skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a cycle. The more people exaggerate to counteract "charitable interpretations", the more charitable interpretation is necessary to get back to the truth, and so on. The end result is a dysfunctional "discussion" where both sides are just repeating the most extreme views they can come up with in hopes that it will draw attention to the kernel of truth they started with.
Well, the retirement savings are somehow (directly or indirectly) invested into a stock market, so they are safe from inflation, or even complete currency crash. When inflation is high, you even benefit, because people's consuming activity increases as there is little they could do to save money which is being burnt with inflation, so they spend, improving the bottom line of the companies they buy stuff from - and stocks of which you have. Or they buy stock directly, increasing real price of stock directly by increasing demand.

That is valid even in the case of extreme inflation - like 1923 Germany. People suffered, but stocks didn't.

Only exception from that rule was the 70s oil shock, but that wasn't a real crisis (economy itself was doing just fine, only the oil became expensive for purely external political reasons).
I (dis)agree with you. One thing that a math degree will learn you very, very well is the spotting of gaps in logic. That is very applicable in e.g. software engineering/programming. For example, it will make you spot missing cases in long if/else if/else chains, both in code and in requirements. In the latter case, the risk is that you will get distracted by minor holes that do not really matter at the scope, and that other people may see as "not worth discussing now, as it distracts from the main course.".

Also, reading http://www.snhu.edu/mathematics-BA-online.asp, my main thought was "do they call THAT a math degree?" At the very least, I would put a sticker "applied" on that. That is a judgment, but not one that judges one item as better than the other. For your ambition in machine learning, it will probably be tons more useful than what I (and from his reply, I guess philh) think about when hearing the term.

For an impression of the difference: With a MS in (abstract) mathematics, you will be able to prove properties of some algorithm or formula from some preconditions, and you may be able to generalize them to some highly abstract terminology (for an example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_(mathematics), which grew about mathematicians thinking deeply about what the concept 'area' means) but you need not get any experience in recognizing those preconditions. As an applied mathematician, it is more important to have a good intuition on when an approach works then to have a good understanding on whether/why it works in esoteric cases (infinite dimensions, with less than two inputs, etc)
How un-selective does an employer have to be before they can talk about skills shortages?

I'm sure you've heard of Fizz Buzz - http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer... - is that too difficult a problem?
What about using the Dropbox URL shortener instead of a custom Droplings one? I'm not sure if that's possible or not, but my one qualm about your app is the sustainability of yet another URL shortener.

Otherwise, this looks awesome. Looking forward to 1.0!
I think you're bringing up good points, which I would summarize this way:

The berlin startup scene is great for recent graduates as an employee, but if you're more experienced, then you want to be a founder.
I'm a programmer who never studied or CS or even took college level math. I'd like to do something like this too, though I don't want or need a degree. I'd just like to have a deeper understanding of algorithms and how they are used in things like graphics, animation, statistics, data visualization etc. I'd like to audit some classes at the local university but am not sure where I should start. Intro to statistics? College level calculus?
Sadly this is untrue.

After working extensively with linux USB drivers by large corps like Philips, I cannot but assume they put their worst teams on the Linux drivers.

And as a proud owner of (what is widely considered the most supported linux laptop) lenovo laptop, I can say that many things just dont work. E.g. Suspend.
What should be a relief to all is that this isn't permanent. There will come a point where wifi will defeat cellular in terms of technology. This is what Apple, Google and MS are all waiting for and why none of them have bought a telco. The future is based off of unlocked phones with dirt cheap data plans. Technically the iPod touch will become a phone at that time because the tech will become so cheap.
Show HN: book recommender based on any user's tweets - iteration 2
http://foxblot.com I built this site over a weekend two weeks ago.

I've spent this weekend matching tweets to books. If you mouseover a book, it shows the tweets relevant to that book.

Internally, keywords are rated inversely with their frequency of occurrence. The one problem is that my word frequency database does not correspond very well with twitter's vocabulary. To base my frequency database out of tweets is for another weekend.

Please let me know what you think. Specifically:
1. here can I go with this?
2. is it useful?
3. is slowness an issue? (it's running of a 256M rackspace cloud instance)
Banheiros com Pastilhas
Os Banheiros com Pastilhas são revestimentos que trazem charme e sofisticação aos banheiros. Apesar de ser um material que pode ser encontrado em decorações mais antigas
How are native Americans and African-Americans immigrants?

