I would evaluate external career boosts the same way I evaluate startup ideas. (Evan Williams has a good framework here:)

http://evhead.com/2007/12/how-to-evaluate-new-product-idea.a...

For internal career boosts, I would do the same, but eliminate the question about discoverability and monetizability, and view "wideness" and "deepness" through the lense of the power of individual executives within the company. It's not enough to hold a wide appeal to potential users, you need to hold wide appeal to the users that your VP cares about pleasing, or you need to deliver value along the lines of your VP's thought process.
Nobody Knows What Running Looks Like
The title doesn't seem to match the content. Sure there's speculation about automation, but what they cite as actually happening is the outsourced jobs being brought back to have humans here on the proper side of the timezone and language barriers do them.
History of Silicon Valley: Profiles of Apple, Oracle, and Other SV Giants
"We have other ways of making money," said Page. "You'll see."
Show HN: Desktop reminder app for Google Calendar with push support
"carmelize"? I've heard US Americans saying it but I just thought it was poor diction for "caramelize" [bleurgh, of course caramelise is the correct spelling ;0) ]. Did you typo it or is this becoming an accepted spelling?

Wonder if you can build in synonyms without making it cluttered: julienne is for _home_ purposes used as equivalent to allumette, or matchsticks, or long thin strips, or batons. In a professional kitchen I think batons|batonnet are fatter, julienne are skinny and long, allumet|matchsticks are as the name suggests but a usually a little thinner.

Standardising recipe descriptions is probably pretty hard.
Just machine learning algorithms and more data.
I know this is a tough sell but I am going to say it anyway. Automation effects every single person and every single job.

For example, if your job is writing custom software, it becomes progressively harder to find problems that don't already have open source solutions.

Or look at how component marketplaces and open source components or modules increases software reuse. There is not an infinite capacity for software complexity to increase. So that reduces the amount of work to be done simply because solutions are being shared rather reinvented.
I think it's been mostly throwing hardware at the problem. Server hardware, backed by terabytes of context data.

I remember back in the day, most of the errors were the exact same errors that a human would make. Even you and I only really hear 95% or so of the words someone says. But we can fill in the rest from the context. It always amazes me when I dictate some sentence to my phone, and at the end I see one of the words change to another that sounds almost identical but makes much more sense in the entire context of the sentence.
"Insignificant percentage of Venezuelan turn to Bitcoins to bypass currency controls."

That is a more accurately title.
Ask HN: Developers above 35 – what are you doing?
On my last internship in San Francisco, almost every single person that I saw at the companies I visited, etc seemed to be under the age of 40. So developers that are close to or above that age, where are you now? What is your job title?
It's like giving yourself a nickname. It's annoying and self-defeating.
My main concern with Peter Thiel praising monopolies is that the nuance of the message will get lost - "earning monopoly through radical innovation" - but the core message remains - monopoly = profit. People will start to pat themselves on the back for acquiring all their competitors, skewing regulations in their favor, and a variety of other sleazy business tactics. I suspect most large business CEOs already understand that monopoly = profits, so Thiel is just making it respectable to talk about by casting it in the light of innovation.
> The automators will continue to get very, very rich, while the automated will have to find something else to do.

Part of me thinks this will lead to make much more apparent the paradox of capitalism: Those with the most money can... make the most money. Over time this means it all gets funneled into just a few families' pockets, until they own everything (which is silly and most likely would not be put up with after a certain extent).

Another part of me thinks that automation has been part of our society for a long time, and that taking it further only changes the kind of jobs everyone has, maybe even promoting equality by eliminating the more menial tasks (and therefore making every worker's skill and experience important, instead of them being just a replaceable cog).

Either way it seems absolutely inevitable in the long term, and I don't see a point in pretending it's not going to happen.
How to Rip and Convert Blu-ray to PS3 with Blu-ray to PS3 Ripper
A decent short overview of how Google's advertising business evolved can be found at http://publishing2.com/2008/05/27/google-adwords-a-brief-his.... While there were some unexpected twists and turns, the timeline suggests that when this article was written, Google was already thinking about the ways it could adopt an ad model.

As a side note, I'm not sure if this was posted as an ironic response to the growing bubble talk of the current boom but unlike in the late 90s, the challenge for most startups today is not finding a business model but rather achieving enough scale to apply one of the many proven business models successfully and sustainably.
It's pretty nice that ZDNet has stories from 1999 up still although I suspect that is not the story's original URL. (They've improved it for the benefit of Google's search engine since that time.)
Same in France. The US is just behind.
eBird is pretty much the definitive siting database. Interesting that its leveraging it. I'll try it out (maybe find some more birds for my flickr (which is inself a bad bird pun).

https://www.flickr.com/photos/acomjean
"Internet companies, which are almost expected to lose gobs of money"