skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This app is actually useful.

Empirically -- and I'm not giving too many details because certain HN users are assholes so I don't make my account identifiable -- good english makes you worth $10-$15 / hour more. What is the difference between the $20 and the $35 to $45 / hour handyman? How well the latter understands your instructions and hence how much supervision he or she needs. This is complicated by the fact, and I'm not sure if it's cultural or just the people I've worked with, but certain people will just say "yes" on the phone even though they didn't actually understand what you wanted done. When what you wanted doesn't happen, it makes you frustrated and unlikely to employ that person again. Simply being able to call your handyman and give him or her instructions over the phone, and being confident that they understood and will do what you wanted, without you having to be physically present the entire time, makes them far more useful and worth a lot more.

So this app, which helps english speaking people purchasing home cleaning communicate with spanish speaking cleaners, may well be quite useful. Part of the value chains give, and for which they keep a big piece of the transaction, is clear communication between english speaking customers and primarily spanish speaking cleaners. Tools like this help cut out the middleman and get the cleaner much more of the $60-$80 customers pay.

source: I help manage an apartment building and hence interact w/ lots of cleaners, handymen, and carpenters.

edit: for example, the guy who cleans the building every week and takes care of light maintenance has terrible english. Saying, eg, "please trim the hedges next to the driveway" simply cannot be reliably communicated without someone being there in person. The other maintenance guy can, eg, be told "something's leaking in the 2nd floor laundry room". He can go there, diagnose -- eg bad drain tubing -- communicate, and be told to go to home depot, buy new tubing, and replace it -- all over txt message. This makes him worth way more money. I think the first guy could also do it, but I would have to be physically present the entire time. The second guy gets paid twice as much.
There aren't any HOV lanes actually in DC that I know of.

395 and 66 are two interstates that connect DC to the Virginia suburbs. The HOV lanes on 395 are usually more open and faster than the main highway. 66 is entirely HOV inside the Beltway during rush hour, so if you want to go that way at all, you need passengers.

Virginia just added HOT (passengers or pay) lanes on the Beltway itself; these are usually very clear because you need a transponder to even travel within them legally, and most people haven't bothered to get one. Maybe because the Beltway doesn't actually go into the city, so the utility is low for rush hour.
Anyone have an idea as to the lumens per sqft?
For one, it has a $2,500 deductible.

It is also only active during a Lyft ride.
Yes, they will refund it in cases like this.
Many years ago I was a trader. I recall watching analysts 'explaining' what had just happened in the markets. The question that naturally arose, was why they weren't speaking from their yachts.
Because I skim through a lot of articles at first to determine if something is even worth reading. I thought this was how the task management app Flow [1] was built. I thought they where trolling with some of the hardware and "Angular" stuff, then I realized sometimes skimming isn't the best approach.

[1] https://www.getflow.com/
The only place he could possibly find work is in some research lab (think MSR) or academia.
In case it's interesting to people, here's a blog post I made earlier this year on the topic of what exactly transaction isolation means:

http://www.michaelmelanson.net/2014/03/20/transactions/
V2G (vehicle-to-grid) aims to solve that problem. You plug in your electric car into an outlet in the parking lot, and sell the electricity to the grid at peak prices, and buy it back overnight at off-peak prices.

Though I don't know how profitable it would be once you factor in the reduction in battery life, and the energy lost between charging and discharging the battery.
Do something different.

What would you do if you knew you only had a year left to live, a month, week, day?

Get a remote job, travel the world. Join an exciting startup or start your own. Take a step back and think about the bigger picture, break the mundane system, you're in a unique space and time to do so. Do what makes you feel alive, if you don't know, experiment. Whatever you choose to do don't settle, you only get one chance...
Nothing is forcing people to pay for carpooling; if you find a neighbor who usually goes the same way, you can just do it. No need to pay Lyft in that situation.

Think of this as paying for the discovery of carpool companions.
Wealth Distribution in a Global World
I'm still facing the same problems with the missing autofocus. For some devices it works out of the box, like the HTC one mini, but for the most it does not. There is actually an open issue about that in the Chrome-Browser for Android (https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=343894)

It would help a lot to get continous autofocus working in the browsers. Especially with barcodes, since their size requires the camera to be really close.
While that may be true, Sidecar isn't in many locations. It looks like it is in Seattle, however I've never heard of it until now, nor do I know anybody that uses it...
Few people don’t know who Peter Thiel is. His Silicon Valley reputation as the first investor in Facebook echoes from the startup world to cocktail parties. He’s also known as the don of the PayPal mafia that includes Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman, who went on to found companies such as Tesla, Space X, and LinkedIn. But most don’t know his unconventional views on starting a successful business. http://bit.ly/1xSm6WT
Awesome Company Will Turn Everything You Ask into a Stuffed Toy
He's got a lot of accounts actually because they all keep getting hellbanned.
Yes, CE certification is needed as well. EMV is a German thing - electromagnetic compatibility tests which are needed for consumer electronics.

