skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Douglas Adams had something to say along these lines:
http://wso.williams.edu/~rcarson/lizards.html
Look at who the owners of breweries and distilleries were pre-Prohibition, and after. Before - small businesses, essentially micro-brewers, spread out across the country. After - Anheuser-Busch and a few others. QED.
Quote: "MediaHint.com is a provider of free of charge proxy server services that are accessible via MediaHint browser extensions"

As it says in the privacy policy, they are only proxy service providers. The add-ons are supposed to do just that, use their proxy.
Given 9 swing states, that gives 512 different possibilities. Nate ranked these possibilities. The actual result (assuming Florida ends up democratic) was his top pick, with a 20% probability. (Unfortunately, this site no longer appears to be available in its previous form).

In 2008, he only got 49/50 of the states right. Yet pundits still call this a victory for Nate.

To judge the accuracy of silver's prognostications, take the top 5 or so of his "most probable scenarios", which added to gether give a probability way above 50%. Did one of these scenarios manifest? Yes, his top scenario manifested. His second most probable scenario included a Republican Florida, which still might happen.

So yes, Nate nailed it.
The problem with a straight popular vote is that it is much more susceptible to attack.

Take a jurisdiction like Chicago which is known for voter fraud and high turnout among the dead. Under our current system, no matter how compromised that system is, its impact is limited to that state.. it can only swing some Electoral Votes (and everything state and local).

With a straight popular vote, that compromised system would put the overall system at much bigger risk.

The Electoral College serves as a corruption firewall between systems.. not perfect, but significantly better than the alternative.
I always seem to forget about this feature. I just installed the Skype Win8 App last night and spent the whole time switching screens. I just tried Win + . and it made the experience a lot better.

I don't have a Surface (yet) but I bet that feature alone makes it worth it for multi-taskers.
Which kind of support do you would wish for Python?
Ok then, mea culpa. I guess I take it for granted that anyone actually pays attention to talking heads. IMO, they have been completely useless since the OJ trial.
I don't really need webcam, speakers, usb, firewire, ethernet or a magsafe connector.

Gorgeous body would be great.

What monitor would you suggest?
Fall getaways around Memphis, Tennessee - Memphis Travel | Examiner.com
The problem with this argument is that you are hypothesizing a case that, if it were going to be happening, would be happening now, not in the future. Yet it does not. There is no great epidemic of confused 911 operators because they can't make out whether or not someone on the other end used literally "correctly".

While one can speculate on why you might be wrong about this being a problem, an examination of the world around us rather strongly suggests that there's no question that there is something fatally wrong with your argument.
So… this can't last very long can it ?
They could always build a Thunderbolt display with a built-in GPU.
Unfortunately I don't have sources to cite or know enough about the topic to explain it eloquently but I know you're wrong. Tool use is far more abstract and requires much more intelligence. The animal has to recognize and understand the problem at hand, the fact that they can create a tool, and then the method of using that tool. Nesting is an evolutionary trait that has existed for a long time.
> just like three betting preflop and cbetting the flop doesnt work anymore.

So true, and frustrating. But, the legalization of online play could bring back another boom at least for a couple of years.
Just found this - http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/the-ips-lcd-revolut...
Atwood did a decent write up about them. It's a good place to start.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/the-ips-lcd-revolut...

Edit: and you found it.
So you're telling me risky investments in possibly revolutionary startups can fail? If we go back to writing by PG, failures like this are proof we are making risky a enough investments to actually make a big difference.
Some historical context may be helpful here: For a very long time Washington state had a highly regulated, tiered program for selling liquor. Very recently, this was privatized. The marijuana legislation that passed, I-502, very closely apes this structure - which kept financial interest in the production, distribution and retail of liquor separate - hence the separate taxation at each "tier".

The explanation here could best be summed up as "the devil you know".

Further, as with liquor, this decriminalizes personal possession without requiring tax stamps. This tax structure is in place to regulate and generate revenue from the production, distribution an retail of marijuana - not necessarily the consumption.
Hacker wanted for offensive cyber attacks
This is really quite exciting for me. I've used Rx.NET a bit, and for sure will be using Rx++ for my next project. Having it open source is just icing on the cake.
I think there are lots of factors to consider, but the electoral college limits, to a certain extent, the "ground game" advantage Obama had. This is making an assumption that Obama's ground game was scalable, because if we went on popular vote, Obama would be able to ramp up that ground game all over the country, just as he did in the swing states.

What the electoral college incentivizes is isolated ad spending and campaign stumping in the battleground states. It's clear that this aspect of campaigning would change substantially if the electoral college were eliminated, so strategic advantages would be sought elsewhere and I think the ground game would become a focal point.
Obviously more people will try it if it is legal, but it's pretty ubiquitous now and most adults have already had the chance to sample and decide.