I said I wasn't sure what the author was trying to prove, but I do have a rather good guess.
That would be valid if USSR ever given anything like tolerable life conditions for the vast majority of its population. It didn't. Something that was shit and got worse shouldn't much of a concern.
Show HN - A map showing social activity not just highways and buildings
If you watched the recent European Championships, the technique of shooting down the middle--the so-called "Paneka" penalty--seems to be making a resurgence. The problem is that if you overdo it, the goalkeeper will compensate, and a Paneka is a lot easier to save than a well-driven shot to the corner. You might notice that fairly often, even if the goalkeeper chooses the right way to dive, he sometimes doesn't make the save.
Show HN: forgif.me for I have sinned
Hi, I'm Carlo, the Droplings dev. For one thing, you can share files larger than 25MB and more than 10 files per day without a monthly sub.

I know CloudApp has more features, but I was mostly scratching my own itches here. ;)
If you haven't read Debt, the first 5000 years, do. I've managed to misplace my copy -- aha! just found it -- but it's among the most fascinating books I've found in 25 years on economics. That, Niall Feguson's Ascent of Money (the guy is in many ways an ass, but this is a pretty good book), Nassim Taleb, Nouriel Rabini, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, The Ordinary Business of Life: A History of Economics from the Ancient World to the Twenty-First Century (Roger Backhous) -- hardly a page-turner, but a very good compendium of 3000 years of economic thought, and Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Baroque Cycle have been very helpful to my understanding.

One of the values in these online discussions isn't the ability to convince others nearly so much as it is to hone and refine your own arguments. I'm not sure I'm even partially cogent yet, but I'm starting to stumble in a direction I like.
State of Technology last week #68
So if someone wanted to relocate to Berlin to start a company, or to expand a team into europe, how would they go about that?

Where do people want to live?
Where to locate offices?
Where do you find good talent?
What are the legal steps to do so?
Any pitfalls to avoid?
Others should feel free to jump on this.
> So what you're saying is, you'd like to talk like you have a virtuous outlook on life, but you don't actually want to own up to the consequences of said virtue. I can understand this outlook. It is easier to pander to people and act in your best interests than actually suffer the consequences of your ideals.

That's not the point they were making at all. One developer refusing to file for patents on their work is not going to make any difference and will only put them at a competitive disadvantage. Reforming patent law will benefit everyone equally. Until the time that reform happens, there's no need to make yourself a martyr.
The fact that they even off to help financially is really encouraging. Perhaps they could structure this similar to a product placement deal like you see in Hollywood.
What makes you think it won't be the other way around -- say, a "5G" network that's an order of magnitude faster than LTE, and available anywhere.

And at that point, what if people then stop buying wired Internet lines and wireless routers (because they all get the same bits, anyway), and instead use the cell network that already surrounds them.
Hold on a second. We've never had the notion of buy once, free upgrades forever. What developers did was version their software. You get minor updates but pay again for major releases. It isn't a bad model. It still largely works.
Highly recommended. Gives a "behind-the-scenes" feel. I like JWZ's comment about how he won the "startup lottery."
The fact that it's hard to prove is what makes it so effective. People blatantly post CIA-created propaganda on HN all the time, and even then it's virtually impossible to prove that they actually work for the government, so imagine how much harder it is when people are actually being more subtle.
I think it's more like an acknowledgement that some software markets are inherently very limited. Consumer email software is in a place similar to where manufacturing pagers were when texting blew up. Sure some people still needed pagers and the newer pagers were the best ones ever but that doesn't matter when basically no one needed pagers any more.

Meanwhile the market for non-recurring software seems as large as it's ever been. Sure you sell for $1-$10 instead of $200 but you sell to an audience thousands of times larger.
This is awesome, when I was building the refer.ly shortener I read through dozens of tutorials looking for different approaches and best practices -- this is the easiest to understand step-by-step guide I've seen so far. I'll definitely save it for reference
I don't know.

The interesting thing is that, from: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070927/012604.shtml

>A recent GAO study found this to be a worrisome trend, noting that fewer new innovative drugs are being created -- with pharma firms instead focusing on ways to extend the patent protection on existing products by pulling a few tricks (such as "reinventing" Claritan as Clarinex just to get more patent coverage).

In other words, government funded or not, patents are stifling medical innovation.
>Because YOU are responsible for content you are redirecting.

Are you?
Is it possible to license a likeness, though? Notice the logo was mimicked here, not copied. It is clearly not actually a JD logo.
Absolutely not - there's no reason you can't implement black listing or whatever. I can guarantee that there are URL shorteners out there that redirect to porn.
Don't read into it so much. Losing a database means losing a database. It doesn't imply that there are no backups. Furthermore, how much detail can you really put in 140 characters? A detailed blog post would be nice but if Posterous is a small company with a handful of employees I'd say sending out a Tweet and getting back to work is a better option than spending that time explaining the specifics of what happened. That should come when it's fixed.

By the way, anyone else getting a 503 error when connecting to posterous.com? Are they still down?
Or 1.4E4 to put it in proper scientific notation.
Ask HN: What do I need to know to move to Berlin?
Per the thread earlier today Berlin has fantastic bones for building companies - talent, culture, cheap living costs, an international culture and access to the outside world.

