skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Could someone who shares the author's worldview try to explain it?

Well, I can give you my worldview. Did you see the article "70% of HR managers turn down job candidate based on online reputation?" Here's the HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192996

So. I rent a bunch of movies with strongly opinionated themes. I dunno, maybe every Michael Moore movie plus travel documentaries about Cuba. I also rent the entire Star Wars sextilogy and The Godfather Trilogy, which I review on IMDB.com. Some enterprising hacker ties my reviews on IMDB to my anonymized rental record. How many 47 year-old males are there in my neighborhood who watched those exact movies?

The hacker publishes his "findings," of course. Now I go looking for a job and someone in HR decides that my political views are too risky, so I don't even get an interview.

The author's views are that Netflix can provide the benefits you desire without compromising the privacy I desire. I think the debate should be around whether the authors are correct.

If the authors are correct, then the problem isn't the authors preventing the release, the problem is Netflix failing to learn from their prior mistake.

If the authors are incorrect, we should simply point that out.
IP Spoofing: A Mammoth Description + videos
If "dead simple" is the new norm for web applications, isn't that a good thing?

So long as the term's actually appropriate.
I remember reading some Feynman lecture in which he specifically mentions how bad this is... anyone got a citation for me?

Perhaps you are referring to this passage of "Cargo Cult Science":

"There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition."

http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/02/CargoCult.pdf

(Caltech lecture series is primary source)

http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

(There are several online reprints of this lecture text in HTML, more searchable than .PDF format.)

See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science

for background and both of those citations.
He's the one talking about it. I'm just offering a way to think about it in a more focused manner.
I want to leave aside the question of whether Linux will beat Apple in the market. That's only relevant if you're thinking about building apps for Linux or if you're an Apple investor. However, I think there's a much more relevant question for many HN readers: is Linux better for everyday use than Apple.

My last three everyday computers were a Mac, a pre-installed Linux laptop from System 76, and now, a Dell that I picked up at Best Buy and loaded Ubuntu on. For a number of reasons, I'm much much happier with Ubuntu Linux than I was with my last Linux box or with my last Mac.

- I'm running the same environment as my production systems. I really like having code, and more importantly configuration, work the same on my laptop and my server.

- This question is largely moot these days anyway since my top applications are gmail in the browser, the 37signals suite, and ssh.

- Software and hardware have combined to make virtualization more practical. I split time between running a business and coding. The business stuff often pushes me toward Windows-only software so I often run a Windows instance during the day. Sun's VirtualBox has been great for me and this laptop is much more capable (enough RAM/HD) than my last one. This is also how I run itunes for syncing my iphone.

- Laptop configuration hell has largely gone away. Wireless and sound worked out of the box. Even my 3G USB card was detected automatically.

- I like the Ubuntu bling. I use Gnome Go, which is like Quicksilver on OSX. I like virtual screens. I like the window animations.

- I actually like having Windows around. There are the business reasons I mentioned above. But I also still play games. This laptop came with a 500MB HD, which means I felt comfortable leaving a Windows only partition.

- I almost hesitate to bring up price because I don't want this recommendation to be read as "Linux is a great cheap option." But it is! I paid $750 for a 17" Dell laptop with dual core, 4MB RAM, 500MB HD. The equivalent Macbook was over $2000. One of my theories on laptop pricing is that I don't want to spend more than I could afford losing--otherwise I'd be nervous every time the laptop was out of the house.
Contrary to popular belief (and my own personal preference ;), you can hack Clojure from Vim, Intellij, Eclipse, and Netbeans (the most full-featured at the moment besides Emacs).

Don't let Emacs stop you. Happy hacking.
A fair point certainly.

However there has been a lot of discussion about this recently - especially regarding search. I think there is a fair number of people for whom anonymous searching is important and that is only likely to get larger.
It isn't so much that the manufacturers don't "allow" people to, it's that they need to update their drivers to support the new versions. (For instance, for a long time the custom Android 2.1 ROM for the Sprint HTC Hero did not support the camera). Carriers are also pretty terrible at approving upgrades.

What may help is Google changing their licensing agreements to require that manufacturers using 'Google experience' phones/Android brand allow Google to maintain sole control of software updates. Google can release an SDK a few months before a new distribution is pushed out, allowing enough time for manufacturers to update drivers.
How does this article get written without actually naming the domain name? I mean one can infer from the context, but seriously?
Interesting to know that the Ides of April is actually the 13th, which is too bad, because it's my favorite way of referring to tax day. Although I am prone to pedantry, I think I'll still keep referring to it that way.
If it's not a problem for you, it doesn't mean it's not a problem for anybody else. Especially the more tweaked UI versions (like the Hero) do need work by the manufacturers to be updated. They do have to do that befor you can upgrade, and not all will.
It sounds like you are describing hyperinflation of the kind experienced in Germany in 1922 and 1923. It can cause chaos where people have to spend money as fast as they can get it or they lose value and in extreme cases it becomes cheaper to burn money than to buy firewood with the money.

