skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
$96 a year. I seem to be sending out 2-3 deals a month, sometimes more. If you book ONE deal (out of 24-36+), and save $400 off average price... it's worth it.

If you don't think that's worth it - then you probably don't fall into the customer segment this is targeted toward. :)

Also, the "finders fee" model requires a ton more work. Integrating with all the 3rd party ticketing sites (kayak, orbitz, priceline), and ALL the first party ones (delta, united... etihad... cebu air... aeroflot... etc etc etc). Considering this is a side project, that quickly becomes prohibitive.
Hotel night clerk, security, housesitting, or just about anything in banking back office. The idea is you get paid a low hourly while spending a lot of the time working on your software. My friend finished version 1 of his application using RDC through his tellers' station, and the bank purported to be strict about personal computer use.

I agree consulting is best but it needs to be easily available and wrap up neatly, or else it'll eat into your creative time.
Because they aren't setting the spec sheet, they're selling refurb computers from it departments, and most of those were originally specced with 10/100
These are city streets. They can't put up fences because the UPS guy couldn't unload, your trash couldn't be picked up, you couldn't get to the sidewalk after parking your car, etc.

New York City is nothing like California.
> These new mechanisms are mandated by law

AFAIK no, it's just that MasterCard and VISA put it in their contracts.

> as newer mechanisms that don't transfer credit card credentials to the merchant

AFAIK even with EMV the merchant still gets the PAN, in the case of tokenization it's just not the "real" one. The Samsung press release mentions tokenization but it's not clear to me whether this will always be used or is just an option.
I've always like Prince Shotoku, able to follow ten conversations at the same time.
Or at least Cedar Mill/Presler, which is an easy drop-in replacement in most LGA775 motherboards. It is unfortunate that Conroe is not.
They didn't want to fix IM, they wanted a captive audience using something that at the time required Google+.

That sounds like a familiar trend for so many Google properties in the last few years...
Well, they are using the audio jack for i/o. Convert audio signal to a logic level voltage, then use that voltage to activate a solid state relay. Camera remotes are normal open momentary switches, and the relay would serve as the switch. The app is pretty much a timer that outputs beeps. Why not make that too?
The Bad Economics of Net Neutrality
Here's my idea to solve the same problem (aimed at tech people):

- Buy a decent expensive plot of land in SV

- Buy several tiny homes (let's say 10)[0] and put them on said plot

- Buy a large cheap plot of land way out in the middle of California (or potentially Nevada for tax reasons) that can accommodate 100 tiny homes

- Move the tiny homes (they're portable), effectively swapping them, from the SV plot to the cheap plot every time someone wants to get funding

Now, I know this is SV echo chamber speak, but hear me out for a second. I think there is a sizable market of people who realize that living in the SF Bay Area is stupidly expensive, and are willing to go ramen style because they're close to VCs. This brings the best of both worlds - cheap comfortable living + proximity to VCs during the time they need it most (rounds), with a community of founders to keep them from going bored.

[0] - http://www.wishbonetinyhomes.com/
I don't know about more planet friendly, but just in terms of dollars, if you're paying for your own electricity getting a modern desktop for $200 is more economical after a couple months.
Yeah, I got it, people on IRC helped me understand that it's not casting it as `Neg`, it's casting the type as `Neg` for namespacing purposes
unfortunately, product reviews don't give any information whatsoever on the lifespan of any product, instead focusing on the instant gratification, ease of use and shiny new things. Maybe that's what the consumer wants, but maybe that's just the only information they have access to in order to decide how to get the most bang for their bucks. Giving different information will at least let everyone decide what they believe is the most bangs (lifespan vs shiny new things) and buy accordingly
I am talking about the press coverage etc.
Docker Registry Hub is down
I'm by no means a physicist but find topics on the nature of universe deeply fascinating. One thing i've always found frustratingly difficult to grasp though, is the expansion of the universe - but just found this article to be a total eye opener: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space

It was counterintuitive to me how we can observe light from objects 12 billion years old, when supposedly things are flying apart faster than the speed of light. Is there an edge of the universe, and what is outside that we are 'expanding into'. If everything is moving apart, why are we going to crash into Andromeda? Why haven't black holes consumed all the mass in the universe by now? If the cosmological principle is true and the universe looks the same in all directions, doesn't that imply that we're either at the center- or that it wraps around and we just can't observe it? Saying it's infinitely large seems like a convenient explanation.

