skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is something I feel strongly about.

At my company, we have spent the better part of the past month fighting the credit card system, but not by encouraging merchants to use it as FeeFighters does. We built a new processing network from the ground up (https://www.facecash.com) that costs far less per transaction than the standard interchange--and then lobbyists for Western Union, American Express and others changed the law in California to make it virtually impossible to get a money transmission license without $2 million in funding for the California requirements alone. At least well-funded one payments startup shut down in April, several are now risking criminal prosecution by not complying with the law, and only one so far has been able to afford to apply for a license.

We can afford to apply, but because the DFI makes up the rules as it goes along, we are basically guaranteed not to get a license.

Consequently, I wrote this...

http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/In-Fifty-Days-Payments-...

...and this...

http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/In-Thirty-Days-Payments...

...and this...

http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/Why-Im-Furious-with-Sil...

...and this...

http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/The-California-Law-That...

I've been in touch with multiple California Assemblymen, the chief consultant to the California Banking and Finance Committee, the staff director of the California State Senate, two people at the U.S. Treasury, and one person at the newly-formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

They want to hear from you. If you're interested in voicing your opinion, send me an e-mail (aarong at thinkcomputer dot com) and I'll get you in touch.

Disruptive change requires actually disrupting a system. That's what we've been doing, but as long as it's illegal, the banks will be able to hold the public's money hostage. Given the state of the global economy that is not okay with me anymore.
Leaked AT&T Letter Demolishes Case For T-Mobile Merger
The Blame Game
I made something similar (but way to lame): http://g33k.heroku.com/
you're welcome Greg! really glad to know you got your laptop back. :)
?I don't understand why there would be a need for a logarithmic graph in this case. The author is not discussing proportional changes or even absolute changes, unless you want to consider income as a change in wealth, but that's not quite accurate and adds an unnecessary layer of complexity.

The author's main goal is to show how a proxy for decision making power (viz. household cash income) is highly concentrated.

I don't think the author's graph is the best visualization of his point. I would like to see a graph of the proportion of national wealth owned by households at each percentile. The would deliver the point the "power is highly concentrated" in the top percentiles. Wealth is a better proxy than income and understanding the proportion of wealth each percentile holds claims to is better than seeing the absolute amount of wealth held by that group.
6 users! wow.
It's a pixel-for-pixel copy of the yellow guy from that logo, down to the irregular shadow on the collar.
In fact I deleted my reply now. ;)
Add taxi drivers to the mix. I've got the theory hairdressers and taxi drivers have a better sense of the moods and attitudes of society than anyone, even politicians.

In aggregate, their opinions and predictions might be a peek around the corner of time.

I like your idea too (sorta) although I think you'll pivot into a matchmaking service in time.
Sign Into Websites Directly From Your Browser
Isn't it against FCC regs to intentionally cause cell phones to stop working? I remember some prisons wanted to buy cell jammers to prevent inmates from using smuggled phones, but it's illegal.
I'm not trying to quote you out of context, sorry if it came across that way.

Central Planning = Government decides and industry follows, like in China.

If you want to take this as a definition, then fine, we have nothing to argue about. But if you just give the phrase its literal meaning, I believe the article is arguing that: One form of central planning is what you described. Another is a very small number of entities controlling a very large amount of money.
Show HN: Hackman - hangman for hackers
This is a weekend hack project I put together with a designer friend of mine. Hackman is a trivia word game that tests your knowledge on startups and influential people around it.

Search for hack-man on the app store to download it.

The free version has 10 words per category and you get 40 additional words per category for just $.99.
As long as they are able to run the same software, who cares?
And has no GIL problems.
I like the app btw. It's fresh. I'll continue using it.
Completely agreed on the aspect ratio complaint. 16:9 is good for watching widescreen video and lousy for everything else. I fail to understand how it's come to entirely dominate both phones and laptops in the last few years. Does anybody other than Apple make laptops with 1440x900 or 1680x1050 displays anymore?
You can simply walk upstairs where there's normal cellphone reception, and you're good to go.

