skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From an economic standpoint, none of those things can be described by the word "cheaper".

"the claims that these systems are "cheaper" prey on economic ignorance."

That's the original assertion. Now, if alternative power really was cheaper than coal or oil, we would already have it because businesses would be stupid not to flock to the cheaper option. Instead it's fringe enough that people hold serious debates about whether or not it's a good idea to invest in it. Everyone would drive a Prius if it was cheaper. Everyone would have solar on their roof. But hardly anyone does, because it's not cheaper.

You want to talk about externalities, let's do that: from an economic standpoint, they don't matter. Because the people who are paying for the power plant aren't paying for the pollution. Until the day we hold them accountable and make them pay for the cleanup, traditional power sources will always be cheaper.

So there's your discussion on environmental costs when you're talking economics of power sources. It doesn't even come into play. I drive a gas powered car because a gas powered car is cheaper. If I had an electric car, the power would come from coal, because coal is cheaper. The ship that transports the coal to my local plant is powered by diesel, because diesel is cheaper. And no where along the way is anyone forcing anyone to pay for the cleanup of their mess.

Now you want to talk morals? Yes we all should be embarrassed and we should be fined high and low for what we're doing to our environment. Shame on all of us. You know how often I drive my car when I could have walked? What the hell is wrong with me? I hate myself sometimes. But no one is making me pay for the damage I'm doing. Force me to pay for being lazy! Force the price of gas up, the price of coal! Force solar and wind to be major forces in power generation! But until that day happens, environmental costs are irrelevant when discussing the microeconomics of solar versus traditional power. Traditional power wins every time when you're talking real, direct dollars.
Not really. If the router auto-updates, it has to get that update from somewhere. If anything, being able to push firmware is more powerful than being able to push configuration.
It's like, you know who has a stronger opinion about wrongdoing than people who dislike infidelity? The people who picket abortion clinics.

Also: there's a neat parallel to the NSA here, in that a substantial portion of the users registered for A.M. probably haven't been unfaithful, and are getting "dragnetted" up with the people who have, because who's going to take the time to sort that out?
Reboxetine is one example. It's an antidepressant pushed by Pfizer. Initial studies showed it was effective versus placebo or SSRIs, but later research found serious publication bias -- Pfizer suppressed evidence suggesting it was not effective. Only after the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care obtained unpublished data from Prizer was its lack of efficacy obvious:

http://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c4737

Pre-registration and mandatory publication would help prevent this.
Oh I'm sure I didn't approach it in the most optimal way. I have years of experience with Arch and only a few days with debian — less when I was installing it. It's only natural that I'd end up using the wrong tool. Assuming I don't get too frustrated/bored with debian, I'll be infinitely more efficient with it in a month or two. Or so I assume, I trust that all the smart people using debian are onto something.

My point, which I now realize I thoroughly obfuscated, is that by only providing low-level tools and focusing on making them simple and transparent and well-documented, Arch makes its inner-working much more accessible to beginners, at the cost of maybe seeming impenetrable to the total noob.
We are never the infidels. Only "they" can be infidels.
Attempting to list out each and every individual instance where a piece of data might be used does not a good privacy policy make.
YC Fellowship rejection letter
Thank you for applying for Y Combinator Fellowship. However, your startup was not selected for an interview. We thought your application was very promising -- out of over 6,500 applications, yours made it to the final 300.

Since there is a limit on the number of startups we can accept for this beta test of the Fellowship, we had to turn away a huge amount of promising groups. Hopefully in the future, we can expand the Fellowship and fund even more companies this way.

Unfortunately beyond that, we can't give you individual feedback about your application. This page explains why: http://ycombinator.com/whynot/

That said, we sincerely hope you'll apply to YC's winter batch. Applications for that are scheduled to open the week of August 24th.
Could this usher the end for Ruby on Rails?
Hi, Chronos Product Manager here ('air' on github).
Status: Having fun creating issues in the wake of the Jepsen post : )

I can say that Mesosphere is 100% committed to both Marathon and Chronos. You're right that Marathon gets more attention for the moment, but we have grand plans for both.

A strength of Mesos is that it's an open platform. If Chronos isn't right for you, there are solid alternatives. I'd appreciate if you raise issues against Chronos though so we can improve it : )

Excuse the plug, but if you'd like to help us improve these widely-used frameworks we'd love to hear from you: https://mesosphere.com/careers/
Or this: https://github.com/trentm/json (npm install -g json).
Even from a cynical-greed perspective, that seems catastrophically stupid. Businessfolks need to stay in touch. A convention center where cellphones don't work is a convention center that won't get a lot of repeat customers, and cellphones don't even offer the option of extorting your visitors to use your in-house service like wifi does.
I get this even less:

-- For 1, that's analogous to having every python package via pip/conda, and the same for other juypter langs.