Presuming you'r building a team from scratch, or expanding from North America. What are the things you'd need to know to move to Berlin?

Where do people want to live? Where to locate offices? Where do you find good talent? What are the legal steps to do so? Any pitfalls to avoid? Others should feel free to jump on this.

Here's hacker news' chance to package up everything you need to know to settle in Berlin.
Is funny how things work out: patents which are meant to stave off copycats from profiting off someone else's work end up being snatched by patent trolls who sue anyone who does something even remotely similar even if they had no idea there was a patent on it. Meanwhile copycats always find a loophole, they much like patent trolls hire the best lawyers to protect themselves and keep blatantly stealing from others, sometimes going as far as copying the logo and other minor details, showing they don't want to compete but to deceive consumers of the original to use the copy.

Either way the innovator gets shafted, specially when the patent troll or copycat is an even bigger company.
Thanks! I actually went through all the links in this thread and found quite a few books, specifically Head First Design Patterns + Head First Object Oriented Analysis & Design.

You succinctly described my plight, "knowing the syntax but not having a deep understanding" as well.
I guess gathering data. If your current task is to respond and email, then it should be considered as email time.
Your hosting provider will hold you responsible. If they keep getting abuse reports because spammers use you URL shortener in their e-mails. Hosting providers (including dedicated servers) do not want to be blacklisted by popular spam lists.
TextMate could act as a counterexample showing that the original author being fully in charge doesn't guarantee anything.
Working on Multiple Teams at the Same Time: Positive or Negative?
I, for one, would like to have enough money to enjoy my retirement, traveling and such, rather than simply waiting to die...
>When people say "software patents" they are usually talking about "business
process" patents, not computer algorithm patents, and business process patents
should be disallowed generally.

You are contradicting yourself. "Business processes" are nothing more than
algorithms, themselves. Algorithms are math. Math isn't patentable.
> There will come a point where wifi will defeat cellular in terms of technology.

Can you please elaborate? I haven't seen any movements in this direction, in terms of wifi technology.
yes, I understand what you mean by ambiguous, another poster mentioned that I look at a CS syllabus and follow something of that nature. I believe that is what I was trying to say.
I know now what to do, I've got a few books to read and some potential projects I should work on to give me that deeper understanding, thanks!
I took a civics class in high school that touched on a lot of this - how to budget, the magic of compound interest, the real costs of having children etc. We even had to carry around a raw egg for two weeks as a proxy for a child, the idea being to give you a sense of how much attention children demand.

Didn't stop me from getting in serious credit card debt, though.
For the vast majority of Apple's customers the first glimpse of a new product will be through a news item or television advert. I think the theatrics Jobs employed at the keynote were symptomatic of a highly prepared and charismatic individual, and not the cause of secrecy at Apple, as suggested by the article.
I've always thought there was one critical flaw in the every man for himself retirement model (where each person is responsible for saving for their own retirement, as we have in the US) vs a pooled plan like social security or a pension. In the every man for himself, everyone has to plan for the worst case (we live to be 90+). In reality, many of us will die well before that, some before we even retire at all. A pooled plan like a traditional pension can plan actuarially for the average, so the total amount per person by which the plan needs to be funded is far less than what each individual has to save when he is on his own. The current US model makes us all save much more than we (on average) need.
In some jurisdictions you have to fight hard to prove you are not if it comes to anything. That fight could be costly.
Measuring the point where something becomes perceptually lossless is quite difficult because, by definition, you're measuring at the bounds of perceptibility.

In terms of simple objective measures (e.g. the masking weighed SNR, http://people.xiph.org/~greg/celt/NMR.v.c.l.png) Opus does better than Vorbis (and AAC) at high rates too. Between that and the overall better time domain performance, my _expectation_ is that Opus can become perceptually lossless at lower rates, but this is hard to validate.

Getting the lowest possible average perceptual lossless rate is also a product of the encoder having a good psymodel, and released opus encoders have pretty much no explicit psymodel at all (but still manage to be competitive). So this reduces the interest in doing a bunch of very difficulty listening tests to determine the exact perceptually-lossless points, since they'll likely go down with near term encoder improvements.
I read that piece more in the sense of how one could go about using disinformation and other techniques to disrupt a conversation in a hostile manner, rather then whether someone aka "the Government" actually were. To me it is at least arguable that there are powerful incentives today to do exactly this, disrupt discussion and tone down activism, making them look like lunatics on the fringes. Given such a situation where someone is inclined to do this, isn't it also arguable that these techniques might be of some effect?

