skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The hate is probably more directed at people who identify with Rand's writing than at Rand herself, for two reasons. First, in many people's experience, being a fan of Rand correlates strongly with being a bit player on the intellectual stage. That's been my experience, at any rate. And second, not only do the people who clothe themselves in Rand's way of thinking tend to be dull, but they tend to think -- and to insist as much to anyone who'll listen -- that they're terribly clever. It only takes a few encounters with such people to poison the well.
You can use Amazon Video with Google TV.
No, there are countries that do not agree with the moral evaluation of freedom of speech that the US constitution and the Supreme Court made and make.

That's not quite the right way to look at it. The right way to look at it is to understand that the authors of the US constitution didn't believe that any state-sanctioned approval of its citizens' speech was "moral." (Whether their intent has been faithfully upheld by later jurists and legislators is a different question.)

I think freedom of speech is important and I do think what happens in the UK is overreach, but I personally prefer putting human dignity above freedom of speech.

Keep thinking the issue through. You will eventually find yourself wondering how it can be moral for you (to say nothing of "dignified") to use violence to keep your fellow citizens or subjects from saying original but forbidden things.
I've never been to Japan so I may not fully understand what you mean, but cutting in line isn't at all acceptable in the USA. The Black Friday riots that get press attention this time of the year are an exception, and usually involve a rare mix of retail incompetence and customer malice.

As far as managing lines of a few thousand people, I've seen many examples of everything functioning totally fine in the USA.
That the sum of two Gaussians is a Gaussian an be found in any basic text on statistics. That combining distributions, calculating them in parallel or online is possible isn't new either. The Kalman filter which was published in 1961 is an example of an online algorithm for fitting a Gaussian.

This is a interesting exposition and places specific results in a more general algebraic framework; however, the title suggests this is a revolutionary discovery which it isn't
NASA is set to launch in 2017 a rocket stage that was in part '3D printed' via a form of laser sintering. [1]

Additionally, many aerospace parts (F22 air vents, for example) are produced in a similar fashion. There are a series of Google Tech Talks on the subject [2]. In short, complicated shapes can be produced with less waste (versus milling from a larger block of material), greater tolerances (no warpage from welding heat, curing of glue), less labor (no assembly jigs), and usually less mass (due to partial infilling of material cross section).

Lastly, you'd be surprised at the number of molds that are now being made via '3d printing' (I'm growing to hate this term) for composite applications. Normally they are CNC'd from aluminum (or 'tooling gel') - whereas smaller run items can be laser sintered. My startup uses PLA molds for vacuum infused carbon composites which we print from a RepRap Mendelmax. (router enclosures, antenna mounts, UAV and motosports stuff, etc).

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/09/nasa-building-space-launc...

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9dZQdVsBNA&feature=plcp
> That's why playing dumb is so effective--if you don't know the rules of the game, you can't play

And that really is the best defence.
I think that Trident Booksellers gives a very good idea how you can run and think a bookstore above a bookstore. Try that in a different way - some ideas here are a good start.
Were you travelling by car? I've found the difference between being in a car vs backpacking that the chances of a shakedown attempt are much higher when travelling by car.
Right. This article bombed in the last paragraph once the author went with the employer-friendly conclusion.

I'd say our education system is working out fine if we're skipping the high-barrier jobs that don't pay a premium wage.
You have to get out more, you'll be surprised what people outside the US think.
I vaguely remember using this knowledge of the scales to "cheat" on the violin. If you move your hand into whatever position puts your first finger on the first note in the scale then you can always move the rest of the fingers in exactly the same manner - whole whole half, whole whole whole half. My music theory knowledge is crumbling but what I mean is if you move into 2nd position on the A string to play a B scale its much easier than starting in 1st position with the 2nd finger.

I did this at a competition once when given some insane scales (like 3 flats in the clef) without having ever practiced the scale itself and got it right.
Yeah, as I said, I can appreciate the problem you describe in your last few sentences: it is a conflict of interest, and it undermines their existing market. However, right now, they already can't get licensing deals for a lot of the newest content, so it really is kind of a crummy position for them. :(

As for the 5%: that's actually a lot of money to buffet their streaming service: a Netflix subscription is $8.00/mo, but they only make $3.50/user/Q[1], or $1.16/mo (so a 15% margin). If I buy a TV show season a month, or rent a few movies, that doubles the amount of money they make off me. (In fact, I probably do both.)

[1] http://seekingalpha.com/article/912051-netflix-don-t-buy-int...

However, while researching that, I discovered the reason why my plan is actually stupid: they make comparatively good money off of their DVD business, at $2.90/mo.

It is then probably the case, for all users (even "whales" like me) that if they can get me to use their DVD service (which they do heavily integrate into their website) that is better for them than if they can get me to use their DVD service it will do better than getting an iTunes affiliate revenue.

