skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Crudely: combine the speed of classification trees with the generally low error rates (flexibility) of the SVM.
Respectfully, commenting code and making it easily readable don't usually add to the bottom line. So while we all miss playing Pinball, it would be a waste of money to the shareholders.

This game was another casualty of maximizing value towards shareholders and away from all other stakeholders.
The first thing I looked for was the a safety cage or something, just a whole lotta fiberglass.
Maybe these are somewhat relevant:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/intel-...

http://bellard.org/lte/
Sell your startup or weekend project.
I am considering to quit my job and get involved in a my own venture. I think HN community works on awesome ideas on the side or as a weekend project but due to lack of time, co-founder, marketing skills or even getting involved with an another new idea the old project just sits on their computer.
If you have a side/weekend project or an idea which you started working but no longer interested in it and want to sell then let me know. You can either post it here or email me at imtu80 [at] hotmail. I would like to know, A) Idea/Purpose of it. B) Current users/revenue. C) Asking price.
26 Portfolio Project Listings for Design Inspiration
<tinfoil_hat>

The plan is for the scanners to fail the tests

TSA apologizes

Congress indemnifies scanner manufacturers

TSA buys new scanners, which is the overall goal

Scanner manufacturers aka campaign contributors profit

Congressmen get reelected

</tinfoil_hat>
My issue is with what threshold of safety should be considered. If for example, the X-ray dose causes one fatal cancer in a million, it would be a positive risk-benefit for many medical procedures, but for the rate of actual terrorism attempts vs air travelers getting that dose millions of times over, the risk benefit seems pretty negative. This is especially true if you're a frequent air traveller and could be dosed two or more times per trip. That really means that airport X-ray machines should be held to a much higher safety standard then medical x-rays.
same question was asked and answered in the comments of the original article.
What makes a user "active" on G+ exactly?
that's a good point, and I will add this in the report. I work at home so my expense are only a little bit of marketing, some devices and I've made a trip to a conference this year in california, and a very important thing is that I have to give some royalties back to the speech engine company for the word wizard app.
So according to my files, it is about $35K. I would say that marketing is not very expensive but takes a lot of times (anyway buying ads don't work well)
EDIT: updated the expense (bad euros/dollars conversion before)
Would you pay Facebook a monthly fee to keep your information private?
The common trope about "free" services is that you pay with your data. In light of the recent Instagram policy changes, I have wondered how much we actually value our data. So, I would like to know, if Facebook was willing to give us a choice to either:

1) pay with personal data

OR

2) pay with an actual monthly fee

Which would you choose?

What would be your upper limit to pay?

Is this for any data service, or would you pay different amounts for Facebook vs Instagram or others?

On a related note, Facebook revenue for 3rd quarter of 2012 was 1.26 Billion [1]. Their total user base is 1.01 Billion [2]. That translates to ~$1.25 quarter/person or ~$0.41 month/person.

Obviously Facebook's value is in huge data sets, i.e. the value of the population is greater than a sum of its parts. Nonetheless, it doesn't seem unreasonable to possibly be able to pay your way to privacy.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/technology/facebook-revenue-surpasses-forecasts.html?_r=0

[2] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/number-active-users-facebook-over-years-214600186--finance.html
LeVar Burton reboots 'Reading Rainbow' for the iPad generation
In case anyone is wondering: Paris is not 3-colourable. The proof is trivial, by looking at region 6 and its neighbours.
So, how many requests / second is your load balancer receiving from outside?
Here is a concise PDF of definitions and notation https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B_WU5GXujPOVRDFYRUlKcFF4RWs

It's from CMU's course titled "Concepts of Math" The professor, Brendan Sullivan, just wrote the textbook in an easy to understand style.Here's a link to the course: https://colormygraph.ddt.cs.cmu.edu/21127-f12/ and if you click the AnnotateMyPDF website, you can get a copy of the textbook, practice problems, etc for a more in depth understanding.
Windows 8 Developers Need to Train Their Users on Windows 8 Itself
I used Wunderlist in its initial incarnation and loved the automatic sync across all my devices. But I moved away because there were a couple of features I needed it didn't support. Unfortunately I cannot remember which were these and it's difficult to say what new features are in W2, so I'll probably need to give it a try.

Meanwhile I've been using a combination of OmniFocus for long term task tracking and TaskPaper for daily tasks only. After using OF for quite a while now, it still feels like it doesn't really fit. Actually, OF makes me feel I'm misusing it, giving me an unpleasant feeling every time I have to open it.
Happy Birthday, Perl :). At Crowdtilt, we are proud to have the majority of our stack Perl based. w00t w00t CPAN :)
Heh, 750 watt motor is a 1HP btw, back in Junior High I convinced my dad to let me buy a 'mini-bike' with a 1.5HP Briggs&Stratton motor, then later we "upgraded" it to a 5HP motor which involved a small bit of custom welding on the frame and an upgraded centrifugal clutch. It was a blast for driving around in the desert but not really a 'utility' vehicle.