-- For 2, this is scary/hard for traditional notebook usecases. IPython gives the user control, so there is no fear of beach balling & unintentional outside effects. I do appreciate the intent however :)

-- For 3, a notebook is just a json file and shareable. In fact, you can share a python notebook with a js app and it'd still work. With maybe 50loc, you can even keep the require syntax.

-- For 4, we're doing this within juypter just fine, and bokeh as well.

We recently went through a similar decision making process, and, when thinking about the above and more, decided it'd be better for the community for us to add features to Juypter than make yet another notebook. I don't think Juypter is the end-all (though for none of the reasons above), so I'm still confused here.
C doesn't have any problems just because you use it poorly. The only thing with a problem would be the coder.
Warn HN: bogus VAT MOSS deficiency notices
Just a heads up to those using the VAT MOSS system to deal with European taxes...

If you got a letter from the Irish tax authorities about a ridiculous deficiency in your tax payments (they told us we owed €61000 VAT on our €120 Ireland sales...and we got off lightly--one e-book seller was told they owed €2500000 VAT on sales of €54), relax. They screwed up.

Here's the email they are sending now explaining this:

--------------

Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2015 10:00:29
From: Revenue MOSS <mossnsd@revenue.ie>
Subject: VAT MOSS Payment Reminders (VMSC)

Dear VAT MOSS Customer,

Please be advised that we have issued a number of payment reminder letters to suppliers of eServices in Ireland, who are registered under the VAT MOSS scheme in other EU Member States. This is in accordance with the rules of VAT MOSS, where supplies have been made and payment has not been received within a specified time.

Unfortunately, the letters contained a number of errors including the amount due to be paid. Some letters also issued to customers who had already made payment to their own tax authorities in accordance with VAT MOSS obligations. We ask you to please ignore the payment reminder you may have received from us.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this error. We are in the process of correcting the system errors involved, and in due course will issue payment reminders to those suppliers in respect of whom we have not yet received the payments due.

Kind Regards

VAT MOSS Helpdesk
mossnsd@revenue.ie<mailto:mossnsd@revenue.ie>
Phone: +353 42 9353315 / +353 42 9353347

------------------

They also have a notice on their website: http://www.revenue.ie/en/spotlights/vat-moss-cases.html

They say about 2000 of the bogus notices went out.

Twitter discussion, with several pictures of the letters received, on hashtag #VATMESS
wolfhumble has a dead question [0]:

"Do you use the router features as well, or do use it only as a mini computer for testing?"

Given that the ERL requires a blob to use the hardware offload features of the Octeon (without which routing and firewalling performance is reduced by a factor of 10 to 20), one would expect that using the thing as a router while running OpenBSD would give you -at best- 100mbit/s throughput.

Does that match your experience, or are you not really using it as a gigabit router, or am I woefully misinformed?

[0] According to his comment history, it looks like he's being shadowbanned, but I can't figure out why.
Yeah, I see JQ as the grep/sed of JSON. If there were a curl-analogue that constructed HTTP requests from its output, it would take me a lot of the way there.

But more generally, I'm dealing all the time with a hodgepodge of json, csv, yaml, POM files, git logs, whatever. We need more tools that understand the semantics of data.
"Calorie Man" reminded me a lot of "New Rose Hotel" by Gibson. Funny how the same story filters through different lenses as the years tick past.
Telsa's Boundary Layer Air Turbine
Is Google checking your desktop files?
Well, you did ask about justifying the sciences, not the other things that go into a toaster.

As for social institutions, I'm not convinced that the influence of philosophers has been net positive. But that seems like a politically fraught topic. Maybe you could name some uncontroversially good social changes that came from philosophy?
You can even just concatenate the names. Erlanglua (sounds like a Finnish born Roman Emperor).
You are thinking of OpenWRT, I believe. DD-WRT is pretty much flash and go. Ad blocking is a bit of a pain, but the rest of the things I named have a GUI.
Very well written !! Thank you !
Hmm. As an assembly language programmer, electronic engineer, who was forced into learning this new "high level language" by our MIT educated boss, decades ago, I can assure you that we were neither beginners nor students as we created the product most likely used on you and yours in hospitals everywhere.
Even with all these data privacy issues, I am still interested on how it performs since 2.4ghz and 5ghz has their own 6 anntennas. This is important for me since on the country where I am living now, 1gbps internet connection is the norm.
Super helpful! Thanks!
How to eviscerate a programming technique:

1. Think of a task that can be done in six lines of shell

2. Ask person pushing a new programming technique to apply their idea to said task

3. Reply that it would have been better to just use six lines of shell

Call me cynical but it strikes me that Bentley's (edit: McIlroy's, see replies) reply could easily have been written without seeing Knuth's code. I don't know anything whatsoever about Literate Programming, but did Knuth mean it to be applied to such simple tasks?
The black market does not want serverside Pocket vulnerabilities. These bugs only have value to Pocket.
His watch looks like a Casio F-91W, or another cheap Casio
why would i invite google into my home?
This might be viewed as slightly OT but this entire container security thing always reminds me how important it is to build on the right ecosystem.

