skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it works both ways. On one hand some videos definitely seem to be published with the intent of exposing the horror of war (Collateral Murder comes to mind), while on the other hand some just seem to be straight up snuff that glorifies the violence.

It is a tricky subject, there probably is not a single correct answer.
A lovely piece of conjecture, complete with pop-culture and drug references.
I absolutely disagree. We're headed into an era of fat native clients. Mobile will dwarf everything, and native is winning in mobile.

Of course, everything is a cycle. And the web will come back. But currently, it's taking a backseat.
http://imgur.com/a/YA4BI

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/o8gw9/30_pricing_p...
The DeanBeat: The race between the game giants and the startups
What do you know about their personalities before their successful companies?
I actually solved the "get the data out from the homebanking system" via 100 lines of javascript executed in phantomjs to screenscrape the site.

It isn't pretty, it might break, and I haven't looked into how to store the credentials "safely" (so it executes just when I call it and enter the u/p, and not in the background), but it beats the hell out of logging in and extracting the data by hand.

You might get some mileage of this, if you want to automate the data extraction and have an homebanking account.
Since these simulations are getting so complex, it shouldn't be long until we can scan our brains structure exactly and simulate it in mobile computer attached to an android.

Then androids could simulate the combination of DNA from parents and have baby androids. :o
We have a few Life chairs at the hospital I work at. I wasn't too impressed - much happier with my Aeron at home and Knoll Bulldog at my own desk (sadly, discontinued). We also have a ton of Knoll Chadwick chairs, and they are terrible - remarkably uncomfortable and they started falling apart just a few months after they were acquired. At the moment you'd be hard pressed to find more than a few in the entire institution where at least one armrest hasn't broken off. YMMV of course.
Guan Yin Bodhisattva for Sale
>vice.com

Really?
Monopoly: Alan Turing Edition
Devil May Cry: Born Again
"Turns out, just having the best product..."

This is why Apple gets a bad rap in the forums. Who would say that that about their computer (except a Linux weenie)? The reality is these are cheap electronics in a hermetically sealed but stylish enclosure that use publicly available OS configured for dummies. So simple is the design they can be used by lower primates.

I like Apple hardware, it continues to look good after all these years, but comments "Turns out, having the best product..." make me like it a lot less. Apple is attracting some brainless users and will be catering to them more and more. This is not good.

Maybe this userbase explains the product placements. Hollywood wants to convey a sense that a character is not the type of person that would know anything about computers, hence she uses Apple products.

Touche.

And thanks for the links.
This is a very interesting essay, if for no other reason that when smart people observe that other smart people have mental blocks against believing the truth of measurable features of material reality, that suggests a market inefficiency. Persistent market inefficiencies should always ping your radar a little bit, because exploiting them makes you rich.
Airbnb: The story behind the $1.3bn room-letting website
It is a law though. The mistake is in thinking that means it will always hold true or is necessarily "correct".

As wikipedia nicely puts it:

Scientific laws:

1) summarize a large collection of facts determined by experiment into a single statement,

2) can usually be formulated mathematically as one or several statements or equation, or at least stated in a single sentence, so that it can be used to predict the outcome of an experiment, given the initial, boundary, and other physical conditions of the processes which take place,

3) are strongly supported by empirical evidence - they are scientific knowledge that experiments have repeatedly verified (and never falsified). Their accuracy does not change when new theories are worked out, but rather the scope of application, since the equation (if any) representing the law does not change. As with other scientific knowledge, they do not have absolute certainty like mathematical theorems or identities, and it is always possible for a law to be overturned by future observations.

"Law" is not a stronger form of "theory", as is popularly believed.

Now granted, it is not a particularly good law. Strictly speaking it is bad science, but a law it is nevertheless.
The problem is you are applying post-hoc analysis.

While a theme was that the outsized returns can come from ideas which sound bad, it doesn't necessarily say that all outsized returns come from bad-sounding ideas.

Not only that, but I think reading the essay will show that the outsized returns are not known until several years after demo day.

Sometimes bad ideas are just bad ideas. In the Venn intersection between bad-sounding-ideas and good-ideas - the 'bad sounding and not good' is a much bigger area.