Oh, wait, ok, but now I'm confusing myself with my own "if nothing else": what I was actually originally thinking is that Netflix could replace iTunes rentals, offering some content for free and some for pay. That is the business model that the-second-coming-of-Napster had: flat fee for most things, but per incident out of pocket for some items.

From what I understand (it probably isn't important enough for me to pull a reference on it, but I give talks on "the business models of Apple" and have done it before), Apple charges the same 30% processing fee for music downloads that they went with on their App Store, which probably leaves them with 10% after fees and costs, which then is in the competition range for the DVD service.

(I actually find the DVD model weird, as it seems like a short-term solution...either DRM is going to win or it is going to fail, but either way everything is going digital: in another 5-10 years, I find it difficult to believe--but am probably wrong anyway--that the notion of "borrowing a DVD" won't have been entirely replaced by "renting a download".)

Again, though: it is a nasty precedent to set that would lead to a very tempting conflict of interest, so they probably just need to "not go there". It isn't like the-second-coming-of-Napster did very well ;P.
I think my statement is quite correct and your reframing doesn’t change anything about that. It is and remains a moral evaluation.

Plus the believe of the axiomatic nature of freedom of speech just drips out of you. We just have different perspectives, I guess. No, I don’t think using violence to prevent speech always has to take away dignity. It does in the vast majority of cases, not every case, though.
I wonder what kind of skills are lacking.
Claims of deficiencies are qualitative.

For example, how much math does somebody need to know for this kind of job? Is it trigonometry to find hypotenuses? Are they writing programs or entering in data to notepad?

This is an important distinction because we need to compare these skills to those of a shift manager at McDonald.

For example, at a hotel the shift manager must supervise the employees, handle money, and keep journal entries. The later two involve rudimentary mathematics and computer skills. There is a good chance that this is a fair wage when compared to similar jobs.
I will never understand why someone would bother with a $3/month "unlimited" backup service. Obviously, there's no way a service provider could provide any sort of long-term robust service at that price point. So why bother? I guess you could back up to 3 or 4 of these low-budget "maybe" backup services, and probably one of them will have your stuff when you need it (or maybe all of them have some of your stuff) . . .
My god ... I love Lorem Ipsum. Every damn time I get into inman, I pay a visit there. Thank you for introducing me into zines and having an awesome CS/Math/Sci section. All your books are so damn well curated.

I wish could help more directly, but I'm steadily approaching broke and determined to be working full-time on my own project till my money runs out.

In any case, I'd love to buy you a coffee / tea / beer / whatever and just chat with you for an hour, your pick of time and place. Best case, you could refine some of my crazy ideas. Worst case, you'll have had an hour break. What's there to lose? E-mail is in my profile! :)
I agree it's not acceptable in the US and there are plenty of times/places where huge lines work well. I'm not making any statement about black friday Free-for-all footage which in my opinion is rare and usually caused by bad policies chosen by store staff.

My point is more about who is in charge of enforcing the social norms. In the US, it is up to the people in line to enforce the norms with other people in line. In Japan, there is usually an 'authority figure' nearby. This person may have no legal authority (other than a store uniform) but people defer to them.

Huge lines can work well in any country. If they do, they are usually well attended by staff. An exception to this would be theme parks where extremely rigid pathways and geography of the line as well as distractions prevent any kind of disputes between line-waiters. Some US stores like Whole Foods use a single line and have staff/technology to help enforce fairness.

In Japan, even small lines of 3-5 people at banks or stores are well-attended by staff who have an eye for fairness. This small-line behavior then tends to leak into situations where there is no attendant staff.

Line-waiting behavior is one of the most fascinating things to look at when travelling. It teaches you a lot about your own culture. Other places where the culture caught me off guard were Russia, Italy, China and India.
"Arrogance?" That's amusing, coming from someone who apparently believes that it's moral to tell other people what they can say.
Exactly. This article makes it sound like manufacturers somehow aren't restricted to the supply and demand of their labor.

If laborers are leaving manufacturers for better pay at fast food companies, workers need higher pay. Its not that complicated. If the company can't afford higher wages, maybe the demand for this skilled labor isn't what we think it is.

If these skills are actually in high demand, they will pay the bills.
Ditto, except it was Napoli and they shut down all the ticket machines on one end of the line, turned all the turnstiles green to let people through, then shook down everyone with a backpack on at the other end. A learning experience.
Teamr00t Continues Attack On Israel Cyber Space - MauriHackers
> We value speech differently.

Yes, we do.

Even ideas that most of us find distasteful should be spoken freely. Yes, this means that we can't jail fringe nutcases who bombard the rest of us with speech that is tasteless, racist, homophobic, obscene, dogmatic, or un-patriotic. (But no law requires anyone to be friends with such people, either.)

