skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think polling on such a detailed level is fundamentally changing the democratic process. In the past, politicians had to be leaders - present a vision that was quite possibly unpopular to start with, and persuade people to come around to it. (See e.g. JFK and the space program.) Nowadays they're becoming expert hagglers: keep this mini-group barely content, say exactly the right nice things to the other, ignore a third altogether because they're 10% over in enemy territory. I don't know where this is leading to, but it's definitely a big change.
(Edit: "limit order" looks like technical jargon. If so, I don't know what it means. Maybe you didn't say what I thought you said)

In your example, it looked like you wanted your 500 share for something else than selling them. So you're talking about "real transactions (with non-speculators) at the boundaries". So yes, those transactions are a useful service provided to you by the speculators. I'm not denying that.

On the other hand, your wording seems to imply that most transactions are of this type (non-speculator with speculator). As far as I understand the system, they are not. If the OP is to be trusted, the vast majority of transactions are between 2 speculators trying to outsmart each other. Do we at least agree on that narrow point?

My second point is that a such a transaction (between 2 speculators) is zero sum. Locally, because whatever the first speculators won, the other lost. And globally, because wherever the share is, it could still be sold to a non-speculator. Making the transaction between speculators doesn't make it any easier. I'd say it could make it harder, for the non-speculators now have to buy the share faster than the speculators (or pay extra to have traders do it for them). Seriously, where is the value in that?

Now maybe a good speculator tends to provide a good service to non-speculators. However, they are not selected by the quality of the service they provide. They are selected by their ability to rip each other off. How quality of service arises from such a cut-throat competition is mysterious to me. (Usually, we compete for quality of service directly, so the connection is obvious. Speculating is not the same thing.)
I think they are plenty of good arguments for legalizing marijuana - however, things like this tend to make me think twice about it:

"In California alone, nearly 1,000 deaths and injuries each year are blamed directly on drugged drivers, according to CHP data, and law enforcement puts much of the blame on the rapid growth of medical marijuana use in the last decade. Fatalities in crashes where drugs were the primary cause and alcohol was not involved jumped 55% over the 10 years ending in 2009.”

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/02/nation/la-na-pot-dri...
The general recommendation for developers is to not look at patents ever. Infringing a patent you know about is more expensive than getting blind sided.

Yes, the patent still applies.

As John Carmac (Doom/Quake engine writer) said:

The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.
I have been doing research on DNS for my project. And below are some of my findings / Opinions.

I am not going to paid a large sums of money on DNS. And that rules out some of the options like Dyn.

You want a 3rd Party DNS mainly because of HA and Speed. Route53 and OnApp hosting's DNS do really well, but they are slow in some areas.

DNSMadeEasy was the best i could find, it doesn't have any PoPs in Asia areas, but other then that it is pretty much the fastest DNS services in US and EU. And it is surprisingly cheap as well for the low to Mid traffic. Expensive at the Higher End compared to Route53 but i guess it wouldn't matter much when you reach that sort of traffic.

I would actually love to use CloudFlare, you get free DNS + analytics. For Personal site i think it is great. For anything business related i still have doubts. They have expanded quite lot of areas over the last 6 months. But last times i looked its speed aren't great compared to OnApp or Route53. Its downtime is also higher.
The internet: where anonymous speech is an inextricable part of free speech when complaining about drug enforcement on reddit, but an unnecessary uncumberance on democracy when releasing a movie criticising a Presidential candidate.
Interesting.

I somehow got added to the Obama campaign mailing list, and their recent fundraising emails politely noted that their records did not show me having donated any money (I'm not American and don't live in the US). They also said that their records might not reflect my donation if I had made it through a different channel.

However, this article suggests that all the channels go to the same database. I wonder whether one of the following scenarios is correct:

* The database has eventual consistency (maybe my donation through channel X would take some time to be reflected by the campaign team);

* The message was a ruse to throw off independent and Republican analysts to the sophistication of the database;

* It was CYA in case something had gone wrong.
The Dangers of Code Review
Coolest thing on HN in at least a week. Thanks!
Generally speaking, developers do not spend any time looking at patents. Patents still apply even if you discover the idea independently; however, if you are found to have infringed on a patent, and you are found to have done so knowingly, then it becomes "willful infringement" and the damages may be higher as a result.

This sets up a perverse system in which patents are intended to provide limited protection in exchange for publishing your inventions to help spread knowledge, but those who would benefit most from that knowledge are strongly incentivized against looking at any patents, out of fear of the possibility of willful infringement.
I worked as a Research Associate (contract researcher) for a UK university in the 1990s - this paid a decent salary, had minimal teaching requirements (a couple of hours a week) and if your supervisor was decent the topic you were paid to work on was pretty close to your PhD research topic - usually they would find money from some contract to pay you for the 6 months or so required to do nothing but write your thesis.

