victoro

Surprising that the "words that begin with n" section didn't discuss how the process works both ways. For example the word newt (as in the aquatic amphibian) used to be ewt, but because it was so often prefaced by "an" eventually the n was attached to the ewt. Wikipedia's definition for this process is juncture loss.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_articles#Juncture_loss

The OP asserting that the pg statement in question was "an astute observation" implies that pg is an impartial observer who is in no way biased by his ties to the startup ecosystem. I disagree with that assertion.

The pg quote that OP provides is very brief -- State/city govt ruling against Tesla/Uber == corruption -- and more an opinion than a true argument because no evidence/elaboration is provided. That Tesla's (very different) situation is equated with Uber's further points to a hastily voiced opinion rather than a reasoned argument. Hence, I would argue that an ad hominem approach is appropriate because there is not much else to go on. Pg voiced an opinion and I made a statement that mentioned some biases that he was likely to have that informed said opinion.

Didn't see him complaining when the government was subsidizing Tesla's R&D with cheap loans and tax incentives [1]. The government giveth and the government taketh away. Not saying I agree with this decision by NJ, but its somewhat disingenuous to take a moralistic argument (corruption) at face value from a party that possibly stands to benefit financially from the alternative decision. (Yes I'm assuming that pg is a Tesla stockholder).

[1] - http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732465940...

This is a great starting point. Can anyone recommend any resources for how to best set up a remote scraping box on AWS or another similar provider? Pitfalls, best tools to help manage/automate scripts etc. I've found a few "getting started" tutorials like this one but I haven't been able to find anything good that discusses scraping beyond running basic scripts on your local machine.

I don't see why the majority of HN commenters assume that the article has a negative bent. All he did was list the results of the PEW study and briefly discuss political ramifications for the two major US parties. The only fault I can find with this article is the completely erroneous last sentence (and title) which mentions the "selfie" -- this just seems to be a bit of link bait as selfies are a seemingly hot topic lately. Otherwise, I think this is a pretty interesting summary of survey results and downright neutral compared to the vast sea of curmudgeonly articles about Millenials floating around these days.

Failure has always been an option in small, unproven, socially unimportant markets. It really shouldn't take 7 paragraphs to compare apples to oranges...

> it's easier to cherry-pick examples

Prior to the Civil Rights Movement, the US was a highly segregated country mostly because of "cherry picked" examples from the deep south. Federal law exists in part to put the entire country on the same page with respect to basic liberties. Its not OK for me to have more freedom of speech in California than in Texas, so why should it be OK for an LGBT individual to have more basic human rights in one state than in another?

I've been looking around for the same. The problem seems to be that there are only a few big outlets (some with exclusive contracts) doing the stats for the big sports. It seems possible to scrape a lot of what you need though, unless you need up to date data daily (which could still be scraped but it would be a much larger undertaking).

My question is, how do you plan on getting data from the daily fantasy sites (e.g. salary caps and salaries of players)? I don't think FanDuel (or any of the other sites) has a public api for anything other than seeing user rankings.

I think this ruling, and others it foreshadows, points to a need to amend the Constitution to ensure protections for personal property held by third parties on behalf of private citizens. At the time the 4th amendment was created, it was reasonable to assume that anything a person wanted to keep private would be safely secured by them in their own home. Times have changed. Now I keep my private financial "papers" in a system administered by a third party bank, my private medical "papers" in a system administered by a third party insurance company, and a lot of my other private effects in databases administered by third parties google, dropbox, etc.

Luckily the Framers foresaw that future changes would necessitate changes to our fundamental law so there is a process for the People to make such issues much less open to broad interpretation by the judicial branch.

He was also responsible for the New Deal, Social Security, and much of the legislation that enabled blue collar Americans to bargain with their employers among other things. But yea, he was a racist and once approved a plan to unjustly victimize and temporarily detain a minority group (which was incredibly humane when compared to literally any other world super power's camps -- think Nazi Concentration camps, Soviet Gulags, and the incredibly terrible things the Japanese did to POW's and millions of Chinese) so he was a terrible person and in no way ahead of his time </sarcasm>.

