skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You can't very well make a healthy profit if the nation in question is burning down around your ears, now can you?

Except that's exactly what they've been doing for about the entire world history of banking.

They're not protecting the nations, they don't care. They're protecting their own hides. You know Wikileaks got dirt on the banks too, right?

Funny thing is, when they release it (and they already have, parts of it), everybody will be like "everybody already knows this". Tickles me mad, that :-D
We Are Donating Our Marketing Budget to Breast Cancer Research. Seriously.
read like an attack piece and/or propaganda. i saw lots of glaring flaws in his economic philosophy/understanding. i sense a recent trend on HN where we're getting more Fox News style low-brow econo-propaganda. I hope it ends.
The hostname of our servers is indeed hardcoded in the framework. So, yes, that's a 'singleton' in the same way that configuring your database hostname in Rails is a singleton.

So far our developers have had a lot of success building upon Parse. There are certainly some missing pieces (like the one pointed out in another comment on this post) but none of them have related to our overall architecture.

I invite you to let us know what it should look like ideally at founders@parse.com or even stop by our office. We love to talk with developers.
Ask HN: Can NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib keep up?
With the Python community looking forward to Python 3 and PyPy, NumPy+Scipy+Matplotlib seems to be be focused on making further developments in Python 2 (and for some time to come, according to Travis Oliphant's recent post on NumPy, http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.com/2011/10/thoughts-on-porting-numpy-to-pypy.html). From what I gather, R has a team of ~20 core developers at any given time and transitions among members are generally smooth; with NumPy I've read several times that not enough contributors know about its innermost workings, and that keeping the ecosystem in step new developments in the Python language itself will be difficult. In the end that might mean having multiple Python installations (not that this isn't happening already, especially on Mac OSes), one of which is installed for the purpose of running NumPy+SciPy+Matplotlib. I have already encountered issues with different versions of Python being installed on different network machines, and having to rewrite and maintain several branches of code for different Python versions. I am not sure how this will be resolved and whether you think this is a sustainable language/framework/ecosystem that would be worth adopting for a product, or learning and teaching?
0.2% to 1.8%
Eventually, I think, there will cease to be icons within the industry. What we have now are the people who invented the internet/computers and the basic components.

The people who are doing the inventing now are just as smart, but they aren't creating fundamental things, they are improving on an existing system.

We don't say, "engineer team y invented the iCore series of processors." we sort of just say "Intel is coming out with a new set of processors."

I'm not sure if I am making my point very clear. :\
> So, Netflix increased prices by a pretty high percentage and ...

Except I have netflix and I am paying no more than I used to, and I don't think that my situation is unusual. The percentage of people who were impacted at all by the price change that chose to discontinue service is some number larger than 4%.
Death is the only guarantee in life and in fact is necessary for human ecology. I too am deeply saddened by this loss, but am supremely grateful that a man like John McCarthy was able to contribute to the humanity's knowledge. May his work be the foundation in many more advances in human understanding, and may his void be filled by someone who respects this journey.

RIP, John.
I made some panoramas at a private boneyard in Tucson in 2009. Here are my favorites:

outside a fuselage/shed
http://www.360cities.net/image/national-aircraft-inc-airplan...

Inside a half-scavenged cockpit
http://www.360cities.net/image/national-aircraft-inc-airplan...

an army airplane
http://www.360cities.net/image/national-aircraft-inc-airplan...

some bombs
http://www.360cities.net/image/national-aircraft-inc-airplan...

Here is Bob (on the right, in the golf cart), who works there. Bob has half of a finger missing. There are a lot of sharp things there, you see.
http://www.360cities.net/image/national-aircraft-inc-airplan...

More general scraps, and two fuselages
http://www.360cities.net/image/national-aircraft-inc-airplan...

These were shot at one of the few commercial boneyards, these guys bought the retired airplanes from the base across the street, and sold the parts.

