skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It would be interesting to know if anything older than Fortran 77 is still in active use.

In active use, that's actually easy, especially in the industrial space (that's why I mentioned distributed as well as active, which gives another metric entirely)

Just about a year ago I was tasked with recovering software from a HP1000/RTE machine (driving an industrial oven in a forge), written in a Fortran dating back from before it was properly standardized.

We recovered the code through the machine's serial port, with the built in print functionality, which conveniently prepended a header along with the file's content. Together with pyserial at the other end, a few hours of hacking had a laptop listen via a PL2302 serial/USB adapter, parsed the printed header to get filename and a few metadata, and wrote content to the proper location.

The harder part was manually moving through directories, and printing the files at 1200 baud, through a terribly laggy and completely burned out 80x23 passive monitor.

Headers in the code mentioned it was actually older than me.

With a few massaging, the code actually compiled on a recent gfortran (F95!), but hte linking part was entirely different, and many proprietary symbols were missing. We went through the 30 years old documentation and found what we needed to stub them and plan how to act forward. The thing was actually quite close already to Unix and what we find on Linux these days, only much much more primitive. The code contained critical functions whose role was to compute thermal data for automation, according to various (thermodynamic and other) complex and undocumented rules, so I built a detailed plan about possible actions to take, including linking to C wrappers binding the stuff into Python, complete with a prototypal HTML5 visual status feedback of the automation system. That's when I left the project (and the job).
Rebuilding the Web We Lost
with median income growing relatively slowly over the last 30 years us households have maintained their living standards largely through lower real costs of many kinds of goods. Moving is certainly a significant financial event, perhaps we just can't afford it as often.
On my 15 inch screen the "not quite" and "perfect" buttons are not visible so I'll have to scroll every time i want to use the controls. I'd move them to the top or add keyboard controls.
Although I believe "big" usually refers to the size of the dataset, I originally heard the term used in the same sense as "Big Oil" - and the implication was that as companies collected massive amounts of data and figured out how to profit from it, "data" was going to become the next high-value commodity.

edit: Although to answer your actual question, it's a bit like "cloud computing" - it probably refers to very scalable systems with an emphasis on reading, writing, and processing large amounts of data - but really it's a bit of a marketing term :)
How To Sell More Apps With Google Adwords
The difference is that one case is clearly explicit: when the ad says "Bob likes our pizza", Bob liking your pizza is an explicit endorsement. The other is more statement of fact: that Bob ate there. For all you know he could have hated it.

On the other hand, add the context of Facebook. What if Bob hit the like button in facebook? You could argue that hitting the button is an endorsement. Or perhaps if the ad is only displayed in a Facebook context where "like" is understood to mean pushing a button on a page, you could argue that the traditional meaning of "like" doesn't apply so it's not an endorsement.
Can we please stop pretending "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" is anything but the most specious of oversimplifactions?

Yes, a person killed all these people. But he wouldn't have been able to if he didn't have easy access to firearms and a large cache of ammunition. Everything else that can be said on the subject of what would or would not have prevented this is speculation that is, at best, contingent on a large number of factors about which none of us can possibly know enough to make anything but the most tentative of suggestions.

But it's absolutely a cut and dry truth that it would not have been possible for him to do this if he (he specifically) had not had access to the kinds of weapons necessary to enable someone to commit these kinds of murders.
Thank you for this feedback. I agree and plan on taking this into account.
Although I don't support it myself, I live in America where there is the death penalty, so we already kill people for doing things we don't like.

I am advocating that the defense that poachers are just some poor schmuck that wants to feed himself is bullshit.
What Instagram did wrong
You could probably take your normal metrics and compute them for the lines of code that specifically contain framework/platform code? Can't say how useful that will be, but I'd be interested to see how those numbers align with my feelings.
All the presented algorithms have pros and cons. You have to understand the algorithms(tools) at your disposal and find the best for the questions you want to make.

In the K-means case, it is good to know beforehand how many groups(clusters) you are expecting. Otherwise, there are other clustering algorithms(like gdbscan) which detect the number of cluster automatically(although you have to provide the average expected density). But once again all depends on the question you want to answer, or if you are just cleaning the data a bit.

Know your data, know your algorithms and always question the results.
So heavily discouraged that it was in this Microsoft sample code linked in the OP: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee41...?
Ah yes keyboard controls are a great idea - I'll add them in a few minutes.

edit: Updated. <Space> to show a new gift, <Return> to choose it.
edit2: Also made the image smaller for smaller screens to help the vertical sizing a bit.
I really really like it. Agree that the buttons could be higher up somehow, but the illustration is gorgeous.

