skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disrupting the $1 trillion dollar annual online wagering industry
My name is Duncan McIntyre, a Director of https://fansunite.com/. FansUnite is a sports social network with a sports betting slant. Current estimations, including both legal and illegal markets, suggest the sports betting industry is worth between $700 billion and $1 trillion per year. As the United States is in need of additional tax revenues, sports betting is suddenly in line to become a accepted and legalized practice. FansUnite aims to be a hub for avid sports fans and sports bettors alike, while providing transparent rankings and comparative data analysis of FansUnite member picks and recommendations.

FansUnite is a big data analytics platform disrupting the $1 trillion dollar annual online wagering sector. We process inputs from our 4,500 beta data providers and leverage a cloud based machine learning environment. Our users have made over 70,000 predictions with a 10% higher win rate then industry averages. FansUnite monetizes by providing real-time analytics to individual users through a SaaS portal, and B2B through a subscription based API.

We excitedly launched our new platform on October 2nd, 2014 to accommodate future growth in our offerings for FansUnite members.
If you present a conclusion, your opponent can claim it's an invalid conclusion based on faulty premises. However, if you only present evidence-backed facts, your opponent can't argue against the evidence and you force your opponent to reveal their hand earlier. In this case, the hand being revealed is ultimately one of national security... but by structuring the argument in this way, they are likely to avoid a prolonged argument with the government over the conclusion's validity.
Their argument that knowing your hydration quotient is more important to fitness & wellbeing than knowing your calorie intake should get them pummelled. I don't care if they have an MD on their staff.

For a start if you care about health & fitness to a degree at all you simply wouldn't drink Red Bull, beer to any amount that it makes a difference. If you do it will be in a binge scenario.

I also use the same technique in debate by dealing with likely criticism by mentioning it and countering with a weak counter point. In this case that is the use of the app to enter drinks you would never pour into a horrid big bottle.

I also wonder about the tech they use to determine the liquid content. I'm gonna guess its not that clever. Using light analysis vs a DB of known drinks or something likely to be wrong.
Unlike other touch receptors, which operate on a loop—you touch a hot stove,
the nerves fire a signal to the brain, the brain registers pain and fires a signal
back for you to withdraw your hand—these receptors are one-way. They talk to
the brain, but the brain doesn’t communicate back. “We think that’s what they
exist for, to trigger endorphin responses as a consequence of grooming,”
Dunbar said. Until social media can replicate that touch, it can’t fully replicate
social bonding.

Crazy thought: Could the haptic-messaging features of the Apple Watch make it the first mainstream product to tap into this principle?
Won't happen, due to the "optics" of dooming regional populations (never mind compelling the unwilling to treat the infected). Horrible as Ebola is, and as bad as its spread will likely get, the areas requiring quarantine for effective results are still largely healthy (relatively speaking); guaranteeing their demise over the hope of survival won't be accepted by those needed to make it happen.

Just yesterday I had a conversation with someone lamenting how inhumane it was to enforce anything remotely resembling quarantine (say, refusing flights from a "hot" country) as being mean on an individual level, despite the statistical odds of an individual infection exploding into the demise of millions.

Hopefully this outbreak will, like most Ebola instances, burn itself out well before it goes outright pandemic. Prepare to self-quarantine if it doesn't; given what we saw in Dallas of late indicates governmental unwillingness to address such an outbreak in a realistic fashion.
It was also speculated that they were killed to oppress the Christian minority in Egypt, who derived a significant part of their income from raising swine, due to Islam's restriction on interaction with pigs.
Book: The Wife Disposal Service
For loyalty cards, why not use passbook or equivalent?
> They had an incision, and a procedure was faked so that they didn’t know that they actually had nothing done.

Is it just me, or does this seem ethically dubious? A sugar pill placebo does no harm, but when you are cutting people open to "fake" surgery...just doesn't sit right.
Ask HN: What do you do with unfinished client work?
What do you do with the projects your clients abandon?
In high school I had four casual friends, in college I had one, five years after college I have zero. Poor you.
The problem is doing this without compromising security. There are at least the following problems:

- Remote RF-based attacks on the card.