To me, the entire essay is about making sure that institutionally, the bad-sounding-but-ultimately-good ideas are not left out. Trying to further identify and silo them at application stage would be even more fraught.
With Tokyo I was referring to the 23 wards. To take the metro area and calculate the density would be like going down to Palo alto and up to San Rafael and expand the density to those areas. Yes, true, Paris is not not full of high rises, but as you mention, you don't typically have the 2 and 3-story low-rises and neither does Tokyo. Tokyo, quite interestingly for such a dense city, does not have many skyscrapers, tho it has many high rises. But anyway, I could have said HK or Singapore, both have land limits and are on quake zones and both have lots of highrises and also a few skyscrapers. The way those cities achieve their densities is not via lots of skyscrapers, but via lots and lots of mid-rises and highrises. From 8 to about 25 floors. Most in the 8-16 range, IIRC.
Amazon’s New Kindles: Everything You Need to Know
Following tactics can also aid the learning process:

1. Associate new ideas to existing ideas (metaphors, problem solve, story)

2. Make it less abstract (story, diagrams, touch, smell, etc)

3. Express it (restate, teach, share, tweet, blog, etc)
I switched from EE to CS quite early (and then from CS to solo bootstrapped startup), so I can only speculate beyond what I've already posted. I'm inclined to agree with you, though; if TV fiction is the infallible source of knowledge it purports itself to be, then pilots would seem to be among the most suspicious of professions (gremlins?).

I'd like to know what makes avionics so special if it turns out that they are indeed very sensitive. Consumer, automotive, and industrial equipment has to shield against, filter out, and isolate all kinds of noise.
Yes, the biggest problem that "write once , run anywhere" has always had is that platform vendors don't want it. It's only an advantage to underdog platforms, this is why Sun wanted it so badly but MS did everything they could to stop it in it's tracks.

It's a lot more difficult to justify the purchase of a $2000 Mac if 100% of the software can be run on a generic Linux box for half the price.

At least with FF and Chrome being open source and gratis rather than directly commercial some of this motivation is alleviated. It's also more difficult to put up a barrier to entry for a new incompatible feature if your competitor can look at your code base and re-implement it from there.
Bing Flunked My Search Taste Test
In Defense of the Best
IMHO the article should have been titled "Stop measuring text in bytes." It doesn't have anything specific to do with code, and because "code" can mean source or object code, it's a bit misleading.
My resume is entirely public, even including my cell number. I don't include references in it, though.
Using Ant to Build a JavaScript Library
Larry Flynt Offers $1M Reward for Mitt Romney Tax Returns
Hubble Has Spotted An Ancient Galaxy That Shouldn't Exist
Thanks for sharing, vimota!

- Heather Payne (Founder, Ladies Learning Code)
New utility nabs OS X keychain passwords
Jordan After Game Stealth Black Light Graphite Varsity Red Cheap
I love the notion of "no reason for the universe". I find it to be very pleasing.
Oracle v. Google trial transcript - day 2
I actually did consider this option and technically it's probably not too difficult.

On the other hand I'd hate to get used to using this and then have them do some obfuscation deliberately to stop me.

I'd also be somewhat paranoid that if my bank figured it out then they'd come down on me like a ton of bricks and use some convoluted law to freeze my account or send me to prison for "hacking the bank" or somesuch.
I'm just mentioning that notable Legal Minds don't believe in adjusting laws. To some folks, a law is an immutable law, and you must follow it, whether you know that law exists or not.
You mentioning rock stars make me wonder if being a scout for a record label is similar. A band that's going to define a new genre or movement will sound nothing like anything currently popular, so it seems you have to identify the things that sound nothing like what's popular but that sound like what will be popular.

Publishers, from what I can tell, have the same problem. One thing that I'm struck by is how many novels that we now consider classic, or novelists who we now consider important, barely scraped into publication. Tolkien famously saw Lord of the Rings in print because of Rayner Unwin, the then nine-year-old (I think) son of a publisher liked LOTR. John Barth and William Goldman have both written about how close they were to pursuing other opportunities—a PhD and insurance, IIRC. A Confederacy of Dunces was only published after O'Toole killed himself. Melville's poetry was self-published IIRC. Virginia Woolf needed to start her own press.

There are probably others with similar stories.

Not only that, but I have to wonder who barely didn't make the cut. Given the large number of writers who skated into print, there must be at least an equally large group who "should" have, but left no marks on history sufficiently legible to trace.

I think about these issues a lot for two reasons. The first is that I've had many close calls with literary agents, all of whom eventually said, "I like you, but not in that way." The second is the technological environment: now that ebooks mean self-publishing is much more pragmatic than it used to be, people who really want to publish have a means of going outside the conventional system. Some power-law-style stars have already emerged (Amanda Hocking, the 50 Shades of Grey author). Others probably will. Maybe I'll be one. But if I'm not, I don't think I'll be too bothered: I mostly want to write.

Yeah, 99% of self-published books are probably un- or poorly edited dreck, but that 1% count for a lot.

(A side note: I wrote about this a little more at the bottom of this post: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/links-the-time-for-...).
Apple's secret weapon for iPhone 5: satisfaction
If you count the long-term unemployed, the number of discouraged workers has grown. U6, which only counts those who are discouraged and have been unemployed less than a year, hasn't risen, but other unofficial counts that include those unemployed for more than a year has.

