skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That doesn't work if you set expectations far beyond what you can deliver, though. You can show that people are interested in flying cars by showing them the Jetsons, but if you can't achieve that in your product, it is useless (perhaps even damaging) information.

On the other hand, if Google knows they can achieve what they show, then it's a good strategy. But if they don't have the tech in hand and just "think" they can achieve it, things won't go well. At best, they'll release a product everybody thinks is subpar. At worst, they'll never release as they keep trying to reach the goal they set for themselves.
This Week in Scala (05/04/2012)
While this is more anecdotal, I know quite a few financial firms use neural networks for their stock trading algorithms. It's less about whether or not they're the right tool, and a matter of using every tool there is to see what happens to work best. Here's a very brief example: http://www.i2r.org/nnstocks.pdf

Also, often times these methods are combined to get even better results. See "ensemble learning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensemble_learning
Maybe they added this after you posted, but under the game it says "Jon Huang/The New York Times, based on the original game by Rootof Creations HB"
Aside from the author's bubble argument (which I don't really buy), a possible outcome is that quasi-legal fraud will get out of control and bring this all to a very public halt, at which point the politicians will rush in to "fix" things.

Human nature is what it is. People will lose money. People will get ripped off. People will blame each other and sue. All of that is bad. The question is will the good outweigh the bad, and will anyone notice?
You're right, it won't go well, because you don't seem to know what the facts are. Check the parents data.

Not only do we manufacture things, we manufacture much, much more than we used to.
1. Wrong
2. Start with 2 passengers instead of 100
3. Rigorous proof would take a bit longer, say 15 minutes
> I mean, do we really think Google will be able to pull off a context-aware "hmmm" as a vocal trigger signifying desired interaction with a pop-up alert?

We have no idea what they have currently built, but from an article a few weeks ago it seems that they integrate with gestures, not audio cues. It's entirely reasponable that the head nodding you saw when he said "hmmm" was what caused the popup.
> It has a "pasting" JIT for as a first optimisation stage

Could you point to somewhere on the interweb which discusses this in detail?
There is no possible way I can read the GP to mean that. He only mentions imperialism and racism after talking about, and with clear reference to, "Buy American".

Most of the movements are voluntary for now, but not all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestm...

> Might there not be good reasons for supporting those who are economically tied to you by culture and legal jurisdiction?

Yes and no. But if the support takes the form of a bail-out, you're just wasting your money while delaying the inevitable and making the eventual crash much more painful. If you instead let industries fizzle out over time, it's much easier for something to appear to take it's place.
Occupy.here - Location-based P2P Wifi Forums
EA Voted "Worst Company in America" in Recent Consumerist Poll
The medical care number has to be distorted. I don't know any American families whose contributions toward their insurance premiums alone would amount to only 7% of spending. Not counting co-pays or co-insurance or any out of pocket costs.

To get down to 7% they must not be counting employer contributions, those who get medical care from the VA, Medicare or Medicaid, nor people going uninsured and then filing bankruptcy when they get hit with notable medical costs.

There is simply no way.
Where are all this high paying jobs? Average data scientist salary at glassdoor is probably less than 100k.
Flashback Trojan Reportedly Controls Half a Million Macs and Counting
Not sure what metric you're using to claim that we manufacture "much, much less than we used to". US manufacturing output continues to hit all-time records. Measured in real dollars, output is ~40% higher than in 1990, and ~$220% higher than 1970.

See http://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/dnllist.asp for data.
I did a masters equivalent degree in theoretical physics, now I'm doing a PhD in computer graphics. A coworker who did his PhD in theoretical physics is now doing a post doc in mechatronic. Many people might specialize more and more, but if you don't like that, no one stops you from changing your field.
As a general negotiation technique for assigning of responsibility, sure. But management at both Chinese factories is still small and in touch enough to know that if 1M unneeded custom parts are produced, it's a waste no matter how the financial cost is split. American companies meanwhile are so deep in overabstraction and middle management that the individuals are only capable of covering their asses and claim to have solved the problem when the only thing they 'solved' was the ability of the company to perceive the problem. Two years later the supplier goes bankrupt after eating one too many change orders and, despite what the all-important contract says, parts stop getting delivered.

