skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's an understatement. Here in California, politicians reacted to the idea with an incandescent, frothing-at-the-mouth rage peppered with (political) death-threates aimed at anyone who dared to make an issue of the issue. But thanks to the direct-initative process, they didn't have to power to actually block it. The direct initiative system has been the source of a lot of grief, and frankly, it has a lot to answer for. But in this case, it proved to be worth its weight in gold. Indeed, it may be the thing that leads to the end of gerrymandering throughout America.

Until very recently, California was polarized even more sharply than Washington DC, and seats were filled with ideological firebrands backed by primary voters who would punish "compromise". This chronic disunity meant we unable to use the power of our size effectively. But now that we're steadily replacing those folks with people who can safely operate together, our reps can safely ignore their parties to vote as a uniform block that only cares about itself. Coming from a state as big as California, that represents a major a threat. In another election cycle or two, California will have enough unity to become the swing vote on anything. And yes, you can expect it to use this power ruthlessly. Nothing will move unless there's something in it for California, and given the size and diversity of the state, it'll be a rare issue that passes without California extracting some major concession from the other States. It'll be all take and no give, all the time, on everything.

Power this substantial and unchecked will be deeply resented and increasingly abused. For other big states, the only way to stop the pain will be to start operating the same way themselves. Florida is well on its way to ending gerrymandering. Governor Cuomo is starting to make an issue of it in New York. If they can start operating as post-partisan blocks, they can work together to neutralize California's power. Once Texas and Illinois get into the game (in that order, I suspect), the political dynamic will be Big States vs. Small States Further Disadvantaged By Intractable Partisan Rifts. Applying pressure of this magnitude to what will be perennial losers should cause the whole sordid institution to collapse entirely, subordinating politicians to people rather than parties in all 50 States. In retrospect, the madness we're living through now will look a lot like the crime-ridden hell scape of New York City in the 70's, as seen from the 90's on.
This is the difference between a regular company and a company with a great atmosphere. It might seem a waste to some people but building an atmosphere like this makes me want to work at github. And that's a very big advantage in the tech industry.

It's quite shocking how little you _have_ to give employees, but in the end people will not be very happy if you only care about the number of hours spend at the office and not about the person spending them there. Also; things like this are a great way to encourage your employees to think differently and get their creative juices flowing.
What's the opportunity cost of working for office manager wages on something you created? The guy offering this deal is a shameless vulture, she should counter (at least) $250K for =<49%.
The cheaper one is a pedometer, the expensive one tries to do things like track your sleeping patterns and hooks into their own make of scale.
Disregard powerusers - think about office tasks for simple non-tech people that need multiple applications for a single logical task.

For example, a common scenario of needing reference material while doing or creating something:

Project manager writing a budget estimate (excel or email) while repeatedly looking at a project proposal (word or pdf).

Secretary discussing a meeting schedule (email, skype) while looking at calendars of the involved people.

Any newbie learning a complex task or app while having a tutorial video or book open next to it.

Journalist writing an article (CMS, etc) while viewing multiple sources and previous articles.

In many of these cases multiple monitors would be useful as well, but modern monitor sizes easily allow writing/editing a document on one side of monitor while viewing the reference part on the other side. The historical way of doing this is to print out the reference document and attach it next to the monitor - there are tools for this in any office supply store. Now that screen space isn't so expensive, it's more efficient to keep both of these documents in the computer.

If you are a pure consumer of information, you may get by a single window. If you actually do something, then it's different.
No doubt, free market economies do love price increases but it's often at a level that could be viewed as price gouging to make money off someones misfortune. Whether that's a truly bad thing is probably a longer conversation for a different day (is there a morality in the marketplace, and so on).
Sunk-cost says she should bail as soon as the check clears and capitalize on her publicity.
nice try, good graphics, but i still find it confusing and boring after a few pulls.
Eh, there was no reason to assume somebodies mobile phone was incapable of scroll. That's just making their decision for them.
Platformer Enemy Design
Poll Everywhere (YC08) looking for a Lead DevOps Engineer
I like fitbit, it is inspiring me daily to go for my workout.

Minute by minute data can be very useful for custom visualization.

I have found a few bugs in fitbit, like I change my daily targets, but weekly targets dont change.

Also, fitbit free app is not available in Indian App Store. I dont want to create a US apple account to just use this app.

If open data access is available, I would be inclined to but a Aria and couple of fitbit zip for my family members as well.
The conversion was taking too long time due to bug. But please try again now!
One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

I'm sure this would seem like a much more profound statement if I hadn't yet learned ecology.
Decoding natural language is almost impossible. You'd have to pick out single words or locations, which can often be taken out of context.