The idea of metric expansion of space between gravitationally unbound matter, local groups, and Hubble flow explain a lot.

I do still wonder though how accurate our understanding of the universe really is, or if there's some fundamental thing we've missed and have generated theories to fit the observations we're currently capable of making.
BOM cost sneaks up on first-time projects. My first big project I was a fanatic about price and I was still shocked how fast it added up.

This is one of the ways an experienced hardware engineer can really turn things around from impossible to affordable- they can handle BOM cost as a major design parameter and drive down cost in ways a novice can't.
Rich Caruana's original paper on multitask learning (from the 90s) talks about this very kind of multi-headed neural networks and it doesn't appear that this Google paper has done anything new with the algorithm.

So, what's actually novel in this paper?

The AUC improvements they show are fairly modest. Training on millions of data points is pretty old hat in the neural network world.
Oh man, I love ServiceStack and have built some incredible API's on it. Just wanted to say thanks :)
I think it is precisely the right place. People here are used to creating solutions, their focus just may need to shift a bit.
Couldn't airlines put some fineprint into any offer, that they are not actually selling you a straight up flight ticket, but a flight ticket that comes with the option for the company / obligation for the customer of a buyback at the price paid (or, say, 110% of the price paid)?
I agree that the Islamic State should be smashed to smithereens, but this won't be enough.
First ever photograph of light as a particle and a wave
I feel like planned obsolescence is much more common that we initially think.
For example, on the phone market, battery lasts on day out of the box. If we consider the battery losing .05% of its total charge after each charge/decharge cycle, after 2 years of constant use, it already lost 30% of its total charge. Yet, despite everyone being annoyed with having to charge their phones at least everyday, apple, samsung and others keep making phones that last a single day on a charge.
They make their phones bigger, bulkier, faster, but nothing on the battery side (I think there was an article linked here where the author claimed he cracked the apple battery equation and his thought was "they make it last a day, not more not less)".
And we can add to that prohibitive repair price and refusal to support older platforms, even though it's often just a cross compilation away.

I get it that it's probably better for any company out there to sell new devices rather than support old ones for free. It just that the "I doubt planned obsolescence is common" strikes me as a bit naive
Looks at some of their properties in SF. 3 level house in Haight-Ashbury, ~18 units.

Each unit is around $1500/month and they estimate clean/utilities at $200-260 per month. Is that insane to anyone else? Where the heck is all the money going for utilities?!?! I have a two bedroom in the richmond, one roommate and we use maybe $30-40 a month in electric and gas, including the washer/dryer.
Twitter integration without writing code
... assuming the target audience of schools, non-profits, and call-centers leave them on 24/7.
Since nearly every Windows web dev has Fiddler2, it can simulate network latency: http://helephant.com/2012/07/11/simulating-network-latency-w...
has anyone here tried it? What was your experience?
That's why I always emphasize that TPM (UEFI/SecureBoot/Boot Guard etc.) are not the right way for open source systems (Linux etc.).

The Linux community should stop to fiddle with locked-down boot systems. They actually should boycott locked-down systems and only support hardware vendors who officially support Linux. Many of them are presented at LinuxGizmos. I believe that such hardware vendors are much more open to the demands of the Opensource Community than vendors who produce locked-down systems.

http://linuxgizmos.com
Abandoned, but fully operational, alien base. We send humans there, land successfully, discover we are not alone in the Universe, and Humanity is united behind the effort to gain deeper understanding of ourselves. Also, there's a hidden door somewhere in the base that leads deeper into the interior of Ceres, where we discover .. the whole thing was a station.