This technology has been available for years on other platforms in a stable fashion. The fact that they never get used for different reasons is always sobering
mmmh... If this is all the evidence that they have, I can not buy the idea.

I could be wrong of course, but to me this plant is too similar to the extant members from the order Charales, aquatic plants having structures filled with spores that could be confused easily with fruits by a novice.

An example to compare:

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charophyceae#/media/File:Chara...

The problem is that Charophycea are not flowering plants at all, they are a type of calcified algae. Having hard tissues the fossils are easily traced since the silurian and are well known. They have ornated oosporanges with a structure that simulates one "seed" inside a cover.

http://mcgregor.sbs.auckland.ac.nz/files/2011/01/dave_082_1....

So I wonder why paleontologists see here an angiosperm. Maybe the species have roots? To me this is a typical algae.
Stumbleupon lays off dozens after failing to raise new round
My point was all the comments adulating the one man when there is literally another person putting all of her effort into making their lives possible. The author certainly spares no effort in praising his partner. But this woman is all but invisible outside of this comment thread.

Society used to be legally structured around a system where people were paired on a gender system optimized for a nuclear family, where both individuals contribute their labor to their common good while one receives all of the autonomy, financial control, status, praise, and respect; the one who received all of this was always male.

The only thing that has changed is that women are legally allowed to be the breadwinner. Enormous social and economic structures still pressure them into being the less valued member of the family unit. Domestic labor is still heavily undervalued, disrespected, and seen as a woman's sphere. The number of full time fathers is still extremely low, and people still judge family units with a full time father as less prosperous than one with a full time mother.

When we descend by class and race down the social hierarchy, the picture becomes extremely complicated, of course.

But I was just talking about Internet comments, you know?
"square matrices have as many eigenvectors as they have linearly independent dimensions; i.e. a 2 x 2 matrix would have two eigenvectors, a 3 x 3 matrix three, and an n x n matrix would have n eigenvectors, each one representing its line of action in one dimension."

This is not quite right. First of all, if v is an eigenvector of A, then a*v for any non-zero a is also an eigenvector of A, so it makes no sense to say "there are n eigenvectors". Perhaps you meant to say n linearly independent eigenvectors?

But this is also not correct. An n x n matrix does not necessarily have to have n linearly independent eigenvectors; consider for instance A = [1, 1; 0, 1], which has dim N(A - I) = 1 (hence 1 linearly independent eigenvector). Basically, not every matrix is diagonalizable. This example also shows that rank(A) is also not necessarily equal to the number of linearly independent eigenvectors (is that what you meant by linearly independent dimensions?).

A more correct statement would be to say every symmetric matrix has n linearly independent eigenvectors (and its eigenvectors can be chosen to form an orthonormal basis for R^n).
They should be out now!
The splash screens aren't the only problem, some hotels enforce device isolation on the network too.

Some kind of travel router (or laptop) sharing the hotel's WiFi to your own little hotspot is the way to go. You probably wouldn't want your chromecast open to other guests connected directly to the hotel's wifi anyway.
Great article. While it's great to have a CEO who stays engaged with the product even as the company scales up, it's awful when they continue to micro-manage it the way they did when the company was 10 people. You hired product managers (and perhaps product manager managers). So let them do their jobs and create great products!

When you're running a 500+ person company, you're not going to go into the code and start optimizing the graph traversal algorithm--you hired smart engineers to do this. You're not going to fire up Illustrator and start drawing buttons--you have artists for this. You're not going to write the company blog yourself, or fix the automated test systems yourself, or design the marketing materials yourself. So why do you feel the need to over-ride your product managers on product direction, feature set, user acquisition plans, retention strategy, etc? Doing so de-motivates the professionals you have whose job is to do these awesomely.
I am aware that the ship does not accelerate in space. No, I don't think we are talking about different warp drives, but either way it doesn't matter, (unless the one you are talking about has weird additional restrictions on things like what directions you can go or you can only use it once and only in a straight line, or something like that).

What I'm saying is the "how you get there" doesn't matter.

If you pick a point in spacetime, the future light cone of that point does not depend on your reference frame, and neither does the past light cone.

And, no, I'm fairly sure that the light cone is still a thing even if you do not accelerate.

So, pick a point X in space time, and a point Y which in some inertial frame of reference is "after" that point, but not inside the future light cone of X, such that your ftl device allows point X to influence point Y.