That said, if they put a Lemco LEM-200 [1] (Peak power 7.8kW aka 10hp and I put two of them in my 220lb Battlebot for about 20hp of fun) into it you could have something.

[1] http://www.lmcltd.net/index.php?page=motors-and-generators-2
"Since the neutron flux in the reactor is the main variable which controls the power output it seems, that a Thorium reactor is significantly harder to control than a Uranium one." This is nonsense. LFTRs are self controlling with a significant negative coefficient. It really makes no more sense to think about putting Thorium in a solid fuel reactor than it does about using diesel in a spark ignition engine.
Thanks, that makes sense. The rules are unchanged, but they refer to db fields, that themselves are protected by the rules.

I was critical of the firebase security situation when they launched, but this looks like a good solution indeed.
You could try Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1. It's in a formal style but covers some simpler algorithms and it's by an incredible writer. It's painstaking to read but some find it to be nearly a religious experience.
I believe most mainstream languages used for web development are quite old now. And today it is matter of personal taste to choose one over another one unless you are constrained by coding standards.

To me Perl is awesome :) Too bad I do PHP for a living, but I still enjoy it when doing something for myself. Like last time I learned about web framework Mojolicious ( http://mojocasts.com/ ) and built http://gotldr.com and http://hntldr.com leveraging Mojolicious and Redis - https://github.com/hippich/perl-tldrer . It took me few evenings, but I really enjoyed tinkering it.
Death at Yosemite: The Story Behind Last Summer's Hantavirus Outbreak
"I wonder if Kickstarter allowed projects to set a maximum number of backers (or a funding cap), if projects would take advantage of it"

They do; kickstarter project teams can set a cap on each individual tier they offer. However, most projects foolishly have chosen to not place caps on anything except the most "exclusive" tiers -- those that usually offer a chance to name something in a game, or a custom character representing them, a flight to some faraway place to meet the developers, etc. for thousands of dollars.

If the tier involves a tangible product, then there should always be a cap. And most of the software projects I've seen should at least triple their estimated project completion time if they haven't started yet or aren't at least "50%" complete.
Show HN: Lean Startup Weekly Updated My MVP
you are essentially saying that google should remove many of its own apps from the market? Even they follow the ios conventions a lot of times. google+ has buttons on the bottom of the screen just like iphone apps. should that be removed?
Finally, they took care of the last major reliability/availability issue.
Thanks for responding publicly to my question, Pierre. Class act. And congrats on your success.
Ask HN: Why do HNers 'submit and run'?
I've noticed people submit their own blog posts and then don't take any part in the ensuing conversation. What is the point? It feels discourteous to the community - people take time to write their thoughts and the OP can't even be bothered to acknowledge.

Eg. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4921024

I've seen it a few times recently, but sadly I can't find the threads immediately.
They were one of the first widespread ensemble methods (based on bagged decision trees), and share with other bagging/boosting methods fairly good empirical performance on a wide range of problems.
Show HN: A Chrome extension for easier HN reading
Fine, /s/children/people. Argument is precisely the same. And you have less of them dying of gunshots wounds by having fewer guns/ammunition. That won't stop knife crime, sure, but let's revisit that discussion when as many people are dying of knives in the US as die of gunshot wounds.

And, yes, addressing the gun culture will have to be a component of this. But violent cultures can be changed. The US is a past master at it -- look at the post-WWII reconstruction it orchestrated in Japan.
ASK HN: What alternatives to AdSense that work well with non-segmented traffic
My pet project Air Mail was doing well when all of a sudden the AdSense god of income decided I violate some of their T&C and stopped it all.
After fixing the problem (Ad on a page with not enough content) I submitted it for review but it was rejected, this time without a detailed explanation.<p>I read through their T&C thoroughly and for the love of Gandhi I can’t find the cause for the problem.<p>Obviously my traffic is not very segmented; users come from all over the globe (170 countries) and use the service to register for 1000’s of different services of all sorts.<p>My question is, can you guys recommend an alternative to AdSense as an income source?
I disagree. Sure, in the short term, taking on that technical debt may have made sense, but in the long term, this is a perfect example of how technical debt added significant maintenance costs to a project.

What if dropping Pinball was not an option? The cost to the shareholder would have been much higher than it needed to be.
This is really great work, guys. We've been using Firebase for a while now. The uptime, low-latency, and consistency have been impressive. A good security framework was really our last hurdle. We're digging in to the new security features and pretty happy so far. Another good resource (in addition to the blogpost above) is the quick start page. [1]

Also, one side note: it's not always clear from reading the docs, but changes to the security rules can be made dynamically and take immediate effect.

