skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probably not directly applicable to you, but I thought I'd share my experience:

"The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, effective April 21, 2000, applies to the online collection of personal information from children under 13. The new rules spell out what a Web site operator must include in a privacy policy, when and how to seek verifiable consent from a parent and what responsibilities an operator has to protect children's privacy and safety online."

One of the reasons I didn't become a web developer in grade school is that when this bill was first written, Geocities decided to comply by modifying their TOS, and then unilaterally terminating edit access to a 12-year-old's account. After turning 13, they refused to reinstate or accept another signup from the same email due to TOS violations. The site remained up, though thankfully without any personal info on it. You can imagine the countermeasures I took after that against a similar attack. Teaching the children that they have to lie and ignore contractual/legal restrictions to do anything useful becomes a standard very early that continues through their contact with music, games, movies, pornography, filesharing, alcohol, drugs, and hookups. "Protect the Children" is an easy, cowardly rallying cry for a Joe Lieberman or a Tipper Gore, but teaching them that all the good stuff happens behind an adult's/corporation's back robs them of their free will within the bounds of the law, and of their respect for anything the powers that be are trying to do.

It is my contention that internet pseudonymity / anonymity is a treasured part of our culture, and part of the way we route around damage. It is essentially required of our minors due to the way we disenfranchise them while simultaneously requiring an online presence for a lot of personally & socially beneficial activities. The hideous notion recently brought up of criminalizing a TOS violation and tying it to jail-time would largely shut minors out of the Internet altogether, by any reasonable cautionary standard. A constellation of laws which requires broad criminality, and is completely selectively enforceable, brings the status of rule of law itself into question.

On this November 6, let's say this: I don't think minors would be in quite so dire of a position if we could all (read: All American Citizens) vote.
> No. Every business has a risk element, but what makes this gambling is that there is no good or service being produced.

I was not aware that this is what defines gambling. And "no service produced" is certainly wrong by accepted economic theory - arbitrageurs provide a price discovery service for everyone; they get rewarded for exposing the inefficient prices, even though it is done through market mechanics rather than a specific customer.

OP appears to be a statistical arbitrageur - which is the same concept, except that it includes a shift in time or space (and incurs risk). You might not be interested in this price discovery service, but other people are paying for it with their wallet. (And it's mostly the market makers who pay for this with reduced profits)

> one trader's gain being another trader's loss (relative to market returns).

That's not true in investing in general - when shares have time to appreciate or depreciate, it is definitely not a zero sum game. Everyone can win, or everyone can lose, or anything in between (it all depends on your time range, and your measure of loss or profit. The "non-zero-sum" element arrives partly from companies using operating profit to buy back their own shares).

> Because there's a commission on trades, and because you pay taxes on net gains but your minimum tax is zero, high frequency trading by its very nature must a loss for most players.

That's only true if all players are hf players. If there is sufficient non-HF activity, then the zero-sum argument does not hold.

(I'm not saying that it's not a good approximation - in most time scales, in most scenarios, it is - but it is not the mathematical truth you imply it is)
Show HN: Where should you live for your sleeping habits?
Haha, there is no such a thing as an 'idiotic' open source project. Remember, most open source has always started as someone scratching his own itches, be it something as awesome as Linus developing a whole new OS just to run Prince of Persia, or one of my many lame contribution to other projects (e.g: fixing some weird behavior on new tabs in Gedit. How 'revolutionary' is that?).

If your itch is displaying all colors in the RGB palette with all their possible alphas, well then... just do it. If nothing else, it'll definitely help you think about how long it takes to iterate over the millions of values that you can represent in 32 bits. It's good programmer food for thought :)
OED has the source if you have access to it, which I don't or I would provide it here.
Thank you so much for writing this. I've been on the fence (fences?) deciding on the right model for a laptop upgrade. The portability of the Air? Features of the "basic" 13" Pro? The screen of the 13" Retina? The much better performance of the 15" Retina? This is the first review I've read that adequately addresses the real-world performance issues of the newest member of the lineup.

I find the pricing of the current Mac laptop lineup to be out of whack with the feature steps between each level, which makes picking the best performance and value difficult.
Also, if anyone thinks getting rid of patents would get rid of litigstion, it wouldn't. An informal, ad-hoc patent like system would arise on top of NDA's and other contracts. Thse companies are always transacting with each other. Instead of suing Samsung for patent infringement, Apple would be suing for Samsung's copying Apple technology in violation of contractual obligations arising from Samsung's status as a supplier for Apple. Instead of patent litigstion in the ITC, we'd have litigstion over humongous iron clad contracts with suppliers in foreign countries.
Voting Machine "flipping votes" from earlier taken out of service
WOOT, more Parse spam.
I think a system of repeatability for voting is important. Once a voter has casted a vote, his vote should be able to be repeated without change in different systems at will to verify that his vote has not been tampered.

