skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Moving is pain in the ass. You need a reason: bigger family, great upgrade, or economic necessity.

The U.S. birth rate crashed between 1960 and 1975, declining over 25%. That removes a lot of moves into bigger houses during that period.

For some reason, new housing starts were below historical averages from 1990-2000. Is that a reflection of poor demand, or lack of good space? If the latter, it could reduce the availability of housing "upgrades" which would create incentives for one to move. In other words, all of the good areas have already been built, and new sprawl in suburban area A is just as good as old sprawl in suburban area B.

The housing bubble certainly hurt mobility post-2007. When it costs you $50K to move out of your underwater house, that new opportunity on the other coast starts to lose luster. A rush to the rental market similarly caused rents to rise across the nation, so both homeowners and renters were disinclined to move. When economists talk about home ownership causing unemployment (in the sense that some jobs go unfilled), this is what they mean. However, this phenomenon may not be large enough to make a dent in the overall trend.

Over the decades, I would credit decreased transportation costs for some of this trend. You don't need to move your kids near to their grandparents when jet travel is relatively cheap. Nor do you need to move within a given state given the continuously improving highway system and relatively cheap costs per mile driven.

Finally, the decline in American manufacturing may play a role here. Factories are typically located in particular regions of the county, but service and technology industries are relatively dispersed. Therefore, if you don't want to move from Boston, or Texas, or wherever, you don't need to if you're not in the manufacturing sector.
looks flexible, but they provide .zip or .tar.gz deployment... wtf?
Seems like most of them are not smart enough to realize this.
As someone who has used Lift in production on a non-trivial webapp for the last 18 months, and has used Play 1 and 2 in both Java and Scala for side projects, I would not recommend Lift.

The "the-view-is-the-controller" approach encourages a messy blend of logic and presentation, with lots of HTML ending up in your Scala code.

It's stateful in the extreme, using opaque callback identifiers to identify serialized closures, so rather than having a nice, clean, easy to reason about boundry between your app and the outside world (your routes file, controller methods, whatever), any code anywhere could be invoked by someone clicking something in their browser.

Validation now needs to be enforced in the models, since you no longer have a single place to check it as it comes in. It goes beyond that and embeds rendering logic in models, which have to toForm method which generates HTML.

The extreme statefulness also means you lose everything when you roll a server, you need sticky sessions, you spend way too much time GC'ing and you need far more RAM/user.
The important thing is that security must be balanced against the other things I mentioned

Which is exactly what wouldn't happen. The security theatre is persuasive to a great many people.
Not only that but the prizes are pretty lackluster. Grand prize gets an all expenses paid trip to SF, which is awesome, but everyone else gets one of these hunky beasts http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130... . Which has no place in my laptop and is ironically pretty useless for html5 games.
> And how do you evaluate security?

It's easy: penetration testing.

With penetration testing you can determine the rate at which a baddy can expect to get by the TSA undetected. From what little of this testing has been done for the TSA, it seems the TSA performs abysmally.

Combine that with the number of false positives (thousands, if not dozens of thousands, a day), and the astronomically small baseline rate of terrorists in the population, and you get the chance that anyone the TSA catches is actually a terrorist. That (absurdly small) probability will tell you a lot about just how worthwhile the TSA is.
I wonder if I am being the target of this scam now too?

I just got an email from Amazon customer service asking if my recent customer serivce inquiry was handled satisfactory. I've not contacted Amazon or ordered from them in quite some time. So I wrote them and told them that (I also linked to this blog post on htmlist). Their reply:

> Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

> It looks like one of our customers mistyped his or her e-mail

> address when placing an order with us. You have not been

> charged for anything as you didn't order.

mistyped their email address? This seems unlikely to me, as my gmail address is pretty unique and not likely "near" other people's addresses. I dunno, feels suspicious to me.
The cost of running that passport service?

Isn't this a federal agency? Why wouldn't this be covered by federal taxes? Likely import/export taxes.
The Candle Plan is and will continue to be free! (All of the pricing on the website is just to give people an idea of what the pricing will be when we leave beta. It's not being enforced right now.)
"The problem is that it's a service and they never promised they would keep providing it under the same terms forever. So when they change the terms, you can stop using it, but you can't (if the new terms are enforceable) demand to keep using it under the old terms, any more than you could demand they keep offering the service if they decided to shut it down."