Even if you could, lots of other services do this to some degree already. Ad targeting relies heavily on user preferences (though broadly, such as other sites visited or for example showing specific ads if a user likes a certain page).

How would you market it? I don't really desperately need an app like this right now.. you'd have to convince people to use it.
How many people here are willing to get arrested?

Because that's what it's going to take to reverse this trend. We need hundreds/thousands of non-violent protesters politely and professionally refusing these intrusions and getting arrested for it. Until that happens these intrusions will continue.
I would guess Schmidt is much less interested in doing business with North Korea and much more interested in currying favor with other governments. Obama himself may have asked him to make this trip and it could go a long way toward softening ties between China and Google as well - depending on the results.
> It turns out that these people [hunter-gatherers] have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors

That's got to be a logical fallacy.

A single farmer with modern tools can feed hundreds of people.
probably die by your 30s

Average life expectancy at birth is heavily influenced by infant mortality. Most people didn't really die in their 30s.
Python can now read out news for you
$5 Billion U.S. Treasury Bonds
That's essentially average-utilitarian (has the happiness of a random person in the population gone up?); I guess many people are closer to total-utilitarian (ie. the total number of happy/surviving people is also important).
Google for 'operation flex' if you want to see how the FBI uses your tax dollars to fight terrorism.
If Apple is so worried, why didn't they name it the Apple Store? Honestly, some of this stuff is only designed for court cases. How about some real brand identity, like putting the Apple symbol on the iPad/iPhone button. Patenting ideas is just crazy. Here's an idea for the new Apple logo - a black rectangle. I'd recognize it...
FOI requests are often made because people don't trust that the "all your information is displayed here on the website" is actually all of the information that is being held on them.

What if the FOI request was supplemented with the users password (changed by them to a temporary one)?

Other possibilities would be encrypting a second copy of the patients data (each time it is stored by the user) using a public key with the corresponding private key held in escrow somewhere on a machine with no network connection. It would then be someone's job, upon receiving an FOI request, to take the patients master-encrypted record(s), put them on the non-connected computer that contains the private key, decrypt, and print out in order to reply to the FOI and then clean up.
Maybe in a few thousand years time people will be reading about how the widespread adoption of computers and the internet in the 20th century was actually a catastrophe because before that it was so much easier to maintain your privacy and there weren't so many goddamn robots everywhere.
A scavenger hunt down the darkest corridors of the Internet
>On a more serious note, what is with the fad of running OSX and doing all of your work in a VM?

Even if you use Linux you are better of doing all your work in a VM. Reproducibility, sharing, snapshots, isolation, multiple VM for different target environments, etc.

>OSX is terrible for anything serious

Citation needed. What exactly does "serious" mean to you? Several multi-billion companies have their developers working on OS X machines.

And If I want to do something with something like Premiere, Photoshop et co (it is 2012 after all, multimedia is not an afterthought), I'm dead in the water in Linux. Not at all good for serious work.

>and is enough of a pain in the ass that one must use a VM just to run their web application on their development machine. Why not just use Linux?*

If your needs are simple enough that you are OK with running a single web server with a single set of libs and frameworks, by all means use Linux. It's not like todays "development machines" just need a single Apache and MySQL.

For anything more serious, use a VM, either in Linux or OSX or whatever.

I might need to run 5-6 different DBs, or versions of a DB/Server/Caching/Proxies/etc depending on the project I'm working on.
I think you explain why it is smart to spend money on marketing. But really for medical use, I find that marketing can be dangerous. I mean creating a need for a drug? really?
Jesus Christ could the author take longer to get to the point? Also, they are terribly selective of their evidence. It's perfectly possible that life expectancy decreased following invention of agriculture and that people had more stressful lives, but the other benefits of social organisation so totally make up for that, as shown by the huge increase in life expectancies since then. Do you realise just how much more peaceful we are in organised society than in hunter-gather societies? Watch the talk on "the surprising decline in violence" by Stephen Pinker: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...
I like the device. But without access to my data I will not buy it.
Pindjur sos
Pindjur sos
cute :)

I have my doubts that shipping 8MB cards in this way when contracted to deliver 128MB would be accepted by a chinese court - it just probably wouldn't reach court most of the time, especially when dealing with a westerner who would just learn some kind of lesson and move on.
Interesting... I'm dealing with similar issues.

What would be ideal is to have some kind of "password/data escrow" service that is separate from companies like yours, or the one I'm working with, so that there is a way to recover the data if a password is lost, but a formal/legal separation of the means to access it is maintained.
> Are you saying that an hstore is really a string?