Now if you're stuck on a train in a tunnel because protesters are causing the system to shut down, that's a different situation, but still not decidedly evil or foolish for BART to turn off its cell service. In BART's defense, they did tell everyone earlier in the day to make alternate plans and prepare for delays.
This is a good post, and it links to fundamentally good material.

Two additional things are useful to note.

The first is that he didn't pick the title "Goto considered harmful", the editor did.

The other thing is that as the article says, many think he is simply an academic. There was a period of his career where he worked for Burroughs corporation (remember, they invented virtual memory before IBM, but nobody believed it until IBM did) and he and three or for others wrote a compiler. That compiler had, in its lifetime, a total of three or four bugs. So there was certainly a practical side to him as well.
way ahead of ya: https://github.com/afeld/mustachio-js
en garde! https://github.com/afeld/mustachio
It really depends on the type of app and is very difficult to generalize.

For our app (Paprika Recipe Manager - http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paprika-recipe-manager/id3924...), iPad sales are 4-5x the iPhone sales. Based on the type of app this makes a lot of sense: cooks want to use an iPad in the kitchen, an iPhone screen is too small.

But then I know there are a lot of other apps where the numbers are completely reversed.
Ok, I am going to say that this is just a little scary, scalewise. And I am thinking that the 2000 cores they used was some teeny fraction of what they might have deployed if they really needed it.
I guess it's about as bad as someone who buys $600 worth of coffee and never contributes any money. That's 200 $3 coffees, or almost 3/4's of a years worth assuming one a day. Of course, this is also in the span of weeks.
Your company seems to be very atypical. At least here in Brazil, most people who used to develop in Visual Basic for Windows have moved to ASP and then to ASP.NET for web applications. Of those who felt tempted to use Java, many moved to C#, which is very Java-ish.

Not all corporate developers are good developers. Managing good developers is hard and managers prefer the more predictable, cheaper, average ones. Sadly.
I really hope that 10% unemployment IS NOT an equilibrium for the US, but I agree that all the major increases in US productivity lately are not being shared evenly among the working class. Capital (held ever-increasingly by the wealthy) is being used to increase productivity and grow their wealth, but those benefits are not passed on to average Americans. That happens now because you don't have to employ more people to make more money - not like 30, 40 or 50 years ago when you had to employ more workers in your factory to sell more and thus grow your wealth.

So I guess productivity going up isn't attached as strongly to more employees being hired, and that does imply the potential for larger, structural unemployment (though probably less than the current 9%). It also means that trick-down ideas of a "factory owner using his money to hire more employees" are increasingly irrelevant.
I do machine learning and would consider myself a data scientist. I was an engineer who decided to do an advanced degree in statistics and computer science just because I liked this stuff. I currently work in the analytics division of a small company:

1. Its not necessary to have the necessary degrees: I did but a lot of people in my team come from the social sciences and other fields. You might find it hard to cross HR but that is something that can be rectified by cleaning up the "weird parts" of your resume and highlighting the "right parts". You seem to have a good handle on what is what on that front.

2. Your statistics, linear algebra and probability skillset need to be upto par. People from a more statistical background will grill you on those things. Its extremely easy to see whether a person can think statistically by giving them a toy data problem and asking them to hack at it. The way to train for it is to play around with small datasets and I see you have been doing that a bit.

3. People who come from a more C.S. side of things will try to explore your knowledge about "machine learning algorithms" which typically are easy to learn if you know your math background. The field has a lot of jargon which might appear to make it fancy. Again, the math behind these algorithms is not hard but there are things that you learn about how these algorithms work in practice that really make a difference. So again doing small projects and putting them up on github will help you learn more and make your resume look good.

