skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We recently saw "Why use SVM" hit the front page of HN, but I feel this is a much more rigorous treatment of the same topic.

In particular, Andreas does a great job discussing the relevance of the kernel to SVMs, its computational complexity, and methods to minimize that complexity via inner product space approximation.

Interesting to see how the Nystrom and Fourier approximations to the inner product space almost match the full kernel's accuracy in 1/3rd and 1/5th as much time, respectively. It is rare that one needs that extra bit of accuracy, so I imagine Nystrom would be far more appealing for anyone using sklearn.SVM.
I personally saw a completely different reason for this, it wasn't that the best developers didn't work for TCS or that the best developers worked for the highest bidders.

For all the years we had TCS developers working with the team, our developers stayed as developers and improved. Yet with TCS the status symbol there was to be a manager. We had a lot of churn over the years as the more experienced developers became with TCS, they stopped development and moved into a more "prestigious" role as a manager and stopped coding.
Well there is also this theory that people saving their money are actually giving a gift to the economy. They gave something they received money for in return, if they don't spend that money they basically sold their goods for free.

See

www.slate.com/articles/life/holidays/2004/12/what_i_like_about_scrooge.html

I suspect few rich people keep their riches in cash.
I serve over 4 billion images out of S3 and don't have any issues with 50x errors.
The best part is at the end, when you realize he doesn't even have any kids yet!
If you choose to not have kids, think very carefully about this. Reading things like this post may help you anticipate some of the emotions you are going to feel.

I say this because I've witnessed a pattern that I find very tragic: A couple in their relative youth (30s) decide that they don't want kids. Later, however, they start having second thoughts. And by the time they decide that they do want kids, they are desperate.

IVF rates, to my knowledge, are still pretty low (once you rule out the four-fertilizations-at-once average-movers), and carrying to term is also hard. So there is depression and tragedy every time the bad news is revealed- the pregnancy didn't take, or the woman miscarried.

I know several people who regret not having kids, but I don't know any who regret having kids (or, to be fair, admit to regretting it).

I'm not trying to preach here, I'm just saying that I would recommend only making the decision not to have kids after giving it a deep, emotional consideration. The rational reasons (I wouldn't be good at it, etc.), may not hold up as you age.
I second that. It's free and works on both Mac, Windows, and Linux.
(The Return of) A
QRCode.js - A Cross-Browser JavaScript Library To Generate QRCodes
Not OPs fault, but from the name I was expecting a web-based harmonica. Anything good online for doing GarageBand type things? Preferably that can be used in other projects?
I have 4 children and they are all young (under 10). While after having kids my motivation and drive to do more increased, it actually took a few years for me to figure out what worked for me. I had to give up a couple of my most favorite past times (writing music, playing in bands, and video games).

I found I had to just pick one major task to do in my spare time so I chose focusing on personal projects. I usually woke up earlier than everyone else and went to bed later than everyone else to make it work. I would commit to at least 1 full hour to working on a project per night (which wouldn't always work out). The key for getting a project done was laying out the tasks and always moving forward so that every hour was spent getting closer to completion.

It was a long road but I now enjoy working for myself as an independent consultant, I have a side project I work with a friend on, and I have my own product I'm working on as well.

I would say that it's a little easier when the children get older but not too much as they start becoming more active in activities like girl/boy scouts, sports, etc.
With defer_javascript on, browser-reported page load times tell less of the picture. The problem is that what browsers report back to your analytics service is the amount of time that passes before the onload event while defer_javascript [1] postpones javascript execution until the onload event. This means that with defer_javascript off you were counting javascript execution time but when you turned it on you stopped counting it.

We're trying to optimize something like "time until the page is visually complete and usable", and there's not currently a good metric for that. Speed index [2] does visual completeness well, but I don't know of any algorithmic way to measure time-until-usable.

(I work on the PageSpeed team at Google, mostly on ngx_pagespeed.)

[1] https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/mod_pagespeed/filte...

[2] https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpag...
It's still a warrant, though, reviewed by eleven (?) judges, who are appointed for non-repeating terms.

I definitely agree with Wyden's proposal -- that there be more transparency in this process, even if it's heavily redacted. Even he and his colleagues recognized and respected the need for keeping at least some amount of secrecy with cases like these, where they can't be brought to a regular (read: public) court. I found his suggestions to be sane and level-headed, and I think that if it hadn't been left to the last minute they'd have had a much better chance.