But occasionally, the fringe loonies are right. Today most people will agree: Women should have the right to vote. The color of your skin shouldn't decide your destiny in life. Slavery did need to end. If valuable ideas like these can't be suppressed by the government, they can spread throughout our society and eventually change things for the better.

And we can criticize our government openly. As an American, I can say that the war in Afghanistan needs to end, the war in Iraq never should have begun, Obamacare is stupid, President Obama is stupid, taxes are too high, my Senator's incompetent...(I don't actually believe all of these things; they're just random examples of criticisms of government.) This is perhaps the most important part of free speech, and according to the article, the UK lacks these protections.

Free speech protections in the UK aren't as good as the US, but I fully realize that it's nowhere near as bad as a lot of places. In many countries, openly criticizing one's rulers like this would lead to jailing, execution or "disappearance" -- not just of the person, but possibly their family and known associates as well, regardless of their guilt or innocence. (I'm speaking of moral guilt. In authoritarian regimes, when a person's arrested, it virtually guarantees they'll be guilty as far as that country's laws are concerned.)
But Perl also has the problem of "what the hell did the last guy mean that touched this?" style programming.
I think there should be a rule against people knee deep in big, lumbering entrenched monolithic industries making light of the threats they face from smaller, more nimble competition that they don't understand. It's a pattern so frequently repeated that it's probably worth just getting a nice general rule in there against doing so.

But then again, people love to say I told you so, so there's that.
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I highly recommend turning it into a co-work space. I'd be interested in working out of that space if you do. Look at 1369 cafe a few doors down you'd notice that people just don't go there just for coffee. People are always on their laptop trying to get some work done. I'd be willing to partner with you if you want to go that direction. Drop me a line.
Anonymous: #OpIsrael Ceasefire - MauriHackers
"Requirements:

- 25 years of HBase experience

- candidate must be 22 year old or younger"
It's not just HR. I did an interview with a YC startup that obsessed over my lack of Rails experience. I have several years of industry relevant professional experience in Java, Python and PHP, but only ever dabbled in Ruby and Rails. Their offer (which did come through, grudgingly, through many repetitions of "so will you commit to teaching yourself rails before starting?" (No, I won't.) was quite a bit on the low end, but I'd probably have turned it down anyway for that strange lack of comprehension of programming skills.
Even if the clue sinks in with the person on the phone, I doubt if it would do any good. That person isn't the one deciding who gets called and what gets asked of them.
Any chance you'd consider making book sales a smaller part of what your store does in favor of other sources of revenue? One of the few things brick-and-mortar shops can do that Amazon still can't is bring people together, to Be A Place. You can.

A few ideas to consider along those lines, either individually or as smaller pieces of a larger concept:

- Become a hacker/student-centric coffee shop that enables freelancers, et al, to work in a less frenetic environment than Starbucks

- (Not sure how big your space is, but) Build a small stage (or not) and host local singers and poets as well as professor and/or student talks

- Become a resource for finding hard-to-get books and charge a premium for it

- Host book sales, etc., for the local universities where students can buy/sell from each other, then give a small discount on books students are searching for but can't find at the sale

Not sure how intent you are on maintaining the store's identity as a Place That Sells Books, but you have a lot of options, I think, if you want to go in another direction altogether – or even partly.
As I recall the Gaussian distributions are the only distribution that have the desired property (i.e. form a monoid). While the Gaussian is important it is by far the only distribution of interest in machine learning. I would like to hear what the author has to say about handling, for example, the beta distribution.

In summary: interesting idea but I'm not sure it applies outside a very narrow domain.
I guess a good idea might be to ask at a local succsefull bookstore (NYC in your case): Just walk in and tell you have a bookstore in Boston and ask how it's gooing and what worked best for them?

Other idea is to ask at a book(store) forum.

Good luck!
Classic: according to the article, the definition of a qualified new hire is one with the qualifications to get accepted into university engineering programs.

Ya'll have probably read some of Prof Peter Cappelli's editorials (he's been making the rounds to promote his book "Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs"). One of the things he's pointed out is that HR use of resume databases encourages people with poor search habits to believe there is no choice. Basically, it's a failure consider the Bayesian math of nested filters.

