skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The current US government is mostly atrocious, but I'm convinced that the American people have the government they, or we, collectively deserve. Congress hasn't become horribly dysfunctional and stupid because they've somehow become disconnected from the people. Rather, the electorate has become horribly dysfunctional and stupid, and Congress simply follows along.

I think the main problem is that our system is set up so that fringe elements have much more power. Voting happens in the middle of the week and is not an official holiday. Who turns out to vote, then? The people who care most passionately will inevitably show up in much greater numbers than people who are less enthusiastic. Passion is great, all else being equal, but I believe that passion correlates strongly with craziness in the political arena. Primary elections are even worse in this respect, since most people don't care about them, and the result is that you end up with two major ballot choices, both of whom are nuts, because the primaries got decided by the fringes.

A lack of term limits means that members of Congress get deeply entrenched, with a result that turnover is not all that high. Why bother voting when the winner is a given anyway? Why bother voting even when the winner isn't a given if it's pretty much a given that the overall structure of power at the national level won't change? And even if that might happen, why bother voting when the other party will just filibuster the shit out of everything anyway?

Finally, the Electoral College means that the decision for the top man in government gets decided by, what, maybe 10% of the total population of the country? Presidential candidates concentrate on swing states because they're the only ones that actually count, and that makes the whole business even more fringe.

In short, it seems like the whole system is rigged to discourage moderate, sane people from wanting to participate in any meaningful way.

I know it works on me. I vote in Presidential elections and midterms, but not enthusiastically. I would never dream of joining a political party, let alone volunteering for one. I hang up on surveys, ignore campaign flyers, and never, ever donate. I haven't even written a letter to my representative in years, after realizing that all it does is generate a mail-merged form response.
That's a great idea to get users!
Recordings + Autopilot Meetings = More Leads and Sales
In lieu of building a home server, I highly recommend the Synology line of NAS machines. They've got everything you could possibly want out of a home server, with a much faster configuration. Automatic backups, a built in Torrent server, Plex media server, and remote file access all in one container.

Seriously a great product and value if you're looking for a home server.
sometimes master keys operate things like elevators and control panels
Great to see Waterloo impressing such a talented dude
Referly strips out other referrer tags, and we use several approaches to handle "gaming". These are issues that every affiliate network faces, but they can be managed.
TLDR: Because you can't act on that data without acting in a racist way that makes the world a worse place. There is no way to use that data without really bad behavior.

Let's break down why it is such an atrocious idea.

Say you have a black man in a high ranking position in your company. Oh, but you want to sieze every advantage possible, and you have data suggesting that black people get lower reply rates on emails. And women get higher reply rates on emails. How do you deal with this situation?

Should he have someone else in the company send high-priority emails for him? Or maybe just set up a dummy email for him with a female hispanic name, and pretend it is his "secretary"? Or maybe he shouldn't be in the kind of position in the first place -- maybe he should be in a more internally focused position? Maybe next time you hire, you should be on the lookout for a hispanic woman for an externally focused position, to make things easier.

There are a huge number of problems with these kinds of actions, starting with the fact that you SHOULD NOT be "dealing with" the situation that you have an employee of a certain race or gender.

1. Flat out discriminatory -- forcing someone to jump through hoops because of skin color / gender.

2.a Fundamentally strikes at human dignity by treating everyone you email as racist, genderist animals.

2.b Fundamentally strikes at human dignity by telling your employees to pretend to be someone "more palatable". Or by having someone do a task, lets say, because the individual is in possession of a female hispanic name. Everyone is dehumanized.

3. Liable to twist thinking. After reading that article, and next time you're hiring someone, you brain has a good chance of (inadvertantly) jumping to the notion of how the applicant's race / gender is going to impact email reply rates. We've agreed as a society, for good and just reasons, that hiring decisions and compensation decisions should be completely blind to those (and other) factors.

4. Any actions taken to hide or shield people who seem to be less acceptable or attractive to society simple reinforces their position. The idea that there aren't successful [insert race / gender] people in [profession] is reinforced by hiding those who are.
Nope, The Sunlight Foundation.
It all depends on what the "Or else" is, doesn't it? If it is just parties, then that's one thing. If it's being ostracized from your peers and family, that's a steep price. People have done terrible things to avoid ostracism like that.
You can be hellbanned manually by a moderator (PG is the only moderator whose name is publicly known AFAIK, but there are others) or automatically by the system for going severely negative in karma.
It's worth pointing out that Kai is a marketing specialist, and this is fairly normal (read: not bad) behavior when it comes to doing marketing. Keep in mind that he's spacing it out by a few days, which matters, and the follow-up actually demonstrates that he's (1) a human and (2) very interested.
And if you don't want to add dependency on a whole framework just for that little bit of functionality? It's useful to know how to implement it on its own.
Network connectivity is one very big problem. What good is a blazing fast server with 2Mbps (disruptive!) link? This is the very reason a lot of people would hate their own servers. Cloud = connectivity + (computing power)
Yay! for connectivity.
No questions about the Reddit staff's relationship with violentacrez?
I think it's easy to miss the forest for the trees. There are billions of problems with the American system, but if you take a step back you see that, as a whole, it works pretty well -- especially in comparison to the rest of the world.