The system can work like this:

- Voter is assigned a unique ID, on his voting card issued upon verifying his identity. He can pick a security pin for added security.

- Voter is given a device thumb drive, RFID with some RAM, whatever storage device.

- Voter goes to a machine to vote. The machine cryptographically signs the voting result with his id. The machine writes the result to his storage device, emails him a copy, and/or puts the result on a public website. The machine also sends the result to a central server for compilation.

- Voter can go to any other machine on any other sites, plug in his result, his id, and his pin to see the voting result for verification. Voter can confirm by sending the result to central server. Or submit the signed result to third party website to display it for verification.

- If there's any mismatch, voter raises hell and demands to invalidate old vote (after verifying his identity, id, and pin), revote, and burn the tampering machine.

Edit: Id obviously means a public/private key pair.
Many networks engage in a practice know as peering. If the author was the peering co-ordinator for his AS, he may have likely been previously in touch with the peering co-ordinator on Moratel's side when establishing a peering relationship, and would thus have had direct contact information to a pretty direct channel (peering co-ordinators are generally also network engineers). The direct contact information being e-mail, phone, IM, or even IRC (yes, some network engineers still use it). Although, the phone (non-VOIP) would be the only option not tied in to IP.
I was wondering about the password change scenario and the FAQ at your link gives some clue. So basically, if you are using this scheme/tool for your passwords than you are basically remembering the changing words (bills1, bills2 etc). This isn't really any different than remembering your passwords (if you are into making password strings of your own).

I guess a local password manager is good enough repository for passwords as it also lets you generate passwords.
Vote buying is not about a voluntary market in a tradeable commodity - it is about your boss not being able to say 'prove you vote my way or I will sack you' or your landlord saying 'prove you vote may way or I will evict you'.
Just to save someone else from having to look for it like we both did, his initial investment was

$10k loan from dad. Built it up to 30k trading manually before my automated program went live.
Did you try scrolling using Safari instead of Chrome/Firefox? With the Retina display, scrolling is significantly smoother on Safari (aka it's not smooth on a 15" Retina on Chrome either).
While writing his own trading system is a decent accomplishment, due to things such as an overall rising market in the time period involved and survivorship bias, the original author is likely to be completely mistaken about the reason for his winnings.

Given that he might convince other people to engage in high tech gambling in a less-favorable market than the one he operated in, strong words are called for in this case.
MS open-sources Reactive Extensions
Did you find a write up on getting it to work with Arch?
Less is more — and here’s why.
Thanks for trying the app. How does the technique work for you? I don't have any official numbers, but it seems like many people can type 30+ words per minute with very little learning. Faster with practice.

Currently no chording for numbers or programmer symbols. Basic punctuation marks (,.:;?! etc.) are predicted at the end of words. Caps Lock is the current toggle switch, but I'll be adding a custom option in the next version.
Unfortunately, my city is not available as an option. They should have a location select using Google Maps or something.
Established media sources (preferably with some statistical analysis showing pro-Democrat anomalies) rather than random blogs would be nice, but thanks.
Make calls for Election Day
I couldn't agree more. However, that isn't the case with the new 13.
In Spain in 1936 the Francoists shot a proportion of people on the voter lists of the Government Parties.
Even without the "ensure" ... what did this network engineer at CloudFlare do anyway? it was a hardware failure.
Any recommended statrting points? LinuxMips wiki is very informative, but not very helpful...
Why? People have been voting third party for more than a hundred years and it hasn't worked. The duopoly is still in power, ignoring you with impunity. All you're doing is giving up your chance to affect the election.

If you want more options the only way to get them is electoral reform. First we need to get rid of the electoral college so your vote matters even if you don't live in Ohio. The way to achieve this is to get your state to sign the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

Then, we need to start holding runoff elections when no candidate gets 50%, so you can vote third party without throwing away your vote.
Did you do the scripting in Eagle? I usually just clone things a schematic building block, although that means that I have to redo the layout for each one.

I haven't made any boards for manufacturing, only one off boards. I like to keep things spaced out so if I need to get in and cut/jumper I can. Soon though, I'll make a board for manufacture. Then the DRC come into play.

I dislike the uncertainty in the footprints. I just sent a board out with a footprint I made, and I didn't have the parts yet to see if they would fit the dimensions. It's all a big guessing game. The Sparkfun library is pretty awesome in that regard (sharing files). I like how they say 'Production tested', keeping quality up when tons of people on Upverter are making footprints may be hard, although if you have a hundred or so 'tested' footprints you might be in the clear.
We'd have to pretty much tear up the Constitution, but I like the idea.