As for the "cost to society", I have to imagine that any damage from use (and there's not much evidence for it) would be countered by the decrease in real damage done by the War on Drugs.
Freescale i.MX6 devboard wandboard www.wandboard.org starts at 69 USD for the Cortex-A9 single core and the dualcore cost 89 USD. Openhardware with schematics and full sourcecode
I find this really interesting, but I'm unclear on the proof that this made a big difference for Obama's campaign success. I'm sure Romney had people crunching the numbers as well, and he actually raised more money than Obama.

This was a pretty narrow victory, there are a lot of structural, ideological, and demographic biases at work here, and Obama did worse among most groups than he did in 2008.

Put another way, is there any evidence that Obama would have lost or even done much worse without this data crunching effort?
I've personally launched and tanked two projects so far. In both occassions it was a matter of my competitor having more money, meaning more dedicated programmers putting in dedicated time.

I have a full time day-job and a family, so I could scrunch in some time whenever I could and successfully launched:

Oracle of Legends

Dotademy

Both were database websites for League of Legends and Dota 2 respectively, it was met with lots of love and kind words and usage. At it's peak I was looking at 25,000 daily users, with thousands voting on couterpicks for the champions/heroes. It was a "success" in my book.

Unfortunately around that time a website called Lolking was picked up by the Zam Gaming network (they own Wowhead, etc) and obviously that now had a team working on it as their job.

A team of devs working full time > a single dev working a couple of hours a week.

I learned a lot, had fun making it, but was sad when I ultimately pulled the plug. Who knows, I may revisit the websites and launch them for an international market. So far none of the big websites has localization and I know the latinamerican crowd is huge, so there's that. :)

All in all I spend 60$ for 4 months of hosting, nothing more.
A truer description might be that the brand is being axed.

I believe that Skype has been migrated onto a messenger backend... so really this is a unification of the chat tech onto messenger, and the brand onto Skype.
Company Announces 65nm Chip for Mining Bitcoins, Funded with Venture Capital
Converting a .Net Console Project to an Azure Worker Role Project
Superstorm Sandy from Formation to Landfall
Could you explain your moral philosophy in a bit more detail?

Specifically, individuals in group A performed injustices back in the 60's and earlier against individuals in group B. Therefore, different individual members of group A (and other unrelated groups [1]) should be discriminated against in favor of different individual members of group B (all of whom were born after the 60's)?

So following this logic, should we discriminate against the children/relatives of criminals in favor of the children of crime victims?

What if group C disproportionately commits crimes today. Should non-criminal members of group C be discriminated against? Does it matter how group C is defined? I.e., is the statement true if group C is {x : x.race = REFERENCE_RACE}, but false if C is { x : x.ssn % 100 == 3 || x.isCriminal }?

I guess my fundamental question is this. You seem to implicitly hold some conception of group rights, and believe that certain groups are worthy of moral consideration. I doubt you believe that all 2^(6 billion) subsets of humanity are worthy of moral consideration, however. So how do you determine which subsets of humanity are worthy of moral consideration?

[1] I.e., asians should be discriminated against because whites were mean to blacks (and asians) in the past.
I seriously doubt Obama is now completely unconcerned with his future in politics. He's much to young to hail mary his second term like this and there's no precedent that would indicate anything of to sort. Also, he's going to be focused on winning back the house in 2014. As it stands, he's in for more gridlock over the next 2 years given the split in congress.

Remember, this is the same guy that supported the NDAA, has increased drone usage both locally and abroad, and didn't take to well to the whole Bradley Manning/wikileaks deal (also, what was his stance on sopa/pipa). Obama is only for "open government" to the extent that it furthers his party's agenda.
They're not necessarily so complicated. For example: you get a receipt, check it, and put it in a box. Another voter takes it home and can validate it against the official count.

This system was designed by a couple cryptographers, one of them Ron Rivest of RSA fame. For details on this and a couple other simple voting systems, see here:
http://rangevoting.org/RivSmiPRshort.html
No, the uncertainty is correlated. Each individual state might have a 60% chance for Obama but all of them will tend to vote the same way.
Ask HN: MSN REplacement
At my company we used MSN as an internal communication tool, but apparently it's shutting down so this might be a good opportunity to start using something better. What does HN suggests?
Something with maybe some cool thing for developers would be great since we(devs) will mostly use it.

Thanks
In order to be a decent bargaining chip they would need to bring more users to Linux desktop though. They can't really say "Give us what we want or we'll move to a platform with 1% of the userbase" without having their bluff called.
I don't think so. :)

Unless they constantly change their proxy's IP and play cat and mouse with the targeted websites. That is possible without user intervention because they use a self-hosted file (http://mediahint.com/default.pac) to setup the proxy through the use of their extension.
I don't hear a glissando in the ad, where should it be?