I'm not familiar with hstore but I think he means you can store some kind of reference under a key.
Wouldn't total-utilitiarian then prefer a population of 1000000 mostly unhappy people over a population of 100 very happy people? In that case it would at least be an awkward benchmark, as you just need to procreate as much as possible to get the "best" scenario.
It's funny how technology brings us back to this "hunter gatherer heaven":

- population crowding is no longer necessary as telecommuting is a viable way of doing most jobs (hopefully the naysayers will be "silenced" in a few generations... like Moses's people that had to die in the desert before reaching the "promised land" as their mentalities were not compatible with it)

- we're becoming "hunters" again, as we engage in competitive activities to earn more "game" (money), dedicating more resources to this "hunting" than to actually "producing things"

- we're "gatherers" again - only that we gather from the supermarket instead of the bushes and we gather from the fruits of mechanized agriculture and industry instead of the fruits of the land

...but better still, we may soon be able to have the cake and eat it too: space colonization, ocean colonization, even higher yield concentrated agriculture via new biotech breakthroughs and "too cheap to meter" energy via large scale thorium reactors deployments and later fusion will allow even faster exoponential continuous population growth.

Let our Zerg (err... Human) swarm grow exponentially and engulf the universe! :)
"How to win friends and influence people"'s main point is to genuinely care about the people you interact with. Hard to see how that translates into "being a massive prick". I'm curious what led you to that conclusion about the book.
Programming is just terrible for you because you don't have the awesome Emacs setup I do.
The flash content must get the data from somewhere, probably in XML, certainly over HTTP. Open Wireshark and capture a session to known where it came from. Then write a program that replicates this behavior and save the data.
The article claims it was a catastrophe in many ways, not in all of them.

I'm glad I was born into my time, in a rich country. And why shouldn't I? I live like a king and don't have to put any real effort into anything to maintain my status. All my problems are literally first world problems. But on a global scale agriculture fucked us up something fierce. And while I take a lot of pleasure in the nicer aspects of advanced culture, I wouldn't just assume that it justifies the horrible things that would never have come to be if we would have kept on living in a healthy symbiotic relationship with our natural environment.

Or as Louis CK said at the Beacon Theater (I'm paraphrasing): "God: I gave you everything you need. Why did you put that shit there? Guy: So I can go faster!"
the team behind rules.io are leading an open source API framework project called Geekier which is exactly this. Take a look at the details here in Github https://github.com/rulesio/geekier/wiki - there is a link to the Google group for the project as well.
That you would speak of doing dangerous stuff with tools and a lack of healthcare and follow that with a mention of the Chinese factory... I find ironic.

Further, while infant mortality was a problem (and has continued to be up until the last hundred years), you would probably not die by your thirties (life expectancy calculations are throw off precisely by infant mortality rates - the life expectancy for a person in almost any society goes up to at least 50 if you discount deaths of those under a year of age or so.)

Is there something wrong with hunting, or difficult about it? I'm fairly sure we were good enough to wipe out a few species before the rise of agriculture. As for "dangerous stuff with precarious tools"... by all means, enlighten me. I'm having a hard time thinking of anything more dangerous than a sharp edge in any non-technologically advanced society. The number of dangers we have today from our tools (heard about a car crash on the radio recently?) and the lethality of them (how many people die from gun accidents? from mixing bleach and ammonia? electrocution? power tools? industrial machinery?)

Do I even need to cover healthcare? Or how the vast majority of the world doesn't have it? Or how the majority of medications we develop don't demonstrate a greater effect than a placebo?
Bye Bye Paypal Transaction Search - Hello Slowpal
WPP acquires stake in Globant
Hey, Kevin here from rules.io. Thanks for the mention. I'd love to connect with you guys - will send an email.
There's now a link to a demo: https://github.com/PascalPrecht/wbb#demo

An adaption of Scott Chacon's Pro Git
Someone needs to make those modern tools...
Pneumatic tires have better cushioning properties, and have less rolling resistance than any alternative tire design that can come close in cushioning. Lots of people have tried to create good airless tires but they just don't make enough sense to be widely adopted.

Really the best way to go is just pack a spare tube. Only takes a couple of minutes to change it on the road once you've practised a few times in your living room. Whenever I get a flat I change it out with my spare, then patch my spare later that day.

Airless tire with decent (though not great) cushioning, but terrible rolling resistance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jYcX_D09ig

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airless_tire

http://sheldonbrown.com/flats.html#airless
Productive Brainstorming
But you can find a little demo right here: https://github.com/PascalPrecht/wbb#demo
So, just to be clear, you literally drove a Zipcar ONE TIME, you screwed up and didn't leave yourself enough time on the rental (yes, you'll have to book with the understanding that things are very likely to take longer than you think -- and yes, you will often pay for time you're not actually in the car at the end of your reservation)...and then you never did it again?