Why even have representatives, just let everyone vote on every issue directly via their Hacker News login?
Per the usual, the witness 'suicided'.
And Mike Bostock, and the rest of the team!

I am still sad that fivethirtyeight got swallowed by NYT. fivethirtyeight has a much better reputation in my mind, I would have loved to see it grow into its own powerhouse.
I'm not in the beta (just used the download link above) so sadly I lack such a channel. But broadly in my experience your suggestion simply doesn't work. Betas are for bug reports. Criticism of the code never makes it to the dev team, period.

On the other hand, it strikes me as quite likely that some of them read HN...
It's not so bad... I recognize 9! :)
The failure has nothing to do with BGP either.
I think you meant to say Democrats have been accused of working to make it more difficult for the military to vote when deployed
Looks like most of the graphics on 538 are using <canvas> which makes me think they weren't made with d3. So that's rather curious for me.
Arq will pop up a little dialog when adding a new folder.
Of course. Voting for a third party and working for electoral reform are, thankfully, not mutually exclusive options.
This is definitely true. Also, it's worth noting that I had to fake the screenshot - screenshots taken in "more space" mode are taken at the res they're rendered at. I took a screenshot of my screen at that res, switched back to "best for retina", put the screenshot full-screen and took another screenshot of that. It looks pretty much the same to me, but there could be subtleties about the live downscaling that the OS is doing that are different when it's a screenshot vs the actual screen.
I guess I was making the observation personally that my priorities are very out of sync with wishing for Jobs' life. I don't think anyone else should have the same priorities as I do. I'm terrified of dying and would like to life as long as I can. I would also feel badly if I knew I died earlier than necessary for psychological reasons.
Woah, you weren't kidding about switching away from XMonad first. That is the most broken focus switching I've ever seen -- and that's after I figured out why I couldn't click anything in the window.
That's not really what is under discussion here.
I wonder if they delete your files if you stop paying?
In the US, HFT is mostly synonymous with "all out tech war, flooding the order queue so your less-equipped peers get lags". (Nanex publishes analysis on these events, which are not occuring several times a month and keep accelerating).

In Europe, HFT is mostly what OP describes, because they have reasonable control (e.g., you have to have one execution per 10 orders or pay a fine; in US exchanges, you can sometime finds 10,000 orders submitted in 3 seconds, hundreds of thousands per hour, with 10-20 executions).

> Also limiting trades isn't really adequate risk management. The tech exists to very accurately model your exposures.

That's basically what AIG did with copulas. Unfortunately, the assumptions in these models tend to break during crisis, when correlations go to one. And AIG went bankrupt.

Limiting trades, done correctly (mathematically AND legally) is the ONLY way to do risk management properly. With more assumptions, you can have "more efficient" risk management in terms of leverage (e.g., you can net S&P and RUSSELL exposure by assuming their correlation structure) - but as AIG has shown, that does not mean you are doing a better job of managing your risk.
I'm not sure why he says the effective resolution is 1280x800. The resolution is 2560x1600. I just sold my 13" Air and bought a 13" rMBP; very happy with it so far.
Have you observed central count?

I think you'll be less enthusiastic once you understand how it works.

In my jurisdiction, ballots are stuffed into an image scanner (like a high speed fax) as they arrive, the votes are detected, any ambiguous votes are "electronically adjudicated" meaning workers alter the database to correct for voter intent or write ins. There's a nightly summary report, allowing people to peek at early results.

Add the problems with USPS losing 1% of all first class mail, and the lower end demographics being more mobile (changes of address), you get some real disenfranchisement issues.

It's true that vote by mail increases turnout, mostly with primary and special elections.

It's also true that vote by mail silently disenfranchises about the same number of people it enfranchises.

The correct solution is postal ballots for people who need them, poll sites for every one else. Thereby maximizing the number of people enfranchised and minimizing the number disenfranchised.
> I'm skeptical for two reasons. (1) because your methods are so unconventional in an industry where convention rules, and (2) because of the time frame of your success,

I was also in this business, and there's nothing unconventional about his methods. It would, in fact, closely describe the methods of more than one shop I'm familiar with. (Except they WERE able to overcome the declines). And the 3-6 month indicator lifetime looks eerily familiar.

And these places are anything but "convention rules" - it's "creativity rules, before our competitors get creative enough".

> When someone shows me strategies that worked in 2009 and 2010, I immediately make them prove their strategy was not the equivalent of being long equities.

Assuming the OP is telling the truth, there is no equivalent "long equities" strategy that would make 1500% profit over 6 months (%3000 annualized), with a max drawdown of 20% ($2000 on $10000 - but his max drawdown was probably closer to 5% than to 20%). You are welcome to demonstrate that there is.