A man can dream.
Triggertrap's legal team would begin by verifying the provenance of any demand letter. Any letter like that is going to start by introducing itself as being either from a firm's general counsel or (more often) a law firm acting as outside counsel, and it's not hard to verify the sender's legal credentials and client relationship. A fake letter would be easy enough to identify and might even attract criminal penalties. In some states, legitimate but overzealous demand letters can be grounds for civil fraud action by the recipient, eg http://www.stormoenlaw.com/extortion-risks-from-overzealous-...

Of course I'm speculating about the contents, but I am familiar with the legal issues, know lawyers who practice in this area, and the camera market, as well as people at Red Camera. I think you overestimate the ease of the 'hack' you're imagining.
Thankyou for the coupon code. I just bought one :)
Hi! I use Smile because it's a little faster and significantly more reliable than the others. Most of my business and personal communication abroad happens via video Skype. Voda and Airtel are sometimes fast enough, but often aren't especially during peak times. I hate having to tell clients that my connection isn't good enough for a scheduled call.

For an idea of what I'm talking about, here's 70 second pings to google.com from an especially frustrating morning in January on Vodacom TZ: http://i.imgur.com/5urJcd7.png. This isn't typical but happens often enough to be a problem.

With Smile I'm paying rates comparable to 4G service in the US, e.g. TMobile[1]. The service isn't nearly as fast (peak I've seen is ~3.5 Megabytes/sec download) but the reliability makes it worth it. I suspect I'm paying as much for lower contention ratios on the towers as for "4G" infrastructure, but the end result is the same.

[1] (http://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/mobile-internet.htm...)
One could make an argument that with PHP, copy-paste deployment is popular. Of course, it's not quite the same thing, as you'll need Apache/etc. setup, however that is one of PHP's strengths. It's good to see another language doing something similar, but in a nicer, far more performant way: specifically for web development, the way Go does stuff is brilliant in my opinion.
I think the idea here is that Kickstarter investors are NOT aware and are easily hoodwinked. Why, even this project appears to have been a lie- it's just that the founders were lying to themselves, too.

The assumption being that the Kick starter investors ought to essentially be protected a little against their own gullability.

This of course all serves as a nice allegory of how rules requiring accreditation for some types of investment were born.
The tech community is smallish but it's an easy place to live. Feel free to ping me with specific q's, or if your brother wants to grab a coffee if he passes through Dar. My email is my HN handle at gmail.
The crux of the article:

“People absolutely have no qualms screwing
airlines," he said, "because they just
hate them."

It is probably true. I think the pricing mechanisms make this true - every time I get on a plane I am annoyed that there will be others on board that have paid significantly less than me, and I suspect that, Lake Woebegone style, so does everyone else on the plane.

I don't know if the maths will support it, but an airline that actually charges flat fares may win enormous amounts of good will.
Shrug, 1500 a month in SF is cheap.
VGA is terrible. The specs you just rattled off don't account for the innate fuzziness of the analog signal. I've reduced a lot of eyestrain from various people by confiscating their VGA cables and telling them they're forbidden from using 'the cable with the blue ends'.

Yes, VGA still has to be used for devices that only accept VGA (like a lot of projectors, very few of which can handle those specs), but apart from that, it should be avoided because the image quality is just that bad.
> These are city streets. They can't put up fences because the UPS guy couldn't unload, your trash couldn't be picked up, you couldn't get to the sidewalk after parking your car, etc.

Exactly. There is a cost, and you're not willing to pay it. Fair enough.