4. Technology: There are loads of languages that are used in practice. Make sure you know one scripting language (R, SciPy/NumPy or even Matlab) and are comfortable using that as your scratch pad. The people who are statistically oriented in my team use R. Other skills that are extremely valuable but won't kill you to know are to learn the Map Reduce Stack (Java (uggh), Pig).

I am currently doing machine learning on a dataset. This involves typically playing around with the data in NumPy and sometimes Matlab. Once I am comfortable with a particular choice of algorithms, I try to write it up in Pig. I use Java (Hadoop) for the worst case scenario.

Hope this helps...
> And how do you keep this consistent across different objects? IE object A and object B are updated at the same time, going from generation 1 to generation 2. I am on a remote machine reading from the cache. How can I ensure I don't get a view where I see object A at generation 1 and object B at generation 2?

You use caches when it doesn't matter, which is much of the time. If it really really matters, then you use ACID semantics of the DB to ensure that.
NPR's Planet Yuppie: How to help your child ace her pre-school interview
An African Chief in Cabby’s Clothing
"Jamming" wireless transmissions does indeed run afoul of FCC regulation; but that's not what they did here.

They disabled the power to the base stations which were deployed in specific locations (locations which are not public property). I assume they argue that they are not under any obligation to provide access to these base stations. I also assume that the base stations in question are either owned by them, or provided by the telcos.

Technically, one of the wireless providers could probably raise a stink that this action made their service look bad, but I seriously doubt they are going to take a stand in this regard.
What basic right is that?
This is a debate about a pseudoscientific norm set by
a bunch of "experts" who evidently dislike children and have
convinced millions of parents their children are sick
because they fidget in class.
Agreed, friend. Agreed.
More than that: they see non-Microsoft web apps as a threat to their ecosystem. They will do everything to fragment the market in order to make it as hard as possible to deliver cross-browser applications without making IE clearly inferior to the competition. Using that with companies that standardize on IE for their corporate desktops and making IE just incompatible enough, they make it harder for companies to migrate away from Windows because core corporate web applications require it.

Several web applications in the company I work for require IE. I have Windows in a VM for that.
Of course. A simple email with a confirm link would solve this.
Gulp.

A team at Google pulled 20tb(!) of SWF files out of their crawl and fed them through a simple algorithm that determined the subset of 20,000 SWF files that exercised the maximum number of basic blocks in Adobe's Flash Player.

Then, using 2000 CPU cores at Google for 3 weeks, they flipped random bits in those 20,000 SWF files and fed them through an instrumented Flash Player.

Result: 80 code changes in Flash Player to fix security bugs from the resulting crashes.

This is great stuff; you can imagine a very well organized adversary spending the money on comparable compute resources, and even (if you stretch) obtaining the non-recoverable engineering time to build a comparably sophisticated fuzzing farm. But no other entity excepting perhaps Microsoft can generate the optimal corpus of SWF files to fuzz from.

DO PDF NEXT, GOOGLE.

You've got to ask yourself: in a year or so, if there are still regular updates for exploitable zero-day memory corruption flaws in Flash, even after Google exhaustively tests the input to every basic block in the player with the union of all file format features observed on the entire Internet, what does that say about the hardness of making software resilient to attack?
People have used subways for over 100 years and dealt with "crazed lunatics with knifes" without cell phones for all but the past 10 of those years. Cell phone != safety
It's perfectly possible and even reasonable to call __hash__ before acquiring lock on the dictionary (and cache keys' hashes for data in the dictionary).

On the other hand, when almost every object is backed by dictionary, the locking has to be very fast, which seems to me like almost unsolvable problem.
BART isn't a private entity, though, it's a government agency.