Consider science funding, for instance. Despite the neanderthals on the house committee, US funding is still comparatively extremely generous on a per-capita basis:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...
"Also, the scientific debate over climate change is far from settled."

Well of course you think the article is bad. You're one of the people they're railing against!
An aggregator could work, but you're at the mercy of the big affiliates from which you need buy-in - and from what it sounds like Amazon isn't playing with them.

All it takes is a cease and desist letter, a la craigslist and padmapper, and you've lost a large portion of your market.
> System admins even more so.

Really? Honest question.
I would consider that difference is primarily power assistance. A vehicle would probably provide power assistance in propelling the motion whereas a free fall is 100% propelled by the gravity.
Startup TypeWhale looks toward tv and radio journalism
It's not an accident. It is exactly what tptacek described. Every other smarter/better representative wanted, and got committees which pay them more. And that forced these losers to end up on the science committee.

No accident, but also no "axe grinding" conspiracy. Just simply money.
Screw Up, Move Up
Being part of Hyperdrive was an amazing experience! But, the work doesn't stop at the end of our three months :) In a way, it's just beginning.
The Waning Days of the VP of Marketing
Nice.

Isn't the functionality of "collate" already available in the standard library as heapq.merge? The heapq version should be faster, too.
The biggest misconception of Big-O is that it actually matters at most start-ups. I get asked about Big-O all the time. My response is, "You haven't launched. You have zero traction. You have no users yet. Stop worrying about Big-O and just build the damn product."
When Building Software Focus on the Why
Better description here: https://blog.dropbox.com/index.php/now-announcing-the-great-...
Democrat says Congress will slap the FTC if it dares to sue Google
Here is how we implement throttle. http://jsbin.com/ejimok/3/edit
> To clarify, I am not victim blaming.

You're skirting pretty close.

> You have the option to choose between privacy and social pressure.

Well, that depends on the nature of the pressure, now doesn't it? Most people can't go through life without their support network, and by 'can't' I mean can not. If being part of your network means friending them on Facebook to avoid alienating them, then that's what people have to do, isn't it?
You only minify the deployed CSS and JS, so in development, it's still perfectly readable. You shouldn't really need to read production js, usually, and when you do (for debugging issues that only happen in prod), the little brackets in Chrome that my sibling pointed out will be enough.
It's really vapid to want to hang out with friends who use Facebook to set up social events?
Fair enough. I'm always curious about why people choose one provider over another - thanks for filling me in on your reasoning. :)
Typically you'd pay for the first option. The term of art is "remote hands" service.

There are options where you can install servers in cages. (Some industries/companies require very strict physical access control.) This is more for show than because it meaningfully increases your security against the attack "your colocation provider is secretly The Adversary."
yes, it relies on an external server. This is an app we built for our selves, it solves a problem we all have had before so we are not thinking about killing it.
Besides, I am thinking about making it open source so people can easily deploy their own version on heroku for free, it's just a couple of commands.

We'll suport reddit once we complete the HN extension, this is our roadmap:

- map HN usernames (so you can find people easily)
- import saved links
- save link to HN discussion
>> Hellbanning is necessary to keep the trolls out.

> No it is NOT.

> You do understand what hellbanning is, right? It means hiding their posts from everyone but them. That's right, if you were hellbanned, you wouldn't know.

That is why it's the only effective measure against trolls. If you ban a troll the old-fashioned way, they can just make a new account. Hellbanning prevents or at least greatly delays this in most cases, making it a more effective countermeasure than pretty much anything else we can practically implement.
Speaking of using amazon, how are are you able to offer "cashback" or incentives through them, isn't that against the terms of Amazon's affiliate program?
Honestly, the solution here would be to give the federal government less control and allow the states to have more control.

The states were established so that U.S. citizens could move to the state with the laws that best suited them.
Working hard is not enough, you have to be consistent
I can tell you that all of the theorists I talk to say and write O, not Θ when discussing algorithms. I think this is because that the upper bound is generally more interesting, better understood, and more useful when reasoning. In fact, if one of them used Θ, my next question would be "Wait, do we even care about the lower bound?"

