skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exponential growth can be much smaller than that. For instance, 1% growth is exponential (as is 0.01% growth, and so on).

In the case of 1% growth the second interval is larger than the first, but the third is not larger than the first and second combined (it's still roughly 1/2 that).
Notes on Europython 2015
A thousand times this.

One example is efficiency. "Why," say the optimists, "would corporations continue to employ more people than they strictly need to?" Implicit in the question is a characterization of the corporation as a rational, singular entity.

And I say that 'optimists' ask this question because one of the large questions that some smart people ask is "where's the massive productivity increase that (one supposes) would accompany a surge in jobs-reducing automation?"

But if we just move down the chain a bit, and re-ask the question in terms of the actual top-down management of these companies, conclusions present themselves. And it's basically that hierarchical, traditional organizations may be bad at reaping these benefits, and they may need to be killed off/severely threatened by newcomers to change their ways.

There are a lot of unnecessary jobs hanging around, for totally rational reasons. Ask yourself:

"Why would any particular manager prefer to have more people working under him, rather than fewer?"

"Why would a Department Head with many direct reports not be eager to work with another Department head to closely co-operate in a way that reduces both headcount and duplication of management effort?"

"If a certain corporate fiefdom is becoming more efficient due to automation in certain areas of its operations, could there be any motivation for the manager of that fiefdom to expand other areas of his operations instead of passing on the full benefits of that efficiency in the form of a possibly-reduced budget?"

It should be clear to everyone that we are being limited by the structure of the organizations themselves. And we are seeing increasing activity in self-organized companies, cooperatives, etc, at the fringes (and also of extremely-integrated larger companies like Apple under Jobs, which is an old-model solution to the problem of the inefficiencies inherent in very hierarchical organizations).

The newer-model organizations may be better able to reap the benefits of automation.

TL;DR: humans used to be increasingly necessary as wet robots for manufacturing, and then largely moved up the food chain to bureaucracy when real robots made the wet ones inconvenient. Mostly-unnecessary jobs have more-or-less stuck around because of the limitations of organizations, not technology.
Yea, the switch from auto-complete to company mode was annoying to get done right, but was well worth it in terms of accuracy. It also provides function signatures which my old setup didn't. I also switched to using virtualenv mode as well.

I can probably try and dig up the relevant part of my config, but since I'm using prelude as a base now it mostly just works with only a few lines of tweaking in my personal.el -- mostly just virtualenv locations and enabling virtualenv mode with a hook.
It will be VERY VERY hard for economics (or any other social science) to have the kind of scientific integrity of Physics. The math is much looser, and many more assumptions need to be made.
New React DevTools Beta
> LLVM is nicely written: its architecture is way more modular than other compilers. Part of the reason for this niceness comes from its original implementor, who is one of us.

What on earth is that supposd to mean?
ASM or WASM, I expect a future where both of them are included in the head of the document by two different developer and I have no choice but to maintain them.
#ILookLikeAnEngineer hashtag on Twitter
Michael Nielsen, co-author of the de-facto standard textbook for quantum computing [1], has an accessible "Quantum Computing for the Determined" video series on youtube [2].

(There used to be a pdf of the textbook online at [3], but it seems to have been removed...)

Scott Aaronson's Quantum Computing Since Democritus [4] is also good, but at a more abstract level. The well-written lecture notes it's based on are on his site [5].

General quantum physics knowledge can also help, but physics-focused content tends to focus more on the calculus whereas quantum computing mostly only uses the linear algebra. I liked The Theoretical Minimum [6].

1: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation-Information-Annive...

2: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1826E60FD05B44E4

3: http://www.johnboccio.com/research/quantum/notes/QC10th.pdf

4: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-since-Democritus-Aar...

5: http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec1.html

6: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-The-Theoretical-Mini...
If we easily could 'host Facebook that .......', then it doesn't mean that we would. People don't use social networks because they have certain features, they use social networks because certain people are there.

For some people (let's call them group A), none of these things that you desire are important at all, so they simply won't do it. And quite a few of the actual trendsetters/influencers are in this group - the historical main drivers of social network adoption, e.g. celebrities for twitter, young college girls for facebook, etc - those are the people that cause others to join/switch the new network. And the group is quite large - stats show, for example, that middle-aged women are among the most active users of social networks; would you think that 'anonymous, fault tolerant, ephemeral nodes hosting web services that can't be cracked or spied on' is something that would cause them to switch?

For most other people (group B), the restrictions imposed by the centralized services are seen as a minor disadvantage, but a network that doesn't have the people from group A is totally unusable. Perhaps they will join try it out, but their main attention will be on the other networks; so if someone from group B wants to reach/share with someone else from group B... they will do that communication somewhere else, not through your network.

And the remainder, those who care (group C)... will have another niche network to talk among themselves.
I have an expensive American electric car and use it in Europe.