ETA a link to BART's discussion of its formation: http://bart.gov/about/history/index.aspx
Email to what, your @me.com email that the attacker may very well have access to?
The best part is the idea was originally suggested by BART's public relations department.
They are of course in full backpedal mode on that statement.
That blog post seems to contradict what Tavis Ormandy claimed on Twitter a few days ago, when the patch was released:

> Adobe patched around 400 unique vulnerabilities I had sent them in APSB11-21 as part of an ongoing security audit. Not a typo.

https://twitter.com/#!/taviso/status/101046246277521409

> Apparently that number was embarrassingly high, and they're trying to bury the results, so I'll publish my own advisory later today.

https://twitter.com/#!/taviso/status/101046396790128640

Whereas the blog post cites 400 unique crashes, 106 security bugs, and 80 code changes (the same numbers that Adobe used: http://blogs.adobe.com/asset/2011/08/how-did-you-get-to-that...).

---

Regardless of the exact numbers though, this is a supremely awesome feat of security engineering. It's very impressive.
Ironically, the receipt JUST showed up now.
We use Grasshopper for our phone-service. They do a computer-transcription of voice mail by default and they send it to you by email. If you don't like the auto-transcription from the email you can have it done by humans. And 5 min later you have a more accurate one in your inbox.

Which makes me think that there are a lot of services that could benefit from human intervention. I can see that you guys are starting out in a particular space but I think that the opportunity is huge!
In fact, I can guarantee they're not solving CAPTCHAs for hire. Our review process for new software applications keeps the quality of our tasks high and keeps spam work out.

CAPTCHA-breaking jobs generally rely on sweatshop labor and don't pay the fair wages we do, so they're not even capable of hiring our workers.

One of our core motivations as a team and a company is to use crowdsourcing as a force for good: happy workers, better technology, no spam. If you're interested in cracking CAPTCHAs, we'll be happy to refer you to our better known, difficult-to-use competitor.

Handwritten and printed OCR tasks, on the other hand, are fantastic for our system.
Gucci outlet supply the cheap Gucci handbags and shoes in Gucci online
Welcome to our Gucci outlet mart! As we know that Gucci is famous luxury Italian brand which was founded by Guccio Gucci in Florence in 1921. With the first-class quality, excellent design and the charming style, Gucci wins the superb reputation in the world. In modern society, go shopping online has become to be a new trend. It is convenient for people’s daily life.
For all it's problems, it's a very immersive, unique experience.

Who knows, a few generations more it could have become small and portable. At the time, it looked like the future.
From the page: Anti-aliasing helps make text and curved lines look smoother, but can make straight lines appear fuzzy. Notice how the lines on the left are fuzzy, while those on the right are crisp.

On Firefox 5 on Ubuntu 11.04, the left lines are crisp, while the right lines are fuzzy. I haven't tried other browsers or platforms.
This makes perfect sense to me, and I agree. The crowd that was protesting is just a bunch of 20-something hipsters who see rioting and revolution in the rest of the world and want in on the fun.

If you threaten the life of a police officer, expect to be shot. That's all there is to it. These people are just looking for something to cry over.

To people saying BART did this to prevent bad PR: I'm not convinced of this. Everyone knows that doing this would cause an uproar, simply based on the fact that they get their panties in a bunch over acceptable police action.

If you want to protest, go to the streets. You don't have to clog up commuters' travel and make their day shitty. Kmart doesn't have to let you congregate inside their stores. BART doesn't have to let you congregate in the paid area.

Also, I think it's a bit ridiculous that people can write off any claim if it has to do with safety. You guys really think that it would be safe to have protesting in a train station?
Go towards your pain. Fix it, then share your solution with the world.
We are trying to separate the culling process from the uploading process. Doing some of the culling bit by bit instead of having this one big overwhelming "ugh I need to connect the camera, import 200 photos, go through them and find which ones to print" task. We've got a few ideas we're going to be testing in the coming months.
LOL, seriously? Kept-blogger? That's a new one. My blog stands alone. It's been around 9 years, and years before I started at MSFT and it'll be around years after I quit.