However, that also holds for speed limits. There are costs. In this instance the costs probably appear as clogged courts. If you make traffic regulations too stringent or too punitive, everybody starts to fight them in court.
We support 3rd party keyboards now, so you can provide one out of tree.
What about pCells[1]? DIDO seemed like a really clever way around bandwidth sharing[2], but I haven't heard anything about it since mid-2014.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGAnDQEQJ_s

[2]: http://www.rearden.com/DIDO/DIDO_White_Paper_110727.pdf
It's not that building a new city is hard. Real estate developers do it routinely. The problem is jobs. There are, at present, quite a few places in the US with more houses than jobs. Only in a few places, such as SF and some areas of Oklahoma where there's heavy drilling activity, is the reverse the case.

If you want to buy an empty town of new houses, there are plenty in San Bernardino. Vacant lots run about $7500. San Bernardino even has a new airport, fully completed and ready to go. But no airlines fly there. Because there are no jobs.
but who's the company? what do they do?
That would be amazing. It would be so exciting to live through that.
> If you accidentally buy 100000 shares of a stock when you meant to type 1000, you don't get a redo.

For the record, you might. Stock exchanges retroactively break many trades as "Clearly Erroneous".

[1] http://www1.nyse.com/pdfs/CEE_Policies_Email_Submission_Guid...
[2] http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=clearlyerroneous
Everything is a tradeoff with phones. There is a tradeoff between phone size, battery life, and processor power. One day is a natural sweet spot since people charge their phones at night. Sure, this will result in a less-than-one-day battery life over time But people might have been happy to replace their phone anyway for other reasons.

Supporting old platforms is not just cross compilation, or at least the cross compilation involved is highly non-trivial.

I would say that excessive cynicism is as bad a bias as naivety. Everything you describe is actually consistent with perfectly informed consumers and profit maximizing companies. You are just not looking for explanations along these lines.
This idea that a product based company can be founded purely on marketing is infuriating. As if every other part of the business (but not marketing) is fungible. It's like the Idea-Guy, come back to haunt us.
I'd sign up, but I'm in Edinburgh, Scotland. I guess that you only offer US-based deals?
Topic models: Past, present, and future
Seems like a copy of the joke the people of The Onion came up with a few months earlier, ComcastifyJS: https://theonion.github.io/comcastifyjs/
Huh, I didn't know that. Thanks for the link.
You're not considering the cost of obtaining this information. And plenty of reviews that I read contained information on the lifespan (usually in the form of "this broke! zero stars!")
We need more than two data points to get the relationship. It may be that monochr will have a fibonacci progression in the daily number of wives...
I'd guess that no mainstream crowdfunding site would touch this one under any circumstances. The liability issues alone would be staggering.

And ultimately, who's going to indemnify you, as the employer of the PMC, against war crimes?
I kind of had the opposite reaction to the same effect- I was exposed around 10 years old to pornographic images (Playboy) and also read the articles about sex. I wanted it far earlier than I was ready for but I felt like it had a positive effect on me- more at ease with the idea of it, my body, how others might react, how to communicate what I want and figure out what my partner wants.
Free 12-Week Finance Hacking Training Course
Builds and Runs apparently: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/810#issuecomment-74986...
Boost Your Sexual Power with Generic Viagra
Could someone briefly sum up the differences between F# and OCaml? Are there any reasons to switch from OCaml to F# in a Unix environment?
For some reason I'm paying around $100/mo for water and sewer, $150 for electric per month, then there's garbage service. I'm not sure if they're including cable TV, internet service, etc. Maybe there's some HOA fees?
In Britain they also have some unit-price law. But Tesco blatantly abuses it: eg one kind of apple is priced by piece, the next goes per 100g (or per 1kg, but converting between 100g and 1kg is simpler).
We use http get body to be able to submit searches to the servers. It feels somehow cleaner that doing a complex search in an encoded url.

The client can decide to use query string or body. Most ruby web servers handle this transparently, so the app doesn't know if the params came from the query string or from the body.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Infrastructure
I don't think operating an elevator (etc.) compares to hunting down and decimating the entire crew (almost) one by one. Such behavior is so far more advanced than anything we see in the second movie. There is a real sense that the alien is just plain smarter than everyone in the crew, and in the end ripley just has to run for it. None of this happens in the second movie, where it's just a slaughter fest.
A slightly different approach then just building or planning your regular tech startup. That is a bit refreshing I might add..
The staying up late portion of the slumber party is more like tolerated/permitted rather than encouraged.