Right, but terms need to be agreed upon by both parties. They can change the terms all they want but that doesn't mean that I have to abide by them if they don't ask for another agreement. The simple solution is to provide another agreement and make me agree again. If I don't agree, then the service is cancelled and we both go on our merry way.
As Fisher said, the task is to separate the noise from the data!
The Muse (themuse.com) did YC W '12 and was Forbes 30-under-30 in Media, plus also Amicus in Social Entrepreneurship, and Mixpanel, tracks.by and Emmett Shear in Games & Apps. Way to represent
I'm seeing that too. They probably just got a massive spike in traffic.
Given the scenario, I was extrapolating, just as everyone else has with this senseless act, but it has been reported that he was on medication in another Slate article. And yes, not locking up your weapons is grounds for calling someone a bad parent, as is not teaching your child that under NO circumstances should you ever feel taking another persons life is a valid solution to a problem.

I'm just tired of all the rhetoric.. as everyone pretends that by getting rid of all the guns we would effectively end all the violence.
Ask HN: Writing copy...please critique my homepage
I am at a point where I am ready for some advice regarding the homepage of my new site. The rest of the site is not live yet...but can you please check out the site and tell me your thoughts on the layout and copy of the homepage?

Thanks

https://myrentr.com
I would leave Facebook rather than pay for anything. I'd spend more time on Twitter or Google Plus.
Is there really such a great difference between operators vs. class/method/function names? E.g., Math.pow() vs. ?
[meteor dev] Meteor treats the server as an environment for running arbitrary privileged code. You can write server-side logic that consults third-party services, logs client writes to a separate audit trail, keeps authentication state between requests, or implements complex transactions across multiple tables. Similarly you can write code to run periodic database updates on an interval, or respond to incoming HTTP requests from other clients.

Not all apps need this stuff right away, of course, and some never do. But it's hard to do these things w/o a secure server environment for privileged code.

And then of course there's the usual tradeoffs between having control over your hosting environment (a la Meteor) and outsourced backends as a service (a la Firebase).

We're big fans of Firebase, BTW. We think more databases will move to a realtime model. Excited to check this out.
This is a short term revenue grab from Facebook, but one that will probably harm their long term position with the media agencies that buy their inventory.

Autoplay videos have been widely criticised by advertisers and agencies over the past few years. While the interruption is a bad user experience (yes, advertisers do care about that), it's the results that are the issue. Publishers started reporting ridiculously high completion rates, just because the video auto-played and then the user scrolled down.

The result in a lot of markets is that the major media agency groups have stated they will not buy autoplay. What will be interesting to see is if the same groups can say no to Facebook. While I would say most will happily support the move to not buy autoplay, I would fear that most advertisers are so frothy on Facebook that they don't care if their ad interrupts and irritates the user.

The challenge for Facebook (and the leverage the advertisers and agencies will have) is that they need the major advertisers and agency groups. As opposed to text-based ads, you can't rely on the long tail for good-quality video advertising.

(Disclosure: I work for one of the major media agency groups.)
We heavily use the Play framework at https://balancedpayments.com where we wrap various Java SDKs over an internal JSON API to communicate to our various banks / processors from our Python backends.

It is ABSOLUTELY a pleasure to use. I did a thorough analysis of all the Java frameworks that I could use and Play is what I landed on. It gets out of your way and if you use an IDE like IntelliJ IDEA - you will develop on the same speed with something like Django or Rails.

Play has made me really enjoy Java again since during our CS courses and my time as a high frequency algorithmic developer on Wall St was spent in C++/Python, I never needed to really use Java.

Now, I can tell you that I have new found respect for Java and I can't speak highly enough about the Play framework. I'm happy to elaborate a bit more on our use of it -- feel free to contact me via email in my profile.
i'm guessing to prevent the possibility of impersonation
I think one also has to factor in the psychological costs, though, to citizens that worry about gun violence. I tend to think statistically like you, so I'm not particularly concerned about getting shot. But my mother certainly doesn't think that way, and no amount of showing her evidence is going to cause her not to worry while out about "some maniac" showing up with a gun. And there's also a low-level distrust that pervades society when one does know the statistics and realizes how many people around them on an average day are likely to be packing a machine that can kill merely by being pointed at somebody and a button being pressed. "An armed society is a polite society" seems like a crazy statement, but the kernel of truth it does have is that an armed society is more distrustful of others (less "social") than an unarmed one.
Pardon my newbiness, but what generated your charts? Is it part of the iOS Store, or a third-party dashboard?
A programmer’s guide to big data: tools to know
The Rise of Cloud Gaming
Hybrid Cloud Requirements per CloudVelocity CTO
Blaming medication is as facile as blaming guns in general for violence. I've taken a lot of prescription psychotropic medicine (as well as lot of proscription medication, IYSWIM), and I've never felt the urge to launch a homicidal attack on anyone.

What we need is a multifaceted approach to the problem; better and more accessible treatment regimes for the mentally ill; better protocols for restraining the dangerous without scrapping their rights; better tracking of firearms and ammunition (eg NanoTags - http://www.nssf.org/share/legal/docs/AFTEVol38No1KrivostaNan...) and better regulation of gun ownership in order to achieve the goal of a well-regulated militia as stated in the 2nd Amendment. I'm not in favor of banning guns, but I think licensure, recertification, and insurance should all be part of responsible gun ownership.