What I do not find sane is articles like this that declare that there aren't warrants involved, that there isn't probable cause. I think that that's misleading and sensationalist.
FreeBSD Foundation exceeds target for 2012
I fell into it when my wife and I had the opportunity to buy a parcel of her grandmother's farm that was already being rented, so I don't have much more information than that.
I love what I do because...
Children, like puppies, also don't stay that way forever. I hate this idea that children don't grow up into flawed, possibly terrible people on occasion. No love is "invincible".
That's what happens when you don't involve engineers in the project spec part of the process, they need to be consulted much earlier and be partners in helping define the feature-set and timeline, not impose it from above with an arbitrary set of features.
I'm really at a loss, I don't understand why we keep talking past each other. I'm willing to accept that I'm misunderstanding something here but I don't see it.

Yes, congress cannot impinge on the President's constitutional powers, can't force him to fire his Secretary of State. But spying is not a constitutional power, unless you accept the AUMF war-time Commander in Chief argument. Which is what set off my John Yoo detector.
Not arguing that MBAs are the "new black." I'm simply saying that one explanation is how many MBAs who have been successful at tech startups are known for other things - not the degree.

And as for your jab after reading (or rather, misinterpreting) one blog post, we can simply agree to disagree.

Thanks for commenting and checking out my blog, though - happy holidays!
More awesome web stuff today. Great job and awesome music!
A couple things here I'd say.

The first is that you have to be careful with the 'live' page stuff on Cloudflare and blaming it directly on Cloudflare. I can't know the exact circumstances that lead you to see the error, but in our experience the couple times that we've had a problem with this, it's been an actual issue on our side that wasn't presenting itself at great frequency, but enough to trigger a live-site error once in a while.

As for imgur, I'd have to look around their site, but I'd say perhaps they didn't do their homework completely? I mentioned it on a previous post but you have to be extremely careful with setting headers for objects or every request will be proxying for an image from Cloudflare, back to the internet, then to your servers, then back through the internet, through Cloudflare and then finally to the user.

Instead, you want to make sure that Cloudflare is caching mostly everything EXCEPT for the page body if at all possible. A developer accidentally turned off proper headers a while back and well, we noticed it in page load speed issues pretty quickly.

Edit: Also, you probably want to see if you can cache the page body as well ;).
Inflation and demurrage do not have exactly equivalent effects, as we discuss in the about page http://freico.in/about/
Mayor Bloomberg blames Apple thefts for rise in New York City crime rate
Seriously considering Seattle or Las Vegas, or farther afield, Hawaii or New Zealand, in 2013+.
It gets easier. As long as you don't use the TV or LCD screen as a tool for parenting, your children will learn by 6-10 how to keep themselves occupied and all you have to do at that point is remind them to bathe and eat, teach them when you can, and listen for too much silence or abrupt screams.
CreateJS in many ways seems to bring Flash/ActionScript concepts to JavaScript. I used EaselJS and PreloadJS in my Win 8 project, and in a lot of ways it felt like I was back in ActionScript (except for worrying about which page on the timeline - for better or worse).
Squeezebox is not perfectly synchronized?
Choosing not to reproduce is also a part of evolution.
Get a hand operated winch you can sling around a tree at the top of the ditch, rather than being permanently anchored to the car? Bonus, it can live inside the car and it won't get dinged in the crash.
Jst posted 1998 SiliconAlley directory (working version)
the more things change the more things stay the same.
People are right now. This currency is live, transacting, and secured by a rapidly increasing amount of computer power. On the subject of their rationality...
The year's most popular wikipedia pages in 35 languages
A great article along those lines: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020474090457719...
I can't imagine wealthy bike owners actually riding them in the cities for health reasons.

The air condition in the cities is extremely poor, and riding a bike would probably do more harm than good to your body.
It's never come before SCOTUS directly (a technical question about whether lawyers can speculatively sue for information about specific cases was heard in October and will be decided next year) but has survived in lower courts.

I'm obviously not an expert but the odds seem very high that warrantless electronic surveillance of specific foreign targets will be found constitutional; warrantless searches of Americans are constitutional in many circumstances.

It's important to remember that "constitutional" is not a synonym for "correct". There's a lot of things we could do that are constitutional but ridiculous.

