skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is true financial access is a problem even in developed countries like the US -- though it is nothing compared to the situation of people in developing countries (and I would say calling the author naive is an unnecessary stretch), you are right in that it's important to raise awareness about the underbanked in the US as well.

You'd be glad to hear we are actually working with other financial institutions in the US like Opportunity Fund that provides microloans to Californians. At Bayes Impact, we have a commitment to building repeatable processes -- the good thing with using data to tackle problems is that it allows us to benefit from economies of scale when working with different actors that are facing similar problems.
Long story short, men discovered that being a well-behaved actor is a losing strategy on dating sites.
Reminiscent of folklore surrounding Airbnb's Craigslist campaign: http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-do...
I think there's definitely something uncanny about being able to look a dead person in the eyes. It's not so much the recognition that everyone will die as the ability to simultaneously see them as a living being and know them to be gone. Granted, it's debatable whether photographs actually do anything new in that regard. I get the same uncanny feeling when I look in the eyes of the Hellenistic Egyptian mummy paintings:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fayum_mummy_portr...
Have you thought about putting the (anonymous) data in a Kaggle competition?
Ebola May Threaten Startup Funding (Among Other Things)
Because you want to have control over all software you're shipping to production.
Guys, we just released the ugly version of Vidooly. Currently we provide intelligent analysis of any YouTube video & Channel. We have some advanced features on request. Need some valuable feedback to shape the product in next version.
Well there are, but I don't have enough space in my backyard to build and operate a casino.
If you de-duplicate time stamps how can you dynamically re-generate the data?

I.E.: Receive a sine wave, and give back the same sine wave?
Sketch of the Analytical Engine, with Notes by Ada Lovelace (1842)
Much agreed with your points. In addition, this part:

"Your profile also gives our matchmakers a glimpse into what you’re like as a real person, but don’t worry - we don’t base too much of our matching on your photos that your friend took that one time at that party after a few glasses of red wine :)"

...really terrifies me. I need to trust that the people doing this selection understand the context of my pictures while not knowing me at all? If I'm serious about finding a match using this service, I will gladly spend a full hours filling out a form telling you more about myself, rather than giving you access to my FB account.
Does this support pointers/memory buffers and other systems programming stuff? It's unclear to me from the compatibility table/etc.
"Our Premium Matchmakers will contact someone if they have someone they want to set them up on a date with."

This is unsolicited spam. And likely against OkCupid's terms of use.
Good luck with the app, I read the intro and the first thought that popped up was Wisdom of Crowds: http://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/...
@rogerbinns - The problem with being paid on success is that people are really bad at understanding the value behind 'success' and also, it's very hard to verify. Working backwards, it's easy to convince someone that finding their life partner is worth $1 million, and a 1% chance of that therefore is 10k.

But most people still think $20 is too much to spend at just a chance. If they were to pay on success, no matter how good we were, we'd be losing a lot of money. Some startups are fine doing that, but we wanted to create a sustainable business model from the start.

Also, I've heard the 'if you're good, you lose customers' comment a lot, but that is not the case with dating. People who are successful still go on a lot of dates, and the better you are, the more people they refer. Our goal is 100% to provide the best matches possible, so that people like us, refer their friends, and end up happy / in love / dating / having sex / doing what they want. If we had a crappy service that kept 'dangling' people in front of one another, a) none of us would want to work here and b) we'd have very high churn and die very quickly.
Oops, sorry had no idea!
Release now. Once it hits customers, you'll get real world feedback that you can feed into your efforts for the ios, web versions.
On Topic death advice: when giving someone advice, don't start your sentence with "Off topic life advice", as you will drop 30% of your readers* when vision hit the "off topic" part.