I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out it's not just hackers. And I think this behavior is because the lower bound generally isn't relevant.
Well that, and the time difference. Students in Singapore woke up 15 hours before their counterparts on the West Coast of the US.

It's neat to see the effects of a global operation.
Phil Bagwell, Rest in Peace
> you need food, water, oxygen, sleep...

...and human social contact, which for certain demographics of social groupings all but requires Facebook.
Been waiting for this for awhile. Congrats on launching guys!
I have found that Dice.com is a great place to post for Technical jobs.
Can I Stream It? 2.0 launched, now supports TV shows
If you buy the hardware from a vendor and get their 24/7 support they'll send a tech to your cage to replace the drive. It's a little bit more expensive than the machine he built, but with the knowledge that someone will go fix it when it's broken. Worth the money, still ridiculously cheaper than AWS.
The factor isn't log(n), it is a constant. Depending on the implementation, that constant is generally 2. (That's because each level is half the size of the previous. So n + n/2 + n/4 + ... = 2n.)

That said, I could well believe that the constant associated with a SkipList is worse than the constants with other data structures. What works well in C++ does not always translate directly to other languages.
Tutorial: Writing LispyScript Macros
The information is usually already publicly available : for examples the facebook graph api uses the same setup for some of their basic api methods (such as letting a site log you in through facebook) - base64 encoded json user data and an hmac signed with a private key + timestamp. Since the data is already publicly available (it's your facebook user id and other publicly available data), there's no need to use a more costly encryption algorithm. The hmac is there to confirm to the server who manages whichever associated online service that also created a facebook app you just gave access your profile to that this is good data, since they've got the secret on their end that the staff registered with on facebook. HMAC is fast.
I used Indeed to find my current job. Great free daily email of top jobs based on role/geography
South Carolina Supreme Court: webmail not protected by 1986 privacy law
How to ensure your startup is trusted by no one. The GetIntro case study.
Daniel Crooks is an Australian artist who does similar work, but with video as well as still images.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvUwud5r5Ug

Some of his work is projected onto huge displays which is am amazing immersive experience!
This attitude is the reason why the most iconic image related to Twitter is the fail whale.
>However, this does not mean competition winners cannot develop and learn this - they have already demonstrated their creativity and tenacity in one domain (applied machine learning), and this carries over nicely to other domains from our experience.

Strongly agreed. I actually got into the field through a company's data mining contest (pre-kaggle). I think people who are strong at building predictive models are great candidates for data sciences. But it took years of work experience after doing my graduate degree in machine learning to get to a point where I'm comfortable calling myself a decent data scientist.

It's easy to think model-building is the only important skill-set, but data and models don't exist in a vacuum; a more holistic view of where your data comes from and how your work will be used is essential. This excellent netflix blog entry illustrates what I'm saying quite well, I think. http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/04/netflix-recommendations-...

They make two points that illustrate the divide between a contest and the day-to-day work of a data scientist:

* The winning model was not usable in production. Netflix had to gut the 100+ model ensemble to a much simpler 2 model ensemble

* Business needs change, the question they were trying to answer changed from the start of the contest
This could make your code behave unpredictably, since you don't really know what events will be used or dropped. For something like a drag handler it's probably not an issue, but it's a little hard to reason about a function whose state depends on when the function was last called. You could easily run into a bug where two pieces of code call a trickle'ed function, expecting it to take an action, and encountering a bug when the two calls are too close.

If polling is what's needed then it makes more sense to use setInterval and have a better guarantee of when things are being run. Or you could stuff events into a buffer and have a function consume them periodically - either way, when you lose an event it's either 1. irrelevant, because polling only cares about the state at time t and not the events, or 2. deterministic, because your consumer function decided to get rid of it.
Show HN: Intelligently convert ALL CAPS text to mixed case (not just lowercase)
how are you able to track what people purchase then?
OP: how tall are you, how much do you weight, you much do you squat?

There must be some common stats that will predict wether you're ready for a standing desk.

The weekend trips sounds like serious exercise. Maybe you don't eat enough afterwards?

If you can bike far but your squat or deadlift is low, then expect lower back pain. Pain in feet is strange, what are you standing on in what footwear?
Amy Hoy and Thomas Ptacek strongly disagree with both the majority here and Paul Graham himself all the time, yet they aren't hellbanned. It's not just "straying outside the hive" or "failing to toe the party line" — much of the time, it's expressing offensive opinions (e.g. "women are inferior"), trying to shove your opinion down people's throats to the detriment of the site overall (e.g. losethos' weird Christian ramblings), or just being very rude about your unpopular opinion (e.g. "Apple is going to fail but you don't see it because you are Tim Cook's gay lover"). You might wish for people to be able to belligerently proclaim any offensive opinion they might hold, but this isn't your site or mine, and PG is within his rights doing what he thinks is necessary to keep the conversation quality at a high level.