Apparently this Lanza woman was convinced of an imminent economic collapse and presumably thought her reportedly-Autistic son would be in danger in any resultant breakdown of society, so she taught him to shoot. Her misapprehensions about the danger to her own and her son's life imposed a horrendous cost on her community. Beside that, the cost of insurance is negligible.
Oh well unplayably choppy is more subjective but I was going with the true problems a large dt would create like collision detection failure and controls not working.

I can't think of a framework that doesn't have a fixed timestep except for maybe gamemaker or some of the simpler frameworks. Maybe some of the html5 stuff is non-fixed timestep but that is a field that is just coming into its own right now.

None of the bigger 2d or 3d physics engines today that I know of use a non-fixed timestep.

In platformers with high speed movements fixed timesteps are even more important because of tunneling. You can often account for tunneling in some of the better physics engines but it is sloooow.

In fps games there is a lot of interpolation going on with the server correcting player and object positions. If the server lags you and everything else is going to teleport no matter what. The server is not even accepting your control input at that point so either you are going to desync or you are going to teleport when the server tells you your real position. Generally in fps games only critical physics objects are being server corrected anyway, this is usually a small fraction of the physics objects. For example if an enemy fires a rocket at you that is not usually server corrected. If you get hit in the server calculations then you got hit whether or not you think you dodged it client side.

My point is that if the server hiccups your jump being slightly off is not the big problem, The big problem is that the controls are unresponsive. Also when the server hiccups it is rarely the actual fixed timestep serverside that is your problem, it is the internet. If your computer hiccups then it is not updating positions from the server so all critical objects are going to teleport. Could there maybe be slightly less teleporting on non-player controlled critical physics objects? Maybe so but if you are losing that many timesteps than things are going to jump around on your screen no matter what because your framerate is like 5.
Germany and Austria have some of the most strict privacy laws in the world so they are a good example of the extreme case. In Germany, you do not control the use of the image, only its publication. That is I can take your photo in public and hang it on my own wall. Publication of public figures is pretty much universally allowed. Use of your image taken in public for data purposes (not published) remains controversial.

If I take your photograph and you cannot be identified in it, I can publish it without your permission, (say in a crowd or in front of a building as you note, etc)
Sext Instagram account incites riot
And that's what comments really need to do: tell 'why.'
Thanks! I'll be eagerly waiting for my access code ;-)
Drive in a lane, not on the shoulder.
Totally agree with you. I kind of think about it like Plane crashes v. Auto crashes. Commercial Plane crashes are very rare but when they do happen 250 people die in one shot. Car crashes happen so much more frequently but each only has a couple deaths. The grand scale of devastation of this one single act, in one single location makes it far more emotional than 1 or 2 deaths every hour 24/7 across the US. And when emotions are running wild... people get all worked up.
They should. I recently switched from a Droid X running Gingerbread to a newer Android phone, and it was super easy to grab all of my instagram photos (and everything else, really) out of the files directory.
I was wondering exactly the same thing, because you do need a model release from all identifiable people in a photo if you wish to use it for non-editorial commercial purposes. Courts have ruled that "identifiable" does not necessarily mean "can see their face" - if you can see any significant part of a person, you need to get a model release before it can be used commercially (e.g. in an ad).

You do not need a model release if the photo is taken for artistic/personal reasons (even if prints of the photo are sold as artistic items).
There would be an impact on users, I assure you. Just not directly predictable.
I suggest googling for "tsa theft"; if they're firing hundreds of people a year every year it isn't a negligible problem. But even if more is stolen by airline employees than by TSA agents, that isn't a defense of the TSA. We couldn't fly without the airlines; we flew for decades without the TSA.
This is such an awesome post. When I think about the history of bug fixing it seems like we haven't gone very far in the last couple of years. Measuring how long a bug takes to fix is still voodoo.
I really like Tony's article and appreciate all the work he has done on Celluloid. I am in early stages of writing a multi-threaded server app using Celluloid and Hamster as the basic libraries to deal with concurrency. So far I have found them to be idiomatic and pleasurable to use. It may actually be somewhat of a drawback, but Celluloid really can get out of the way to the extent that you would not even realize as the client of a particular object API that there is a message-based proxy in the middle of things. Still ,I like it that I don't have a lot of infrastructure and ceremony in my code just to be safely concurrent.

The GIL is like a boogey-man hanging over heads still. Its important to remember though that we still get a lot of concurrency in MRI; if you are bound in I/O you may not see a difference. My core app is not I/O bound and I predict I'll see enough benefit in JRuby to use it. I find JRuby to be slow in development; but library support is good and I'm presently planning to unit-test in JRuby in parallel and deploy with it from the beginning.
Why can't you color every enclave the same color - something different from the province they're inside of?