- Attacks on the phone app.

- Leaks at the point credentials are transferred into the card. It turns out that most chip and pin cards do not use a public key/private key pair, with the private key inside the card. Visa actually recommends against this. (http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/bulletin-chip-recomme...) So getting the credentials off a chip and pin card is possible.

- Leaks from the servers at "Plastc".

- Customer liability beyond US law limits for bank credit and debit cards. (What if it's Plastc's fault? The bank blames Plastc, and Plastc dumps the liability on the customer, citing their "it's never our fault" EULA).

- The device is a great tool for "carders". Previously, "carders" using stolen credit card info had to make sure nobody saw them putting a white card in the ATM. Using a stolen credit card required access to convincing-looking blank cards and an embossing machine. Now, with Plastc, anybody with a list of stolen card numbers can easily create fake cards. At least if businesses are willing to accept Plastc cards.
Wow, never seen this quote. It applies to certain folks on HN for sure, and definitely folks on Reddit. You'll see lots of criticism, but very little work they've done.

Link bookmarked!
Am I the only one who thinks their use of the e-ink display is super friggin' cool? I'm personally not aware of may other use cases beyond e-readers.
Thanks. I'm trying to get cURL to decode, but it doesn't seem to natively handle. Now I'm digging into .../escape.c

I feel like I must be missing something... :/
Yep, that would be better. IMO the broader point is that stealth isn't magic. Just like any other tactic it has countermeasures... and pretty cheap ones. IMO this should be discussed more as our country pours billions into stealth aircrafts.
I actually would not be surprised -- I did neuroscience research at two major research universities, and I handled the lab finances as part of my RA duties.

Our grants and the university-provided lab startup funds bought the smaller stuff -- EEGs, eye-trackers, etc -- which ran in the thousands of dollars. The university financed the building and some of the maintenance of the larger stuff like the fMRI facilities we used, and we paid hourly to use them.
Thanks, that’s a typo :)
Or use my Hacker News client for Windows Phone:

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/hacker-news/a527...
I'm not looking for anything that isn't online already. I would be happy with JUST the results available in Google Maps, in fact.

I'm not asking for restaurant menus; the restaurants ARE categorized in Google Maps already.

I know exactly what data is available, and how I'd code it. I just don't have the time.
As the CDC has acted, nobody wants to actually lock down an infected area, clean it with appropriate HAZMAT gear, and "level 4" quarantine those exposed. We don't, so we won't.
Path was basically founded on the idea of Dunbar's number and that didn't work out so well. I think they assumed people wanted deeper connections with their friends online than folks really did. This article backs that up pretty well.

It is interesting the conclusion about the thinning of relationships and what the impacts of that are. I agree that you can likely form very strong bonds over the web but I don't think at this point they can replace actual physical interaction for the majority of people.
The article doesn't say that it's hard, it says that when you do it, there aren't significant benefits over placebo.
I should never use a debit card for anything anyway.

You have awful fraud protection and zero to near-zero rewards.

Banks will give you net-30 terms for no cost, reward you with many benefits, and give you fantastic protection from thieves AND retailers.
1000000% agree, I don't know why that's the "in thing" at the moment
Totally. I guess that was my point, that it's completely ambiguous, so I was curious to see which interpretation the algorithm picked.
Off topic, but just so you know -- dogs are colorblind (as compared to us) in that they have a more limited perception of color, but they don't just see black and white (and shades of gray)!

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner/200810/can...
I haven't socialized outside of work with someone who I don't work directly with in... decades? (aside from the person I'm married to :) ) I also see lots of other comments in this thread echoing similar sentiment.

I have a feeling we may be in a community that is an outlier to "typical" social behaviors.
Here are all the ones that have been mentioned so far. I'm sure there are a lot more!