(Not that this is necessarily the Dell case - I'll bet that Dell is on the hook for a certain amount if they suddenly decide to stop using a particular laptop body. It's just that when this philosophy of financial blame becomes your go-to instead of ignoring the financial abstractions and solving the underlying problem, you're begging for someone to exchange your money for false peace of mind)
Criticisms of World3 model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3#Criticism_of_the_model

The new book, Abundance, has an informed point of view that speculates an opposite reality in future: http://www.abundancethebook.com/qa-2/
scottw is referring to the well-studied demographic transition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
Stop Crapping All Over the Email Client
I don't want to login.
K- means clustering with scipy
This post explain the K-Means algorithm and shows how to use python implementation.
Don't they also have a 25% VAT ? And higher living expenses because of it, so even with a 60,961 nominal GDP/per capita (5th in the world) when you correct for PPP it's 37,585$ (17th).
Since I got my transformer (nominal 16 hours battery) I've stopped using my x86 netbook. In theory I can run more programs on the x86, but having that much battery makes a huge amount of difference (I took it on a train across russia recently), and I've been able to find android programs to accomplish everything I actually want to do with it.
Exactly what I was thinking. I'm a developer at a small startup that can't afford to pay their developers as much as other companies in the area, but I enjoy my job and couldn't picture myself anywhere else for a while. If my salary goes up, I'm not going to complain.
> Um...isn't this what Google+ is supposed to do, in effect?
Maybe, I have no idea. It lacks the manual grouping though.

>Users do not like manually curating lists
No one is forcing them, I'm not proposing this is the default behaviour, this would be a part of advanced search.

>your solution requires that users know what they don't know
No, it enables users who do know something to leverage that knowledge (as the existing "site:" qualifier allows with a single site)

A very small number of google users even know about any kind of advanced functionality so there'd be no risk of an "echo chamber phenomenon".
As long as you have enough low skilled people to fill the jobs (ideally, teenagers and depending on your politics, immigrants), this is absolutely true.

The problem is when you fall into a situation like the one we have now, where you have hundreds of thousands of people who had decent paying low skill jobs and lost them all at once (over 5+ years, but close enough in econ terms).

The right thing to say/do long term is 'we should provide adequate training to help these people maximize productivity, as it's a smart investment', but in reality you've got tons of hungry, broke voters on gov't aid, significant political pushback against the government being the one to invest the money in them, and not enough training capacity. You can't build a nursing school overnight from scratch, or triple the capacity of every state's licensing board... So you're a bit stuck, both politically and practically.

The good news is that as the economy grows/recovers, low skill jobs will eventually re-emerge, shifted to whatever sectors they're now needed in. The bad news is that there's ramp-up time for doing this, and very little political will to support the idea that the government should fund it. These people take tons of government aid, which isn't cheap, and they vote. This tends to push politicians towards more protectionist and pro-low skill job rhetoric, ceterus paribus.

I should point out that it's probably not a no-brainer to all economists and policy makers to do this at all, there's significant dispute on if/when/how the government should pick winners in individual fields.
Unfortunately, half your customers are giving valid feedback, and half want you to be making vodka instead of beer. A developer's time (and fleeting sanity) is much too precious to have him sort through them...
For things like Retina LCDs they make strategic long-term arrangements. For screws and resistors &c, anyone can just buy them. Even Apple's demand for screws is not a significant fraction of China's output.
Stupid Addictive Games
Did you read his blog post and see that he did report the vulnerabilities and noted which companies fixed it?
Pay Like A Banker: Why Companies Should Learn To Share The Wealth
Congrats to Aria and Bradford. Knowing Aria and his work, I have little doubt there is some fantastic engineering under the hood at Prismatic.
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I'm not sure they're that relaxing though; e.g. laddering in StarCraft is more of a stress-creator than a stress-reducer.

That said, it does require your entire focus.
Here's a press release / article from JILA. Not very technical. There's a paper in Nature too.

(http://jila.colorado.edu/content/laser-perfect-pitch)

(http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7392/full/484043a...)
Kottke.org redesign by the numbers
Real-time javascript error logging using Mixpanel
Head nodding also strikes me as problematic and potentially socially dubious. Though I'll admit it's far more plausible than speech or arm/hand gestures.
Opening theory in Bughouse is indeed totally distinct from classical chess. It behooves white to be hyper aggressive and black to be hyper defensive or the game typically ends quickly.

That said, the openings played in the video are not traditional Bughouse openings.
So, do you disagree with the point in the original article about the bail-out of the auto industry preventing a much wider loss?
wow! that was a very insightful interview. the idea of technological stagnation is something which I discussed with friends over the last 10 years. really deserves some more attention.
I'm not confused (thank you very much for your diagnosis though - that's a grand way to gratuitously insult people). I didn't say redefining things at the language level; I meant redefining at the programming environment level.

You can compile standard C++ with C++/CLI just fine, and have it run on a fine managed platform. "IJW" was the slogan: It Just Works. Still didn't go anywhere.