*No scientific evidence behind this statement, but this is the internet, so it's true.
"and this model works" for women <- FTFY

> Men will swipe right on the majority of "matches"

Great stereotyping you have going there. Could you share some more insight into your "Women as the gatekeepers and men will hit on anything" life view? Maybe some men would prefer not to have to "swipe right" and face constant rejection? Maybe some women might prefer to approach men first instead of waiting on a man to present himself? Naw, what am saying? Gender roles were defined for a reason. Let's all just stay in our places.
Broadly speaking, this is what happens when the effort/volume tradeoff runs into low response rates and low read rates. The effort required to write a better message does not correspond to a sufficiently high chance of a response. Couple that with strong evidence that profiles and messages don't matter nearly as much as photos.

The net result, is most any given man is going to see more success in getting responses - and dates - by spamming any woman within a hundred miles than by writing the kind of message women publicly opine to want.
Show HN: Cubes Challenge: Optical Illusion Game
As a former contractor for USAID I can definitely testify to the increase in red tape. This is mostly in the form of congressional earmarks.

Many people don't realize that just "getting money out the door" is an incredibly difficult task when you have the burden of so much bureaucracy. Most of this bureaucracy is well intentioned (e.g. vetting partner organizations for terrorist or narcotics connections), but taken as a whole it is stifling.

In fact, the USAID Mission in Kenya (USAID's largest in Africa) turned down increased funding in 2012 because they simply had too much cash and not enough staff to obligate it to organizations on time.

This ends up creating a heavily calcified aid "system" where older organizations with the ability to cope with legal/bureaucratic issues are the only ones who can survive. The average wait-time for a USAID payment is something around 9 months, so small start-up organizations are de-facto ineligible if they need immediate funding.

Obviously this is just anecdotal. However, the ultimate result that I have observed is that aid typically gets distributed to organizations (contractors) who are heavily entrenched and will generally take around a 50% overhead fee.

USAID has attempted to alleviate this problem through the USAID Forward initiative (which requires Missions to have a certain percentage of "locally owned" organizations ). However, once again entrenched aid contractors are best suited to jump through bureaucratic loopholes. For example, by incorporating country-based subsidiaries in locations where they are pursuing contracts.

Just my own take on why money isn't always the problem when it comes to assisting developing countries.
Same in Egypt. There are still patches of paint on ceilings to be seen at the sights there. No sign of any Electrum though ;)
People blame gall stones on a fatty diet, but I think that is mistaken causality. It is certainly true that gall stone attacks often accompany fatty foods, but that's to be expected: the gall bladder's purpose is to pump out bile to help digest fatty acids.

My anecdotal surveys of people with gall problems has led me to believe it is often a low fat diet that causes the stones, perhaps because the gall bladder is not being used enough to fully "clean" itself out between meals. This may be made worse by a lack of vitamin K2 causing poor calcium handling within the body (which, itself, is a fat soluble vitamin). These conditions cause impurities to build into gall stones and, when a fatty meal is eaten, the gall bladder tries to secrete bile and pushes the stone(s) into a biliary duct.

Many people have been told they cannot eat fatty foods after their gall bladder is removed. For most, this isn't true, but it does take effort to rebuild one's ability to eat fat (you need to slowly work up to it), and some people are required to supplement with bear bile. Given a reduction in fat almost necessarily implies an increase in carbohydrates, and an increase in carbohydrate is strong associated with increased insulin resistance and the negative health outcomes associated with that, it's a worthwhile effort.

I have misgivings about any supposedly "useless" organs. We know a lot about how the body works, but we certainly don't know everything. That a person can live without an organ does not mean they are living an optimal life without it.
We're approaching our $100,000th sale on Android only while I've spent the last year polishing our product and getting it ready for iOS, where we still have not launched.

