skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sort of comes down to the question of what's really being learned here?

That's a great question. We are learning to recognize trends and non-trends based on previous examples. Since the Twitter trends algorithm gives us such examples, you could say we are learning to replicate the outputs of an arbitrary algorithm --- and you'd be right. But learning from examples is a very general thing, so the method has applications beyond detecting trending topics.

Are they modeling some inherent process of topics becoming popular

No, we don't model the process of something becoming popular. (To do this, one might suppose people spread popular topics in X way and unpopular topics in Y way, and try to estimate from the data whether the topic is popular or unpopular.) The beauty of this is that we never have to build a model, because we rely directly on the data. As a corollary, this approach is applicable out of the box for any domain with time-varying data (though I suppose you might have to take care to measure the right kind of time varying data).

Does that answer your question?
Need of Unreasonable Obsession in the Startup Grind
Ask HN: How do you ask someone to join your board?
It's time for my gaming company to choose our first board of directors, and I've identified a number of potential members that could help a lot with their wisdom and experience. The thing is, I don't know many of them, and they're important people who probably get approached about a lot of things.

Does anyone have experience "cold calling" a request like this, or advice on how to approach them?
I find it remarkable that the 'management' would want to do this. This make their company look ridiculously out of touch; by now LOTS of people have seen and edited this code themselves, and have copies; you can't put that genie back in the bottle.

They could have used this to their advantage by simply allowing it to stay open but requiring that their company/brand name be used in the project (like Twitter Bootstrap), thus allowing the company to be seen as a supporter of the open source community without much effort on their part. Now they look the exact opposite of that, by doing something that would require huge effort and resources to achieve/maintain.
Rails is a good choice for your server-side code and will stay in fashion for a good while I suspect.

Don't forget that you're also going to want to know javascript for your front-end development.

I suspect node.js is going to come on strong over the next few years, but in most discussions I've been having recently, everybody I've spoken to still feels it's a bit to early to jump on that bandwagon. But if you want to get ahead of the curve, node might be the ticket.
Simple script to create a remote repo of your project in dropbox
What about smaller, privately owned businesses? For example, if you own a company worth $5,000,000 and die than your estate needs to come up with $2,500,000 in taxes.

The problem is, owning a company worth $5,000,000 doesn't mean you necessarily have $2.5 mil in spare cash laying around.

For this reason, estate taxes encourage businesses to go public so that they can convert the value of their business into liquid assets enabling their estate to easily pay taxes. Or, if going public isn't an option, often the estate needs to sell the business to a larger corporation.

End result is, these smaller $5 - $20 million dollar corporations disappear when the founder dies and they morph into bigger, lifeless enterprises. That's not to say all small businesses are great places to work, but if you ever talk to people that work for founder ran enterprises vs. shareholder ran enterprises there is often a significant difference in quality of life and in how the owners treat their workers.

Estate taxes kill small businesses and also raise very little revenue.
Their comments would be full of kindness and mutual respect.
Frightening.
http://new.weavesilk.com/?czjy
Thanks again for a great post. Not sure this really adds anything to the conversation, but felt that I should thank you again. For what its worth, I never thought you were dismissive of OOP; your original post seemed rather clear, if rather alpha in tone, that you thought the important thing was to use the tools at hand.

Funnily enough I was asking for the same reason that you had in mind: I have a child with an interest in robotics who recently hit the the limits of Mindstorms. Alas it has been 15 years since I last did any embedded programming so I am rather out of touch. (Indeed it has been a while since I have done any programming.) The silabs dev board seems to be an amazing deal in terms of the amount of peripherals and documentation available, thanks for pointing that out. I think I shall get one and have a fool around, it looks like great fun!
Yeah, what am I missing? In my view if you can start a business, you can start a business. If you need to be incubated... well that kind of takes the fun out of business.
He was lucky it was only Peterborough. It could have been Newcastle, or Glasgow. When you live in London everything is so busy that it becomes easy to assume that everyone else must live there too.
Interesting idea - I had implemented a similar symmetry concept in one of my ios apps (http://gravitypaint.com - if you want to check it out).

Why not extend it to also cover radial symmetry - should be easy to add and you can let the user set the angle etc...
Does this mean we have to stop using it? If they once released it under permissive license, can they just change it and sue me if I still use it?
I'm waiting for the people writing the CSS and HTML standards to do something like be more proactive about approving extensions so we don't need the -webkit garbage in front of rules.

It should be as simple as filling out a form requesting a property and getting it within a matter of weeks at the outside.

If you can apply for ".poop" as a top-level domain name, there's no excuse for not having a CSS registry.
Well, who's giving the State its legitimacy right now?