Most people doing things this way took 4 or 5 years rather than the 3 of full time PhD students - but at least you got a decent salary - not a bad trade off (not to mention the other perks of working on EU funded projects).

[Of course, some supervisors were good some were awful - I heard some horror stories from colleagues].
According to http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/ it seems like Amazon will be introducing this sometime in the future.

"In the coming months, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) plans to introduce an option that will allow you to seamlessly move data between Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier using data lifecycle policies."
I would go further than that, and say I would happily pay £40 or so a month for unfettered access to tv, music, games, etc.

They could take my money and divide it between the content creators based on the content that I had consumed.

Let's get away from silo'd mentatlities reinforcing old-world ownership models, and make content easy-enough to consume without having to revert to piracy.
The Growth Hacker - Parallels With A Quant
I think the reason China is excluded is probably because China gets its own customised Skype as opposed to using the standard client.

https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA10910/what-is-tom-online
A few ideas since nobody's responded yet...

7 years isn't very long as an adult. It's going to pass in exactly seven years. If it were me, I'd consider it just another cost like rent. Live with roommates longer I guess.

Work a year or two in a big megacorp where you have to have a badge to get in. Save some money and gain infinite motivation to succeed on your own. Take mental pictures of where you'll never go back. I don't think I'd use the extra money to pay down the loans faster - you need liquidity if you're going to go out on your own. Get some credit cards during this time too. Also, then you're no longer fresh out of school, you're from megacorp!

Don't worry as much about investors. This whole thing has been hyped into some kind of audition process. If you get investors they will be your boss. Bootstrap while you're working at megacorp and by contracting later.

Don't try to create a new market. You (and I) can't afford to do that.

Finally, you must have a trustworthy non-technical partner in the mix. A biz-dev/sales person. Coders and designers are not people people.
Election Results via Xbox Smartglass
I wasn't aware about that. Updated.
Please Stop "Fixing" Font Smoothing
meh. phd

God says Line 1253

as thou comest unto Zoar.

13:11 Then Lot chose him all the plain of Jordan; and Lot journeyed
east: and they separated themselves the one from the other.

13:12 Abram dwelled in the land of Canaan, and Lot dwelled in the
cities of the plain, and pitched his tent toward Sodom.

13:13 But the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the LORD
exceedingly.

13:14 And the LORD said unto Abram, after that Lot was separated from
him, Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art
northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward: 13:15 For all
the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for
ever.

----

God says...
kindred EBCDIC retiring find whirlpools infringement Those
hearer gentleness continence thus foulness preferring
imbibed revelations afterward life- didst add hastening
unbending shut ye -unto message presented insane objections
30 sublimities caught psaltery plead fruitful Ours despaired
cheap fatherless Lovely thankful became arrogancy up psalm
knocking harmony eternity threatens 12 believer Body gilded
happily badge rebuked reposing heresies equivalent nominally
Themselves window life-giving arise Epicurus submitted
garden endeavor uncorruptness answered pinching txt guiltless
malice
Whether or not you would need a different strategy is debatable, but you would almost definitely see one. Voters in less populous states are over-represented in the EC, and urban voters are a key Democratic constituency, so you would definitely see messaging shifting away from things that would appeal to farmers in Iowa, since it would cease to matter (think things like mentions of ethanol as an energy source in stump speeches), and towards things that would drive up Latino turnout in Los Angeles: heavier discussion of immigration reform, for example, which very rarely came up in this cycle -- the foreign policy debate didn't mention drug violence in Mexico at all, this time, I don't think, and instead focused entirely on the middle east.

I think lots of "urban" issues would suddenly be much more relevant to the campaign, particularly on the left; gun control would be back on the table, marijuana legalization would start to be taken seriously as a social justice issue, etc. I'm partly talking out of my ass, but things would almost definitely change.
Dude, I'm from Indiana and it's what they call themselves. I know what the term means to you people from cities, but come on, is that even real? Why?
Apple will probably get little press for this, but it was just as unfair to them as the Samsung lawsuit was unfair to Samsung. Software patents (and ultra-cooperative courts) are a problem no matter which angle you look at it. It is not Apple, nor Samsung, nor VirnetX (wow that name sucks)—but the system which allows them to take advantage of patents that needs to be fixed.
The thing about a joke is it's not supposed to be taken seriously.
Nate Silver himself said (in a radio interview that I cannot locate despite much Googling :< ) that if he said something would happen 60% of the time and it was 10 out of 10 that he his figure was wrong and should have said 100%.
Just for clarity, political contributions directly to a political campaign are a matter of public record in the US. Thus this piece of knowledge was not the result of new data mining techniques, it's been used for a number of years.
So basically, Nate Silver is to politics what Billy Beane is to baseball?
I appreciate the sentiment. It seems like the most common title/description on Twitter is something to the effect of "CEO and Co-founder of _________ "