The thing that I find interesting is whether these techniques might be countered. I mean, along the lines of building a better platform for discussion that is more robust towards this kind of manipulation from an hostile minority. Now that is something that's interesting for the HN crowd to discuss, isn't it?
> One developer refusing to file for patents on their work is not going to make any difference and will only put them at a competitive disadvantage.

Every developer says this individually, and they're right. But if we all were more diligent about shooting down spurious software patents as a matter of professional pride, it would be a better world. That is to say, if it was considered part of professional ethics to help vet patents for obviousness and prior art for software.

And if the thesis, "The patent system is broken" is true, then we're all already at a competitive disadvantage. The pursuits are not mutually exclusive the way you make them sound.

Personally, I am tired of everyone saying, "This is the way ____ is done." What you feel there is the status quo, and it is demonstrably not a good thing right now. Do you think these UK banks adjusting Libor have a similar speech about competitive advantage?

If we only define "success" but facile metrics like quarterly revenue, then we're going to dig ourselves a hole we will never emerge from, all while piously protesting our invisible hands are tied.
I agree with you overall. However, Social Security has come to be seen by too many people as a retirement fund when it was originally designed as a type of insurance. I think it should be means-tested.
Is there a list anywhere of all the 'One More Thing' announcements?
The potential for a runaway positive feedback cycle is something I wanted to mention in my original post[0], but didn't due to sleep deprivation. I guess your mention of the cycle gave me the mental starting point necessary to put my thoughts into these few words.

In my childhood I had people take seriously things that I exaggerated or made up (they were silly things like made up names of plants), and as a result I gradually developed a desire to be as level and honest as possible. I frequently wonder whether I'm deluding myself into believing that I'm not overstating my case (in which case I think my positions must be very weak indeed), or doing myself a disservice by avoiding the exaggeration that most listeners expect.

[0] I hate making comments that sound like a retroactive reinterpretation of an earlier comment to make myself appear to have been more insightful or correct than I actually was; it reminds me of Adam Sandler's "me too" character from the SNL skit in which Jerry Seinfeld plays a distraught history teacher.
Checkout http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1536822 for Hacker House ideas too.
Rumour has it that JS was built in 10 days. How long does one need to do better.
Recommended Readings on Rationality
I wouldn't got that far. A huge chunk of US corporate profits comes from overseas, which wasn't the case 30 years ago. Population growth in emerging markets is part of that, but rising incomes in those markets plays a huge role too.
http://mashable.com/2011/10/07/one-more-thing/
Christianity: the original viral startup
Because they want another Bob, of course! It's unlikely such a person exist and, more likely, the ones who do charge out the yazoo for their skills.

And even if you can find one another Bob is almost certainly not what they actually want http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4094990
Berlin has the largest turkish population outside of instanbul. They have turkish restaurants everywhere and also grocery stores.

The population is ethnically very diverse, though of course, more middle eastern people than latin american ones.

Germans tend to be proper. So, drinking beer on the subway might be frowned upon, but nobody will comment. If you're obnoxious or noisy or otherwise being a jerk, germans will not be friendly to you. If you're polite, they don't care what you look like. If you've got a chip on your shoulder, you may mistake their coldness, which is really professionalism, for judgement, which it isn't.
Wikipedia has what it claims is a partial list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenote#.22One_more_thing.......
I'm not sure how you attribute "unknown mail-order University" to Excelsior. I'm willing to guess that a fair number of HR managers and several million U.S. service members(and obviously their families as well) and veterans might know very well the name of this institution. Look up Regents College if you're interested to know the history.
Javascript App Hosting on S3
A person that is against patents will make no societal difference whatsoever by abstaining from them, while hurting their bottom line, so it is not worthwhile. The best way of changing patent law is by lobbying the government. Individual personal efforts of avoiding patents will be completely inconsequential.
It isn't the porn content that is the problem. Not "mainstream" or "normal" porn anyway.

If you end up being the conduit for something worse (everything thing from malware that just plays ads to people, through to malware with more damaging intent, up to the far more objectionable porn and other things that you might have trouble squaring with your conscience even if it isn't your fault (because you did everything you thought necessary to make sure that didn't happen).

If you setup an anonymous redirector, don't just put it out there. You need to monitor it for some of the worst things it could be used for. If not for legal reasons, then because you don't want to make things easier for certain sorts of people to hide.

(I'm not saying don't set one up, feel free if you think you can monitor it to your own satisfaction, just be careful with it, and at very least make sure it is very easy to report links to questionable content to you so you can nip them in the bud ASAP)
I'm in Incline Village at Lake Tahoe and the development scene must be deep underground or doesn't exist.
I'm sure it it won't be a problem to get some rooms for meetings and collaboration happening. All non tourist relevant resources seem to be easy available.
In Reno it looks probably better but the commuting gets to you, especially when the winter kicks in again.