Late edit:

Note that while it's hard to find FISA case law, it's not as hard to find case law on the principles animating it. Here's SCOTUS, US v US District Court 1972:

Moreover, we do not hold that the same type of standards and
procedures prescribed by Title III are necessarily applicable to this
case. We recognize that domestic security surveillance may involve
different policy and practical considerations from the surveillance of
"ordinary crime." The gathering of security intelligence is often long
range and involves the interrelation of various sources and types of
information. The exact targets of such surveillance may be more
difficult to identify than in surveillance operations against many
types of crime specified in Title III. Often, too, the emphasis of
domestic intelligence gathering is on the prevention of unlawful
activity or the enhancement of the Government's preparedness for some
possible future crisis or emergency. Thus, the focus of domestic
surveillance may be less precise than that directed against more
conventional types of crime.
Er, nothing you said contradicts what he said, and everything you said could be applied to NPE patent portfolios as well.

Try again?
It should not be "decide to not have kids"
It should be "decide to have kids"

Having kids is a major decision.
Not having them is not.
E-book subscription service. Basically Spotify for books: You pay a monthly fee and get access to all the books you want. I don't use the Kindle or buy books through Apple because I hate the idea that because of DRM I'll be forced to always use the same reader. With a monthly subscription that problem is solved.
Not really.

#2 is a narcassist because having kids is all about him and his fulfillment/ego.
Is there ever a question in life that doesn't seem to start with,"depends"?
No, because it has been very hard to even get a lawsuit against it accepted, either because NSA or the White House tried to dismiss the cases because they don't have standing, because they can't prove NSA is spying on them, or by using the state secrets privilege.

EFF has one case against it now:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/eff-government-state-s...
Ask HN: Wearable/Ubiquitous computing. How will will it affect our daily lives?
With sensors, processors and display devices becoming increasingly integrated in the world around us, I believe that the barriers between physical computing devices and our daily lives will be broken down.

How do you think this integration of technology into our lives will progress from where we are today? Google Glass is one next step, but how will we use it? What comes next? How do you imagine our (technological) world 5 years from now?
If that argument were correct, Moore's law would destroy the computer industry as everyone would perpetually wait to buy.

As this hasn't happened, it may be worth considering the effects of time preference in both examples.
Married 15 years, no kids, no desire. I can't have kids, I think my wife would have had kids had she married someone else who wanted kids, but has never expressed that she's wanted kids (and has more recently expressed thanks that we don't have any).

What's it like? It's just life. You keep living, with or without kids.

What does bother me some is the moral high ground some people take when they know you don't have kids. "You couldn't possibly understand what it's like." "Once you have kids, you'll know." To some extent, that might be true, but I don't think it's impossible to make judgements about certain situations without being in that situation entirely.

Some people tend to make a lot more judgements about me and my decision not to have kids than I do about their choice to have kids. "But... no kids? That's so selfish of you!" Then 10 minutes later... "aren't you worried about who will take care of you when you're older?". WTH?
This is really cool. Only thing that confused me is the UI seems to have a mind of its own sometimes - songs suddenly change themselves, and the list scrolls, and I can't find my way back to where I was.
MTA Releases Subway Time App
Jimmy Teddy Happiness Campaign
After just roughly scanning the graphs I'd speculate that the ageing society plays a role. Which could explain why less liberal states are experiencing a rise of population, while the more liberal states are experiencing a decline.

Which is just my hunch (without any source or proof) that people get more conservative with age. And another one, that they prefer to live in places with like-minded folks.

Just wild guessing though. I am not even from America.
My apologies for "implying" that. I facepalmed when I saw, "slow" and "ruby/rails". So I digressed into a rant about the lack of a simple blog engine for Java, which would likely run much faster than a Rails solution. I'm fully aware his solution is to just pushed static files, and I even bet he's having Apache do linux sendfile, which would pretty much idle the CPU.

Better?
You are smart and lucky to have grandparents to help out. Give it a few more weeks before you declare how easy parenting is, though.

You said yourself that you miss your baby terribly. So how is that a winning situation for you?
I haven't even heard of Instagram before their change in ToS.
Why don't you buy it back? He gets to recoup part of his failed investment and you get your project back. Dedicate 3-7 days to implement what you've learned since that time and set up a passive income source. Would make a hell of a follow-up blog post too.
This app also has a web version: http://apps.mta.info/traintime/

Which means the MTA has unintentionally developed an API: http://advisory.mtanyct.info/Test/gtfs/scraper.php?line=1...
It's good to hear some insight into this, as it's really been grating on me lately, so thanks!

I'm somewhat curious about what kind of problem you could have that would allow the 'live' site to work, but break through CloudFlare. That seems entirely counter to the functionality... do you happen to remember or are you able to comment on what was happening?
Even the public tantrums tend to be few and far between. We've had a couple among our three kids. Perhaps others around us were horrified. But other parents aren't- we get it.