Maybe you could take this further by having a set of filters that limit the results by category (e.g. I know I want to get my brother a book, but I don't know which - I don't need to see random products, just books...)
By posting on HN you are agreeing to my peer-friendship ToS. As part of this ToS you hereby grant me unfettered access to your personal finances.

edit: give me a $1
Random Forests are interesting because they are designed to make many, many bad decisions that cancel each other out leaving only the good decisions behind.

To oversimplify, each of the many, many decision trees is going to do a poor job building a classifier. Each tree only uses a subset of the data and a subset of the features. So, the results of each tree won't generalize well (and may not even do well classifying the data it was trained on). But, for each tree that misclassifies in one direction, another tree will misclassify in the other direction. The theory (which appears to be validated in practice) is that poor decisions cancel each other out but good decisions don't get canceled out.

Although, it isn't quite a simple as a "good" tree and a "bad" tree. All decision trees are bad but there should randomly be good parts in the bad trees. Each tree is going to be "mostly crap" (as Jeremy Howard puts it). But "mostly crap" means "a little good." The crap in one tree cancels out the crap in another tree. The good parts are left behind... and... like magic... you have a good classifier that is fast although somewhat of a black box.

Jeremy Howard from Kaggle is a big believer and where most of my knowledge of Decision Tree Ensemble algorithms come from: https://www.kaggle.com/wiki/RandomForests
Hahaha, fantastic.
Yes. Because the site isn't live, I made the testimonials up...but I do plan on getting some real quotes and putting them in that section. This is like a scrimmage.
As of now, just US. It took a lot of work to be certified to accept social security numbers and do background checks. So We would like to tackle the US first before moving ahead.
We are bootstrapped too the extreme! So trying to make it happen with little resources.
I disagree. This was a carefully worded response. Notice "commit to you that we will be doing more to answer your questions, fix any mistakes, and eliminate the confusion. As we review your feedback and stories in the press, we’re going to modify specific parts of the terms to make it more clear what will happen with your photos." They expected this.

It's a classic move from the Facebook playbook. Push out a far-reaching privacy policy or feature update. Release a message or press release saying that "we're listening". Make token changes and say "we've listened and made changes". And just in case people start to sue, vigorously lobby and donate to government officials to keep the regulatory heat off their backs.

They are trying to get away with as much as they can. These stupid companies are going to be the reason why 10 years from now the Internet is going to be a morass of government regulation.

Don't work for or support companies that act like this. Shame on them. Period.

I wouldn't be surprised if at some point soon you won't be able to register a domain name or start an Internet company without taking a licensing exam.
Legal documents are easy to misinterpret.

It's a shame this is the case. Isn't it part of the point of legal documents to be hard to misinterpret? Isn't that supposed to be why they use such stiff language?
Housing crash. People don't want to sell their house for less than they bought it for. You don't pay capital gains on the first 250K / 500K per couple of gains on a primary residence but you can't deduct losses or use them to offset other capital gains. In addition people are conditioned not to believe they had a loss until they realize it and of course there are underwater homeowners. You can't move if you can't sell the house you live in.
Some big data is machine learning, a lot however is running analytics via software like Hadoop (map reduce) to gleam results from the data. Examples of both would be calculating shipping times based on previous shipping times. If you had enough data, you could predict with analytics how long a shipping process would take. You can then use machine learning to get more and more accurate results.
The Behind-The-Scenes Story Of 'A Charlie Brown Christmas'
When my kindle broke (within one year though only barely) I asked if they wanted a picture of the error (frozen screen). I was told they don't need it and my brand new kindle (with added 3g, the broken one was wifi-only) should arrive in the next 2-3 days. So yeah, I hope their service stays as awesome as it is.

On the other hand, the stuff recommended in the blog posts would be easy to implement without really making it more of a hassle (only ship to places already listed, ask for more than name, mail and address, collate chats).
I think it says a lot about you that you're so excited to fight with someone who believes in an omnipotent god that you've projected that belief onto Paul Buchheit and have taken up the fight on Hacker News. You might be better off finding someone who actually believes that.

From what I tell by reading his actual words--and of course such summaries are fraught with peril--Paul's god is the collection of structures which offer "unconditional love" in the world. I see no mention of omnipotence.

Then to answer your questions:

1) He described being 'reduced' to unconditional love during his daughter's struggle.

2) Nothing, really. He seems to be talking about the doctors and nurses only as background information for his experience.