Everyone wants to be considered an entrepreneur, CEO, or founder or something these days....even if it's only their personal blog or a pet project.
Mind telling what's the issue? I find it working fine on IE8, except the fact that round corners aren't working. Twitter Bootstrap doesn't support round corners because IE8 doesn't provide support for the CSS3 property and pseudo-class border-radius and :nth-child.
But that can be said for any basis of any tool or technology. Your use of CNC matching creates a dependency on that tool, and it's advantages and disadvantages. You've locked yourself into that tool if you don't want to change the way you work. A shift to any other tool will come with modifications to your work, and I don't think that is unique to 3D printers.
The oposite opinion can also be argued, that now politicians are a lot more connected to the populace, and that the will of the people is now represented much better than it was in the past.
Sorry. I didn't get you. Are you suggesting me to get some designer or you are talking about yourself?
If she's a prof, then she's engaging in the scam that is the current university system. Is she or the other profs you know advocating for the abolition of undergraduate degrees to be replaced by online learning like coursera or udacity. Also, abolishing phds/tenure and replacing with funding their research from kickstarter/indiegogo. Probably not. They might care about their few chosen students (selfishly, for the social company and labor it provides) but they're putting their finger up at the entire rest of the world (which includes potential students that never were, like in africa or india).
My favorite example of tool use in birds is this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYZnsO2ZgWo of a crow that actually bends a piece of wire to form a hook. There are some details about it here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/08/0808_020808_...
'Four more years': Barack Obama's tweet most popular ever
Ouch. That would be my bug. Fixed now, with my sincere apology and thanks for reporting it.

https://code.google.com/p/election-maps/source/detail?r=4975...
I thought Romney was an excellent candidate, but his campaign was rather hamstrung by the Republican party.
"a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true: in a paradox, he has discovered that stepping back from his job has increased the rewards he gleans from it."
Check out Zimbra yet? They have open source and enterprise solutions.
http://www.zimbra.com/products/pricing.html

Also look at Fastmail options. https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/business.html

I'd call / email to negotiate prices with them. Why pay what's just listed on their site? If your users are mostly hands-off in terms of support maybe getting a discount is feasible.
Did you ever try DrawPlus or ArtWorks?

Obviously ArtWorks, with significant UI changes, morphed into Xara, but I think DrawPlus got ported to Windows in some form too.
I'm bookmarking this to read later, but how much more sophisticated does the algorithm have to be than:

1) Create a list of 500 - 1000 active, relatively popular Twitter users: this would eliminate most celebrities who only tweet casually or delegate it to their PR people...presumably, by the time they tweet something, it's already huge.

2) Segregate the sample group of Twitter users into cliques

3) When any topic spreads between multiple cliques at an accelerated rate, that topic will likely trend

In addition, have a list of mega-popular celebrities and assume that most of what they tweet has a high probability of being a trending topic.

Twitter has some kind of formula for removing constantly-popular topics (or else Justin Bieber would forever be on the list)...if there's an easy way to include that, then it seems like predicting trending would be straightforward?
MS Messenger is actually the foundation for their Enterprise level Unified Communications offering.

It will be interesting if that client also gets the axe in favour of Skype, or if they intend to keep it as a separate product.
Worldmate acquired by Travel Agency CWT
What makes me curious is whether this lawsuit has anything to do with Apple never actually submitting FaceTime to the standard bodies.
The items like people's knowledge and documentation are not purely functional.

You might be a good steward but with high prices due to the education costs you take on teaching the API to others. Someone can piggy back on your work, charge a lower price and never do their own further design work.

You can compete without copying the API, just design your own or use an open source one. Yes it would be hard for people to switch libraries when they have existing code but it is possible to rewrite the client software.

It is allowed by many copyright holders. Virtually all open source software and a number of other commercial platforms particularly when the API has been designed or released by or to an industry consortium.

I see it as a perfectly valid reason not to choose a platform with a closed API and while I feel sorry for those that are locked to one theynreallynshould have considered it at the start. I still don't see it as an essential issued.

I've enjoyed this conversation but I suspect no one is watching apart from us so while I wanted to answer your questions so as not to be rude and ignore them I plan not to post again on this thread.
> The truth is that there is a lot of variability between PIs and their students. Some see them as lab techs/free labor, others see them as their family.

Very true.