It's not some god in the sky that does. We do: not just a generic we, but most people reading this, you and me included. We choose to participate in the markets it establishes; it tells us what property rights are and says they're property rights because it says so and has the guns to back them up. The corporations we work for rely on it to break down people's doors when someone gets ahold of a next gen device that they misplaced, and we feel safe that the money we put into our banks is safe for us because the State will yell at the bank if it takes our money and pay for it if the bank loses it.

There's no reason a protection agency wouldn't do the same to establish its own legitimacy. It seems like a good business model, in fact: convince everyone that questioning it is morally bad, create some ideal of "citizenship" that amounts to brand loyalty to violence, and then expropriate value from a populace that's not only cowed but actively consenting.

Don't get me wrong: it gets my goat as much as yours that that's the situation. But I wasn't describing before how a hypothetical, ahistoric government-like entity might develop: I was offering a general theory of how it actually did. If it's right, the State isn't some aberration but an emergent, self organizing maelstrom that has gradually grown to envelope virtually all people in all places.

My issue with libertarianism as it exists in popular culture is that its idea of liberation seems to be getting the State to deign to rewrite property rights to privilege one part of society instead of the current one (that's all of electoral politics, actually). Once that's achieved, one gathers, we can all become happy and free consumers because a certain property right regime has become the law of the land, imposed from above by our now-purified and almighty State.
People put it in there to keep the vampires at bay.
You don't have to customize anything. If you don't want them to call, you can add a sentence that you accept (or don't accept) foreign currency checks at a market exchange rate. That is about the only question foreign businesses ask.
What prevents other open source projects from being taken down with a "management did not authorize this" notice?

Estoppel
I understand the structural bias toward two parties, and yet: in the past the regional variety was larger, and "Democrat" and "Republican" were fuzzier categories.

Now, we have national cable news and 365-day-a-year recreational poli-tainment. We have outrage/indignation/us-vs-them magnifiers like Twitter and social news. More issues are discussed – and political affiliations chosen – nationally.

At the level of the casual observer/participant (and the 'marginal voter), I think that's led to unhelpful dimensionality reduction, into coarser and more childlike political categories. And that's especially dragged down the Republican national brand, because for several reasons (including less sympathy in the media) their most-embarrassing regional characters do more damage elsewhere than those of the Democrats.

So the devolution to more than 2 brands I mentioned wouldn't mean a real enduring 'third party' – I agree, the US system is rigged against that. Rather, it'd be getting away from the national 'Democrat' and 'Republican' names when they're unhelpful oversimplifications, perhaps via differently-named, and more doctrinally varied, regional affiliates... a little like the 20th-Century General Motors model of many brands.
End of Free for the LA 'Freeway'
Can you imagine the size of the CSS spec if any old brainless mutt could add to it on a few weeks' notice for the past 15 years? At which point, creating a fresh browser implementation quickly becomes insurmountable.
Think infrastructure. Consider utilities, internet, interstate highways or any similar circumstance.

On a practical level, I don't see how these exist without government. The risk would be astronomical for a private entity to undertake such a massive investment that relies on negotiations with thousands of individual private property owners. However, if a private entity could pull it off, they would have extraordinary pricing power.

Not my idea of utopia.
I don't know, I think it's stupid to allow any private company to control the worlds data, as Twitter, Facebook, and to some extent Google are attempting to do. To expect these for-profit companies to act in any way other than "unilaterally" is naive. If you think that they violated the terms of service, then you should sue them for fraud - or if that's too expensive, make it clear that you think they are engaging in fraud.

Actually my message is this: build for the open web, and only the open web! There is a lot of room in that space. Personally, I think that Twitter will go bye bye and Facebook is going to get eroded by it. But that's my personal belief.
He explained this pretty well. How come most ecommerce websites have "trust badges"? The government didn't need to create an agency to rate web site security, but yet such a thing exists.

If people wanted a health inspection organization to rate restaurants it'd exist. Since the govenrment already monopolized that field it doesnt. Okay, it sort of does, it's called Yelp.

Anyways, the point is pretty clear, we have all sorts of "trust" systems on the Internet to verify everything from privacy (Truste) to security (Verisign, etc.). People can create these types of organizations on their own without government and will if they actually do something useful.
Clustering geo points with elasticsearch
Can you please confirm the date
Office space search engine 42Floors in NYC with $5M new funding
Entrepreneurs, don’t let your overloaded inbox drive you insane
Hey, 3stripe! Good to see you on here, I didn't realise that you were. Great blog post, drop me an email or PM and I'll put a mention in the LFGSS email for you.

Are you going to Impetus Momenta on the 6th? If so... see you there.