So I would advocate doing number one. Launch, get feedback, get better, find your market and get paid while you work on the iOS version.
Is this like an Alexa for youtube?
The male experience on dating sites is soul-crushing. It consists mainly being utterly ignored by everyone. Then, when you read profiles and put in effort, you discover that you're shouting into the void. So you move to copy-paste in part because it hurts less and in part because it gets you more responses.
There's actually something of a negative feedback loop that's taking place. Women get a ton of junk messages (spam, inappropriate, etc.) while men get responses to their initial messages very rarely (most often just dead silence). So the women continue to be frustrated by the dozens of terrible messages they get and men continue to get frustrated by the low return on their efforts when they take the time to read profiles and craft thoughtful messages. In the end, it's a lot of effort on both parts to even establish a conversation.

While the feedback on Tinder (where there is less investment required by both to start a conversation) early on was positive in my circles, it's starting to turn really noisy too. In the end, I think we'll see a successful model where you have the low barrier to conversation as per Tinder but a bit more info about the person as per OKC.
That's not being altruistic, that's poaching.
If OKCupid has all of these messages, couldn't they algorithmically rate your message (based on sender patterns, receiver patterns, and/or site wide patterns) before you send it. While it wouldn't be perfect, it would act like the minimum reading level from most grammar checks. (This feels like something that must have been tried, or dismissed, before.)
> but just because someone is rejected doesn't mean we didn't do our job well

To my mind, yes it does. When someone is paying per match, if match that won't meet you, it was a failure. I don't mind rejection, but I don't want pay to be rejected.

It doesn't have to go on indefinitely, but it makes sense to me to retry a couple of times that month and then offer the person the choice of either a refund or a new match next month with some advice on how to improve their profile.
Phantomjs as an HTML Validator
As a native, English, English speaker, I don't see anything at all wrong with goodside's phrasing. I think they successfully expressed what they were trying to express, succinctly and with appropriate tone.
I've been using Macs since 2010 and only bought one item from the Mac App Store (a cheap game) to test it out. You don't need to use it if you don't want to.
Ugh that brings back bad memories of my first ever proper job which was wirewrapping prototypes for a couple of design engineers. Was ok for the first couple of hours, then you realised why they didn't do it themselves.

I built a simple Z80 system in 1997 and refused to do that again so I used strip board. Worked fine. Wouldn't use it for analogue/RF though.
It's not just that if you message 100 women, a few will respond. It's that you tried being thoughtful and genuine and discovered it was a waste of time.
uhm seems to be working on chorme for me
The ability to use type parameterization to create a type with one or more "holes" in it that is filled in at declaration time. For example, a type that is a List of ints would often have almost exactly the same code as a type that is a List of strings. But without generics, you have to write it twice (or copy/paste, use code generation, etc.) With generics, you say "List<T>", and the compiler makes it work for both List<int> and List<string> (and pretty much any other type you substitute for T). (There are various ways of making it work under the compiler can use under the hood).
I'm genuinely curious to know what you've been using it for.
that is very very impressive!
Not just living in the past, but in a specific slice of the past since in the era of IE3 (pre-Webkit/pre-Chrome/when Netscape was big on turning the browser into an Office Suite), IE was by far the best web browser.

That aside, while I do think modern IE is quite a good web browser and I mostly use Windows, I still use Chrome as my primary browser because it is everywhere (on my phone, on Linux, on Chromebooks) and IE is only on Windows.
There's an entire ecosystem (though possibly not very robust) around providing services to people on dating services like helping with writing their profile. I've heard from a few people that it would be awesome to have someone just manage their dating profile for them. This service seems in some ways to add to that ecosystem and fill the need. I would think that OKC, etc. would in the end benefit from their contribution.
It's okay. If only one person reads it and stops the passive aggressive, office speak?, whatever that bizarre stuff is, I've done the rest of the normal sane people a favor. I'll take plenty downvotes to save just one person from having to listen to that weirdness even once.
Apple and Facebook are now paying for women employees to freeze their eggs
Totally agree! Plaintext is an unnormalized form of program code, and working in it generates all sorts of artificial problems. I've started various pet projects to try to be able to edit the AST naturally, but haven't seen much success yet. The UX is really difficult.