Bob informed us that these places have stopped buying 'new' airplanes from the air force base - because of 'security measures', junked airplanes now have to be cut into pieces no larger than about 12 inches square. This, as you can imagine, renders most parts of the airplane no longer very useful ;-)

The "real boneyard", across the street from this junkyard, you can see on our world map page:
http://www.360cities.net/map#lat=32.16896&lng=-110.84235... The aerial/satellite map itself is really a feast for the eyes. By the way, there are some very threatening signs along the perimeter of this base forbidding photography, and I have heard of photographers getting confronted by fleets of military police cars. So the guy who got inside this place really was very lucky indeed.

There is an open-air airplane museum also nearby, which is a lot of fun. You can't go inside the airplanes, which is very disappointing.
You can see lots of wonderful airplane panoramas from the Pima Air & Space Museum here:
http://www.360cities.net/image/pima-air-museum-convair-b-36j... (scroll down below the panorama for 'nearby' images)
What sad news. I do hope that Standford makes a statement, just to clarify.
'The Blu' Brings The Ocean To The Web
We are the 1 percent: We stand with the 99 percent
John McCarthy would say we are doing news completely wrong.
It is a little more complicated than that. The bizspark program lets you continue using the software you have installed without buying the licenses at the end of the program - as long as your use falls within certain parameters. Namely, this "gift" is based off of something like 2 windows standard servers and 1 SQL standard server. We are way beyond that and will have to pay for our licensing at the end of the program. But for a lot of startups that haven't gotten our funding it is a great boon.
Congratulations - you've created a reduction from a somewhat-tractable problem to a much harder one.
It's both sad and ironic that you think you're being persecuted for calling out someone else's lack of humility. It's because you're being a troll, quite frankly. I know you can't see it, but that's how you're coming across.

You claim to have a concern about the greater good and the millions who have leukemia, but from where I stand -- and pretty much everyone else -- you're using that to cover your asinine, judgmental opinion of what Amit's doing.

If that was your true concern, there are a thousand ways to express it without injecting your judgment. If you cared about not being judgmental and effectively communicating your concern, you could easily have chosen one of those. Instead, you appear more concerned about calling out Amit for a trivial fault -- the guy is using the resources at his disposal to save his own life!
One Item Todo List
Announcing The jQuery Standards Team
Well shit. I said it about a week back [1] (maybe a little indelicate, but in my defence, was a little over-wrought):

The technology pioneers who were in their 20s/30s in the the 60s/70s are now really old. The next few years will likely see a bloodbath.

Granted, he wasn't that young in those times, but the point holds. We're going to see a bunch of luminaries 'move on' in the coming months :(

[1] https://twitter.com/#!/shr1k/status/125712526397816832
How to Get Clear Skin Taking Basic Steps
>Stormfront is not all talk and their actions have easily endangered more lives than Wikileaks has.

How? What violent or dangerous actions have they taken?

>This is the largest online community of neo-nazis on the web, for fuck's sake! What do you think they do, drum circles and interpretive dance??

No, I think they make posts on the internet about Jews controlling the world economy, sell racist bumper stickers, etc. Offensive and stupid, but not dangerous.

>Stormfront is quite objectively more evil than Wikileaks no matter how you spin it, unless you're ignorant or have neo-nazi tendencies yourself.

As I said in my original comment (which you don't appear to have read very carefully), I'm Jewish and I find Stormfront offensive. I also said that evil wasn't the relevant way to compare Stormfront with Wikileaks. But, given the information I have, I think the standard position of supporting free speech so long as it doesn't endanger people is consistent with blocking donations to Wikileaks but not to Stormfront.
Four percent in a single quarter is huge, especially if it reverses a consistent growth trend.