Consider a company, in a city of a million people (don't want to pay for relocation), which wants someone with a bachelor's degree and five years of experience. The US unemployment rate for people with bachelor's degrees or higher is ~3.8% and about ~7% of the population is between 25-29 years old. Rough and tumble numbers put the pool of candidates around 2500-2700 before including any subject-specific knowledge. Ask for a specific discipline, like "Computers, mathematics, and statistics" for which 4.2% of bachelor degrees were awarded, and you can cut your your pool of candidates down to about 100 (1/10,000). If you also filter to require mastery of PHP, javascript, and Marqui, 10 years experience with Server 2008 and fluency in a Romance language...

tl;dr: the absence of time travelers in the applicant pool is not evidence of a skills shortage.
Yes, absolutely. I remember back when Java was only a few years old, it was common to see jobs where the company wanted 5-6 years of experience. Now, it could have been agency recruiters who had no idea what they were talking about, or it could have been coming from HR. But the result is the same: flagged for spam.
It is the same thing with propping up the auto industry. If a company can't afford higher wages and it isn't economically rational for people to invest their time in an area then maybe the only rational thing to do is for that manufacturing to head offshore.
My country had women's suffrage before yours. My country had a great transformation from a primarily racist white society to one where all have equal rights. I too can openly criticize my government and people aren't disappeared off the streets. I won't be saying which country I'm talking about as it is irrelevant.

Everything in social justice the United States has achieved my country also has, with our different free speech values.

I don't presume to say one is better or worse, but I do consider it totally arrogant the attitude Americans display when talking down about other country's free speech values.

Which are different. Not necessarily worse.
I challenge you to read my original comment and the comment I replied to. Seriously.

I'm challenging the idea that there is a difference in how you measure the success of a public sector entity over a private sector one, not wether Munich is a competently run city.

In fact, the OP suggested that is was meaningless for Munich to have done this private-sector-style savings analysis. I wholeheartedly disagree with him and agree with the approach of the City of Munich.
I think there is always a need for more hacker/startup community spaces in Boston/Cambridge; especially ones that are not coworking spaces/offices.

There can always be more events too.

How about hosting an in-person brand/biz hack of the store?
The problem is that age discrimination laws in the US aren't readily enforceable.
I don't envy it. Nor fear it. Nor hate it. That's an extremely arrogant statement you just made.
I'm building Ghost
See my reply to the other person who just called me "arrogant." You're on shaky ground when it comes to that particular accusation.
About That Shortage of Skilled Manufacturing Workers
> Women should have the right to vote. The color of your skin shouldn't decide your destiny in life. Slavery did need to end.

Plenty of countries were ahead on all three of those regardless of the right to 'free speech'.

There are lots of good things about the United States, there are lots of bad things too. Free Speech is good, but it did not automatically lead to the abolishment of slavery, a lack of discrimination and the women vote. It definitely helped but the courage of those standing up for their rights was orders of magnitude more important. It also does not translate into being able to say whatever you want.

And in spite of free speech the United States still has a long way to go when it comes to citizens rights, due process, cross border criminality and last but not least the rights of LGBT people.

The United States is not at the pinnacle of civilization yet and there are tons of countries that rank higher on various parameters than the United States does.
I think my argument was mistaken. The CNF form I was thinking of involves adding unknown variables so it doesn't actually allow you to compute the function in one step.
Is he really using market cap to determine success?

EDIT: I'm not really commenting on the rest of the article, but public perception (which is really what market cap is) has traditionally been a poor indicator of success. Even just recently, look at ZNGA, GRPN, AAPL ('97 or so). Amazon has 25x the market cap and operated on a 274M loss this quarter. Netflix only lost 8 million.

Of course, Amazon is interesting because- much like netflix- they are operating under the assumption that profitability will come in the long term. I find it quite interesting that investors trust Amazon (who is much older and proven) over Netflix.
I'm glad you caught that line because I thought it was confusing

Who are we supposed to understand is under-educated? The employers? Or was this a vain attempt to pull a fast one and shift blame to public schools for...? What? Pumping out kids with the mathematical literacy to understand that $14 is greater than $10 therefore McDonalds pays better than manufacturing?
> I just want to point out that it wouldn't be logically inconsistent to believe that Manning's treatment was justified

Torture is never justified.
Why don't you make it to me directly.
Economist Dean Baker comments on this: That Shortage of Skilled Manufacturing Workers is Really a Shortage of Employers Willing to Pay the Market Wage

News stories have been filled with reports of managers of manufacturing companies insisting that they have jobs open that they can't fill because there are no qualified workers. Adam Davidson at the NYT looked at this more closely and found that the real problem is that the managers don't seem to be interested in paying for the high level of skills that they claim they need.

Many of the positions that are going unfilled pay in the range of $15-$20 an hour. This is not a pay level that would be associated with a job that requires a high degree of skill. As Davidson points out, low level managers at a fast-food restaurant can make comparable pay.

It should not be surprising that the workers who have these skills expect higher pay and workers without the skills will not invest the time and money to acquire them for such a small reward. If these factories want to get highly skilled workers, they will have to offer a wage that is in line with the skill level that they expect.

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/that-shor...