The traditional 4-color map rule only says that each neighboring region has a different color, not that the colors are meaningful.
The Lean Startup Conference 2012 Videos
And if you want to get more advanced, there's this great open source framework...
http://www.ros.org/wiki/
That is a valid assumption. But I don't give them full credit for it.
Join us on Google+ -- it's like the Python of social networks.

http://xkcd.com/353/
How about box2d via Emscripten? https://github.com/kripken/box2d.js/

In general I agree with your assessment though.
Yep-- lawyers who write ToS' tend to make them as company-friendly as possible to give them the most wiggle room (and best defense in case they get sued). But it'd be silly/suicidal to use photos from deleted accounts when there are literally BILLIONS from non-deleted accounts.
Thank you for writing all this out. I recently helped sponsor and put together a small local hackathon; it would've helped to have had this article handy when the organizing team first started working on it.
This is a shitty pattern that news sites(huffpo, espn etc.), especially, have bought into. You open a series of news stories across a half dozen tabs expecting text stories. You get auto-playing videos across tabs accompanying each text news story.

Just for this reason I am for a browser-level default block on auto audio/video playing. Let me unblock it at the domain level(ie. youtube).
In mapping, enclaves are usually colored the same as the "parent" country to which they belong. It's an additional restriction that's actually well catered for in the generic graph coloring context, as opposed to the "map" coloring of the original problem (which did not bother with the enclave issue).
Clickable: https://myrentr.com/
(Shrug) Sorry, I'm not 'equal' to a poacher. That's an idea that somebody spun from whole cloth, one that a lot of other people seem to accept as an unjustified axiom.
Excited about this finally stabilizing enough to try a project with.
Microsoft explains why the Pinball game never made it past Windows XP
RStudio: Shiny - Easy web applications in R
Tutorial: Building 'Shiny' Applications with R
Your view just plain scares me, there wouldn't be so much heat over this right now if it was something the majority of people including app developers thought was the right thing to do. There's plenty of examples of things that I feel is uncool, but I can understand it from the business side. A few weeks ago, when people went nuts over the possibility of ads showing up in peoples instagram feeds, I was like, fine. In every single terms of service that I have ever read, that line, "we reserve the right to alter these terms of use at any time", appears in some form or another. That is not an end all, and it's not an important distinction. What you alter the terms to still matters, especially on this big of a scale.

You make it sound like if they did this and didn't tell anyone about it, just opted everyone in, and started selling off photos. That you'd be ok with this. Not sure where you draw the line, but facebook/instagram finally decided to cross it. Users of products do have rights, and honestly app developers should head this as an important warning/lesson. You should always have a right to protect the interest of your product, but sometimes, when you decide to monetize a service years after its conception, you mess up. Even facebook/instagram can make huge mistakes. Instagram is going to take a gigantic hit from this.
Twitter passes 200 million monthly users
After an iPhone Breakup, Google Moves In
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Why I Quit Instagram
Instagram's official response
"The bug was easily fixed by upgrading the build server, but in the end we decided to leave assertions enabled even for live builds. The anticipated cost-savings in CPU utilization (or more correctly, the anticipated savings from being able to purchase fewer computers in the future) were lost due to the programming effort required to identify the bug, so we felt it better to avoid similar issues in future."

I'd like to ask: for anyone here who's ever worked on a large C++ codebase, were assertions ever actually observed to be a noticeable detriment to performance? I'm sort of naively assuming that a good branch predictor would make their impact negligible, but I ain't exactly a system programmer.
I'm troubled by the fact that it's news at all what someone's family member thinks. I mean I know in this case Arielle is a prominent figure in the tech world on her own, and as such her opinion on things like this may be more news-worthy than what Jeff Bezos' sister in law's ex-husband's housekeeper's uncle's opinion is, but if that's the case make it newsworthy that her opinion is such-and-such, not that Mark Zuckerberg's /sister's/ opinion is such-and-such.
No, your orignal comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4928127 said that "only in the US do kids shoot other kids with automatic weapons" and "but can someone please explain why a school teacher would have three guns in her house, one of them a Glock semi-automatic pistol??"

Nothing about that said all guns are bad, part of it was completely false referring to the automatic. There is absolutely nothing exciting about a ... gasp ... "GLOCK" semi-automatic pistol. Glock is just the name of a brand. You could also have a Ruger, or Smith and Wesson, or Kimber, or any number of other brands that make pretty much identical guns.
Explain how risk/reward could be different without one being better than the other. Is one going to come out as an imaginary number or something?

Actually, now that I think about it more, you're probably going to be dividing by zero to calculate that risk over reward so testing equality will be a challenge...