(The CLR did not choose safety over other considerations. It has a safe subset, but it is not like the JVM; it has unsafe operations too. When you write IL for it, you are not even required to use GC memory; you can manipulate things at the level of untyped blobs of data if needs be.)
I think that all that is going on with Brazil is that it's a miniature replica of the Foxconn plants in China, and as been mentioned numerous times, it's only because it would be MORE expensive to make them in China (however inexpensive) and ship to them to Brazil than to deal with an inflexible supply chain in Brazil and make them there. Even factoring in demand and supply volatility. If things don't go well for the plant, on the world scale, it's only Brazil. All of these were factored into the decision to build them there.

China is responsible for making every iPad in the world outside of Brazil. You can't assume the same amount of risk for that scale. If a component goes bad or if demand skyrockets, you want as many responsive factories around as possible to pick up the slack or to get you new components. Why wouldn't you want to locate your supply chain in China? Only if you have a situation that looks like Brazil--high import tariffs.
You do not need to be a web developer to write a blog. R, MatPlotLib and Matlab make pretty pictures.
According to the article reverting does NOT involve re-deploying. Each server maintains the previous version of the binary and if needed the release team can pull the switch to revert all the servers. I assume that takes seconds, not 30 mins.
"Working class" is a terrible misnomer for "lower class" or "poor".
"In my business, we would be crucified if we had to wait for 3 minutes to roll back a change let alone 30."

According to Rossi the servers keep the old version around after rollout, so rollback wouldn't require them to push out the old binary again but just to restart the old process. This will probably only take a couple of seconds making rollback really fast if needed.
I haven't played in over a decade as well, but when I did play strategies usually consisted of very quick attacks on the f-pawn, usually sacrificing a knight(sometimes a bishop, but you would have to "waste" a move getting a pawn out first) on the square as quick as possible. Very common for the first 3 moves to be a knight sacrifice on f7.

And trash talking anybody who dared castle.
I don't know anyone who complains about GPL forcing them to give back.

I know many people who cannot touch GPL3 code because of corporate legal departments' fears (especially with regard to patent clauses) and the absence of test cases, but who frequently contribute back to BSD/Apache/MIT/etc-licensed projects.
You may want to check your data sources or clarify if you mean 'manufacturing jobs' or 'manufactured goods'. One of those has decreased significantly, while the other has increased...a lot.
I'm reasonably new to the world of startups, so I'm hoping someone can answer this question for me:

Are there really that many people who wanted to invest pre-JOBS and couldn't? It seems I've heard dozens of stories about how some suburban family invested in their neighbor or brother-in-law or drinking buddy. I don't think I've ever heard or read someone complaining that they wanted to give money to an entrepreneur and just weren't allowed to. What am I missing?
Some hypotheses based on anecdotal observations:

Women spend more time shopping for men and children than men spend shopping for women and children.

Women spend a lot more on shoes than men.

Women spend a lot more on accessories than men.

Women enjoy shopping more than men so retailers offer more opportunity to browse.
One of the examples ( in the original article that this posts copies ) Apple changed the glass on the screen with 6weeks until launch.
Corning had opened a factory nearby to make the glass and were able to change the screen shape quickly another nearby company was able to drop everything and make new gaskets.

It takes 6weeks to ship product from Corning's US factory to China.
You should contact them. If that fails, make a commit to the Rails project.
"Facebook is updating tens of thousands of servers with every push. "Rolling back" a release would effectively take as long as a regular push and could contribute to problems if they're found."
Absolutely not. A lot of places get around this with a simple symlink switch. You keep N older releases. So it might be /code/releases with various datestamped releases...and /code/releases/current points to the currently running one. Want to rollback? Point current to one older. Done.
One russian security firm that makes money selling OSX antivirus software has made this claim without producing any evidence or even explaining how the estimate was produced.
No, but they do have an extremely fast and efficient tool for performing online schema changes to its huge MySQL deployment: https://www.facebook.com/notes/mysql-at-facebook/online-sche...
Hacker News hates me, but that's ok
kottke.org is one of the most popular daily-updated blogs and was recently redesigned. Today, Jason posted some stats (highlighted below). I think the stats on Tumblr and Twitter engagement was interesting, too.

- Overall traffic to kottke.org was up 14%. And February was a pretty good month itself so that's a nice bump.

- Mobile traffic now accounts for 19% of kottke.org's traffic and increased by 25% over the past 30 days.

- Referral traffic now accounts for 45% of kottke.org's traffic and increased by 28% over the past 30 days.

- I also removed the links to the tag pages (like this and this) from the front page. I had a hunch that very few people were using those links compared to the real estate they took up and the traffic numbers bear that out...traffic to tag pages decreased only 3%.
Good point with 'Rails'—my mistake—and I understand that now my competence could be questioned. I meant Ruby of course (which is Rails' core and if you got Ruby well you are a much better Rails dev and I think that's the #1 reason when reading Ruby books => Rails).