At around 0:15, just as the bigger iPad is going out of the picture, a third piano enters the song.
I have junkie friends. I also have alcoholic friends. The winner of the "who is more fucked up" medal goes to those without a good support system or those whose underlying issues / mental illness / pathology are harder to treat. Spend enough time around addicts and you realize the drug of choice doesn't matter. I knew a girl in rehab who was a compulsive shopper. I didn't even realize that was a thing but there's a fancy word for it and everything: Oniomania.

This comment is making me realize that I have a lot of fucked up friends.

Anyway, I'm fighting an anecdote with an anecdote but the most harmful thing about addiction is getting thrown in jail, getting jail marked down on your permanent record, being afraid to ask for help (or help being unavailable) because Johnny Law is getting tough on crime. The substance doesn't matter.
It's not clear whether you mean that link as a rejoinder or as a supporting argument for the parent. My take is that it supports the parent.
Not a biologist but my guess would be that nest building is more or less "hardcoded reproduction code (perfected over time)" and this case is one of seeing a problem, finding a tool to fix the problem.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In Comments

Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

...

Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.
This seems like a great trending topic detection algorithm, but nothing revolutionary. The "hours in advance" part is probably more to do with the scale of twitter's data and their decisions about when to publish topics on their website than it does the novelty of the approach.

It seems like a great and tested method for developing your own trending topics algorithm, which could be useful in other contexts. I wonder if this could be applied to corporate email servers to let management spot issues before they're brought up.
Well, depends on where you are really. For instance, here in the Netherlands, you barely follow courses (20-25 EC in four years) and the teaching load is small (usually at least one 5 EC course in four years, more if you want).

So, you can dedicate ~80% of your time to research as a paid employee of the university, including ~ 1.5 months paid leave including weekends, holiday money (8% of year income), 13th month (one month extra salary per year) and benefits (retirement fund, unemployment benefit).

I have just finished my thesis, and during the last four years I have felt as welcome and as much part of the staff as any other employee.
It doesn't change whether you committed an offence or not, but it should, and does, impact the punishment you receive for it.

In this case I would argue the sentencing guidelines are too restrictive; although they were given punishments at the lower bound (three years in prison), this was still completely disproportionate to the crime they committed.

The crime they committed was not a violent one, and did not significantly harm anyone. It diverted money away from criminal gangs towards charitable projects. The couple involved were of good character, and did not pose a danger to society by any stretch of the imagination.

I think it's plain to see locking them up for three years is a colossal waste of taxpayers' money.
Nor am I. My opinion is that most of these guys are interchangeable, and (of the elite subset they are part of) quite average.

"Underwhelming" is a good descriptor. I've yet to experience someone describable as "good".
Payments Company Braintree Waives Fees On The First $50,000 in Transactions
I saw this post and applied online for their promotion. I have just started and because of this went and even set up a bank account(didnot need one earlier since I have not raised money from outside) , TaxId etc to get this free transaction and here is the email I get from braintree sales rep

Your business model is known as third party aggregation, which is considered higher risk by most banks. We do have a bank that will underwrite you likely, however due to the risk of the business model they will implement a 5-10% 6 month rolling reserve. Unfortunately that means you will be ineligible for the promotion.
( I donot see this on their ad)

If you would like to continue the process and apply with them, I'll just need you to fill out the prescreening questions below. If you have any questions, I've CCed a sales rep, Eric Hall. They should be able to help you out.

Then there is a bunch of question below. My question to them was what are they providing more than paypal or stripe besides this promotion to even go with them. Does anybody else know?

Even to underwrite me they want last twelve months P/L, balance sheet and what not
A critical analysis of Dropbox software security
Maybe Apple and other corps. should offer subsidized housing in this part of Texas, to outsiders, with the criteria being that you must be against patent trolling.
Don't forget to factor in $70 - $100 (and the loss of the a USB port) for the miniDP to dual-link DVI adapter you need to drive one of those panels.
I had an almost exact same "forget-it-not-gonna-happen" conversation with an admissions officer at MSU around 1984 (I think). It was suggested to my parents that a substantial bribe would reverse my fortunes. We chose not to apply - I went to my local U instead - but they could have definitely afforded it: they were both high-earners (my dad headed a science lab and my mom was a professor) plus they both made the so-called northern coefficient (basically, 2.5x regular salary for living in Bumf--k Siberia).
> The problem looked innocent enough at first glance: given a circle and two points on the plane outside the circle, construct another circle passing trough those two points and touching the first circle at one point.But the solution is in fact quite complicated. Few of my future colleagues at Harvard and Berkeley would have been able to solve it right away. One must use “inversion,” a concept that was not studied in high school and hence could not possibly be allowed in this exam.