- http://www.improvely.com

- http://www.appointmentreminder.org

- http://www.briefmetrics.com

- https://pinboard.in

- http://www.appointmind.com

- https://www.hittail.com

- https://www.getdrip.com

- http://www.bidsketch.com

- https://getmysky.com

- http://www.snapinspect.com

- https://www.everytimehq.com

- https://www.menutail.com

- https://www.s3stat.com/

- http://www.twiddla.com/
Once you've seen the Teal And Orange, you can't unsee it.
I hate to be so cynical, but product names nowadays are bordering on parody. And what's with the poor special effects in the background video? The e-ink display doesn't even line up with the card when it moves! You'd think they'd put just a little more work into that, since it's the first thing people see.
How to Turn Star Trek into the Next Marvel Movie Universe
As far as I see, Readme.io has additional features but everything you've listed is available for free on readthedocs.org, built on Sphinx which is free software.
You think that radars don't already have extensive filtering for clouds (otherwise it becomes a weather radar), birds and the like? What makes you think a bumble bee signature is readily trackable? Also, do you think radar engineers miss obvious solutions, and that you'd make a good engineer at Raytheon? Maybe you should apply.
Apertus axiom crowdfunding succeeds; magic lantern support
I set things up so I could actually run their whole JS SDK and talk to it from C#.
Is modern programming hard to learn, or is it more that people want to do more fancy stuff than before, and quicker? Making a java app is hard for the uninitiated, but compiling a few java classes just requires a compiler (essentially) and to memorize a few commands (or use something like Dr Java). Making a slick web app in RRails is probably pretty daunting, but writing some HTML doesn't even require a server, just a web browser.

There are a lot of interesting problems that can be tackled with simple tools (how about writing a toy compiler in C, for example). Will such things be useful? Probably not, but the learning experience is very valuable. And that's already a good outcome for someone who is only getting their feet wet.

(That said, I'm a relative beginner myself, and I'm kind of itching to make something that is actually useful, at this point. But things like learning language specific package managers, make tools, and other stuff that are needed can be taxing.)
Google "smartphone e-ink case", there seem to be a few of these. Very cool.
It won't be able to figure out the non-delimited version in the parents example. That's the point. By allowing that you've made it harder to read unless the reader has exactly the capabilities of a heavy weight IDE. This may or not be an ok trade-off, but you have to accept that there are cases where people may be reading your code without that benefit.
Console Improvements in the Windows 10 Technical Preview
and one showing all top stories updating in realtime. Obviously, in JS, but the other Firebase SDKs are similar: http://jsfiddle.net/firebase/96voj1xh/
How to Retain Engineering Talent
Incredible? I don't know if I'd quite go so far, but Reeder on iOS has a really fluid, slidey interface that works like a stack of cards. The best part is that you can drag to navigate back/forward from almost anywhere on the screen. I find myself constantly swiping back and forth just because it's so much fun.
How to become a Windows Agent power user from the command line
Previously the U.S. government enjoyed conflating cryptographic algorithms with munitions.

See http://cr.yp.to/export/status.html

Maybe they were thinking (light heartedly) that a practical post-quantum signature scheme might raise the attention of the government again. So they're giving a shout-out to the legions of governments officials that might find themselves on that page once they whip themselves into a panicked frenzy.
Frequency of need is a non-issue in the travel space or any other. As has been pointed out, there are many other spaces where lack of frequent visits has not been a barrier to success. Nor is name recall/retention an issue - if you create a great first impression i.e. delight your customer the first time and give them something they really like, they are unlikely to ever forget you.

IMO, the key issues to cracking this space (and these are beyond building a great product that people will find useful which is crazy hard anyway!):

1. Getting new users from free channels/biz dev
2. Getting new users from free channels/biz dev
3. Getting new users from free channels/biz dev

Most startups look at user acquisition as a secondary consideration to the product. In the travel space, it has to be atleast an equal priority, if not an even higher one. You HAVE TO figure out how to hack user acquisition from free (or very cost effective) channels or you will fail. The sooner you start thinking about that the better.