Before buying it I was worried about all the things you mention.

Now that I have been using it for some time normal cars look crazy outdated to me. Going to some place(gas stations) just to fill the tank. Why? It should be in my home, like with my electric car.

Lots of European houses have natural gas installations on homes, so why can't we just plug our vehicles to that, like we do with electric.

In any western country there are electric cables everywhere since 100 years ago or so, and most are not used at night, so it is not a big deal.

Impossible to take a charging cable at night? In the UK?.

I routinely use my car in Spain and Portugal, with no significant problems.

The only problem is that we attract significant attention everywhere we go.
The Case for Flux
My definition agrees with the dictionary definition, which I don't consider very loose. You can still help someone without being altruistic.

Intent is the difference between murder and manslaughter, so I recognize I tread a fine line here, unlike the aforementioned, I do not see a reason to differentiate between the following two actions:

a) I let someone stay the night in my house and they offered me $60 as a thank you in return for the hospitality, I initially decline but they continue to insist so I take the $60.

b) I charged for someone to stay the night in my house and they agreed to pay $60 to stay at my house instead of an alternative place (and/or sleeping in their car/on the street)

I guess as a couchsurfer I have a different moral perspective about the act of sleeping in someone's house, offering money, accepting money, and bargaining.

E:

A reply to this comment was deleted, comparing that A helps all people and B helps people "willing to pay". My response to that is below:

You're still helping someone in either scenario. The pool of people you are willing or able to help is smaller in B than A, but you are still helping someone. Again - helping someone else does not need to be a selfless, altruistic act.

"Instead of spending $80 at a hotel, you can spend $60 at my place and you can join me for dinner."

By saving you $20, I have helped you. You saved $60 and had a place to sleep. Your alternatives were:

1. Sleep in car for free
2. Find someone willing to help you for cheaper and/or free
3. Sleep at a more expensive place

By giving you a superior option to 1 and 3 and you failing to find 2, I am still helping you. Would I be more altruistic if I let you stay for free? Sure. But to say I'm not helping you when I'm saving you $20 is stretching the definition of "help" to include altruistic behavior.
>Hardware people

The PC way to refer to robots.
You can do all of that today on Freenet.
Tangent, but in Japan the close door button actually works; some elevators will even just sit there and wait until that button is pressed.
“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.”
I think you are mistaken. I have friends in that industry and my impression is they wouldn't even bother with the interview unless the salary was at least $150k and closer to $200k is not uncommon in a locality that Wolfram Alpha says has a 30% cheaper cost of living than SF.
Yeah, in my mind it's you-es-ian. Which doesn't seem particularly awkward or hard to say to me (but maybe a strange until you're used to it).

It just seemed a natural term to me. I promise I wasn't using it to avoid a controversy (which I'm not even aware of!). In my experience with spanish speakers, they'll usually just say "gringos" (not as a derogatory term), but they'll also happily use "americanos" -- and don't seem to have any problem w/ it. (Tho Spanish it is literally an ambiguous word; you have to deduce from context whether it means from the USA or from the continent.)
I used to live in Mexico in the early 1990s.

Wonderful place. Incredible people. I'd be glad to live there. But at the time, there wasn't the emphasis on education that there is in China and India. (And Mexico's top university, UNAM, doesn't place high in international rankings: http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2014.html .)

Unless that changes, I don't expect Mexico to become the next Silicon Valley.

(Important note: My means of measuring countries may be wrong. Notice that India has very few top universities, as well!)
It may very well be. But does it matter? As a hackathon organizer/mentor, these are exactly the resources I'd recommend. Publicity by providing a service is not a new concept; I really enjoy this post about it in particular:

http://blog.crew.co/how-side-projects-saved-our-startup/
> If the US and its companies want to force their moral and legal standards upon us, we will force our standards upon them, too.

This is incredibly silly reasoning. Google enforces the standards it chooses (generally American standards, in this case, as it is an American company) on its own properties. That's quite a far cry from imposing your own set of values on a third-party service provider.

The equivalent would be to start your own service which imposes your own set of standards (which, I'll point out, exists in the form of DailyMotion and LiveLeak, among others), not to say "well if you get to apply your standards to your service then I get to apply my standards to your service."
If we're talking so literally I can only go back to the definition of economic growth, with is squishy enough to avoid pesky physics.

Economic growth is a very theoretical concept. Something doubles our economic growth if we make it and people value it as much as the stuff we are already making. If we invented new Japanese cartoon cat pens so cute and desirable that every person on the planet pays $1000 for it, bam! 7.1 trillion dollar growth. Just remove 7 billion regular pens to make room in the universe, and we're at 7.0999. (assuming no resources were diverted from other things)

Economic growth is kind of meaningless to think about at this scale. But at any two points on a more human scale, it means something.