And about FCC. This article explains it pretty well: https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/398
Announcing the Launch of My Investments Page
Hi pault,

The way I would go about it is:

Start talking to potential customers. Find out how painful and valuable the problem is. Find out if they are currently using some other solution to the problem (your competitors).

Approach an industry organisation, if there is one, and talk to them about the problem, who has any existing or new solutions and find out if they have market research from their members.

Just a comment about the above two points, you don't have to pitch your specific solution to the problem but I would still leave the door open when you are talking to people and say something like, "if I were to come up with a solution that would do (insert features and benefits) would you be interested in talking further?" If the problem just isn't perceived by your customers to be painful or valuable then I would move on.

Now assuming the pain is sufficient and a solution is valuable then start looking at the economics of the business and start 'building the market.' What I mean by that is start with some assumptions about customer characteristics, for example demographics, and start putting some numbers together in terms of total market size. Try to do this from different angles and use different assumptions.

Then start playing around with what you think your cost and profit structure would look like with different business models. Think about what your cash burn rate will be and what sort of adoption you will need to hit a 'cash neutral' and break even scenario.

Then start applying this to your 'whole of market' model that you did before and start thinking if it makes sense. Do you need 1% or 0.0001% of the market to start adopting your solution? What might it cost to acquire those customers in terms of time and money? Start thinking about how that relates to hitting your 'cash neutral' and break even scenario.

Take a step back. Does this make sense? How much work is involved? How much capital are you going to need to achieve this? Then multiply that by say 4-5 times to give you a margin for error.

Now start thinking about post 'cash neutral' scenarios where you are capturing different rates of the market. How much do your costs ramp up? What is your marginal profitability? What does this equate to in terms of return on capital? If the returns are low then forget it. Investors want you to return their capital plus a big fat profit. If you don't think you can grow a big enough pie so you can get a slice of it that will satisfy you then forget it and find another opportunity.

If things look like they are stacking up well and you got a good story to sell to investors then good luck. Raising money is a bitch. Assuming you manage to get enough then things get harder because you will now have to execute within the cash 'runway' you have been given and well the rest at that point is up to you, your team and luck.
>> Or, you know, just leave him the fuck alone.

Do you hold the door for a guy in a wheelchair, or let it close behind you because you fear he's gonna resent any effort to help him?
Ask HN: How do you track working time of your remote workers?
What are the best tools you use to track your remote team about what they do and how much time they really spend.

Most tools are for remote freelancers but our team is completely remote and sometimes I have a feeling that my employees just don't work full-time. How can I fix it?
The docs are kind of thin, what benefit does this have over using requests with the proxy setting set to use privoxy?
Same for me on Iceweasel 31.2.0 on Debian
The drone was actually running on the same wifi as the beam and had no issues btw (I setup the drone at the event)
There's something to be said in favor of light emitted from a point, like an HID bulb, or along a line like an incandescent light bulb. The advantages of points and lines is ease of constructing lenses and optics to put the light where you want. This is a problem for LEDs where the light is emitted on a plane, or multiple parallel lines, or space-filling curves depending on the semiconductor process used. What would be some advantages of a planar light like these, if they existed?
maybe because it saves a few bytes? I don't think performance advantages were the reason.
That's a nice chunk but insufficient nowadays. (The 24-year old in that article might've been able to make several $million in his remaining career.) The Lyft driver could still end up on the hook.
Killerstartups sucks.
The Making of Blue Pond: confessions of an indie game developer
Chef Server 12 Released
To call not being accepting of any incarnation of racial violence "zero-tolerance" has a really unfortunate air of dismissal to it. I, for one, am not a middle school hall monitor. There are things that a (relatively) advanced, civil society like ours should not accept. Just because you say something and may or may not mean what someone else meant does not remove the broader social context. The word is racist because of the social context and when you use it you evoke that context whether you understand it, agree with it, or not.

Edit: to be clear, my point is that evoking such an idea or meaning is violent towards others and an individual doesn't get to decide that this isn't the case. Believing you can is a hallmark of privilege.
Several thoughts on this topic:

- Cards (debit, credit, etc) are inherently insecure. When all the information you need to make a purchase is stamped right on it and or completely public (e.g. address).

- "Verified by Visa" and "Mastercard securecode" help a little but they're badly done, poorly supported, and are trivial to bypass (they also rarely work on mobile devices).