[1] https://www.firebase.com/docs/security-quickstart.html
When I began doing apps, I was inspired and motivated by such posts. They gave me the motivation to try and do it. So I thought I could give back. I did the same post last year, and I'm sure I have new competitors because of this post but that's OK for me. I'm here to build great apps and competition is very good for that !
Well, he is a developer who writes educational software and he is explaining how he did what he did for the educational market. I think in a market context the numbers make sense and help both shed light on an opaque market and to give tips to those trying to break in.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2012/12/gun-control

Better link. Good article.
I just tried their failover feature. It is really compelling. They deliver an IP address for the master. This IP doesn't change during or after a failover. I wonder if they can setup replicas in different availability zones.
There is no chance that I would pay Facebook a monthly fee. I love Facebook, but I would start using it differently or jump ship entirely if I suddenly had to start paying for it.
So shipping the initial product and being a month late with the final product is considered "Where the ?!$#!" is it ? Especially with a team that has been in _constant_ contact with their backers about status updates and progress reports. Like I said the article is link bait plain and simple.
MapReduce design patterns and real use cases
Badger-Rails is a tool that helps you set up any linux server to be a fully functioning rails environment. It supports deployment like heroku does, using git.

We also have support for best practices with resque and multiple app servers baked in :)
>There is zero content discoveries features, so you have no way to get new followers or find new people to follow.

Instagram has had an Explore view for a while now.

>And the top posters are all teenage pop stars that I've never even heard about who post completely uninteresting photos.

To be honest, I look at a lot of Instagram data because I work on a photo sharing startup that uses their API extensively, and the network as a whole is completely dominated by teen girls vying for each other's attention. The amount of content they create and consume is mind numbing.
Richard Branson on How to Use Age to Your Advantage
Would I pay? Possibly, if the company could convince me that they are trustworthy.

Would I pay Facebook? No, they haven't proven very trustworthy.
Sure. I learned a bunch of things I didn't know. I had no idea Spotify's valuation was so high, for example, and I didn't know people were using location in cryptography.

And sure, I'm happy to see YC alumni in the list. It's nice for them to get some recognition.
I would expect GUHA instad of Apriori, but I guess Apriori is more influential. But it's not like either of them is new.
Aerobic exercise beats resistance training for weight loss
Upcoming changes in the status.net service
They have shit to get done that doesn't involve their blog?
I'm not sure what you are looking for. Isn't your question akin to asking since Java just compiles to bytecode, what advantage is there to writing java instead of bytecode.

The higher level abstractions that are directly supported by Scala are precisely what make it more "scalable" from an authoring perspective. In particular, the amount of help it provides in writing many objects to support an OO design along with the functional support it has go a long way to reducing your code down to quickly communicating the abstractions you are using, and not the language used to describe them.

This is particularly true in a method body, where one can use inference to remove the types from the code rather well. With judicious use of map/etc, often changing the collection type you are using is reduced to a single change in the code, and not through every intermediate collection along the way.
State of Designer/Developer communities and what we can do to improve them
To Have or Have Not: DPI, The ITU, and what it means to You
>Believe it or not, high income earners in other parts of the world are very happy to pay "crazy high" taxes.

>Those countries provide a hell of a lot to their citizens, and the citizens are happy to pay.

When you have a $600k per year income, those services aren't necessarily as valuable as they are to someone who makes $60k per year.

Seems that I've upset some people. Have you forgotten that international business does exist?
Ironic that I get more money than an educator ? Yes it is in a way. But it is the world we are living, no ? (and we should not start to talk about bankers)
On the other hand, there is no comparison between a software developer and a educator (I teach nothing except to my kids)
I find it amazing that people with such a deep and detailed grasp of mathematics such as this person are able to also express very advanced concepts in layman's terms through real-world examples and practical applications.

I'm only a semi-advanced secondary school student, so many of the concepts are way over my head at this point. Things like this article serve as catalysts to curiosity and are inspirations to pursue the study of the mathematics.
Georeplication: When Bad Things Happen to Good Systems
Making commercial open source software
Are they easy to interpret? Is it ok if I have a lot of columns in my data?
JUnit Strikes Back
Answer is in the article:

[That would have been even more work, because there was at the time no infrastructure in Setup for having 32-bit-only components. (And then automatically uninstalling it when WOW64 was disabled.) And besides, all the people who criticized Windows 96 as "not really a 32-bit operating system because it has some parts in 16-bit" would use the same logic to say that 64-bit Windows is "not really a 64-bit operating system." -Raymond]
Any particular reason why you chose therubyracer instead of nodejs?
This looks even LESS practical than a Segway, and we saw how that went.
The human body is not a bomb calorimeter. Simply cutting calories in (and running to try to increase calories out) reduced my energy and crushed my mood. My body compensated for lower input with lower output.