How did BitMit overcome the problem of trust between buyer and seller? E.g. somebody sends bitcoin to a wallet and never gets the product they wanted. Did they offer some kind of escrow service or was everything based on reputation and buyer/seller reviews?

Thanks for the recommendation, Netflix doesn't have it available to stream but Amazon Prime does. Awesome film so far.

Yea this guy really trivializes the fact that GM got a $50 billion dollar loan on incredibly favorable terms from the USG when the banking industry was reeling. No matter how brilliant his plan was it would have all amounted to nothing had they not gotten that money, so congress/the Obama administration (and even the Bush administration) can take all the credit they want.

This Walmart vs Costco nonsense has got to stop. They serve completely different segments of the market. I won't bother rehashing here what others have argued much better (and with data to back it up). Just go read this and stop making the comparison already:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-27/why-walmart-will-ne...

(This article was also posted on HN a couple weeks back)

This is one of the most unthought-out posts I've ever seen on HN.

A) Please do some research and determine if in fact you must cede your US citizenship in order to become a Columbian citizen, plenty of countries have dual-citizenship agreements with the United States.

B) "gave up one of the most valuable things anyone could have" -- Please qualify that. What exactly does he get for his American citizenship? Sure he can live here without being hassled for a Visa, but if he's married to an American citizen, then that point is moot. This isn't Sweden where citizenship entitles one to heavily subsidized healthcare/childcare/higher education or Switzerland where citizens might soon be entitled to an unconditional income. The right to a social security number, some paltry Welfare income and the ability to tell your friends that you live in the "land of the free, home of the brave" is not exactly much of a birthright.

There is nothing really that novel about this story to anybody who knows anything about Russian history. Rural Russians have been saying "God is too high and the Tsar is too far away" for centuries now. A strong central government that cares little for the provinces is the status quo that has been maintained despite a variety of different political systems. Unlike the US, which has had powerful agrarian political parties that were fiercely suspicious of a strong central government since at least Jefferson, Russian serfs and the overall "agricultural class" have never had any significant political power (factory workers and other lower-class city dwellers were the prime force behind communism while the serfs were mostly an afterthought).

I don't know if anyone can make any sort of objective claims as to whether the highly centralized Russian power structure is any better or worse than a more evenly distributed one. Yes people in small towns live without infrastructure, but they also choose to live there, often for the "clean air" as the article notes. I'm sure there are many American individualists out there that would love to be able to disappear into an unregulated wilderness, mostly free of government scrutiny and yet be like 4 hours away from the capitol.

Agreed with the 'reading my mind part'. Though it is high time for fantasy season so its probably at the front of everyone's mind right now. Anyway, very excited to get into this.

Agreed, but I find scaling Amazon's physical and digital infrastructures in tandem is equally impressive.

I agree with you that Zuck deserves praise for taking the idea of Social networking and running with it far longer and more successfully than anyone else. But, I can just as easily make the argument that people were using the Internet to interact socially before, they can interact socially on other websites, and they will continue to interact socially online even if Facebook didn't exist (we could be spending 2-3 hours a day on myspace or instagram right now). All of these companies (except for maybe Apple, who introduced a completely new paradigm with the consumer PC back in the 80's) took something consumers were already doing and did it better. Therefore, I think the argument has to be made from a technological perspective, where Amazon is the clear innovator.

Agreed. It's really hard to read the rest of the article without questioning every statement after reading that ridiculous paragraph early on. You're telling me Facebook, who's killer app was photo tagging for the first 3 years of its existence and who has, over the last few years, been struggling with transitioning its platform to a mobile audience, somehow ranks ahead, technology-wise, of the biggest e-commerce site on the internet? The technology that goes into Amazon's logistics and distribution platform alone rivals facebook's impressive scale, and Amazon is doing that while, at the same time powering a gigantic and feature rich cloud service and methodically eating the publishing industry's lunch.