Velocio
Ok this was mine : http://new.weavesilk.com/?czgl

Would love to see a retina iPad version of this.
This is implemented with canvas. Cleaned source: http://pastie.org/5391134
This is why I’m not backing you on Kickstarter
:( Oh well, you guys will get my business when I relocate.
I thought Safari and Chrome both use webkit? Shouldn't your site be at least usable in Chrome then?
Haskell vs C++
Haskell and C/C++ working together in perfect harmony?
There's still time, if that's something they wish to do.

If/when the whole story emerges, it'd be neat to hear.
Just dreaming here, but is it possible that this could be outsourced, the way you can outsource credit-card payments with Stripe? Have another organization invoice them, collect the check, and then deposit the money into your account, without you ever having to make more than an API call?
Ignoring the evidence you read little more than the title, the doublethink required to produce this comment staggers belief. The "darkest days of IE6's reign" was a direct result of Internet Explorer from about IE4 onwards beating the pants out of Netscape on technical excellence (ironically in this context, including CSS support), a situation that Chrome in particular is now well on its way to repeating.

As for whether Chrome or Safari are 'better' in some way than Microsoft of yesteryear, both companies have an attitude toward backwards compatibility that could at best be described as 'disposable', particularly in the case of Google. In the meantime, Chrome is pushing a new 'open source' version of ActiveX on the world (NaCl), and extended the web specs so much that they've all but plain given up on cooperation with the W3C in favour of their own kangaroo court (WHATWG). I could go on..
I don't know for sure, but I imagine Salesforce has this down.
Writing And Enforcing An Effective Employee Security Policy
Thanks, I appreciate the updates and thoughts. I did dive a little into the data, and yes, there does seem to be something real going on. Interestingly, there are quite a few people who answered that their neighborhood had too many trees, but the city as a whole had about the right number. Makes me wonder if this is speaking about "fairness" rather than actual tree preferences.

The statistical testing is tricky, though. Did you go in with the thesis that there might be a correlation between age and ideal number of trees, or did you first pin down "too many trees" and then search the data for correlation? Or even more problematically, did you search for cross-correlations on all columns and then discover the age-tree link? If either of the second, your definition of "significance" needs to be custom.
As I understand it you're only bound by the open source terms included with the software at the time you started using it - - basically if you modify the code you're bound to release your changes if you redistribute the software. They cannot change the version you're already using retroactively.
There's a large percentage of Silicon Valley that is at least fiscally conservative - if the Republicans would just soften up on social issues I imagine many of them would jump ship.
"Pollution would be treated as a tort."

That's a very bold statement that needs some justification.

Take climate change. For the moment, I don't care if you believe in it or not: just take it as a given, because something like that is certainly physically possible.

Let's say for years many countries polluted the atmosphere with CO2. Over time, it substantially changes the planet's climate and causes untold trillions of dollars of damage to billions of people.

How do torts handle this? For one, who does the suing? Do we allow class action lawsuits with billions of people? What about countries that don't allow class action lawsuits?

What if one heavily-polluting country has for years funded propaganda opposing accurate science, and when chickens come home to roost it still insists that carbon emissions had nothing to do with warming climate? What if the legal system refuses the huge payoffs that would be required? What if the will happens to be there but the country just can't afford to pay for the damages it caused?

Is it even fair to levy taxes or fines on people to pay for something that's been going on for generations? After all, why should our descendants be forced to suffer because of our present day callousness and shortsightedness?

Should people who benefited from climate change be forced to pay more? How does one deal with the fact that everyone, to varying extents, helped cause it? Is it only people who were totally off the grid and carbon free who should get to receive compensatory payouts?
More amusingly, the standard complaint in this setup is the disproportionate power which the small parties wield - since it is often necessary for the larger parties to form coalitions with the smaller ones, and the smaller ones, catering to specific niches, are not accountable to larger electorate and thus are not afraid to offend it by openly extorting the larger parties. The second complaint is an inherent instability of such system - as soon as smaller ones are paid, or as soon as larger ones are unable to keep paying (paying doesn't have to be money, of course - can be policies, appointments, etc.) the coalition breaks down and the shopping season starts again.

I'm not sure which one is the better - having only two choices which are roughly equally bad or having multiple choices two of which are equally bad and then also must buy the votes of the choices which are even worse.
So IE's short-lived superiority negates the many many subsequent years that followed (the dark days) in which it was a stinking dead weight around the neck of every web developer on the planet?

The only double-think and belief staggering in play here is the idea that a rapidly evolving, open-source and highly standard compliant modern browser (Chrome) is anything like IE at any point in its history except perhaps the present day.
If you took this graphical art concept and combined it with the generative music concept of apps like Brian Eno's bloom, you'd have an absolutely amazing app
Ask HN: mobile data transport SDK?
Hi there hackers,

We want to find a way to post multiple photos to a server as a background process in our iOS and Android apps.