As for the Tumblr, I created that at the suggestion of my friend Anil Dash.
Hong Kong stock exchange hacked
Central planning isn't bad just because it's bad, there's reasons for its badness. Here's a few -

First, you get people who don't know about a profession trying to dictate to people who do know about it. EX: Hitler and Stalin managing farm production, even though they didn't know anything about farming - agricultural production goes down leading to famines.

Second, you lose the price signal which says what people really want enough to act on, given scarce resources. This leads to a feedback loop where goods priced below the equilibrium have demand far in excess of supply. EX: Everyone would love to buy a subsidized steak instead of a hamburger, so if steak is subsidized to hamburger prices, there'll be shortages and you'll need to impose rationing and coupons and things (which becomes a dual currency system where the coupon/ration becomes the real constraint currency, and then those become blackmarketed until an equilbrium is reached - but only with a lot of hassle).

Third, central planners generally have incentives that diverge widely from the people they're supposed to be planning for - ex, making sure those new centrally planned jobs go to your political supporters. This has happened in the majority of centrally planned economies.

You wouldn't expect a high concentration of wealth to have these same problems. Steve Jobs having central planning ability over Apple, and by extension, over a lot of the high quality glass and semiconductor industries isn't the same as Brezhnev having that power. Jobs, of course, is much more competent at building high end consumer technology than Brezhnev and not prone to make some of the common errors.
"Slide to Unlock" your Home with iDoormat
There's a similar site in Germany that has more or less replaced hitchhiking. Very popular. Someone is going from, for example from Hamburg to Berlin, and says how many places are free, and how much money you have to chip in to cover expenses.

http://www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de/ is the URL.

It's worth taking a look so you don't have to reinvent everything.
They address the safety of people on the platform, but what about people that didn't have a few dozen cops nearby?

I have ill family members, and need to be able to be on a plane in a few hours notice. Avoiding some bad PR photos justifies missing that important inbound phone call?
A better (still horrible) analogy would be more like saying if you build cars for F1 you can't do it for NASCAR and use the same parts or use the same drivers and sponsors etc...
It surprises me how many people try to build an MVP before looking at the existing competitors :)

Graze.com has been doing a recommendation-engine driven snack delivery service for several years now (they raised a $2.5m VC round from Octopus and DFJ) and are making revenues in the high millions.

Graze have a pretty proven business model by this stage, but given they only operate in the UK there's obviously the potential for someone to clone their business in other countries.
I am merely suggesting that the entropy can be less than what is estimated by looking only at the dictionary.

Re 1: words still consist of characters
Re 2: Certainly correct, but to ignore the possibility of English words having less entropy than it appears at first is odd given the patterns English words often follow.

I'm interested in reading more about those entropy estimations, can you recall where you read about it? According to Applied Cryptography Shannon states that entropy per letter decreases as the text grows. Shannon estimates 2.3 bits per letter for chunks of 8 letters but it drops down to between 1.3 and 1.5 bits per character for 16 character chunks.

Applied Cryptography cites a paper by Shanon called "Predication and Entropy in Printed English" in the Bell System Technical Journal from 1951.
I Have not personally read it yet but will try to find it in the near future.
You sir, should be a writer for The Onion.
The situation with Java is even stronger than "MS just realized": MS was /forced/. Back then, MS thought Java was great, but looked at it as a language and execution engine as opposed to a dream about "write once, run everywhere", and so released J++, allowing developers of Java applications to use a replacement toolkit that bound to native Win32 widgets. This caused them to get sued, and the result of the case was that they lost their license to Java. J++ 1.1 seriously came with a dialog when you ran it apologizing that they were legally required to stop distributing the application, and that you should look into alternatives. Thus, .NET was born.
That's fair, but I don't have a tone on that pulse -- guesstimate is they upgraded their wive's iPhones or have no interest/knowledge/time to make a few bucks on eBay. However, the premise of the argument is that there is too much grey area. It is disingenuous to rank all iPhone sales against a gaming platform; anecdotal results would lead me to believe a majority of smartphones are not used as gaming devices.