I'd add: There is also a wide range of management styles of the profs. Some are hands-off (come back and see me in a month), others want hourly updates. The best ones dial their style upon recognizing which way the student works best.
How to get the word out about your exciting new web app
You can't electrolyze urea by solving it in water and passing electricity through the solution, for that you'd have to melt pure urea and electrolyze that. Problem is that it will decompose above its melting point.

So, even when urea is solved in the water, only the water is electrolyzed (in hydrogen and oxygen).
Good analysis. 'Pro', to me, means more screen real-estate, not less. Consumer, as in the consumption of content, means a sharper, prettier screen with a lower effective resolution.

It's interesting that in this iteration, it seems that these qualities have switched product lines. The Air now seems to be the choice for professional work, for the reasons you describe in your last sentence. I do hope that as they roll out the display across their products they continue to ship a model with a larger effective@native resolution.
Exactly. HFT reduces counterparty risk for market makers (because with HFT, it's much more likely that there will be a counterparty for any given trade). This enables the market makers to reduce their bid-ask spreads; the profit from the bid-ask spread is what covers the risk a market maker faces from their market clearing obligations.
As pointed out by others, it is not good to paint everyone by the same brush. My advisor has always had the best of intentions in his mind for me. I know of other studens who say something similar as well. I understand that there an be varying experiences but do not let these experiences make you generalize any fraternity.
I would suggest changing the title to "the dangers of not fixing problems found in code review", the very first example shows code review being an effective means of finding problems, and the presumption is that they just let the problem slide instead of refusing to merge the change until it was fixed.

The problem of changes being to big ... is another instance where you're ignoring the results of the code review. "This change is too big for me to review effectively" is a 100% legitimate problem with a change. The change should get rejected on that basis alone.
It's like the old saw: a man can go from liberal to conservative in 30 years without changing his position on any issue.

It's pretty much inevitable that the country will move to the left; it's called progress. The choice we make every four years is whether to change faster ("progressive") or slower ("conservative"). In thirty years' time the Republican stance on many issues will be about where the democratic one is now (supporting a weak form of socialized healthcare, pretty committed to gay marriage but with only vague support of transgender rights, not entirely averse to cannabis legalization but certainly wanting tight regulation...), they'll be popular among older people, while Democrats will have a position much further to the left and be popular among younger people. This is the way it's always been.

That doesn't make the conservative side "wrong", unless you consider old people in general to be wrong; the job of the political parties is to reflect the electorate.
To my knowledge there is no equivalent of the Controlled Substances Act. Prostitution laws are all state laws.
Did anyone notice how Skype now shows ads on the their iPhone app? Far as I'm concerned it and live messenger have the same overall experience. I'd do away with Skype if I weren't using it to keep in touch with clients.
Thanks for the heads up. Might have a bash if I can be bothered. I already know how to set up IRC servers though (I was an op for a few years).
Nvidia  GeForce R310 Drivers for Linux Gaming Announced
Like I said, I'm happy for him to get credit for nailing it. But I'm pretty sure that conclusion's based on misunderstanding his forecasts. Unless I missed it somewhere, he's never said "VA is going to Obama, IA's going to Obama, NC's going to Romney, etc." If he has, please provide a link.

For analogy, let's say I have a biased coin. I tell you that I'm pretty sure it comes up heads 75% of the time. Then we flip it and it comes up heads. Did I "nail it?" No. The coin coming up heads is stronger evidence in favor my "model" (P[heads] = 0.75) than if it had come up tails, but it's pretty far from conclusive. The logic doesn't change if I tell you that the probability of heads is 90%, 99.9%, or whatever. (but, if I say it's 99.9% and it comes up tails, I'll concede that the model's wrong. If the prediction is extreme enough, a single observation can invalidate the model).

To extend the analogy, we only know if I have a good model for this biased coin if we flip it a bunch of times and roughly 3/4 of the outcomes are heads. If we can't do that, because the coin flip is a one-off event (stretching the analogy quite a bit, but whatever), we still could tell if I'm good at modeling coin flips: if you give me a bunch of different coins, I give you a probability of heads for each one, and then we see whether the proportion of heads after we flip each one is close to the average of the probabilities I gave (i.e., let B(i) be 1 if the ith coin is heads, 0 if it's tails. Then n^{-1/2} (B(1) - Prob[coin 1 is heads] + B(2) - Prob[coin 2 is heads] + ... + B(n) - Prob[coin n is heads]) obeys a CLT and -- if the probabilities are right -- it becomes normal with mean zero and known variance as n gets large).

If I tell you that each probability is .75 or some other number greater than 0.5 but less than 1, and all the coins always come up heads than I'm not "nailing it." But, I want to emphasize, it's premature to say that that's what's going on with Silver's predictions. And from what I've read of his blog, he completely understands this and explains it well.

edit: minor change for clarity in the first and third paragraphs.