Seriously, in the big picture it's no big deal. Downs syndrome, in contrast, is a big deal.
Cough cough http://fedgov.dnb.com/webform/pages/CCRSearch.jsp sputter sputter ahem free one business day cough do this before submitting to Apple cough D&B is basically extortion

For what it's worth, I was sent the URL above on a wink wink hush hush basis by a large EV SSL certificate issuer. We needed a cert for our non-US company, but they wanted a DUNS number. Nobody outside the US actually uses DUNS numbers (I don't care what D&B says). So yeah, that URL gives you a DUNS number for free within 1 business day, paid for by the US Government.
Full Show 12/21/12: The Big Picture Christmas Carol
If you're a normal human being, it's actually a lot of work (or an outpatient surgery, for me) to not have kids.
Do you have any idea the kind of crazy non-sense that gets a warrant issued in "regular" courts? I'm happier leaving complicated decisions about intelligence to a group of experts who specialize in the field.
I believe the future will see far fewer people having children simply because it won't be necessary. I've captured a lot of this idea here: http://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-future-of-human-identity-... .

Basically, as we move from 100,000 years ago to 1000 years from now we'll have gone from needing to have children to survive to essentially living forever. All the way back there was zero individuality, and we have more now, and we'll have more in the future.

Individuality is the opposite of parenting. That's why women are still behind. To a larger extent than men they live their lives for their children. And when you pour your entire life force into another human, you simply cannot achieve the same as someone who does that to create art or music or literature.

Men started being individuals before women did, and they are ahead as a result. Women are catching up, though, and that's a good thing. The important thing is that in the distant future we won't have the requirement.

When we are creative life forces with arbitrary bodies that live (effectively) forever, what will be the need for reproduction? At that point we'll be enlightened entities providing services for each other.

In short, reproduction is a vestigial requirement that we sill possess. And because it's evolutionary it provides us pleasure, but it will give out to advanced happiness in the future, and that happiness is the happiness of creating art, music, literature, etc.

There will still be children for a long time, and they should be celebrated and loved enjoyed when they do happen. But we've long since past the time where everyone needs to make them. In fact, it's nearly becoming criminal to keep making them when so many exist that have no loving parents.

As for the article's direct point of whether one can be happy without them, I think the answer lies in how much happiness one can gain from being an individual. If you are an author or a painter or a musician, and you truly love what you do because it helps other people then you likely are tapping into the same sensation that parents get--and likely something more as well. For people like that, having children is not a requirement.

And since this should be the goal anyway, i.e. people CREATING things for others to enjoy (as opposed to http://danielmiessler.com/blog/parent-to-child-propagation-o...) then those who can do so should pursue this course without fear.

As for those who simply feel elation from raising children, there should be no shame in that either. Opposing nature in the name of a distant, future type of happiness that may not be possible for that person is not likely to be fulfilling.

It's not time to abandon parenthood. But it is time to adopt adoption, and to look forward to a time when creation of art and beauty should become the goal of everyone living rather than a default action of creating new humans who will participate in a mostly meaningless means of making money so that their offspring can do the same.

Anyway, sorry for the ramble. I think a lot about this.
It's sort of weird that you criticize igravarious for saying "just solution" because it's an opinion (and so what? We can express opinions here, right?), but then you say that in such a system the rich would be "unfairly taxed", which is also an opinion.

And yes, some rich people will probably leave the country if you raise taxes on them. But that's no more an argument against raising taxes on the rich than "if you increase the price of bananas, people will stop buying bananas!" is an argument against raising the prices on bananas. If we want to stop talking about opinions and subjective ideas, then what you're left with on that specific point is simply an optimization problem.

The government is essentially selling a product, which is a big old package of laws, regulations, court systems, public programs, etc. which make the country a nice place to live and do business in. Taxes are the price that the government charges for that product, and compared to much of the world, that price is very low. So to say that all (or most) of the rich people would leave the country if their taxes increased is roughly equivalent to saying that the US is an inferior good, competing on price alone. And I don't think that many people, including most who make such claims, believe that for a second. At least, not as far as the wealthy are concerned.
this is really against what most restaurants should try to do. I'd rather have a place make 10 dishes very high quality than 50 ok dishes. With a large menu its very hard to provide quality and consistency.
I agree, without secret courts or indefinite detention the stazi wouldn't have been able to eliminate threats to national security. When it comes to national security almost anyone could be a threat, and the police should be able to surveil them with out having to jump through the bureaucratic hoops. You really can't run a modern society on quaint ideals about 'rights' and 'liberties' foisted upon us by 18th century 'activists'.