While we can certainly build this ourselves and post to S3, I wanted to know if you have any recommendations for an SDK or library that handles this well. In particular, there are issues such as handling different photo resolutions and dealing with wireless connection interruptions (e.g. suspend/resume).

I know of Parse and Kii... are there other services that you might recommend?
Ghost Planes Clouding the Skies
Was the license ever valid though, if the copyright owner didn't issue it? If I stole a car, then signed a contract giving you the car for $1, then would you be able to keep the car?
I'm not sure I see how money could be made in the taxi, or any, industry where a business kills and rapes it's customers.

Benefits: more choice and competition in the marketplace, lower prices.

See:
http://www.econ.armstrong.edu/toma/Taxis.pdf

There are already laws against violations of safety of passengers. If you really wanted to ensure passenger safety allow for concealed carry laws in the city, you'd have no issue with drivers harming passengers, or vice versa.
The gray area here is their claim: That it was done without their approval.

If the company is the copyright holder, then the license that the code was released under was invalid from the start - regardless of it being out in the public.

Just because someone gets some Microsoft internal code and slaps an open source license on it and releases it to the public, that doesn't mean every company is now free to use the code without reprisal from Microsoft.

They're not "changing" the license - they're saying it never existed / was never valid in the first place.

Now, if they had done it officially - then yes, the best they could do was dual / re-license it. Being the copyright holder, they have the right to do this at any time. They could then stop work on the original open source licensed version and from that point on, internally, continue to develop their closed source version (minus the contributions to the open source fork).

The open source (older) version would continue to exist, separately, and continue to be free for use.

If someone has a business/product built on using nv3d and they come after them with a cease and desist / demand for money, the business in question could definitely take them to court over it and attempt discovery to find internal documents indicating whether it was truly approved or not - which would then either ratify or abolish the license once and for all.
Haha, glad to see I wasn't the only one shocked by that. That's pretty incredible actually.
Noiiz released next version of it's social news plattform
I was under the impression that to be staff+ you had to be a leader (technical direction) but not a manager (performance reviews, people stuff). How accurate is that?
Provided how little Hollywood is intent on helping them in any way, I don't see any downside for them. On the contrary, exposing some D congressmen as a puppets of Big Business - in this case, big entertainment business - can allow them to counter frequent similar claims from the D side.
And given the skepticism of the R base about any extension of the government powers, as I said, no downside at all. I only wonder why there's not more of this.
The Hobbit by Melbourne House
>Let's analyze this situation with some economic rigor. What you're invoking is Coase's theorem.

You're attacking a strawman, and I said nothing about the Coase theorem. For some criticism of Coase by a libertarian economist see here from page 4 of the PDF: http://mises.org/rothbard/lawproperty.pdf

I said, "Pollution would be treated as a tort." Nothing really special there because all rights violations would be, viz. we do not believe in victimless "crimes against society".

I then was mentioning the idea of easement rights in pollution (for more on this cf. from 26 in the above PDF).

>A polluting coal plant might cause $1,000 of health damage to each of 100,000 people, and it isn't worth any of their whiles to litigate such injuries. Yet the cumulative impact of such activity is large--the coal plant is essentially "stealing" $100m, but getting away with it by stealing a little from a lot of people at once.

In common law tradition, people were able to sell their tort claims, no matter how small. Modern authoritarian law prohibits this, there are barriers to class action suits, and so on. We'd like to return to the common law tradition here, so if you are concerned about this, you ought to be on our side.

Besides the problem with a governments ability to simply be corrupt, polluters often pay fines to the bureaucracy rather than compensating victims. You are incorrect to automatically assign a $ amount to any claim of this sort. The punishment could involve at least a chance of death and who knows what all these minor health hazards might add up to.

Still, the impact of an individual polluter may be seen as trivial, but firms would be able to collectively pursue the torts after buying claims from the victims.

I believe in a continuation of good 'governance' after abolishing 'government'. I'm working on some interesting ways in which "municipal" service providers might utilize distributed torts against polluters into something resembling various "social welfare" programs we have today.
What are the advantages to using 42Floors over LoopNet, other than the UI?
I'd very much like to have decryption and signing. But I contracted the core work several years ago and the math genius who did the initial port isn't around any more. For my part I mainly organized and abstracted everything to make it simple to use.

The code has been collecting dust for at least 5 years so I figured I'd throw it up on github and see if any other geniuses want to take it any further.
Incremental App Updates: The Best Invisible Feature of Windows 8