I appreciate the author and his work but frankly: I got so frustrated with the style. Go and read chapter 13 and compare all the blog posts about Singleton out there (it's a huge difference). Reading one chapter again and again just to see that someone on StackOverflow drew a far better picture doesn't make you happy. Or take the next chapter 14 about class instance variables: this topic is brought to the reader in a very verbose style and again, the net full of blogs and Q&As deliver better much results. People there even discuss and question the benefit or real-world usage of class instance variables which is fully omitted in the book.

>> its wonderful for smoothing out edges and cementing some of the more advanced concepts

Sorry, I totally disagree, especially the advanced stuff is delivered in better quality in the net. Don't get me wrong but your words sound like the typical not-helpful Amazon reviews (which made me buying this book). BTW, there more annoying parts like squeezing every subject at the end of a chapter in a monotone structure ("Staying out of trouble", "In the wild", etc.) which is getting boring quickly, doesn't give one a better understanding and feels like the author going through his checklist for every chapter.
I believe you mean "White Hat Hacker"... I think everyone gets the gist of what you mean but just wanted to clarify in case someone's thinking you're a racist hating on "Whitie" or something :)
So, I'm as concerned about environmental and energy concerns as the next guy, but I noticed something about this graph..

The big predictions haven't happened yet. The part where we're tracking perfectly is just an almost-linear continuation from where we were before. You can make the case that that's unsustainable (and I'd be convinced), but that doesn't mean this model's predictions are borne out by data we've seen so far.
At my startup we prefer Fischer Random (aka Chess 960) blitz, where the opening positions are randomized (with a few limiting rules). Read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960

Bullet chess (where each side has only 1 minute on their clocks) is also a great head clearer and adrenalin booster. Video: http://socialcam.com/v/kBzSWTQk?autostart=true
Most people assume that this bill will have the most impact on tech startups, but I am not sure that is right. Rather, I see small, non-tech, local businesses reaping more of the rewards of this bill.

And as for salaries, that is a total red herring argument. As more startups are created and salaries rise, more people will choose programming as a career and balance out the wage inflation. But hey, so what if programmers are making as much or more than bankers and lawyers...
You haven't been browsing HN long enough. People go off on rants about the GPL restricting their freedom and just generally being evil all the time, has nothing to do with corporate lawyers.
Great post. Very thought-provoking.
Why Larry Page is so interested in Google Glasses
Adding to that, "just organizing it" has one substantial problem: people generally disagree in how to organize the world and what they see as priorities (stuff they want to find), so any one way to do this would be the wrong one for the big majority.
That's the lesson Europe and America learned with import duties years ago.
You set duty levels to protect your local industry, it keeps out an international product that customers want and you have no local competitor to. So they open a "screwdriver plant" which just screws the "Made in X" label on.

The local government ends up subsidizing this process, under the claim of creating jobs, to far more than the income from the tarif.

Meanwhile your consumers are still paying more for the product, paying again for the tax breaks and you still haven't protected any local iPad competitor ;-)

edit: A famous example of this is a Ford plant in Chicago that removes seats and windows from Ford vans. There is a stiff US import tarrif on foreign trucks to protect the US truck building industry. Ford builds Transit vans (box van in US speak?) in europe but it would be too expensive to import those into the US so it imports mini-buses = box vans with seats. It then has a plant that removes the seats and windows converting them back into Transit vans to sell.

But the important thing is that high quality seat-removal jobs are kept in the US, a plant in Chicago is paid for by the tax-payers of Chicago and a great American truck building company like Ford is protected from cheap foreign competition by Ford.
Can This 'Online Ivy' University Change the Face of Higher Education?
>two old forum posts and a pot of coffee

Something about this made me laugh.

50 years ago: "I'll make this work with nothing but duct tape and chicken wire!"

Today: "I'll make this work with nothing but two old forum posts and a shitload of coffee!"

Love it.
We know every place possible where the online equivalent of car keys are found.

Well, I don't, but there's this company called Google that seems to.

Speaking broadly, "search" has been, as he points out, a major paradigm in human intellectual activity long before and far outside the web. Library card catalogs existed for searching. Door-to-door salesmen are effectively searching for customers. Inventories, indexes, tables-of-contents, filing systems, maps, and written records of many forms exist to facilitate searches or to distill the results of searches.

The word 'search' is a negative word. It fairly reeks of loss...

I think this opening statement embodies the mistake in his whole attitude very succinctly. A system for searching - particularly a nearly effortless and instantaneous one like Google offers - gives users the freedom to lose things, to forget things, secure in the knowledge that we'll be able to find them again when we decide we need them.

Your to-do list has 11 things on it; would you try to memorize it or would you write it down? Most people would rather write it down because it frees their minds to think about other things in the interim.

But of course, looking at the list is fundamentally a search.