I became quite curious about solving this problem, I tried to look up what he means by "inversion" but could not find it. Anyone knows what it could be?

Update: Wikipedia suggests http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_in_a_point but obviously this is covered by high school program and is not very complicated.
Its a shame that this will almost certainly be shut down quickly. Just browsed Hulu and they have shows on there which I download on a weekly basis.

I do not watch much TV. I do not want to pay an extra £20/mo to get the hundred or so channels I need to watch the handful of shows I enjoy.

Instead to get access to shows I like reasonably quickly I need to frequent some ad-infested torrent crap hole to find the file. The alternative is wait for it to come on DVD which can be up to or beyond 9 months after the show has finished airing in the states.

I would happily pay for hulu. I would happily buy advanced access for individual series. Maybe this advanced access fee could then become a voucher to own the series? Promote a purchase after the series has finished?

Unfortunately due to geography this isn't allowed... so I will keep downloading torrents and keep giving ad revenue to some unscrupulous torrent site owner. Not because I am bad person. Its because the entertainment industry hasn't figured out a way to give me an option to access their content.

Note: I subscribe to Netflix - which is great if you don't want up-to-date episodes of TV shows. Why I can't buy credits to watch the latest season or two is beyond me.
Startup Weekend begins its 2012 Global Startup Battle
You'll probably need a Mini DisplayPort to Dual-link DVI adapter as well, if you're driving one of the Korean displays from a recent Mac. Apple sells one for a hundred dollars, or monoprice has one for $70: http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=104&c...

Just something to keep in mind when you're budgeting.
Looking for Rails Enthusiasts
I'm more worried about the HD 4000 driving a Retina display than I am about the resolution. I moved from a 15" MBP to a 13" MBP and it's never really bothered me.
Despite common wisdom to the contrary, documented vote fraud is virtually nonexistent in the United States. Highly (overly) motivated individuals with all the resources of government behind them are unable to find it. You can read a summary in this Justice Department report, http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/s0809a/chapter6.htm , skip on down to "Voter Fraud and Public Corruption Matters".

We do have a fair bit of voter registration fraud, where a fictitious name is registered to vote. This is because registration is handled by the political parties paying contractors per registration, leading to fraud for money. The key is that even if Mickey Mouse, or the roster of the Dallas Cowboys is registered to vote multiple times in the country, they don't actually show up and do it.

There are cases of people deliberately multiple voting, but the most common fraud is a convicted felon who has lost their voting privilege continuing to vote. Some states have strange and complicated laws about which crimes render you ineligible to vote, and many felons are not well versed in the law. It certainly sucks to lose your probation because you tried to do your civic duty.
Apple must pay $368m after a court ruled FaceTime video calls infringed patents
RunKeeper's Marathon Plan for Startup Success: "We're Not in a Rush"
I leave my 15" rMBP in 1920 mode. Having two full A4 or 8.5x11 sheets of paper next to each other is too valuable when studying or doing research. The texts are invariably in PDF format. If I'm working on my notes, I'm on the web, if I'm working on a paper, I'm in LibreOffice. If I'm working on code, it's in emacs. Generally, inputs are on the right, and the working text is on the left. I frankly have no other use for such an incredible machine. I just wanted the screen.
> it means that 6 times out of 10 Obama would win and 4 times out of 10 Romney would win. If Obama won all 10 times, by his own account he would be wrong.

That's a very frequentist perspective. I think the Bayesian interpretation is a little more sensible. Given a prior estimate, updated with the information we have, it is logical to assume that Obama has a better chance of winning.

That is, Nate Silver's 60% doesn't mean that if the election in a given state were repeated, we'd see different results four times out of 10, but rather that his information in making the prediction was incomplete.
I believe Nate Silver is, by far, the best popularizer of statistical thinking in the U.S.
That scaling pixelated displays produces less satisfactory results than native resolutions is not news.

What is noteworthy is that the direction Apple is headed is toward competing on specifications such as pixel count rather than functional design.

Retina branding is in no small part about competing on pixel count. It is not significantly about competing on productivity.

Personally, if I am admiring the rendering of fonts on my screen, either the content is less than compelling or I am graphically designing with inadequate attention to a real world audience.
ROX brings some of RISC OS goodness to Linux/Unix desktops BTW.
(In theory) patents can only cover an implementation; you cannot get a patent on an idea or concept. In practice ...
A 100-year-old engineering puzzle is solved
The innovation solves a 100-year-old electrical engineering puzzle and paves the way for a more efficient and reliable electricity supply system.
Flagged. Patent awards are equitable compensation. A fine is a punitive measure.
I think she's on to something with fun educational DIY robotics projects. I wished my sun was a bit older, but I'll probably chip in anyways.
It's interesting that they mention email lists - I tried unsubscribing several times from the President's list, and it never worked. Anyone else notice this?