The system is designed specifically to disincentivize people from doing what you did -- to book without really having a good sense of how long something is going to take. This is to prevent people from screwing over the next person, which as you said, you felt bad about. And you should -- you fucked them.

The system is what it is, and is designed for a certain kind of use. If you're going to take a trip during a relatively in-demand time (meaning, not the middle of the night) that's going to take 3.5 hours +/- 1.5 hours, you either book for 5 hours or you probably shouldn't use Zipcar. You can risk it to try to be efficient, but then you might pay a big ole fine and screw over someone else.

If you need to be able to take highly variable length trips and not commit to a given rental length, then maybe you should buy a car. Don't blame Zipcar when you're trying its very structured system in a willy-nilly manner.

You literally had a worse experience on your first drive than I've had on any of my probably 100+, and you're condemning the entire service -- nay, the entire business model -- based on one experience. One. Surely you can see how this seems like madness.
The Raspberry Pi Education Manual
Agriculture is hardly to be blamed for hunger. In modern economics you need to pay to get something. And you need a job to earn money. What this basically means is, hunger is basically a problem of affordability and not food production. No jobs means, no food. Not just that it also means no good shelter, no good clothing and access to health facilities.

The biggest failure should be to look at why we haven't leveraged automation in agriculture to a point where one shouldn't have to work just to survive. But the way I see, in another coming decades this is something which is going to be inevitable.

In my country(India), it suggested all along the years that the biggest struggle for resources is going to be for water. In fact we are already facing a massive water crisis. It is believed there will massive riots, big war like stand off between states and mafia like control over water resources very soon. Much of this is a result of reckless mismanagement of water resources Eg: Waste dumping(both industrial and civic), turning lakes into sites for real estates in cities, over consumption of ground water. Some more time from now and India is all set for a major water crisis.

The miserable back breaking 12-14 schedules making electronics for you, is far better. The alternates are far worse. I can tell you it was more worst in India even in the past. There was rampant caste system. If you weren't born a male in a high caste warrior or priest family you were essentially screwed. And yes at least now people can chose some alternatives, back then it was slave labor bonded through generations. All you could do was slog in the fields for a rich landlord/king and hope you could eat bread twice a day. Or at most die building structures like the Taj Mahal or The Giza Pyramid. And yes there were famines, plagues and epidemics. In short, life in the past was scary.

I would say we are far better off then what we were before.
One interesting fact about the post WIMP era
Can logical operator in Python be used to conditionally initialize an item in a dict? For example, can:

group = dct.setdefault(key, [])
group.append(value)

be replaced with some equivalent of this Ruby snippet:

(dict[key] ||= []) << value

?
You had districts in California that were Democrat vs Democrat, meaning Republicans couldn't pick up any popular votes in those districts. That alone makes for a mighty skew in the popular vote totals.
On Dec 31st WhatsApp processed 7B msgs inbound and 11B msgs outbound
Praise Saint Steve, hallelujah! /sarcasm
It seems like your missing the point. The reason there is no affordable housing is because the city doesn't allow building up so SF is stuck with only existing housing. As it gets more desirable those prices will continue to rise. There's only really a few possible paths forward

1) leave it as is. Prices continue to climb

2) allow building up. Prices come down as supply meets demand

3) some how make sf less desirable lowering demand
Does any one find it funny that Apple is more worried about a rival store selling android apps than Google is.
YOLO, So Don't Waste Your Time Saying These Banned Words of 2013
KDE Software Compilation 4.10 postponed to next month
I have two points.

Point1: Nothing that Microsoft ever does will blaze a new trail of products, they are not an original sort of company.
They will always be playing catchup.

EG Kinect to WiiMote

Point2: Nothing that CS conferences or journals ever publish will blaze a new trail. They too will always be playing catchup.

EG first came Facebook, and only afterwards the whole social networking research craze in academia.

I exaggerate Point2 a little. There are 1 or 2 Academics who actually make stuff, like Michael Stonebraker. But overall the record is pathetic.

Don't buy the hype.
Will.I.Am swaps music for tech
How do we decide on districts? There will always be a possibility of bias and there is no "fair" way to divide districts. There is more random - that's about the best we can do. No districting system ensures a majority vote wins a majority representation, nor is it intended to.

I agree with your point on gerrymandering's biggest issue being the overall bias toward a party, however a proper primary system I believe moderates the parties, or at least provides one moderate and one extreme choice from one side of the electorate rather than two extreme choices from both sides. This ultimately represents people well.

Frankly I don't want a choice between a right wing extremist and a left wing extremist. I want a choice between two reasonable politicians, and I believe fixing the primary system would have a far better impact than worrying about gerrymandering.
Isn't Windows 8 a tiling window manager?
Decimal Places in Javascript: toFixed or Math.round
Facebook Lists aren’t as private as you think