Starz will be going away in Feb 2012, a few months from now. Dreamworks will not be coming online until 2013. Thinking Netflix's stumblings have been completely contained within the last quarter may be a bit foolhardy.
If being a hedge-fund manager means you are responsible for the market crash, does being a computer programmer mean you are responsible for DDoS attacks by Anonymous?
Perder Peso
socket puppet #123! :D
That's why I used "scold" - no matter how politely you try to do it, most people don't take kindly to being criticized about their driving/cycling by strangers, particularly when it requires being stopped by said stranger. They will feel like they're being scolded. And they will probably respond in kind.
SendWrite teams up with Chirply
October 2011 is turning out to be one sad month.
The two biggest factors in the time it takes to close a VC round are how obviously good the idea is, and how much competition there is for the deal. The two are not entirely independent of course.

By "obviously good" I mean obviously good to VCs, who as a rule tend to overlook the very best ideas because they seem crazy. So for example it may have slowed things down for Gabriel that he was working on a new search engine, because to many VCs it would seem crazy to try to compete with Google.
That leaves 23.8 million, and even though you might do weird extrapolations and predict they're gone in 2.5 years tops in reality it is amazing that they managed to do this and only lose a percentage that small.

Given that the majority of the 'leaves' will do this right at the front the next quarter will give you an idea if this is going to be the end of Netflix or whether they just managed to substantially improve their margins.

I think it is too early to call.
> the less fortunate no longer have a chance to catch up.

You just spit in the face of every "less fortunate" individual who worked harder than everybody else and did catch up. It makes his accomplishment seem rather worthless. After all, he could have simply accepted the charity of someone like you or supported a system where that charity was systematically dispensed. Why bust your ass and work hard?

Oh, that brings me to the next point. Incentives. You just killed any incentive to work hard and bust your ass if you're in the "less fortunate" group. Why bother? You can just wait until someone helps you up.
University applications for 2012 down 9%
YouTube for me. Although I would have continued to stream Netflix if that was an option.
That's not an absolute. That could mean from 2 to 18, or it could be from 2000 to 18000.

It also doesn't say how it holds up over time, whenever you change something there will be a spike, and then it will level off.
> My point (poorly worded, upon rereading, but I didn't have much time, dayjob and all...) was that the potential advantage of record-major does NOT increase beyond what is packed into one cache line -- so it is a small constant, rather than deserving of O() notation.

I see what you mean, now. You're right that it's a constant multiplier.
I was looking at purchasing shares in Netflix the first time the stock dropped. I believe at that time netflix was trading at 35x earnings. At the close today it was 30x earnings and now even lower in after hours trading. I never bought the shares because of the high multiple. However, I believe the current bad news is a blip on the radar in what will continue to be a tremendously successful company. Can someone explain if I'm evaluating Netflix wrong?

Others seem all over the map:

Apple trades at 14.6x earnings
Amazon trades at 105x earnings
Microsoft trades at 9.87x earnings
I don't think that someone is a liar because they don't always vote in line with their beliefs. There are good reasons for occasionally voting for things that are not 100% inline with what your goals are for one particular issue. Sometimes compromises need to be made in one area to make progress in another.
I'm not an American. I've only been living in the US for the a few years.

Of course there's some poor reporting in the US, like anywhere else. I don't know of any European/Asian newspaper that does a better job than the NY Times or WaPo (or for that matter any good regional US paper), for all their faults, and those who are comparable are usually less widely read than the American ones.
Why not go to a good private hospital somewhere in South India.

Amit probably has a better chance of finding a matching donor there and the procedure, I'm assuming, is less expensive than over here.
Tablets becoming perfect TV companion devices
This has got to be the most depressing month in awhile.
true! i've done both - had a baby when my startup was 3 years old, and it made parenting much easier to have gone through that whole everything-at-stake emotional roller coaster once before. I had the same partner in both ventures, so it was particularly good practice. amazing how similar startups and babies are! (and Jeff's pain/pleasure pie chart could easily apply to either, imo)
Yes it was, I got it mixed up.
"Employees of DynCorp, a US government contractor funded by US tax dollars, in Afghanistan paid for the services of underage "dancing boys", apparently a euphemistic reference to Bacha bazi, which is considered child prostitution.[22] The boys were auctioned off to be sexually abused by Afghan policemen, with some to be kept as sex slaves and participate in events funded by DynCorp"