That said, an exponentially growing (shoe) economy that eats the universe sounds like a Douglas Adams story so maybe you're right.
Juniper Networks - San Francisco, CA| Full-Time | ONSITE | VISA

The Group

Network security a dynamic industry teeming with innovation and the opportunity to define real solutions that go beyond traditional static approaches to stopping threats. It's time to build intelligence in the cloud and connect it to our network security devices. The data sets are large, the threats complex, and only the smartest will be able to create new algorithms to find the needles in the haystack that are malicious. This is the right time to join the team at Juniper Networks “Juniper Security Intelligence”, in San Francisco with the charter to be disruptive, to build new products, and to cement Juniper as the thought leader in network security by stopping the bad actors and protecting our customers. We need people to own responsibility for developing systems, algorithms, and approaches that connect the potential of large data and the wide footprint of the cloud with customer network devices to stop advanced threats. Juniper Security Intelligence is the epicenter for advanced threat defense in Juniper and now is the time to join

Responsibilities:
First and foremost you're passionate about writing code. You love to code. When you're done coding you ensure it is flawless by developing automated unit tests. As a Security Intelligence Software Engineer, you are implementing features designed by technical leads in the organization. You help estimate the software development cycle and follow through by completing your tasks in agreed time while not compromising on quality.

QUALIFICATIONS

3-4 years of Experience developing Software
· Experience with one or more modern programming languages: Python, C#, Java C

· Experience with Malware security software and techniques.

· Involved in building a cloud service application over a Cloud Infrastructure like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

· Experience with some sort of "big data" stack: Hadoop, Dynamo DB, HBase, Cassadra, Mongo, PostgreSQL

· Experience with HTTP, RESTFUL APIs, Web Sockets, SSL/TLS.
Some understanding of content formats (e.g. HTML, PDF, XLS, DOC)

Email resumés to: mahadevk@juniper.net
Nice article!
Raise.me | Full time | SF | Fullstack Software Engineer

We're a Series A funded startup focused on improving access to education by transforming the way billions of dollars of financial aid get distributed each year by building microscholarship programs to help high school students afford college! We’re backed by First Round Capital, the Gates Foundation, and Imagine K12. We are a small team based in San Francisco and are all really excited about building a large and impactful business.

Tech stack: Ruby/Rails, Node (for notifications), Go microservices, Backbone.js

We offer a very meaningful equity stake to talented engineers, along with good benefits and competitive pay. Looking for bright people who are interested in learning and helping others learn!

Here's the listing:
https://www.raise.me/jobs/full-stack-engineer
Don't worry about the '5+ years...' or having experience with our specific stack. We know talented engineers can learn our stack.

Apply to jobs[AT]raise.me or you can email me directly at ryan[AT]raise.me.
Xcode crashing for OS X Beta 5 and Beta 6
Xcode was crashing yesterday whenever I tried to archive an app for the app store, and now I installed the new OS X Beta and its crashing when I click on main.storyboard. Is this happening for everyone else?

Quite ironic how Apple releases these betas for developers and then makes it impossible for them develop on them.
I used the google reader android app before it was shuttered.
Presumably a grad student.
LLVM was started by Chris Lattner while he was a graduate student at UIUC.
As far as I know it, in any recent QM lecture or textbooks a measurement operation is described as an entanglement of the original system with an external quantum system with very large number of degrees of freedom. In older texts you would just find Born's rule.
> To me that appears to be the strangest way to express a loop in any language I've used (and I've used a lot of them).

How is it strange? Feels rather intuitive to me: "Do this 100 times".

> It also really bothers me that in ruby you can invoke a function on a null value to see if its null (myvar.nil?). That's really messed up...

Again: how so? `nil` is just another object, so why shouldn't it have a method telling us if it's nil?

Of course, if you don't like it, you could check to see if it equals `nil`, or you can check if its class is equal to or is a subclass of `NilClass`. Like Perl, There's More Than One Way To Do It (TM).
As your fellow Alan Kay fan I have a lot of sympathy with what you're saying here and I especially appreciate how heartfelt it is. I also partly agree with it—or maybe it would be better to say I fully agree with it, but think it's only a partial picture.

In any case, this is definitely not the ressentiment I was talking about; this is an opposite kind of discussion, one that is thoughtful, not cynically predictable, and opens the conversation further rather than closes it. All of which is just fine for HN.

It's also an example of what I meant by "if people would speak openly and personally about such feelings", and that takes some courage and I admire you for it.
... except that the fact one is a reddit gold member has to be validated, and therefore one is tracked; every login is audited by Reddit itself.
Show HN: GitHub Pages server deletes content from plaintext files while serving
> It's 0.1% on most transactions, and 0.01% on derivatives transactions. That's enough to kill the high frequency trading industry and downsize derivatives trading by 90%, based on Sweden's experience.