In fact, by some unofficial counts, like this one http://www.opednews.com/articles/Real-Unemployment-at-23--by... , total unemployment may be as high as 23% right now. Nor is this the only one, this sight is pretty lefty, two recent essays on the conservative site VDare.com have given similar estimates (22%) for current total unemployment.
Webkit Inspector: Implement SCSS source highlighter
Facebook: 'No plans' to enter China anytime soon
You overestimate the value of academic research and of PhDs
Show HN: Introducing Rapido
You can have everything but rounded corners.
How to Lock Down Your Facebook Profile
"Discouraged workers"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ogxZxu6cjM
Then why aren't you a billionaire yet and why do you need Paul?
Well, I still enjoy your essays. Let this comment be the generic encouragement of those who aren't trying to pointless dispute and who are usually silent.

At least some of the people who are questioning you are probably doing so out of intellectual curiosity, rather than animosity. You probably know that intellectually, but for many people—including me—it's sometimes hard to remember that in the heat of the reading moment.
If you like this kind of dynamic code generation and usage, LLVM with ctypes is also a promising avenue, as you don't (necessarily) have to invoke an external compiler. You can build the module on-the-fly.

For example see bitey, an abstraction to directly import LLVM bitcode files: https://github.com/dabeaz/bitey

That said, there's so many ways to speed up Python these days...

In most practical cases where I need performance I'd try to run it in PyPy (easiest), use Cython (great python-C hybrid), use Theano (to generate GPU code), or even write a plain Python C API extension (no dependencies to deploy, and in contrary to ctypes you can directly offer Python classes without Python wrapper).
Presumably most of them still think there's a top level universe that is not being simulated by a computer, and I doubt many of them believe that universe was created by a personal deity.
Java Still Not Safe, Security Experts Say
or use @free.kindle.com to force (free) delivery over WiFi.
The software community is set up so that there is social compensation for open source labour. To a certain extent, the community of authors is the same way. The publishing community is certainly not set up so people are used to recogizing publishers for their contributions.
Decorative CSS Gallery – Part 2
I wonder why there hasn't been much in the way of proposals (that I've seen) for moderate redevelopment to make SF more like Paris, versus more like NYC. Stuff like replacing a block of 2-story townhomes with a 6-8-story apartment building. Construction economics, maybe? Developers seem mainly keen on getting approval to put up 20+ story glass-and-steel condo towers with sweeping views.

Or else, cultural differences? In much of Europe, block-sized, mid-rise apartment buildings, often centered on courtyards, are seen as a very classic, nice sort of city-center construction, while high-rises are seen as a bit garish, either too much like an office building, or else too much like an ex-Soviet housing project. Americans seem to have the opposite association, of high-rises as modern and mid-rise apartment blocks as meh.

(Though on the ex-Soviet angle, I've read that as one explanation for why Berlin is one of the cheapest major cities in Europe: the East German government didn't have much patience for these bourgeois concerns about "historical character" and "neighborhoods", so just built rows of high-rise apartment blocks right in the city center. As a result, the city now has an unusually large housing stock.)
The idea put forth is that if we're able to simulate life that we must almost certainly be living in a simulation. But this assumes that our post-humans have nearly infinite computing resources and that each simulation (within a simulation) somehow has the uncanny ability to evolve to the point of creating exceptionally good simulations. I don't think either is true so I think we're probably real.
>Then androids could simulate the combination of DNA from parents and have baby androids. :o

well that is the fun bit. :)
I'm an avid goodreads-user, mostly to exchange book-recommendations and find books to read via the recommendation-engine.

Some gripes with the page:

- people are too nice, every single book seems to have a 4/5 rating - with positive reviews to boot! I've read at least 5 shitty (not only shitty - but badly written, terrible characters, amateur work) books that had a plethora of positive reviews on goodreads. Weighted reviews, or weighting users' votes based on how much they vote might help.

- The recommendation-engine is quite conservative: I usually get books recommended that are insanely similar to the ones I like, or even from the same authors (or books that I've usually already read). I got around 160 books rated now. I don't get any far-flung recommendations, like, for example, "you seem to like freaky stuff (Cosmic Bandidos) so here's Ass Goblins of Auschwitz."

- and one issue Goodreads can't do anything about: Would be nice to have Kindle-integration to track reading-progress, right now Kindles (afaik) only have Facebook/Twitter-integration, which is useless to me.

Also interesting to see that the majority of users (I see) use their real names for their accounts, and I don't think goodreads actually enforces this. How did they do that?
Google: Bing Still Using Our Click Data For Ranking
Agreed, I read this:

"If you make a simple calculation using Moore’s Law, you’ll find that these supercomputers, inside of a decade, will have the ability to compute an entire human lifetime of 80 years—including every thought ever conceived during that lifetime—in the span of a month."