"The U.S. bargained with other nations on moving prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to other countries. In one case, U.S. officials allegedly offered Slovenia a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama, if the country accepted one of the Guantanamo Bay detainees.[24][25] Offers to other countries include economic incentives or a visit from Obama"

"In 2009, the U.S. manipulated — via spying, threats, and bribes — the Copenhagen global climate change summit to coerce reticent participants into supporting the treaty. The U.S. punished countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia, which were deemed "unhelpful" for not signing the Copenhagen Accord, by cutting off millions of dollars in necessary funds;[27] while, the U.S. relieved Saudi Arabia, the world's second-biggest oil producer and one of the twenty-five-richest countries in the world, of any kind of obligation.[28] The U.S. used funds in millions of dollars to recruit the Maldives to sign the Copenhagen Accord, after it has relentlessly took a stand against it"

The above is a sliver of things I've personally learned, and am glad I know, from the leaks. It may not be pleasant or happy information, but I want to know what the Governments and corporations are doing. You may not care or want to know, but some of us do care what is happening.

(used wikipedia's listings to find what I was looking for, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_United_States_d... )
Haven't done much Perl hacking, good to know it's more-or-less pure reference counting.

Paging can occur as a consequence of copying a reference.

var p1 = *A // let p1 be a reference to A
// something in the interim
var p2 = p1 // create a new reference to A via p1

If A is no longer paged in incrementing its reference count (as a consequence of copying p1 into p2) can cause a page fault. There's are also gotchas with destroying references such as a collection having to effectively iterate over its contents to decrement each reference count, again possibly leading to additional paging.

This assumes an object carries its reference count with it, which every reference counting system I'm aware of does. I suppose you could technically keep reference counts in a common space, though growing that would be a bit rough.

A GC isn't a magic bullet or anything, but they don't need to cause any paging as a result of reference changes until a sweep; and even then, they only need to page in the live set which is more likely to be resident in memory.

I'm... skeptical Apple's introduction of ARC is really performance oriented. Seems more like they tried and failed to build a workable GC for Objective-C with Tiger. Haven't worked with much Objective-C since 10.4 though, so I'm not completely settled either way.
I have windows xp running on a 7 year old PC that was low end at the time. Hulu and Youtube do pretty well on it but netflix chokes. If I were going to set it up again I'd probably go with Ubuntu.
I am close to two sets of families who each adopted multiple kids.
One family adopted 2 kids from Russia and the other adopted 2 from China.
The first family also had multiple children biologically.

Honestly, the 4 adoptions seemed much easier to me than the biological process which I've also seen many times.
This probably sounds terrible, but you can also return the adopted ones if there are any major problems
(and I've seen that happen too.)
81% Of Website Users Are International
The Big Business of 'Big Data'
> I'd think settling somewhere between 30-40/shr. is a good premium.

$30-$40/share would give it a P/E multiple of between 7.5 and 10. Netflix has trailing 5-year EPS growth of around 35%. You may hate the company and the stock, but $30-$40/share would have it trading at a discount to other companies with similar growth histories. There's no case to be made for $40 being a premium for NFLX.
Yes with a Mac Mini connected to a LCD TV you have a ton more choices(hulu, cbsnews.com/video, tv.com & others).