Cutting out sugar and grains, on the other hand, improved all of those things, and dropped 50 pounds off me despite actually cutting out the running as well. I never had to count anything; without the broken satiety mechanism, I'm not going to accidentally eat 20 oz of steak like you might accidentally eat a half a pound of spaghetti.

This is the point where you say "ok but that's just a trick to reduce your calories in," but that's entirely the point: calories in and out is descriptive, not prescriptive. Thermodynamics says that if I am losing weight I am consuming less energy than I am expending; it does not say that if I consume less energy that my expenditures will remain constant and fat will disappear.
Treehouse takes its coding education tools to Detroit
The biggest problem I have found with the RaspberryPi is that they tend to lock up under load. I have two Model B's, one the latest revision and one the first revision and neither will stay up longer than about 1 to 2 days, especially when doing heavy reads from the SD card...
Visualisations are very powerful thing for understanding algorithms. For the classical CS undergrad ones (DFS, various shortest path or minimal spanning tree ones, and of course all of the sorting), visualisations are easy enough to find on youtube, but with less well known algorithms, sometimes you have to draw one yourself.

Another thing I sometimes do is run a few iterations of the algorithm myself on paper.
did they datamine a paper on data mining?
how is this different than meteor's security model?
Online storage prices come down slowly — Apple still the max
That "contract" you had with all those sites specifically stated that the business could change the terms of the contract at any time in the future. If you don't like that stipulation, then don't agree to those terms and don't use those services.
I clicked the AnnotateMyPDF, but it looks like you need to be signed up for the course to see those materials :(
I'm curious about this as well. When I hear "without writing any server code" in the demo video, my mind says that this is client-side validation, which does not suggest it is secure to me. What server-side validation happens under the hood to deal with modified clients/proxies like Burp?
This is the one big thing that really needed to happen to Firebase to get it ready for the world and having worked with these guys a bit, I know it was a difficult problem to solve. I think the solution they came up with is actually pretty novel and exhibits the qualities I strive for these days:

1) It's as declarative of an approach as it can be without sacrificing flexibility.

2) It follows the structure of your data and is itself a datastructure that can be trivially manipulated.

3) It centralizes a concern. Security measures often end up spread all over the place, making it very difficult to reason about what is or is not correctly handled. Not so with this model.

I'm excited to see what people do with Firebase now that the one thing that was really holding it back has a solution. I know from my standpoint, it's certainly nice to have someone else dealing with the nightmares of real-time scaling and security so that I don't have to.
What are you using for static analysis? What are your thoughts on Fay?
Why are you using purchasing power parity data? Japanese people don't live in America. They live in Japan. You are introducing local factors from the US into the data.

According to this:

https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

Japan's population begins to stagnate around 1996 or so.

Use this chart and restrict the data from 1996 to today.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp-per-capita-at-curr...

Now use this chart:

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp-growth-annual

Again, restrict from 1996 and onward. Then select trend. A nice downward line trending toward 0.

The true effects of a stagnating population won't be felt for years. As the article notes, Japan's population is aging rapidly. That means fewer and fewer productive members.
The SSN is technically a NUID, not an UUID. So legal names are more important in international context (an Indian SSN doesn't mean anything in the US, for example).

But yeah, assigning GUIDs to everyone born in the world, like as "a93sz0sz" would allow uniqueness for thousands of years.
We used firebase to power Scratchpad.io's back end (launched yesterday) and it was an awesome experience! The security features were super easy to use
Learn JavaScript Animation with requestAnimationFrame
Sometimes you can't fix security in a minor revision. Can you imagine if proper admin rights policies were added in an update to XP? Everything would break and people would be very rightfully mad at Microsoft.

And transforming the supplied fonts for validity is in fact the correct answer, once microsoft gets around to it...
My dad was a mathemetician ("was" as in he died in 2001, otherwise I'd be sending this to him to comment on). I never understood most of what he did, but I know that some of the work he did was based on or related to the four-color proof referenced here. I once had a slightly less math intensive book (but still very academic) mainly about the four color theorem that referenced one of his papers as well, but alas I don't have it handy to find the relevant quote. I don't know where my copy went, but I bet my mom still has one.

I don't know that I have a point to this really other than to say that this post reminded me of my Dad, and all the things I haven't been able to send him links to for the last 11 years.
I tend to notice more when the opposite happens-- when somebody gets on the thread and argues every point made against their original post. It feels like they didn't come to learn, but to convince the rabble that they're right.

By contrast, it's nice to think that a silent OP is reading and trying to learn from the discussion, either modifying their ideas, or thinking about how to better communicate their ideas in the future.
Depend on the number of trees, and their depth. Even with 20 trees, with effort, it could be written on paper as rules, for example. And it helps if most of the trees are depth 3 or something.

But then, some models are pretty much impossible to understand or interpret.