I think the Light Table team is trying to do this now with Eve, although it sounds like they are turning it into something even more revolutionary but further from textual visualization.
Stack Recommend – recommendation for stack overflow posts
Hey

I have just put online my final project for a Data Science course I am doing. Check out and tell me what you think. (http://recommender.im)

The idea is, based on your profile or tags you are interested in recommend posts that you could be interested in reading.

I am still fine tuning it, put it is already pretty usable.
Well, Mozilla is Humble's partner for this bundle, receiving a cut of the revenue, and asm.js is their work.

Plus, Chrome users can benefit from Mozilla's work, too, just as Firefox users may appreciate Google. It's the "Mozilla Bundle", not the "Firefox Bundle", after all.
> Premium Matchmakers do occasionally use their real profiles

Unless they're on OKC to look for dates, they have no business being there. The only messages that they could legitimately send on OKC would be to ask someone on a date.
Hah. Sorry to hear that.
Thanks for stereotyping me and grouping me with the worst actors in my gender.
My exact same thoughts. I wonder how much traffic can a custom CPU like that can handle before crashing.
We actually explored that before we met Bayes Impact. The Kaggle team thought a competition would be overkill for our data set (about 8000 loans).
Women have far more choice on OkCupid, it's the men who do not: http://www.alternet.org/why-online-dating-sucks-men

She talks about how easy OkCupid is for women, how she recommends her female friends to try it out, but how she also dissuades her male friends from trying it. Because the site is so difficult for men.
Spam is in the eye of the receiver. Someone with an empty OkCupid inbox would probably be glad to get a "I know someone you'd be perfect for!" message. Maybe that's still against OkCupid's ToS, I don't know, but if I was the recipient I wouldn't really care.

If it was just generic "come sign up for our new dating service!" messages, I'd agree with you, but that's not what they were doing.
Pretty much the same thing that drives them to write, I imagine. Pain -> Art
Yea, on front end it is Alexa for YouTube channels & videos. You can get stats & performance of any YouTube channel, videos. We have some advanced features for content creators, brands & MCNs to grow & optimize their channel organically. You can request access to get our advanced features!
A really huge project. Few seconds to have a Physical Online Cloud in IAAS. 4 core ARM, 2Go et 20Go SSD in few seconds and first PHP5 instance created. Test it.
> Yeah i just see Go as an alternative for web technologies

I don't see any web technology Go could replace. Not even dynamically typed langauges.
I've been doing debian on server for years.

I decided to go ubuntu 14.whatever on a laptop that had XP on it (Acer One) and keep it as-is, as a new user.

I was pleasantly surprised. install was smooth, all hardware works, and I just installed firefox, and it all works (99% of flash works).

I use it for gmail, facebook, twitter, ello, surfing, etc. The machine is underpowered for full-motion video, but oh well, it was $349 6 years ago.

I use terminal to ssh into remote servers, and I've done no configuration at all on the machine. it works fine.
Got invite by twitter. Thx!
How tired are you of seeing Clever's advertisement?
How often does a K-12 teacher thank you for coding? Find out at Clever (YC S12)

Who else if completely fucking tired of seeing this shit pop up?
This is tested in latest Nightly:

Open up: about:config?filter=keyword.enabled

Set it to false.

Now things like "bjafbsaofbdnaspolnas" will just end up at "http://www.bjafbsaofbdnaspolnas.com/".
Thing is that people who comment on HN are used to writing longish form text with correct spelling and grammar. There are also many people who have a lower education level but still want to use OKCupid and might be a good match for someone.
See: http://straightwhiteboystexting.tumblr.com/ (Let's try to ignore the flame inducing name of this tumblr).
Then I have a question.

> Tell your employees to stop creating fake profiles on OkCupid and spamming our users.

Seems to be what the poster really means.

>Please tell your employees to stop creating fake profiles on OkCupid and spamming our users.

That means the poster is begging the person stop? Does that really make sense? It sounds like someone is directly telling someone something, but is adding "Please" to get themselves off the hook for being seen as directly telling someone something.