Yes. A good number of streets are named after famous authors. I used to live on on Poe St. and remember seeing Byron, Seneca, Kipling, and Homer (and others I can't remember). A subsection of streets close to Stanford is also named after famous colleges. In general, I think its a good strategy for a University town to surround citizens with subtle reminders of famous/successful examples of education and the educated.

The Atkins diet (and almost every other diet I can think of) has been debunked, un-debunked, debated, berated, and praised almost from its inception half a century ago. It has not stopped the companies that promote the diet, produce the food, and publish the cookbooks, from making money hand over fist.

With any physiological system of sufficient complexity, whether it be human digestive/metabolic systems or the neurological systems responsible for memory and intelligence, there will be opportunities for profit as long as improvement of that system is desirable and a small fraction of the population believes they have the chance to improve it and the cost is reasonable. Plus, there will likely always be "success stories" to cite simply due to the placebo effect.

We have a massive alternative "medicine" industry that supports not only the people in it, but also, ironically, the people producing the constant flow of content criticizing alternative medicine. Lumosity will be fine.

The Appalachian version of this App in one line of javascript: alert("Don't do it, you're related");

Mentioning "endless SaaS/CRUD" apps in a derogatory fashion and then singing the praises of Kickstarter a sentence later seems a bit hypocritical given that, aside from its large audience, Kickstarter is just a slightly more advanced CRUD app.

I was gonna say, the extra e in the product name is pretty inconspicuous. I know its probably a working title, but if OP keeps it, seems like a C&D waiting to happen.

One of the best integration of multimedia and text that I have seen in 15 years of being on the internet.

"government shouldn't even have the right to regulate markets in such a way that innovation (and competition) can be stifled by the established players."

This statement is completely impractical. I can't think of a single law that does not affect the markets in some way. By its nature, any regulation requires proof of compliance on the part of the regulated party. This will always create some costs, at least in time spent, to the regulated party. Since "established players", by virtue of being established, have more resources at their disposal, they can comply more easily than upstarts with much more limited time and money on their hands. Hence, any regulation will stifle innovation to some extent while benefiting the established players.

Creating and updating regulations for the benefit of the majority is exactly what democracy is supposed to do most efficiently. Taking that right away from the government would be tantamount to taking the government away entirely.

10 years ago taxi regulations were not stifling innovation enough to be detrimental to the majority. Over the past few months they have. Then they were updated democratically. The system worked.

I lived in California for 10 years, then Seattle for 10 and now I'm back in Cali. You are totally spot on. The OP reads like a typical Seattleite rationalization of the crappy weather situation there.

The biggest problem with the rain isn't getting wet; its the lack of sunlight, slippery driving conditions and constant threat of rain.

Even the described 20% chance of rain in any given hour is surprisingly inconvenient. Riding a bike to work/school or jogging are things that I think are best if turned into habits -- done at specific times on specific days -- not on the spur of the moment after looking at a weather report. And executing a picnic or hike with any decently sized group of friends is barely possible on a moments notice.

Seattlites need to call a spade a spade. If you like doing things outside (and judging by how full the city parks get on any remotely sunny day I think a lot of Seattlites do), the weather there is consistently inconvenient for about 10 months out of the year.

The title of the original article is "Invisible WiFi Signals Caught on Camera." I thought "Invisible" was too Ripley's-Believe-It-Or-Not-sounding so I removed it while trying to keep as much of the original title as possible intact. Probably a better title would have been "WiFi Signal Strength Caught on Camera" or the one you proposed, but, whats done is done.

I'm pretty sure the construction contractors have some skin in the "donating"-to-local-politicians game as well. Its not just one side that gets to hire lobbyists.