This is not to say that the system is perfect. Many people get banned wrongly, and I think uriel was one of those. I do think a warning system would be better in many cases. But it seems to me that most hellbans are handed out to people who are indeed simply jerks.
Well the example given is bugged, as if you make updates at 0 and 50, then it never fires the function at 100 for the change that occurred at 50. If I didn't want to rely on the whole framework, I'd copy and paste the tested implementation (and dependencies) in underscore.

Not that it's bad to know how to do it yourself, but I'd make sure my implementation was sound before sharing it as advice.
Your missing the point here.

Look at the thread, the responses and the clarifications. The least useful answers in terms of education value are the ones which focus on whether he was or isn't a bad person for saying it.

As I also point out, your concerns are handled when he gives up the moral ground. you don't have to follow something you know is wrong.
If people can successfully "game" Referly we'd probably try to hire them.
i've known this secret for a while.
i went from paying $4k+/month spanning over 10+ servers in amazon ec2, to just 2 dedicated servers < $1k/month in an unlimited 1gig colo.
the performance difference i see is huge. i never realized how actually slow EC2 is. their issue is definitely in slow IO, which i think only their SSD instances can fix (which will cost me in the $8k+).

i now have a wicked setup, Xenserver Cloud, SAN, all Highly Available, don't have to worry about bandwidth overcharges, and much much faster .
Congrats @dmor, keep up the good work!
There are probably solutions to all the above. "Tapered" prize giving (even 100th place gets a small prize), more frequent changeovers (rather than tenure and multiyear student commitments, have monthly or weekly reviews about wh stays and who leaves, just like in the private sector). Anyway, I acknowledge your points, I just think the present system isn't necessarily the perfect system.
I wonder if it makes sense to map capslock to, effectively, ConnectBot's use of the "okay" button on Android - where a single tap is ctrl and a double tap is alt/esc (or vice-versa - it's muscle memory at this point...)
I visited Bletchley for the first time less than a week ago and believe me, they waxed lyrical about the 3 polish mathmaticians. I've seen the memorial they have there. I came away feeling that it was a joint effort, but you have to remember that there were thousands of people working at Bletchley and Turing was key in the SPEED at which they were able to break the code by inventing the Bombe. If there's any mis-appropriation, it's not Bletchley's fault.
biz dev, dear growth hacker.
Just as important, nobody actually studying algorithms (where having this misconceptions would matter) actually has these misconceptions. It's completely fine for Big-O to mean one thing when chatting with a bunch of devs and another when sitting down for research.

The distinction between all the Big/Small letters is only really useful if you're trying to prove the bounds and something and proving an upper or lower bound is an easier place to start. Honestly practicing programmers shouldn't even be worried about these type of concerns since in practice there are some very small Ns and very large Cs that can make 2^n surprisingly workable and n surprisingly slow. Speaking in rough terms of 'it grows like this' is just fine.
The ones on memory hierarchy (cache oblivious algos, etc)
My evidence would suggest that they guess.
Introducing Circa – The best way to read news on your iPhone
I think we agreed. It's clear that you didn't get your number from Planet Money since it's not there.

It is good to get the source though. So thanks for your reply.

For those who are interested, the sunlight foundation post is here: http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/04/02/housecommittee...

According to that post, the numbers were calculated at Planet Money's request, so there you go.
Another live version here (non-cached)
http://hyperdrive.communitech.ca/blog/posts/alexis-ohanian-m...
There's always a third option: go to the collocation facility and change the disk yourself. You won't usually be charged for access during business hours. Attractiveness of that solution depends greatly on the distance to the DC.
1) The article has a title making it seem like it's unix shell tips straight from the unix master, then instead is advising to use certain Mac programs.

2) A trackpad can NEVER replace a regular mouse with scrollwheel and many buttons. Maybe the apple.com website triggers your emotions. But the following website triggers mine: http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-mice

3) OS X may be supremely better for you, but not every person is the same, you may be their target audience, other people are not and, gasp, may actually prefer a different design philosophy.

4) Being free or cheap is not usually a reason why one runs Linux on a PC. Can you imagine someone can actually prefer something, independent of cost?

5) Mac OS X has apps. Other OSes also have apps. They all have their selection of awesome apps. Usually one prefers the ones they're used to I guess.