It's not the same user experience as a TV, but for me it's better. It allows me to watch/listen to shows/movies in one tab while reading articles, instant messaging friends & other things within other tabs.
Your tech skills have a two-year half life
I think a lot of the outrage came from people learning about the price increase, learning that Starz was going away & then on top of that learning that Netflix was going to destroy the convenience aspect by separating the services. Regardless of the costs, it just seems like Netflix kept eroding the value of their service while asking more for it. Plus how they relayed this information seemed like a mix between condescending & manic.
This might be a bit inappropriate, but do you mind sharing how much ownership you gave up for that 3 mil and was there any strings attached ? And how did you finance your search engine before this financing round
Agreed, and the close proximity of their deaths makes me think that that's it for a set of 3.
Aaron Barr & Thomas Ryan = welfare queens and "cyber security" clowns?
Selective/incomplete reporting at its best. According to this article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/884...

applications for

"Applications for 'mass communication and documentation'
subjects, such as media studies and PR, have been hit
the hardest, falling 40.6 per cent compared to this time
last year.

"Education courses have also suffered, with applications
dropping by 30 per cent while interest in creative arts
has dropped by 27.1 per cent and business and administration
studies by 26.1per cent."

Medicine and dentistry have had almost no reduction, ditto Cambridge and Oxford. With the "soft" subjects taking a 40% hit, perhaps maths and the sciences are not so badly affected.

Digging into the details will be interesting - it's a shame we can't trust the BBC to do that.
I've played quickly with your webapp and I really enjoyed it. I think the functionality is great and the results are pretty accurate! I was really impressed.

I would only suggest that you give people the option to rank more movies before building the circle if they want to. I think I could have gotten even better results if I could've reviewed more films.

Hope you succeed!
The reason I think long and hard before signing up for new web services isn't even the cost 99% of the time, but the uncertainty in how difficult it is going to be to cancel should I decide I do not want to continue.

I've had it UP TO HERE with services that allow me to subscribe with one click and then make me go through a half-day long ordeal of phone calls to outsourced customer service people (who earn bonuses based on convincing you not to leave the service) in order to cancel.

Making it obvious that I can leave at any time just as easily as I joined is a huge greasing agent for getting me to actually put down money to try your service. It is a shame so few sites/services do this and most go with the short-sighted trap-em-in model which hurts the industry as a whole (since it makes people like me far less likely to use any non-essential services just to avoid the potential of a cancellation PITA).
53 years are like an eon in computing. Probably older than most of us. It's hard to imagine because it is very much relevant today despite its old age.

RIP.
The data page
NetFlix Stock below $100, first time since July,2010
I have a bad internet connection (1.5 Mbit) and found that without using the whole connection I wasn't able to stream netflix and was still burdened with artifacts and terrible quality. Now to put this in perspective at a little over half my connection speed (~.8Mbit maybe it is less) amazon streaming works perfectly with decent enough quality and no stops to buffer or recheck my internet speeds.

So maybe I'm in the minority or maybe I'm not but I dropped netflix streaming and probably won't be going back unless cable or fiber internet comes to my area.
I reverted it again. I feel terrible doing that but the alternative is sourcing our article from personal communications or a tweet. Have yet to see a reference which is reliable (in the wikipedia sense) or not ultimately derived from the original edit to wikipedia.
You could have a MVA panel. They have superior viewing angles as compared to traditional TN panels, and from what I've seen their price is comprable.
I never understood why McCarthy was never featured at YC or Startupschool. Listening & being able to ask McCarthy questions would have been like peering into the past & future at the same time.
One of the later examples does that.
Those objections have one thing in common: they are all flimsy after-the-fact rationalizations constructed to protect an irrational conclusion that your friend has already decided to believe, i.e. that cars are better than bikes in every way, and to hell with bikes. They're not his real objection to bikes.

A good conversational tactic for that kind of situation is to try to get him to agree in advance to what evidence would sway him. If you prove to him that cars are less energy-intensive to produce than cars, or that having several cars is less environmentally friendly than having one decent all-purpose car, will he agree to accept that, and actually change his mind? The purpose of getting pre-commitment here is to avoid the inevitable back-pedaling (no pun intended) and shifting of the goal-posts that would otherwise happen once you rebut his claims.
No I don't know what you're talking about. Are you trying to suggest that if MacOS were resolution independent, they would start including 1680x1050 as standard on all 15" Macs?