A more moderate level of inflation though will not cause such problems and a modest and predictable level of inflation can be beneficial to economies.
It seems to me that any data at all will necessarily reduce the entropy of the probability distribution of members' preferences, likes, dislikes, habits, and so on (i.e., their privacy). The authors seem to brush off the "greater good" argument here, but I don't understand how any large scale data release can happen without at least some reference to such an argument given that context. Given that, the authors seem to be making a fairly strong claim here: that no large scale "anonymised" data release should ever happen. Is that helping anyone in the context of movie viewing? And is it hurting anyone other than academic researchers, given that companies share more sensitive data anyway?
So the one thing that never seems quite right about this: how/why do we trust that the guy doesn't log IP addresses? Let's put it this way: If someone promises not to do anything bad with the IP addresses they store, and we don't trust them about that, why would we trust someone when they say they don't store them at all?
I would invest half of it in low risk mutual funds and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities...
For most apps it doesn't matter.

For those that do (e.g. 3D games), you simply state that it requires a snapdragon or whatever CPU. Customers will soon be more familiar with their phones specs, as they are with their computers.
Teal and Orange - Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness
The title of the paper being "Predicting Marital Happiness and Stability from Newlywed Interactions" is quite meaningful in light of what is being discussed in this thread.

Full citation is

John M. Gottman, James Coan, Sybil Carrere and Catherine Swanson, Predicting Marital Happiness and Stability from Newlywed Interactions, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Feb., 1998), pp. 5-22
That doesn't really make it better, and I can understand pg's disappointment, when a team falls apart almost instantly upon getting accepted. Ethically speaking, you don't ask someone to invest time, money, and effort into helping you build a business if you aren't actually going to build that business.
Get a mortgage. Its a tax write-off

Not so much, if you're in AMT-land (and it seems like the poster is).

But even so, I don't understand why people (you're far from the only one) say this. For every dollar you save in taxes, you're paying two dollars to the bank. How can that possibly be smart?

Whether to invest in Real Estate is an entirely separate question. And one that I also think is a poor choice in this age. I base that on the current price of homes relative to their historic levels. They're still expensive.
Yeah. Well I take it with a grain of salt I guess.

Anyway, I saw Siqi's response and it seems pretty legit.
Continental to Charge for Food
My original idea was to have a place like HN where, instead of reading titles, I could read the quick excerpts from the latest articles and news events all over the web. I also didn't want a simple voting system (insert long discussion about mob voting here) and instead went with a tagged learning system.

Later on it occurred to me that social hooks and app-store integration might really help with growth.
See also, the Chicago undergraduate mathematics bibliography: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~abhishek/chicmath.htm
Thank you guys! This is going to be another world for me. The latest months I worked an insane number of hours per day in order to do both Redis and my real work. Now I'll have more hours for Redis, in an environment where I'm more supported full of skilled techs, and not doing other works.
I don't necessarily see this as an issue -- the HTC G1 shipped with an older version of Android, and naturally, its unsold inventory still has that older version.

It should automatically update (barring the unforeseen) to the most current level of Android OS it can support, as it has done for all the existing Android users as new releases became available.

The only thing I can foresee as a problem is that older hardware may not be able to support the newest Android versions. The HTC G1 doesn't appear to support Android 2.0, which makes sense, as it's MUCH older than the Droid or Nexus One. That causes problems more for the developers than for the end users I suspect, but I think that people are used to the logic with PCs -- I can't play the new game, need to upgrade.
Axler and Strang are really very different books with very different intents. The most striking example is that Gaussian elimination is practically the first thing that Strang covers, but Axler doesn't cover it at all.

I can't speak in general because I've only skimmed Strang, whereas I worked through nearly all of Axler. But if your interest in Linear Algebra is as preparation for quantum mechanics, then Axler is a great choice, perhaps even for a novice (though it does require a bit of mathematical maturity). Axler really hammers you with the idea that a matrix is just a way to represent a linear transformation, and that the numbers in the matrix depend on the basis you choose for the underlying vector space. This way of thinking is very helpful when you learn quantum mechanics.

EDIT: Axler also has the advantage that it is short. Personally, I find it much easier to work independently through short math/physics books than long books.
Fair point (for the most part), but the illustration graphic shows a Nexus One... which was indeed released with 2.1 (the latest and greatest). Not terribly material, just silly.

Now, on the substance: the reason why many of the phones lag behind is that the manufacturers and carriers have the ability to customize the system - sometimes to add features (multi-touch appeared in some HTC phones before the Android core), sometimes to junk-ify the phone.

Some of this I predict will fade, as manufacturers/carriers find the value of having the LatestAndGreatest OS will outweigh the perceived benefits of customization. Some of it probably won't, which is the unfortunate but mostly unavoidable consequence of producing an open/open-source platform.

My guess is that over time Google will make a greater effort to distinguish the phones that will be kept up-to-date (because they have few OS customizations) from the ones that just use the Android OS as the basis for their own distro (this is the very fine semantic difference between "Android" and "Android with Google"). How closely consumers will distinguish the two, is of course another matter entirely.

Edit: As an aside, I've been surprised (though perhaps I shouldn't be) how many of my non-tech friends don't even really identify "Android" as a brand - when I tell people we develop for Android, I often get a blank stare - they don't realize that the Droid, Nexus One, etc. have much of anything in common. A branding failure, on the one hand - but also an opportunity to correct some of these other issues.
All on black.
Microsoft copies Apple with Windows Phone app lock-in?
OK. This statistic refers to notional value. Adding up notional values makes as much sense as adding apples, oranges, yen and dollars. Actually it makes less sense than that. You cannot understand a bank's book without access to the individual line items.

If you have the line items, you have everything. Without that you have to rely on high level financial statements and the opinions of bank examiners or other regulators. And as Lehman, Madoff, Enron and other cases show, it means you have nothing.

It is time for banks, who operate a public trust, to offer continuous (lagged) line item disclosure to enable crowdsourcing of risk analysis. The markets are running on the informational equivalent of fumes. No wonder they sputter.

I call this Real Transparency. It is no more intrusive than the fact that I can find out how much you paid for your house and how much you borrowed to buy it. Information like this is necessary for the functioning of a proper market and price system. These are worth preserving more than the privileges of banks.

Real Transparency is the kind of regulatory reform that would make a difference. Not the kind which gives power hungry regulators more information to ignore.
I think the parent is referring to an element of we-told-you-so in this letter. I think around the "instead, you brushed off our claims" part of the letter. It sounds a bit confrontational, though perhaps it's too late to rewrite.
Congratulations Trevor. Generous reflection you've shared. Much appreciated.
Thus ignoring our entire system of checks and balances. Do you not see the danger, here?

Except that we have checks and balances. The chief central banker must be appointed and confirmed and reconfirmed on a regular basis. This in itself provides a check and balance very similar to the one where the Supreme Court Justices must be appointed and affirmed by the other two branches, but are then almost entirely independent afterwards.

Similarly, the other two branches could pass legislation affecting the other levers of the economy if the Fed is doing poorly or even disbanding and replacing the Fed if it truly must. Doing something like this would be incredibly difficult, but this is part of the point. The Fed is meant to be mostly independent.

There are checks and balances to reign in the Fed in the extremely unlikely event that it goes out of control, and the rest of the time it is meant to be independent and sheltered from most of the ups and downs of the rest of the political process.
Give it to charity. Sounds like you have more than enough.
I totally agree. In this particular case, Slim became over-the-top wealthy from buying the monopoly "Telmex" right after it was privatized--with some help from the corrupt government.

From wikipedia:"controversially, the payment itself took place over the course of the next several years, using money earned by the phone service."
There's still an issue of trust, why should I trust Duck Duck Go any more than a company that has a reputation to lose?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Learning Server-Side JavaScript with Node.js
Exactly. I think YC's process works for YC. But I wanted to make that counterpoint about VCs/angels and batting avgs in the context of this thread so that people don't infer that because they didn't get YC they will likely not get angel or VC money.
Keeping math whizzes off the street--Off Wall Street, that is
Mal Elemento con la Copa del Mundo
I agree with the several commenters who have commented that statistically speaking, the cited researcher has not yet achieved "prediction." He has done some interesting curve-fitting on a smallish data set, but has not tested his curves on fresh data sets--something that every responsible scientist must do sooner rather than later, if the scientist wishes to speak of "prediction." I indicated my agreement with other comments by a bunch of upvotes, and also posted the citation for Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" lecture.

That said, my wife and I have been using a couple of Gottman's recent books to reexamine aspects of our twenty-six-year-plus marriage, and there is some good advice for couples in Gottman's writings. It may not all be rigorous science, but clinical experience based on close observation of many couples can be helpful to any one couple who want to enjoy their marriage more and to pass on advice to their children (four, in our case) about how to have happier marriages in the next generation. So once we all agree that proper science involves TESTING models developed through analysis of one data set on other data sets, we can start some application of the clinical observations on ourselves and see what we think after trying this out at home. My wife and I have been pleased to become acquainted with these writings and to discuss them together.
1) bootstrap a company....get products out the door.....try to find product/market fit

2) best starting point is to go through the cycle yourself....if you haven't, refer to response to 1)....this investment in building a company will pay off down the road when you want to invest in other startups (and have accredited investor status, etc.)
Why HTML5 is worth your time
Well, there IS some of "this hardware can't support X feature". But another reason some phones haven't been upgraded is that they're running custom Android builds, courtesy of the manufacturer or carrier - so those take longer to get updated.
Slovenia went pretty well too.

Maybe even better than the examples you listed.
Customer Service is the New Marketing (Zappos)
This is the part that did you in:

Instead, you brushed off our claims, calling them “absolutely without merit,” among other things.

Now even if you are all emotionless, 100% objective researchers with no interest other than the greater good, this very sentence will make it impossible for humans to read your letter without implying a certain level of snark.

If you want to project pure motives for the letter then it would have been best to leave their reaction to your original research out of it, or, probably more appropriately, don't publish an open letter at all—contact them directly.
Software processes are software too
Missing the absolutely fantastic The Higher Arithmetic (Davenport) in the number theory section.
Facebook opens India office
The 48 Laws of Power... on CNN
In what kind of companies? With what kind of success? In what region?
Yep, you got it!
And business people, please don't "reach out" to me anymore. It's dead simple, just email or call.
The book has been claimed.
Right now you don't have funds to be an Angel, usually it requires $250,000 or higher in income and proof of yearly investments. That means you barely made the minimum requirements.

However, you could join an Angle VC investment club where they pool resources including doing fact checking on deals.

An alternative option might be do the startup yourself rather than attempt to become Angel as you already are at zero debt and security/retirement taken care of..in which case a mobile app might be ideal as a startup

Non Angel wise..municipal bonds
I'd ask myself how much time I'd want to spend in growing the $50K. An angel requires time to help cultivate an idea. Do you have time?
That looks awesome. I don't use a device that runs iPhone OS, but it's a brilliant idea and looks beautiful.

As a side note: I'm a huge fan of Shovebox. I use quick jot at least once an hour.
Agreed. Aaron's claim is making money in a very indirect way. Making money in the market is hard enough through direct means (purchase a security watch it go up). I would say it would be even harder to purchase something then move the inflation lever up or down in hopes to manipulate their personal wealth would be much much harder. Plus that also means that they can agree on a set of securities they wish to target which I would say is less likely than a cold day in hell. Not to mention the amount of money they lost and haven't gotten back is pale in comparison holding inflation at 3% instead of 4%.

What I would argue is that Bankers and Wallstreet just want it to go back to what it was. They're trying as hard as they can trying to build a time machine to go back before everything fell apart, and resisting all attempts at changing for the better. They just want this to all go away. So given the choice they want that lever to make everything as it was before which is impossible.
Nobody makes decisions based on what their money will be worth in 100 years. Low, stable inflation is a good thing. Depreciation to 4% over 100 years is about 3.3% each year. If inflation is stable, you can take that value into account when making contracts with others that deal with longer periods of time. Low inflation only really hurts people who stockpile cash for years. Don't do that.
How long have you used Android devices?
The Biggest Little Man in the World
I'm saddened to see someone gloating at having helped to prevent the release of a dataset that I see as beneficial.

I'd encourage people that usually skim just the comments to read the post, which was not gloating at locking up the dataset. The thrust of the post is about what a shame it is that the contest was canceled and how to make sure future contests can work.

[Note one: I have nothing to do with either side. Note two: I guess there is a gloating interpretation, with the paraphrase "you ignored us, but the FTC said we were right, nah nah nah" — but this isn't a useful or constructive way to continue the conversation.]
For real analysis, I'd recommend that you pick up a copy of "baby Rudin" regardless, but for learning real analysis, I'd recommend a book like "A First Course in Mathematical Analysis" by Burkill. Other viable options include "Calculus" by Spivak (it's really a book on real analysis at a level somewhere between a typical freshman calculus book and "baby Rudin"), "Real Mathematical Analysis" by Pugh, or "Yet Another Introduction to Analysis" by Bryant.
Dear submitters,

Please stop submitting blog posts where people whine about people writing some trivial cliche.

That's now very cliche itself.
What if you aren't in a university or if the university is not that rich to have an access to most popular scholar journals ? You are not aware of the luck you have if accessing scholar journals is as simple as that for you.
If 'semantic web' annoys you, read on...