4. Making money. If you can acquire millions of users, this becomes significantly easier.

5. Breadth/size of the space. This is a huge space with tons of variables and different personas. You have to figure out a way to make this work to your advantage. For example, most travel startups, being based in the US, seem to think that users only exist in the US. There are millions of users, especially in fast growing developing countries, who are pretty much being ignored. Another example - if you can figure out how to service the whole space well (and I know thats a BIG if), then at any given time you are going to be catering to some kind of user (increasing your likelihood of reaching millions) unlike a niche service that requires to scale based on a very specific user persona

If you can keep acquiring new users cost effectively and delighting them with your product, you will succeed in the travel space. Most startups cant do this and thats why they fail. they dont fail because of the frequency of need or name recall.
Beethoven was an alien spy: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeethovenWasAnAli...
The article, in fact, addresses your question.

> The ethical issues aren’t easily dismissed. Theoretically, a sugar pill carries no risk, and a sham procedure does. This is especially true if the procedure requires anesthesia. The surgeon must go out of his or her way to fool the patient. Many would have difficulty doing that.

> But we continue to ignore the real potential that many of our surgical procedures and medical devices aren’t doing much good — and might even be doing harm, since real surgery has been shown to pose more risks than sham surgery.
We've been using Readme.io for our documentation for a while now (http://api.knowtify.io). Love the team, but mostly I love that the non-technical folks (ie - me) can maintain/update our API docs without engineering having to time on it. It's one of the last things engineers want to spend time on (and one of the last things I'd want them to spend time on)...
My college roommate made the observation that "Everything is equally hard to do in LabView." He was a physicist and generalizing, but it holds up nicely. You can either sum up and divide a few numbers, or automatically collect data from a sensor every five seconds and store to an Excel file with about the same difficulty.

I both adore and hate the language for that weirdness.
This reminds me of when Europe used to prosecute animals for killing people and destroying property:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_trial
Married for 6 years. Can confirm. I have 1 close friend now (my spouse), and the rest of my friendships are casual.
Evernote has acquired Readable!

Hmmm, let's check Firebug's Net tab

http://readable.tastefulwords.com/log.js?rand=0.8736547357568928&url=http%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Finformation-technology%2F2014%2F10%2Fborked-belkin-routers-leave-many-unable-to-get-online%2F&options=%5B%5B%3Dtf%3A%20quote(Palatino%20Linotype)%2C%20Palatino%2C%20quote(Book%20Antigua)%2C%20Georgia%2C%20serif%5D%5D%5B%5B%3Dtfm%3A%20quote(Courier%20New)%2C%20Courier%2C%20monospace%5D%5D%5B%5B%3Dtfh%3A%20quote(Times%20New%20Roman)%2C%20Times%2C%20serif%5D%5D%5B%5B%3Dts%3A%2018px%5D%5D%5B%5B%3Dtlh%3A%201.5%5D%5D%5B%5B%3Dbw%3A%2030em%5D%5D%5B%5B%3Dcb%3A%20%23F5F5F5%5D%5D%5B%5B%3Dct%3A%20%23282828%5D%5D%5B%5B%3Dcl%3A%20%230000FF%5D%5D%5B%5B%3Dta%3A%20normal%5D%5D%5B%5B%3Db%3A%20blueprint%5D%5D&customCSS=&_=1412717055539

I'll stick to Color Toggle [1] then.

1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/color-toggle/...
The submission is from 2009. LED lighting from that long ago was either not very good or was very expensive.

LED lights are now much better.
The article made it clear that most casinos don't enable the double up feature by default. If you tried to play the long game, you'd end up interacting with the same high roller employees week to week to enable the feature, and eventually arousing suspicion.
Except for not having the mark phase (also not having to copy). The mark phase can take a lot of time.
You can't simply decode each character without losing information. For example, &#x3c; means a literal < character to be shown on the page, as opposed to a < in the stream which starts an HTML tag.

If you're just planning on displaying the text in a browser, no decoding is needed. If you want to parse the text to do some sort of textual analysis, an HTML parser library might be best.
> Most people work with a two-axes "strong" vs "weak" and "dynamic" vs "static" system.