Almost every slumber party I went to/heard of watched an action movie or a horror movie that wasn't too hardcore for our preteen selves. I'm pretty sure it's cultural at this point. Also these kids are friends of Ebert's kid. I'm pretty sure they'll be much more movie-literate than the average kid.

We were a bit too old for nintendo and too young for n64 to be part of the culture where we lived, so no comment on video games. We did run around the backyard pool for quite a while.
It's a good list but my favorite quote from last week, on twitter no less, is instructive:

>>> "Fail fast" refers to your product, not your startup." - Justin Kan

18 months ago when I quit my job to join a new company as Co-Founder I had no intention whatsoever of failing and I still don't. It's not even an option. We did fail too slowly on the first rev of our first product and that was painful and expensive but we recovered.

Please stay healthy and learn to turn it off and sleep too. I strongly recommend quitting coffee altogether. It helps immensely to keep you on a good schedule.

[1] https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/571008487456509953
I know a way of solving this, but "ideas are worth nothing, execution is everything". If anyone's willing to value the idea as significantly more than nothing, I'd be happy to discuss.

See my reply to commenter below. I for one don't believe ideas are worth nothing, and am willing to pay for ideas/information useful to me.
Nah, just buy a startup that has a decent product and a bunch of users, inject more and more ads until the product dies, rinse and repeat.
The idea behind the "hardware is hard" message isn't that hardware is impossible, but to get software engineers starting hardware projects to stop trivializing it. Engineers have a tendency to dismiss all disciplines outside their own as easy, the sort of thing you can pick up in a week if you need.
How Global Warming Helped Cause the Syrian War
Interesting I have my own modem with a static IP running on Comcast with no issues. I never even thought to ask when I switched from my "rental modem". I just bought one and plugged it in. The first time I logged in to my computer the browser defaulted to the Comcast site saying I needed to authorize the modem. Went through some simple verification questions and 5 minutes later was up and running. Never spoke to anyone to hook it up, have not had any problems, and still have my static IP.
we worked on Citizenfour and this is not a legitimate film. Please don't share if you're a friend of the film
When things move so slowly, there is no advantage to being autonomous. And it makes little difference economically who the owners are. Right now, ships will change their speeds based on changes in interest rates, since it is more fuel efficient to move slowly, but when interest rates go up, it is worthwhile to get the cargo to its destination quicker.
I would back it ;)
I recently purchase a Dell Inspiron Laptop which gave me a nightmare to install Windows 7 on it.

The "secure Boot" isn't to secure the boot against rootkit, but secure from "unauthorized" or "unsupported" install your favorite operate system. In this case, I cannot install windows 7 on my brand new laptop.

I still remember the SIM card lock from carriers years ago, so if i am the vigilant, I am going to ask users to pay upfront to unlock "Secure Lock" so that they can install another operate system.
any company a little bit serious will do some statistical analysis on expected lifespan of their product. Without speaking about planned obsolescence, you want to know what warranty to give to your customers, which parts will break first and so on. We are already paying the price to get the information. We just don't have access to it.

And "it broke" just tells me it has a very short lifespan, but won't let me know if some stuff has a 6 months vs 6 years lifespan. "short lifespan" is fundamentally different from "not working".

We're used to the former (unfortunately), but won't consider the latter acceptable, except maybe when buying obviously overly cheap stuff
Product pricing and reviews from customer sites
The absolutely vital importance of fact-checking current news stories, AKA "the old story", is in forming a measure of the reliability and veracity of the sources of this information, which can be factored in to future reporting.
In the U.S. all airlines allow you to cancel your reservation at no charge within 24 hours of booking, so if you make a mistake, then you can cancel your reservation and make a new one.
‘Becoming Steve Jobs’ – New Book by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli