skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There was a very interesting article in the NY Times earlier this year about this subject:

"For other industries, though, a dollar of savings is worth a lot more than itself. For pharmaceutical companies, a dollar in savings is worth $1.50. For software firms, it’s even higher: more than $2. This means that investors are behaving as if they trust the executives in these industries, like Larry Page of Alphabet, to be smarter about using that money than the investors themselves could be. ...

"Why? The answer, perhaps, is that both the executives and the investors in these industries believe that something big is coming, but — this is crucial — they’re not sure what it will be. Through the 20th century, as we shifted from a horse-and-sun-powered agrarian economy to an electricity-and-motor-powered industrial economy to a silicon-based information economy, it was clear that every company had to invest in the new thing that was coming. These were big, expensive investments in buildings and machinery and computer technology. Today, though, value is created far more through new ideas and new ways of interaction. Ideas appear and spread much more quickly, and their worth is much harder to estimate."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/magazine/why-are-corporati...

The implication is that big tech companies see some very disruptive trends coming down the pipeline, but they're not sure which specific idea or ideas should take most of the investment, and they're hedging their bets by hoarding cash for now. Maybe when the AI/automation revolution kicks into high gear, we'll finally see what they spend all this money on.
More or less. Set goals that are within your control - I find that mine are more tied to personal health, intellectual pursuit, and business. Not many people can affect those, but I sure can. Personal responsibility is a great thing.
I'm pretty sure there is a Chinese firewall in place for legal reasons due to the Zenimax lawsuits and him likely having a non-compete that only applied to desktop games and left mobile free.
So you are saying people don't have a right to choose for themselves who they want to rent their home to? It isn't illegal being a bigot or religiously deluded yet.
I cry so little my wife had me tested for Aspergers...and she was right. I tear up about once a year at most. Most of the time when I do start to get overwhelmed my first reaction is "WTF IS THIS?" and beat it down like a $2 mule. It isn't that I'm completely without emotions, but I really do have less than "normal" people.

Anyway, nice to hear about the experiences of others.
Zika scare means Olympics Games should not be held in Rio, 150 scientists say
They could police it the same way bloggers are policing it: If Airbnb sees a suspicious rejection of a person of color, Airbnb themselves could try rebooking it under a fake white profile. If it gets accepted, ban the host.

They could even automate it with a bot.
First, Andrew Ng is a co-founder of Coursera and helped teach a few Machine Learning classes just so we all know he has the chops to say something like this. That's how I recognized his name a little more digging shows he really does have a good ML/AI background.

Second, He isn't saying an imperfect autopilot. He's saying that 1000 to 1 is NOT acceptable error. So the title is misleading, unless he edited his post.

Third, he is correct. Lay people who see this will immediately think that Autopilot is WAY to hard and that software devs will never get it right. I'm not saying they are right, but I am saying it's terrible PR for AI to release a system that is as buggy as this and assume zero responsibility.
There are healthy ways to express your anger. Raising your voice at your coworkers is not one of them, and is out of line.

I can't think of a time when I've had to yell uncontrollably. I can think of many times when the only thing I was capable of doing was crying.
EBay founder backing Gawker’s appeal of Hulk sex tape verdict
>Why does US Law Enforcement so dramatically escalate every contact with a citizen?

US LEOs are indoctrinated with the belief that they are 'at war'. Convincing the public of this is imperative to retaining authority, securing more funding, and receiving immunity from any consequences of their actions.
One way they accomplish the above is by never passing up an opportunity to dress up like an army man and publicly display force
Grave of the Fireflies http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095327/
Is that a good long-term solution? Can the CO2 just be left there forever?
Feasibility and morality are two totally separate things. Just because two things are equally feasible does not make them equivalent.
> You are putting yourself at serious emotional risk

Yes, a relationship is an emotional risk. But without risk, there is no reward.

A log of her moments of joy, warmth, love, contentedness, etc. might show that relationship in a very different light.
How many people are using the same email and password on other websites? How many people have the same password protecting their email?
If they have the matching emails, at significant portion of those email/passwords will work for Facebook, and any other site out there.
> Remember clock Ahmed the clock kid?

It turned out that his invention was a fully pre-built alarm clock removed from its plastic housing.

Also other details emerged that pretty much sealed the case against him - what he did was create an intentional hoax.
Yes, all the stuff the SteamVR overlay is built with are public APIs that competing stores can use to make their own overlay (including notification popups during games, etc.). You can make a competing store in a tab alongside steam, or replace the Steam VR overlay entirely:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr/wiki/IVROverlay_Over...
Sell them for a couple grand on Tor. [1]

Crosslist it with email addresses from more active sites.

Use these credentials to pop more accounts.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheRealDeal
That would be a rational response. The psychology here is not rational and is based on evolution under conditions where small tribes competed for scarce resources over a wide area.

Scarcity -> Identify a vulnerable out group -> Attack out group and steal their hunting grounds

Our brain stems don't know what millennium they are in.
Bloggers: Which Social Media Channels Should You Use?
Yeah, the post confuses APIs with source code.
Seriously? You're trolling their diversity efforts with absurd strawmen like the idea that teams will trick black women en masse into being fake token founders so that the real teams have an extra shot at office hours.

There is a disgusting "argument" being made here, but I'm not the one making it.
And to add to what oh_sigh said, what makes you think that the reasons for discriminating by gender are valid? In my country (the USA) we passed laws decades ago making precisely that (discrimination in lodging based on gender) illegal.
There's now at least a dozen feasible and diverse fusion projects out there. So planners who assume there won't be fusion soon are obliged to explain why they must all fail.
When I hear the phrase corporate profits, I think of the fact that they aren't really profits at all. According to a UN report, the amount of environmental damage the companies caused is on par in dollar terms than the profits they made. They just exchanged something for something else, except that the global population has to eat the losses in the form of pollution. Nothing is free in this world unfortunately, not even corporate profits.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-to...
The discussion around Vive vs Rift and Valve vs Oculus is getting more and more emotionally clouded and "good guys vs bad guys" with each passing week. People are letting their own frustration around Oculus' poorly managed launch and non-existent PR affect their perspective on the situation. The fact is that although Oculus is adopting somewhat of a walled garden approach, people entirely overlook that Valve maintains a virtual monopoly on PC games distribution. Sure they aren't as powerful as iOS app store or the Google Play store, but Valve wants the same thing as any other player - to be in a position where you can't avoid selling your content through their channel and to take a big cut of all the sales. Those who attack Oculus for trying to be the one who gets the cut are deluding themselves. Apple, Google, Valve, they all already do this. Further, Oculus doesn't make any money on hardware right now, what can a person expect them to do? Just operate without any intention of ever making a profit?

The PC gaming community online can be extremely toxic and idealistic, entirely ignoring business realities.
How the ArXiv Decides What’s Science
Well, maybe you could redirect the current directly into the grid and spread it accross it so that the power is divided accross the entire network and save fuel from power factories in the process. If you can predict the hits, you can balance the production accordingly.
I just want to leave this here - http://narrowstreetssf.com/
one can dream.... America with narrow streets
"God works in mysterious ways"

(as does the flying spaghetti monster, the tooth fairy and santa)
I think it's worth pointing out that Steam might technically be a walled garden, but it's a very open one, and it has full support for both the Vive and the Rift. I don't get the impression at all that the Vive is trying to be a console artificially. There is no content that is exclusive to the Vive only because of business contracts; the Vive is just enjoying temporary and coincidental exclusivity which is a result of Touch not being available and not even having a release date.
Wouldn't an ID check or similar on arrival be sufficient?
Is it apropos on HN to link to cite one's own comment? I made a comment about this a month or so ago that I think is relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11592455. Essentially, I think this cash hoarding is motivated by fear, fear of being "disrupted" and becoming the next RIM or Palm or whatever: in a dominant position in year N; dead as a doorknob in year N+3. And this is the toughest kind of fear, because it's perfectly reasonable but can still get pathological when taken too far.
They check gun registries? Why?

I suppose that registered guns suggest that someone is not criminal, because the alternative assumption should be unregistered guns.
Crying is correlated with empathy, which is among the most important traits a human can have.
You see though, you don't even know the details of my thoughts and you build a strawman that doesn't resemble them.

To be clear, by your analogy, I do believe that GMOs exist.

Jokes aside, GMOs are not a binary proposition, like the question on global warming or evolution, which is whether the theories are true or not. The question is two fold - whether individual GMO crops are safe or not, and whether it is possible that harmful GMOs are possible at all. The answer to the first question seems to be that existing crops are safe, based on several studies. The answer to the second is easy - yes, harmful GMOs are obviously possible - it doesn't seem all that difficult for instance to insert a gene from a toxic organism into a food plant. Not that anyone would do that, but it's physically possible. People conflate these two questions, which is where the crazy internet arguments come from.

Considering that it is indeed possible to create a harmful GMO, and considering that we barely understand how regular old nonmodified genes operates in relation to the entire organism, it is neither unscientific nor absurd to question whether subtle problems could arise from transgenetic modification. Current safety testing involves statistical studies across time and subjects, looking for correlations between the crop and harmful effects. It is impossible to simulate from first principals and predict all effects to an organism and its ecosystem due to the countless parameters involved. Science doesn't prove anything - it only posits theories and strengthens them with evidence, which could always be overturned with future data. To claim otherwise is the true anti-science stance.
Taking the Robots to Design School, Part 1
Emotional stoicism gets real world tangible results. But it doesn't let us explore our emotions in depth.

As a kid, excessive emotions made me feel toxic because there is no solution to emotional issues. I learned how to block those emotions and voila, I'm now a great cog in the economy. I can get stuff done without emotions affecting me. I am pretty good at conflict resolution (not domination).

I have a very nice rational life but a few relationships did make me realize that my go to solution for any problem is blocking emotions. Not really healthy IMO.
In the long term your prediction will be correct - those willing to rent to anybody will acquire more money, and eventually might be able to boot out the other more "choosy" party. A virtuous monopoly of sorts.

I was talking about the unconscious worry about resources and survival, not the rational economic kind.
Imagine athletes from poorer states take it back to their countries which don't have good healthcare infrastructure and it becomes an uncontrollable epidemic there.

A very real possibility of Half a Million people taking the virus back to every city on the planet and all they are saying is we'll use mosquito repellents near the stadiums and hotels and everything will be fine.

I understand that there's alot of money and sunk cost at stake for Brazil and IOC but it their adamance over this is dangerous.
Can anyone explain how the visualization with the header '? -> ?? -> ???' (a little past the middle on the right hand side) was generated?

I'd really like to know how spreadsheet data gets turned into that awesome D3 diagram!
I don't think the two are comparable. Emacs is a bizarre beast that fits no common UI paradigm/design language/whatever. It has its own shortcut system, its own undo/redo behavior, its buffer concept, etc. Everything about it is EMACS. If you use Emacs, it's specifically because you want to use Emacs and all it's uniqueness. It's consequently a love-it-or-hate it tool, and it's extremely niche relative to Word, or I bet even gedit.

Office, on the other hand, you probably use because you need to create Office-formatted docs. Very few people are likely buying Office because they long for the Office interface. Office doesn't even have a consistent interface paradigm. They've reinvented it repeatedly, culminating in the Ribbon UI. But at the end of the day, Office's interface is a Windows interface. They've done their own thing, but it's still clearly Windows, and shoehorning that interface onto a Mac feels out of place in a way it doesn't on Windows.

I can't comment on interop. It's been a while since I used Office for Mac. I don't recall any notable interop issues, but I mostly used the mail client (Entourage, later Outlook). I used Word sometimes but wasn't exactly writing for publication.
But their Android version also looks pretty much exactly like the iOS one, same for their web version.

Facebook is going down the consistency across platforms route and not the consistency with platform route (I'm not passing judgement on them, and in some ways I disagree with the article's main thesis).
A serious question: does anyone -- management, shareholders, analysts, anyone in the picture at all -- seriously think that these companies will actually find a way to invest a nontrivial portion of the cash piles they're sitting on? (Bearing in mind that to date, year after year after year, they're unable to invest quickly enough to prevent the pile from continuing to accumulate, let alone spend it down.)
AirBnB is a platform to connect vendors and buyers; they're closer to a measenger app than a hotel business. Airbnb trying to end hosts racism makes as much sense as Facebook censoring racist messages.
> Not wrestling specifically, but you certainly wouldn't be the first to feel a sort of alienation from... I don't know: call it physicality

We've been moving past this "physicality" for at least the last 3,000 years, it's what makes us, well, rational and modern humans. Case in point, the mighty Achilles and Hector both die, while the non-physical Ulysses finally manages to return home to his beloved Penelope. Also see Goliath vs David.
LemonAid Gains Official Certification from NCAA to Help Future College Athletes
Obligatory "Wrestling Isn't Wrestling" plug - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYvMOf3hsGA

You should really watch the video because it's amazing, but the tl;dw is that WWE is a live-filmed TV show with stunts about an over-the-top wrestling league. The world in the league has magic and wizards and all sorts of outlandish fictional elements, but the show we're watching is a sort of meta-show about that world.

With that in mind, politics is taking on a lot of the characteristics of wrestling in that it's this meta show about itself that doesn't really resemble the underlying truth. The big difference though is that the underlying truth in politics is the real-life workings of government, not a magical world of wizards, undead, and feats of strength.

With regards to papering over reality in favor of a preferable narrative–an activity as old as recorded history–I think wrestling actually has a much more honest relationship with fiction and truth than most things.
Teacher Unions Haven’t Forgiven Michelle Rhee, Don’t Care That Her Policies Work
Here is an idea: make it a standard practice for hosts to publish the a "we do not discriminate" clause in their listing. Maybe even provide a checkbox that adds that boilerplate.

I'll bet most people prefer to rent from hosts that say they don't discriminate.

Of course this won't solve the problem, but for hosts like the one our blogger found, it will at least tug on their conscience.
I'd love to get your input and have you try it out if you're interested?

P.S. What do you think of the book? Was thinking about getting it myself.
I have both. The Vive gets way more use, for one simple reason. Room scale is the future of VR. Some of the Oculus games are fantastic uses of the technology. Lucky's Tale has the camera on a rail based on where your character is, and EVE: Valkyrie has great mechanics for seated VR. But both of them feel like you're playing a game, albeit an immersive one, whereas room-scale vive games feel like I'm interacting with a world. Water Bears VR is adorable, but most importantly, the puzzles make use of the physicality of the experience. Moving objects in 3d space is hard with a gamepad, and intuitive with a motion controller. Sitting down isn't the way to use those controllers, either; It's fine to work with your hands sitting down if you're doing detail work, but the resolution isn't there yet for detail work, so you want to focus on sweeping gestures. That means standing up. That means shifting around, wiggling side to side, taking a step. There's theoretically a standing in place mode, but I've not seen it used, everything makes use of the 2Mx2M play area, and for the better.
The type of emotional stoicism and detachment you're advocating for fit under the simple description of either a doormat or a sociopath.

Seriously, there's nothing wrong with feeling emotion. Emotion and logic are NOT, as people in our field so love to proclaim, mutually exclusive.

Your emotions frequently cue you in to valuable information in a situation. Emotional people are actually very predictable -- they are showing you their feelings and in a way communicating their needs.

How can you seriously think that repressing your emotions make you a stable person? This literally goes against all of the literature on the subject.
But Valve does so by providing a good platform. You have Origin, which is used mostly because of exclusive titles; most people I know would love to ditch origin for Steam.

Value also doesn't have the same approach as Occulus; where Occulus tries to be the iOS Appstore (others not allowed), Valve never had that approach.
GoDaddy's New App Helps You Evaluate Business Ideas
Yes, like the fact that there is not a single accessible Uber vehicle in New York City... we THOUGHT the ADA had outlawed that sort of thing, but apparently not.
What are tech jobs in Kelowna? I can't imagine there are many tech jobs there at all. Or at least any tech jobs there that pay more than 30% of a similar job in major US cities, let alone SV.
Emails and passwords, you could try those emails elsewhere, including with the respective email itself.
What is "going wrong" in your scenario, though?
I'm sure there are, but it's kind of standard that most 18-21 year olds have only 1-2 years experience in an independent apartment/house. Just like 17 year olds typically only have 1 year experience driving.

I wouldn't even rule it out entirely, you'd just need references (a decent rating).

The same age group is faced with similar problems renting apartments because they often lack credit ratings and previous references.
It's funny that you mention that.

My refurbished iPod Nano (4th Gen) has been in continuous usage as my cars' music device (hot summers, cold winters) since March 2010.

The only time it's not in there is when I sync it with new music.

Still works great.
That's like saying Amazon's not responsible for the products sold on its platform.

There's plenty Airbnb can do to ensure their hosts aren't racists. They have complete oversight of the booking process. They can detect racist rejection patterns and investigate.
>I hardly think they'd still recommend the maneuver still if it was "bunk".

The mayo clinic doesn't recommend it any more. And your logic there makes no sense. At what point does "still" matter? It used to be recommended by more people. It has been falling out of favor as more and more organizations stop recommending it as there is no evidence to support it. The fact that a few haven't updated their guidelines yet doesn't make it supported by evidence.
I'm so sorry for offending your sensibilities. I'll try to do better next time.
Or my personal favorite, 127.0.0.1?
Ditto. See _A_Clockwork_Orange_
Because the world is a fucked up place, and ignoring it doesn't make it any better.

Would you rather see an individual that's happy sometimes, sad sometimes, and an autonomous human being, or the human equivalent of the cow from Hitchhiker's Guide that wants to eat itself?
| "5 guys from 19 to 21 from a fraternity"

"5 guys from 19 to 21 from a fraternity" isn't a protected class under US law.
I like Warren Buffet's phrasing as cash is a call option with no expiration date. Standard finance theory is that companies should either invest the cash themselves, or if they can't find good investments, they should return it to their shareholders so the shareholders can deploy it elsewhere. However if the management of these companies thinks that the ultimate return on the cash they hold will be greater even given the time value of holding a zero-return investment for years then it makes sense to wait to deploy. I happen to think they're wrong and that they'd be better off returning most of the cash to their shareholders but that's for the respective boards to decide.
This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the markets and would INCENTIVIZED patent trolls to become a big enough target then just sell off their shares to the "do-gooders".
Have there been any incredibly disruptive & profitable markets in the past 10 years? Would hanging onto cash help solidify your place in the next disruptive & profitable market? At the end of the day, the question for these companies is: can you afford not to have cash available for The Next Big Thing?