Then there is some other frame of reference where point X is still not inside point Y's past or future light cones, but now is "after" point Y.

Then, the same ftl device would allow point Y to influence point X, or other points in X's past light cone.

(to simplify, assume that the ftl device does not have a maximum "speed" This implies that it can impact any future point. I'm pretty sure that the same line of reasoning with the two points still applies when ftl device is limited to a "speed" of twice c,
but I am not well versed in relativity, so I am treating the "speed" of the ftl device as unlimited. I am putting "speed" in quotes to indicate that it isn't a literal speed, so much as a ratio of (I think) distance in some reference frame compared to time in the reference frame, within which the ftl device can reach.)

Note that I have not at any point in this talked about a path between X and Y, or anything like that.

So, you can't get around this by noting that the ftl device never actually goes faster than c in the space it is in, because none of the things deal with the ftl device moving, just influencing things outside of its light cone.
What do you think about my App Site
Download iOS 9 Beta 5 and install with super new features
He says:

"Applying the cold logic so common in computer science to the cell biology of the disorder, we’ve started predicting therapies, some of which have since come to bear fruit and improved my son’s quality of life beyond measure."

I curious to read his research on this, but I haven't been able to find it here:

http://matt.might.net/#papers

It's mostly security/GPU/Static analysis stuff.
"A friend of mine led his company from nothing to over $1 billion in revenue / This worked brilliantly up to about 500 employees."

I'm often confused by the apparent VC assumption with excessive growth and not building right-sized companies sometimes. Is this failure?

To me, this is a great time to say "I'm making lots of money, my employees are making lots of money, and it's ok to be at this size and there's nothing wrong"

It might have been a great time to stop at 100, or even 25, and you could have had a fantastic time, doing one thing supremely well, too.

There's honor in that.

I think the pressure to grow to unicorn sizes inherrent in VC things could often result in weird business choices.

It's important to remember the VC is motivated by the final selling price, and big companies sell more -- but that's totally not failure.
Quant Finance Lectures – videos, ipython notebooks
Ex post facto justification of complex interdependent decisions and consequences by virtue of market valuation?

That's just dumb survival bias endemic to the YC camp.

It's not something you should actually base business and technical decisions on.
For sure, it definitely depends on the target audience. I think as gTLDs gain more ground, people will stop defaulting to ".com" when they type in an address.

But even as a techie I find myself defaulting to that sometimes. I do, of course, kick myself appropriately afterward.
Thanks for making that point. The statement "square matrices have as many eigenvectors as they have linearly independent dimensions" is meant to inform the statements that follow.
It's probably similar to our results from last year: http://domino.research.ibm.com/library/cyberdig.nsf/papers/0...
I'm surprised to find this being a pretty good way to look at it.
Product managers are potentially both the most helpful and potentially most damaging hire you can make, as you are ceding them control (if you do) over the very definition of the value your company provides.

I think someone like Steve Jobs keeping a lot of that control there is definitely of value - in not delegating it.

I've worked with a lot of PMs that were like "this dialog needs to be more orange" (one defunct startup from many years ago), and miss the picture, because they are just kind of faking it -- they are the guy with the opinion and the title, because somebody had to do it, but not really trying to make the best choice for the end user.

There are some that could be exceptional. (Speaking of several different companies where I've experienced this). You need to have someone with a really good gut feel and instinct, and a lot of passion to believe in the thing they are doing. But if a PM is a "CEO of a product", that makes it the most important choice in your entire organization -- for that product. If you have one product, that's huge.

An alternative approach is to get a company really involved, to where everybody on the team has input in the product, and that you source the ideas from everywhere, but yeah, somebody still has to drive it.

Depending on who you talk to PM can mean like 37 different things, and no one person can concentrate on all 37 -- you do need people doing all of those things, but I think it's GREAT if the person at the helm of your company is all about the product. Else, you're just cranking size and numbers?

The purpose of the company, to me, is about creating the things you believe in and want to create - the business is the means to the end, and the food on the table along the way. Approaching it from a pure business perspective is missing a lot of the fun and opportunity.
Oh my god, I can't take this rambling book review style. Please save me from this pretentious focusless essay disguised as a book review.
I've watched the first episode as the pilot was free to download, so my opinion is based only on that episode. While it was unique in some ways a few lousy tropes managed to sneak in. Like making the love interest a bumbling scatterbrain who needs to be saved. For all I know in later episodes her character develops into a secret mastermind, but in the pilot she was weak.

Not every female character needs to kick ass, just as every male character doesn't need to kick ass, but if you have a small set of core characters with fewer than 50% being female, avoid weakening their character so that they have to be saved every time they walk into a fuck-up. Even just make them mildly competent.
So many people seem to dislike Wordpress but what alternatives are their if you want to host your own blog?