3) Paul didn't thank his god in this post at all, nor did he disregard the doctor's and nurses. In fact, most of his story has to do with the doctors and nurses and what they did, and very little about gods. You seem, again, to be projecting the beliefs of... well, I don't know who... your parents? Sarah Palin? ... on Paul.
Quickly build APIs from SQL in a java container
I would imagine that many others also have to go grocery shopping this week, but that doesn't make it newsworthy.

I find trying to use hn as your support group a little distasteful.
Really? Only 5 days ago this was on the front page of HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4917689. And what about the complaints of Twitter and Facebook ads? You can't say that people don't whine about companies monetizing via advertising.
You hear that, loser marriage-having people?
Not like it will matter. The witch hunt has started and nothing can disperse an angry mob. Except free pie of course.
"Come on" or "C'mon" or , not "Common".
Seriously giving thought about moving from Facebook over to Google+... just a series of shitty updates with Facebook that I cannot be bothered giving time to think about how they effect me.. it's becoming such a cancer it needs to be excised from my life. Currently as it stands the only reason I have it is to stay in touch with family oversea's and my D&D group etc... but I ask myself now.. is that reason enough..
"why don't new small players arise as small cooperatives that serve individual neighborhoods"

I am just going to guess that it is a combination of (1) the expense of getting linked to the rest of the Internet, (2) the low density of knowledge i.e. most people who would be interested in a cooperative don't really know how bad American Internet service is, and (3) the difficulty one faces with laying cables. I could be wrong, of course; I only briefly looked at doing this sort of thing, and I was planning to use wifi (once I saw how expensive things would be, I dropped the plan).
I'm already on Google+; unfortunately, most of my friends and family are not. And if I want to stay in contact with them, I need a facebook account.

However, I'm only willing to put up with so much before I just delete my account and revert to email alone for that group of people. Video ads would only make my decision to do that immediate as opposed to coming very close to it everyday.
There's something I can't quite put my finger on, that makes this response seem a bit forced and insincere.

"Legal documents are easy to misinterpret. So I’d like to address specific concerns we’ve heard from everyone"

My understanding is that legal documents are written precisely to be as hard to misinterpret as possible. They say exactly what they mean, and (subject to possible judicial interpretation) mean exactly what they say.

I'm sure the average layperson might misunderstand or not realise the consequences or scope of a particular term, but
as I understand it, the original concerns appear to have been raised by an EFF lawyer[1] who presumably does have a reasonable grasp of the matter.

That sets the tone for the piece.

"Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos."

We are selling a package. Which might include some photos and some other advertising or whatever services, juicy user data, etc, but we're definitely not selling the photos. Only the package thing.

"Ownership Rights: Instagram users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos."

My understanding is that this is irrelevant to everything except maybe attribution; they're granting themselves sufficient rights to transfer & sub-licence the works, which is essentially everything necessary to sell/use/licence a copy. In fact, the existence of a perpetual royalty-free transferable/re-licenceable licence will significantly devalue the content, if the actual owner wanted to sell or exclusively licence the content.

Maybe I'm reading it wrong. But it definitely feels like the Non-Apology-Apology "We're truly sorry that you feel upset about how we're trying to shaft you good & hard."

[1] mentioned in http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57559710-38/instagram-says... as Kurt Opsahl[2]

[2] https://www.eff.org/about/staff/kurt-opsahl
Confusing the Linux kernel service API and the OS API is pretty misleading.
Higher Education Is The Next Big Bubble
Man, this is some absolutely insane over the top hyperbole.

No one tried to cast this as a conspiracy, they simply called it what it is, a company monetizing by making the user experience worse.

"Remember that the people running this company are you peers. It's disgusting watching the community salivating over burning them all at the stake today."

I don't know whats craziest here. First, equating "burning them at the stake" to "deleting their accounts on that persons website" is absolute lunacy and I don't know how anyone could take your points seriously. Second, pretending that because these people look like my friends, they should get a free pass on changing their terms to better monetize user content is just lame, just because someone looks like me and is a millionaire doesn't make them immune to incredibly correct criticism.
End-to-End Encrypted GMail? Not So Easy
HN: IEEE wants you to report copyright infringement
Your statement doesn't hold true because actual peers call each other out on bad moves, and the failure (or lack of attempt) to find an actual good move.

If we take your words as gospel, then we should be critical of them and we should take action.

This is also because Instagram as a business is not a peer, does not follow advice, and absolutely needs to be burnt at the stake (and salivated over?) to realise it made a mistake.
No they're not. This article from the Verge is weird. The important changes are in the copyright license. The instagram blog post is lying by omission.