And said to myself "Bzzzzzt! and thanks for playing." But I expect we'll see more before we see less, folks like my kids are graduating from college and they have had access to computers their "whole life" and they have always managed to get hugely faster and more powerful "their whole life" and so it becomes something of an assumption.

When Intel drove the Pentium 4 off the process rails into the valley of heat death a lot of people said "Hmmm, that doesn't bode well." But the truth was even then memory speeds were flattening out, actual 'mean time to data' disk speeds have been slowing in lock step with the increase in density, and transactional state space that point in time where you know a transaction is well and truly complete, has gotten fuzzier and fuzzier.

So while I enjoy the simulation hypothesis, and remember going to my friends with a short story based on it (the punch line was once you figured out you were in a simulation it crashed, which caused the people running that simulation to realize it and crash that one, all they way up to a programmer who sighs, and says "Ok, lets start again, first we need some light ..." I thought it was hugely clever and was quite proud of it, the editor at Analog (magazine I sent it to) just wrote "simulation hypothesis, no thanks." on the post card I got back. Well suffice it to say its not all that new a concept.
Interesting analogy. Here is where it breaks down for me:

Assuming (Movies : Apps :: Theater : Operating System), then (Television : Web), makes some sense, but doesn't fully work. The browser (the current medium for interacting with the web), exists on top of the Operating System, but Televisions are not tied to movie theaters in any such way.

On the other hand one obvious thing TV and the web do have in common is ads, versus up front cost of admission with native apps and movie tickets.

I might be old fashioned, but I see native apps as tools. Sturdy things that you can count on to do a task well. Browsers are one such tool used for communicating over the web. I see the web as a medium of communication rather than a tool. I suppose this mental model is why web apps feel wrong to me.
Only as long as you use static linking.
Why Chrome Hasn't Killed Mozilla Firefox
Asynchronize All The Things
$ bower lookup jquery
jquery git://github.com/components/jquery.git

Web link: https://github.com/component/jquery

Since there's no authentication, the bower jquery package will always point to this url, which is not officially associated with jquery.
And how has that worked out for you?

Have you ever experimented with an opposing strategy? (Funding "non-technical" founders with "weak" personalities.)

Probably not, lest you would risk your reputation. Hence, you might not have evidence to show that this approach would not yield suffcient numbers of "big winners" to justify the investments. For example, if someone sugested the hypothesis that from a set of a given size of non-technical founders with weak personalities, some "big winners" will emerge, could you disprove that? If you wanted to be scientific, you would have to test it, repeatedly.

From my intepretation, I think one of the points in the pg essay is that human "intuition" will only take you so far toward the "big rewards". By its very nature it steers us away from the counterintuitive and protects us from taking what others would perceive as unreasonable risks. It will stop you from adopting a strategy that no one else is using that might get you labelled as foolish (but, as history shows us time and again, might actually yield an enormous reward).

In hindsight we'll continue to see that some of the biggest winners would have been viewed as unreasonable risks by many VC. Foresight won't allow us that vision. So-called intuition will stop you from investing in a "big winner". Hard to accept, but true.
It seems like there could be more than one way forward. The big successes dominating point to one path: finding those wild outliers.

But many startups exit without making it big and return 2-3X to their investors. If the median startup were doing 3X, you'd be making a great return. I don't hear much about this strategy. It would be interesting to look at the remainder of YC's portfolio with Dropbox and Airbnb removed to see what that distribution looks like.
I clicked the link expecting to find a discussion on the role a father has in the raising of children.

What I found was a wandering discussion about epigenetics with zero real-world applicability, given that all Fathers-to-be or existing Fathers cannot rewind the clock.

Changes in a childs crucial upbringing years will have orders-of-magniture more effect than this stuff.

Besides, it's dangerous to program little ears with 'you can't help being fat, it's because your father ate too much as a teenager'.

Personal responsibility is the most important thing for a child to learn. With personal responsibility, even the fattest person can get back to a normal weight range.
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There is no such thing as institutional misandry, so no, misandry does not permeate our culture. However, the headline is total click bait, but this is the NYT so no surprise there.
The ultimate sandbox. Deterministic, free will-less sandbox. :(
Does anyone think this can finally be the tool to bring sane package management to client side JavaScript development? I'm hesitant to use any of the existing tools because none of them support all the libraries I use, so I'd end up doing stuff manually anyway, and I don't have any confidence that any of them will keep working in the long term.
> It also had a large number of people who pointed out all the reasons why it wouldn't work.

To be fair, it's not actually possible to present a new idea on this forum (or any forum with technical-minded people), without getting a flood of reasons why it won't work.