I dispute this.

First of all, I think that most programmers use a one-axis system of strong/weak, where "strong" means approximately "the safety that I like", and "weak" means approximately "lacking the safety that I like", a system in which they have no words for "additional safety that I do not value". I'm not aware of any useful definition of these words, nor any specific definition widely agreed upon by any meaningful non-partisan class of speakers (e.g. "working programmers" or "published academic type theorists"). Can you correct me?

As such, I think that saying "very, very few languages are 'weakly' typed" is unlikely to be understood by your audience in the sense that you intended it (whatever sense that was).

I agree that the dynamic/static axis seems to be in wide use, and I'm unaware of massive divergences in usage. Although note that many people spell the word "static" using the letters ['s', 't', 'r', 'o', 'n', 'g'].
I'd say that was an example of strong typing. The + operator in both languages converts types if required. But it's a proper type conversion - it's not reinterpreting the existing data as another type.

If you are happy with a method like Ruby's puts converting objects to a string, why is + any different? They both do type conversion if required.

In my mind an example of a weakly typed language would look like this:

print 1 + "1";
> 399299293

Here my imaginary language has taken the object that represents the string "1", it has ignored the type and has reinterpreted the string object (which happens to be a pointer to a character array) as if it were an integer. This is what C does - which is why it is a weakly typed language in my mind.

But as I say, the are no good definitions.
"... there are now plenty of companies that have raised more than $7 million each that run almost completely using the Meteor framework ..." - anyone know who some of those companies are? I'd love to see some large-scale examples of Meteor running in the wild.
I was at a huge high school, there were 55 alumnus per classroom, and 15 classrooms per generation, my friends at the University were a subset of the ones at high school.
That's deeply concerning. Everything I've read highly recommended medication. People with ADHD report it significantly improved their lives.

Can anyone say if this article is reliable? I can't even read it on this computer.
What you don't like about that, would a video have been better?
Catcalling data from around the world
I hope my girlfriend doesn't read this.
All GCs have to deallocate objects. It may be very cheap to do so, for example when you have a semispace collector and no finalizers, but switching the spaces is still a form of deallocation. Production-quality GCs don't use semispace for everything because of the huge memory use overhead, and all practical GC'd languages I know of need finalizers in some form.
My source to the dynamic payout ability is a past co-worker that did work in the casinos back office computer system (think big iron computing). He entertained me with stories of how the casinos manipulated the environment to manipulate you into giving them more of your money. So, I may have misunderstood some of the details. But, am curious where your certainty comes from to see who's closer to the truth here.

Regardless, when a machine pays out in a way that is against the house, my take is that these guys deserve every cent they earned. The gamblers did nothing that the casinos don't do everyday. That is, use the rules of the game to their advantage (ie. manipulate you to make a decision against your own best interest). In this case the rules of the game were broken in an extremely subtle way.
Did they determine whether or not construction of a subway line beneath the same street where the archive is located was the cause?
From their website:
"Plastc Inc., this website and the products and/or services offered on this website are neither endorsed, nor sponsored by, nor affiliated with, the above-referenced banking/financial institutions and/or retailers. Each of Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Charles Schwab, Citi, Chase, Bank of America, US Bank, Wells Fargo, and Apple are registered trademarks of their respective owners and this website does not endorse or sponsor any such trademarks or their respective owners."
after they are over some 20k non-manual labor employees, its all in the median for my comment to apply
Both the Nintendo 3DS (portable console) and the HTC EVO 3D (phone) have dual camera setups so you can take 3D photos and videos.

When the rumors were swirling about the Fire's 3D I just assumed it would have the same sort of setup (even if the 3D display was just a parallax effect), but alas. In any case, there were so many WTFs (AT&T exclusive, price, etc) about the phone when they officially announced it that the omission of ability to create 3D content was pretty far down the list.
That's the equivalent of adding jitter to try to foul up a timing attack. It doesn't really work.