Look at the former section
"Proprietary Rights in Content on Instagram"

> Instagram does NOT claim ANY ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post on or through the Instagram Services. By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content not shared publicly ("private") will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services.

This section about copyright has turned into something pretty much like Facebook's:

> Instagram does not claim ownership of any Content that you post on or through the Service. Instead, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service, except that you can control who can view certain of your Content and activities on the Service as described in the Service's Privacy Policy, available here:http://instagram.com/legal/privacy/.
He also doesn't say he's going to stop beating his wife.
8500 out of nearly 350 million is 1 in 40000 people. And how many of those 8500 were gangsters or robbers anyway? 50%? 90%? In any event, I'm having a hard time getting worked up over here.
Thumbs up for letting me go to bed in a very happy mood … :)
This will be fun.
It's "limited to 20 mph" (this somehow lets it be classed as a bicycle, a claim of which I am dubious). Even a 50cc scooter goes faster than that.
While I agree that the facebook fears are probably overblown, the TOS' language does not comfort me at all. In fact, I think that the Verge is entirely wrong in that article(IANAL, etc.).

This TOS tweak allows Instagram go sell your content for advertising purposes to a third party. They can use your images, as is, in their advertising(presumably on Instagram, though that is not clear). So they can take payment for your content, without compensating you at all.

That's a pretty huge difference from Facebook's TOS. In there, they state that they will use your content to deliver ads. They're not delivering your content to other parties to be used in their ad campaign.
Maybe, though personally, "perl operators" has never failed me in Google.
Color me unconvinced, for all of the usual arguments that have been already enumerated in the other comments. I'm beginning to think that this form of personal transportation is akin to the flying car in terms of viability.
I liked the pictures of the building and the handshake, but the picture of the paperwork -- which, for me, popped up first -- seemed very busy and distracting. If you can improve on that, do so. Maybe some more abstract representation?
> It's not "baggage" but "meaning".

Some atheists deliberately choose the meaning of "God" that makes people look like idiots and conspicuously ignore meanings of "God" that are internally consistent and reasonable.

To me, that's baggage.
Thanks! It's actually my first self-illustrated site (I usually stick to developing)

There are "person" categories if you click on the gift tag (not sure how noticeable that is)... but product categories could be pretty useful too.
Time isnt necessarily the most important factor when considering a persons contribution. If i work faster thus produce more than a partner, or if they are stuck grinding out a problem that i may have breezed through they will be rewarded for their inadequacy, as opposed to an actual relevant contribution.
Read interesting reviews about Latisse
Generic for Latisse is a brand medication that is used for the treatment of hypotrichosis. Generic Latisse, that is available in Europe and Asia, also contains in it the same constituents as the brand medication and has the same effects. But, this does not have FDA approvals and is not for sale in USA
A little bit of balance for the pitchforks crowd:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/18/3780158/instagrams-new-te...

This story is giving me a headache.
Instagram apologizes to users: We won't sell your photos
What blows my mind about this whole mess is how quickly this community has gone off on some witch hunt. Just read the comments. This is apparently what you have to look forward to if your startup is successful and you eventually try to monetize. Good luck everyone.
As a customer, I would prefer they do _not_ trust people claiming to be me. I've called customer support all of once, and almost never buy anything from Amazon these days, so anyone claiming to be me probably isn't. I'm not impressed, and would like them to stop doing that, since otherwise the safest thing is for me to close my account.
I think the fact that I was giving a personal opinion made it pretty clear that I was sharing a biased point of view. My point is that I personally disagree with pseut's point of view that "once professional photographers and celebs leave instagram, the service will be worthless".

Do you believe that to be the case?
imgur.com is something like $24 a year, and AFAIK they don't claim any ownership on your photos...
Brilliant way to collect email addresses pre-launch
According to the CDC, 91% of accidental poisoning deaths are from drug use.

That's certainly a problem, and I do think the USA also needs to do something to get its drug problem under control. But for the purposes of this discussion, drug users overdosing and gun violence isn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison.
[Firebase dev] I've mentioned this in the chat several times, but I should probably mention this on the HN thread as well.

We're big fans of Meteor as well. Firebase is just a data layer -- we do high-performance, scalable real-time data sync -- but we aren't a complete Framework for building an app. Generally devs will want to use something like Meteor (or Ember, or Backbone, or Spine, etc) to help them organize their code and manipulate the DOM.

In the future we hope to have a Meteor integration, so you can power your Meteor app without running any of your own servers (and do it on a super-low-latency, highly scalable backend).