Sounds to me like you are doing low frequency strategies; it's a completely different ballgame than HFT. He's done 400,000 trades, half of them long, half of them short. It might have been luck, and he might have been riding something underlying the equities, but this is NOT equivalent to being long equities. He might have found a way to get non-linear leverage (rather than prediction). But that's also worth a lot of money in the right hands.

> buy 10 RUT futures at the beginning of the day, sell 10 at the end, and just scratch 1 lots for the other 998 trades. In a bull market like 09-10, that would have made 400k, and would have nothing to do with Machine Learning or its applications to HFT.

That may be (I wasn't trading in 2009-2010, and don't remember the movements or the required margins), but that would have had much higher volatility (and days with much more than $2000 loss) than the OP had. (Assuming, of course, he is telling the truth)
The most recent example was this year in Florida, when the time frame for early voting was shortened to ensure that only one Sunday fell in it rather than the usual two. They did this with the knowledge that Sundays during early voting swing extremely liberal, thanks to primarily black churches encouraging their communities to vote and providing transportation.
I keep hearing about the importance of measuring and I found this article to be really practical and approachable about the subject.

Where can I educate myself more about this stuff?
Ah. Depressing, but not surprising.
Not to mention Apple's making the same mistakes over and over. Same shitty glossy screen. Same idiotic mania to make products thinner at the expense of battery life (especially stupid from the company that swears you never need to change a battery). Same keyboards with no real Delete keys.

Now glued-in batteries. Soldered-in RAM.

This entire decline of Apple's product line reflects massive failure to recognize what Apple has helped prove: a lot of people don't need a computer. Computer users and tablet users are DIVERGING, so the last thing the devices should do is CONVERGE. If someone fires up a computer now, he needs a COMPUTER and not a crippled gimmick. Why would I buy a computer if it's just a tablet with a keyboard? I can buy... A TABLET WITH A KEYBOARD.

People are finally realizing that Apple is sadly detached from real-world usage, but they've been getting a free pass on it for decades. Literally decades. They capitalized when the competition simply showed greater stupidity than they did:

1. Creative Labs utterly blew the design and marketing of MP3 players.

2. Everyone blew the UI and functionality of cell phones, which pretty much fell off a cliff after the StarTAC.

3. Microsoft became moribund, lost, and increasingly irrelevant as the only things a lot of people needed to do were surf the Web and play media.

The sheen is off. It may be fiascoes like Maps that started some critical thinking, but there are many more fundamental problems that reveal Apple's dire need for a common-sense overhaul of its product line. Stuff like this: http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/06/will-apple-ever-fix-i...
The other argument for this is that the ability to have better control of your immediate community/district is really useful in avoiding or stopping decisions that can destroy or permanently harm those neighborhoods. Local politics reflects really well the kind of struggles localities and communities go through, even if sometimes NIMBY kicks in and leaves everyone worse off.
Evan Williams thinks it’s harder to start a tech company today [video]
Well, from an archival point of view, jwz's blog post I expect will last for some time (I believe he understands the value of durable URLs). On the other hand, either Google Code or the Xee project have managed to break the direct link that was submitted to HN last time (less than 4 years ago).

So that Google code link is the original source today, but it might not be tomorrow.
First - this is taken from http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/109714/nate-silver-the-times%E...

Second (as is clear from source article but, once more): via https://twitter.com/JanetCoats/status/265925450696642561

@fivethirtyeight did not account for 20% of NYT traffic; 20% of visitors to NYT looked at 538. Big difference, my math-challenged friends.
Paper ballots are a must, I agree, because they can be counted by hand, but they don't have to be, at least not at first. Electronic counting/scanning of paper ballots can be trusted – it's not that difficult to verify the counting for a small (known) set of test ballots and use the machine to count the rest. If there's doubt, then hand-count... but hand-counts are fallible too – mainly because the human is the weak link, of course (we make mistakes, even when we try not to) =)
Stop Showing Ads to People Who Have Already Purchased
With a conversion pixel, you can now label people who have already converted on your ad, thus saving advertising $.
The first point hits close to home; I have twice been in the position of losing happy, paying customers due to other decision-makers getting involved. I work for an agency, not a start-up, but it's the same process: convince someone within an organization to pay you large sums of cash for services.

In both cases, we were providing services to a single product group within a company large enough that those product groups can act nearly autonomously. And in both cases, the corporate office came to the (quite rational) decision that having ten product groups using ten different agencies was inefficient. In one case, corp's pet agency became the agency of record; in the other case, they actually built an in-house department from scratch and stopped using agencies altogether.

If there's a moral to this story, it's to scale that ladder. If your product/service/whatever only has one customer within a large organization, your use is vulnerable to consolidation moves. But, if your one user is happy and satisfied, you can often use that to gain wider traction within a company. In addition to more customers, it's a much safer position to be in when someone from on high wants to start standardizing across the organization.