- This is largely a parental issue. You aren't bringing up a "good kid" if they either A) don't understand the value of a pound, or B) do but don't care.

- Parents often blame the companies for "allowing" this to occur after the parents themselves knowingly added their card onto a system their kid has unlimited spending potential on (e.g. app stores, other digital goods, even Amazon).

- I think it would be a nice gesture for EA to refund SOME of the money but, frankly, the parents deserve to take some level of hit on this one.

- Most banks suck at informing their customers about unusual activity, like 2500 pounds on digital goods over a short period(!).
Olá!
I don't know any OCaml developer in Portugal besides myself (outside the universities at least)! Where are you from, how do you use OCaml?
The hand-made port looks really promising. This could work alongside QuaggaJS as the decoding part, since ZXing does not locate the barcode.
Light from large sources is "softer", meaning the shadows are not as harsh. This is why you see photographers use soft boxes or umbrellas, or videographers using light panels.

Indoor lighting is usually more appealing, and more functional, from a large source, as well.

Imagine being in a dark room with only one, small light source, and trying to do some sort of fine motor work. If the room is evenly lit, from a large source, it's easy to see what you're doing. But if there's just one small source, you end up casting a shadow on what you're trying to work on, making it much more difficult.
I could - but I don't see the point at all. Blaming him for being a racist is like blaming someone with alzheimer for being forgetful.
Well played. I was going to post one example that survived in my mind pretty far into adolescence but now I don't half to.
Scientists solve reptile mysteries with landmark study on evolution of turtles
Google search – “king of united states”
These would be much worse. They're essentially an array of tiny LEDs and a consequence of the distribution of LED forward voltages will mean that some of the LEDs are going to hog current and others will get less. This will lead to bright spots, and the human eye is actually very sensitive to this. You get the same problem with OLED displays and people have complained a lot about the visible noise on OLED phones like the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.
From the FastCo link [1] in another comment:

"Consumers should start to see Lightpaper in the wild around the middle of 2015. But Rohinni won't be aiming at the home hobbyist market until after it takes hold in the commercial and industrial space."

Bummer!

1: http://www.fastcolabs.com/3038890/rohinnis-lightpaper-is-inc...
If You Care About Women, Delete Your Uber Account
Have you really tried with Code128 or EAN13 encoded barcodes? In the demo, you can switch between those two modes. Make sure your camera has an auto-focus built in, because blurry images are not recognized robustly enough.
Well in my experience as a cyclist, I'm sure you see a lot of them as most drivers are focused on their phones, their radios, the scenery -- anything but the road.
You just maid my day.
"In writing this book I had one more goal in mind: I wanted to stress the practical power of abstract reasoning. The point is that during the last few years at different computer science conferences, I heard reiteration of the following claim:

Complex theories do not work, simple algorithms do.

"One of the goals of this book is to show that, at least in the problems of statistical inference, this is not true. I would like to demonstrate that in this area of science a good old principle is valid:

Nothing is more practical than a good theory.

-- From Vapnik's preface to The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory

*

Vapnik is not well-described as a "theory guy". That implies that he's not interested in connections between theory and practice, and this is most profoundly not the case. He has arguably been the most successful ML researcher ever as far as connecting abstract theory to real-world outcomes.

Besides the SVM: the VC dimension started out as a lemma regarding set counting, and he pushed it to the surprising (even shocking) conclusion of universal consistency for very general classes of estimators.
You say it as though it were a bad thing. He has money coming in, has a roof over his head, does fulfilling work, and from his description is quite satisfied with his life. Where is the problem?
I guess this varies a lot across domains, but in computer science for instance, most of the management and administration is done by researchers too, using platforms such as EasyChair for example. So there isn't any cost here either. At the end when all the work is done, the publisher receives the work and only has to put its stamp on it. Okay I may be exaggerating: last time I published in a Springer journal they did two additional things to my paper: they changed the page number color from black to blue, and they changed all the internal references to other section from "Sec. n" to "Sect. n"… Clearly that must have cost the $3500 in APCs that they asked to make the paper open access.

Of course neither me nor my lab could afford that so I just went with the regular way, signed their fucking copyright release form while cursing a lot against them, and in the end didn't really care because in my field (cryptology), most of the papers are on the IACR ePrint Archive even before they are published (including mine) and they are updated there when they change.