As a native English speaker, I cannot remember anyone, except maybe an old person at dinner saying "Please pass the salt", say the world "Please" at the start of a phrase where it wasn't an aggressively postured order. Like this obviously was.

Serious question: Could you tell me what I'm missing with that?
Two more browser memory disclosure bugs (CVE-2014-1580 and #19611cz)
The Narrative of Mediocrity
REST API on Rails
Cool post. I thought this was the most interesting point:

"As an outside agency, we can’t (and shouldn’t) make this decision for Zidisha. However, it IS our job to inform them well enough to make it. The ROC curve is abstract and hard to interpret for this purpose, so we translated its information into a plot that directly measures the trade-off at every possible threshold value."

So many of the standard techniques in machine learning assume an objective function that's different from what the end-user actually cares about. Good practitioners like Everett know to translate between the algorithm's loss function (e.g., squared error) and the end goal. I'm surprised there's not more research to let ML algorithms optimize the ultimate loss function directly!
Speak for yourself. I, personally, discovered through direct and firsthand experience that being a well-behaved actor was a losing strategy.

Then I stopped to think about it and understood why.
"one needs to consider the problem from both genders"

Exactly. I think Tinder's model is more aligned with how men and women meet IRL. As a guy, my modus operandi is to present myself as a high-valued man to everyone and have the women pre-select me so I can start the interaction.

How men use Tinder: like like like like "Oops, I wanted to see the rest of her pictures"

How women use Tinder: nope nope nope nope "Oops, he was cute"

Its the 80/20 rule-- 20% of the guys will get most of the likes from the girls.

With all that repetition, I think there must be an even better model for matching people up...
That seems to happen to all michaelochurch.wordpress.com posts. I suspect that it has nothing to do with the union topic. Since July 2012 (my "Don't waste your time in crappy startup jobs") HN has been down-modding posts on my blog, even submitted by other users. (In other news, I also can't submit new links to HN. I could use sock-puppets and proxies to evade that, but I don't care about HN enough to do so.) Consequently, submissions of links to my blog will always fall to the bottom.

I am (unintentionally, having never signed up for the role) Paul Graham's Anti-Christ. My comments fall to the bottom even when they have 20+ upvotes, and if I access HN while logged in, it takes 5+ seconds (as opposed to ~200ms when not logged in). I also get the "submitting too fast" message after 3-4 posts in a day.

Oddly enough, 7 years ago, I was a major fan of Paul Graham and what he had to say. I considered applying to Y Combinator. I loved On Lisp when I first read it (2007). I did find him to be a little bit closed-minded in his rejection of static typing (when I asked him what he thought about ML and Haskell); however, he wasn't any moreso than most programmers.
VFF – All Ideas Welcome
Hmmm...that's a curious definition of both "unsolicited" and "spam". If you post a profile on a dating site, are you not soliciting responses? As for spam, if someone contacts me for the very purpose which I have solicited responses for (in this case, finding someone to date) I would hardly call that spam.
Mostly because I think I would very rarely reject a date. I like meeting new people even if I may not have a romantic future with them.

Even if I don't think they would be a good fit based on their profile, I'd always be up for having my expectations disproved. I also don't trust profiles to describe people very well.
Wow, I signed up to Kickstarter to specifically get your email about this, and I'm finding it a day after and never got an email.
> I would think that OKC, etc. would in the end benefit from their contribution.

That's BS and you know it. If that were the case, OP's startup should've bought ads on OKC and OKC would be glad to sell ad space. I really doubt that OKC or its parent company will sell ads to a competitor dating site.
The great mortgaging: How credit growth is indicative of financial crisis
The Subversion book covers the concept of vendor branches extensively:

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.advanced.vendorbr.htm...

That's where I first read the term, but it predates svn. As far as I know, it's been the common term for committing external dependencies to your own VCS for as long as there's been such a thing as a VCS.