Most HFT transactions already experience this level of fee overhead. This will not cause HFT to go away, it will cause it to pass on more costs to the consumers of HFT. That is, every financial transaction will be more expensive.

This may have the effect of concentrating HFT even more than it already is as the regulatory burden favors bigger players.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that and I think the natural economics of HFT is already well on its way to creating natural monopolies in that industry, but a Tobin style tax will NOT cause HFT to cease to exist (nor do I think that is a desirable outcome).
I live in Portland where curbside recycling is a long-established tradition. A number of years ago the rules changed, instead of the homeowner separating plastic, glass, paper, etc., all of these are put into the same bin. Separating the components became the hauler's responsibility, definitely a more centralized method of handling the task.

Yes, bottle caps are supposed to be removed, but if not probably won't be a major calamity. Anyway, some plastic/bottles have aluminum caps, and those I might leave on vs. tossing in the bin detached. I figure it wouldn't matter, aluminum is recyclable too.
The US is a bully that enforces its will worldwide via military and economic might. I don't hate the US, but I consider that statement to be fact at this point. They have an absurd tax system and use threats to get other governments to agree to enforce it.
We already have user pays in Seattle. It costs $ for larger and larger cans of recycling and garbage (but not food waste, I don't think).
And the bill for updating the grid and local distribution network to cope with the higher loads.
Rackspace is collecting Chicago's “cloudtax” starting Sept 1
Not surprising given the law passed, but disappointing it didn't get killed. Here is the text of message I got through Rackspace's issue tracker:

Dear Rackspace Customer,

The Personal Property Lease Transaction Tax Ruling #12 has been approved by the City of Chicago. As a result, Rackspace will begin collecting the Personal Property Lease Transaction Tax (the “Transaction Tax”) on sales to our customers located in the City of Chicago, beginning with invoices generated on or after September 1, 2015.

If you are an exempt organization, possess a direct pay permit, qualify as a reseller of our services, utilize our services in multiple jurisdictions, or are currently registered to pay the Transaction Tax directly to the City of Chicago Department of Finance, please provide us with the requisite documentation no later than August 24, 2015. Once we have processed your documentation, Rackspace will not include the Transaction Tax on your future invoices.

To submit documentation, or ask questions regarding this tax, please contact the Sales & Use Tax team at sales&usetax@rackspace.com.

Regards,
Rackspace
This is mostly dead, replaced with 'every program shrinks until all its features are off-loaded to the cloud, security and privacy be damned.'
Meta - Boston, MA - full time - onsite preferred

Meta is building a platform that allows users to seamlessly search for, access, and share files across all cloud platforms and devices; in essence, Google for your files. We just closed a seed funding round and are looking for talented developers to help us take this idea to the next level.

https://www.meta.sc

We have exciting development work ahead of us in nearly every area imaginable, including responsive client-side web development, a microservices-based cloud architecture written in Go and Python, performance-critical native client applications, a lightning fast personalized search engine, and complex data science and analysis problems in semantic analysis and information retrieval.

We’re right in downtown Boston and looking for talented developers and computer scientists to join us. Offering competitive salaries and large equity compensation. Email us at careers@meta.sc and check out our careers page at https://www.meta.sc/careers
> we can go very far with very little funding, so why sell shares when we can get a 50k grant in exchange for some (admittedly tedious) paperwork?

To be entirely frank, it depends on the field, but I imagine it's easier in many ways to get VC funding than a grant for many projects. Grants are a pain to apply for (there's a reason that full-time grant-writers exist) and the feedback loop is very slow. Compare that to the VC world, where you can quite easily raise a small amount of seed/pre-seed capital quickly, and even when you're rejected, you're likely to hear back quickly[0].

This will be a challenge for YC, because it inherently creates an adverse selection problem. The companies that YC (and all venture funds) want to attract the most are the ones who could win a grant if they applied, not the ones who are seeking venture funding simply because they can't actually survive the grant process[1]. The grant application process is terrible for a lot of reasons, but it does have the side-effect of filtering out a lot of people who simply aren't that serious or invested in their work. For YC, it means a lot more companies to sift through to identify the gems.

There are certainly some billion-dollar companies that could not survive the grant process (or simply would prefer not to go through it), but if we're looking strictly at the ratios, it's going to be a lot more challenging for any venture fund to find these 'needles', because the 'haystack' is simply much larger (relatively speaking).

[0] If you never hear back from a VC, that means you're probably either rejected or being punted on ("not now, but maybe later"). But that's a good thing - at least you know! If you don't hear back from a grant application after 2 months, that doesn't actually mean anything other than your application may not have been reviewed yet.

[1] Possible reasons for failing to win grants: project/business model is simply not valuable, project is not well fleshed-out, company does not have the runway to survive the drawn-out application cycle, etc. All of these apply to the venture world as well, but the cycle there is much faster.