So, my personal experience and my research on the subject (I have done a lot of work on open access, see http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html which is only available in French for now) say that no, the publishers work is most of the time not that important: for instance in my case if the conference or journal just published a list of links to the accepted versions of the paper on the IACR ePrint archive, the cost of publishing would decrease drastically and the quality of the publication would not change at all.
Here is a nice collection of node.js / browser stuff that wraps around IndexedDB / LevelDB / WebSQL and is mostly compatible with one another.

https://github.com/rvagg/node-levelup/wiki/Modules
FF 33.1 on Windows 8.1 isn't working for me either.
If I understand this article (only skipped it over) he hasn't normalized the data. So if the training data and validation data have similar trend, the result will be invalid.

edit: It's two days of data? For one stock? If you are interested in this stuff, this is not an article worth reading.
Yeah, I already tried the webpage on my Flame and it worked out of the box. This might be a great app for the FF-OS store indeed.
More NSA technologies are expected to be open-sourced soon. After all, as the NSA pointed out: "Global reviews and critiques that stem from open-source releases can broaden a technology's applications for the U.S. private sector and for the good of the nation at large."

I'm no fan of the NSA, but I am a fan of government (read: taxpayer funded) research and development being released as Open Source, so I consider this a mostly positive development, within the context of our current system.
So assert is an interesting combination of several things:

- A check that can be disabled at compile time
- A check that blows up the program if it fails
- A check that has a really convenient syntax

The "disabled at compile time" bit is pretty much insane (at least in a language with side-effects) -- you'll inevitably end up accidentally having some sort of side-effect in your asserts, and if you turn them off for your production build, you're basically inserting a whole brand-new untested configuration, running in a build that is particularly hard to debug. But probably most people just leave asserts "on" all the time. (Even if you don't have side-effects in your asserts, you're still enabling untested run-paths, which is going to give weird, hard to debug error reports.)

The second thing is blowing up the program. Sometimes, this really is all you can do, and every language has some way for this to happen -- take the head of an empty list, access beyond an array bounds, whatever.

The problem is combining it with the really convenient syntax -- it's just very tempting to assert conditions which you should actually be handling more robustly, because assert is the easiest thing to write.

I'm doing a mix of Go server-side dev and Obj-C client side dev at the moment, and I do use asserts in Obj-C land.

I try to only use them only for truly "programmer screwed up" conditions, which should all be caught during development. But we still get crashes now and then from real users from asserts that shouldn't have been asserts; we fall into temptation.

So I suspect that actually we might be better of in Obj-C land, too, avoiding asserts.

(I also like the invariant-style thinking and documentation quality of asserts, though.)
He's carved a life out for himself that works. He has food, shelter, money, and fulfilling work. Why do you assume that he needs people to offer help?
Buy advertisements - just like any ethical business would. At the end of the day, if your business can't survive without "cheating", perhaps you should pivot or go into another kind of business.

For example, if Verizon can't make money if they actually honored their "unlimited data plans", they should stop offering unlimited data plans.
Show HN: Nearley.js v1.2.0 – a fast, powerful JavaScript parser generator
“Speaker” for OS X reads to you, with language auto recognition
This will be really cool when it's a real thing. Right now it seems to be limited to very small scale samples and Photoshopped mockups.
I have a BC-700 charger and a bunch of low self discharge AAs and AAAs that I use in practically everything (game controllers, wireless mouse, TV/roku remotes, headlamp, and things I'm probably forgetting), so put me in as a vote for AAA.

For the slip resistant material, I don't know if it exists, but something that isn't a dust magnet would be great. I've noticed with my SpaceNavigator that the ring of rubber on the bottom tends to accumulate dust and start slipping until I wipe it down periodically. Again a bigger deal for them, since their 6-axis devices include pushing sideways as an input.

As far as software support, Mischief does 1px increments with [], so that one's easy. And open source programs like GIMP and Blender could always be modified if needed. So I guess I'm not too worried about software.

This is a kind of niche thought, but I wonder if I could suction cup it to the back of a Surface Pro. I tend to sketch with the tablet in my lap and no good place to set a Flow. Chairs with no tables, flopped on couches, etc.

Went ahead and backed it! The $20 worldwide shipping is a bummer, but I'm glad it's been priced into it. IIRC that's one of the big problems that Apollo Pens ran into.
I really think what you say here is deeply ideological. As I explained in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8657030), there exist ways to have high quality OA venues at a fraction of the cost per publication that are demanded by gold/APCs OA publishers. You can read more about these models by googling for Diamond Open Access and Platinum Open Access (and see very successful and large scale exemples such as SciELO and revues.org).
Same here. FF 33.0 on Ubuntu 14.04.

I wish they had the courtesy to put up a "Sorry, your browser is not supported" instead of having me answering everything and then finding out it doesn't work.
The sarcasm and hyperbole tags have not made it into schema.org yet, so webmasters aren't deploying them widely.
Have a feeling this is going to be taken down shortly. So here's a copy for later http://i.imgur.com/JyVEY1p.png
Riri, Swiss brand. E.g Aquazips on some Patagonia shells.