skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would be interesting to run the freeloader situation with 1% freeloaders, 2% freeloaders, ..., 99% freeloaders, each 1000 times, and plot the probability that more than half the population are eventually infected as a function of the number of freeloaders.

I'm thinking the graph will show a sharp spike at a critical transition probability because it's a similar model to percolation [1].

In fact I may write my own simulation for this.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation_threshold
Note that social skills are needed in order to work within a team. I suggest you explore expanding your socials skills. If you want to, I can give you a few pointers over email.
Basically, stop being autist/aspie.
I like dark chocolate
Note that refinements are an 'experimental' feature only for Ruby 2.0, and many library authors don't want to use refinements. So I wouldn't expect to see a very big uptake in their adoption.
Keeping your mouth shut and doing what you are told sounds like a great idea for the first week of employment. You need to spend some time figuring out how things work, getting settled in, and even just learning your coworkers' names before you start asserting yourself.

If you came in to a brand new job and saying "no" to the boss was the first thing you did, it's not too surprising that they formed a negative impression.
There are ~no college courses I've seen anywhere which are critical to starting a network carrier (assuming you have a high school+ level of understanding of basic math, English, etc.). I've done datacenter stuff and ISP (satellite, not fiber, except as a customer), and international. Everything else is either something you can learn yourself (Cisco certification is moderately helpful, but the rest is all either craft skills or dealmaking), or stuff you have to learn yourself (local politics).

If you really want to start a network like Google Fiber, JFDI. Neither college nor YC should delay you.

There is ~no chance you'll be building a national or global network out of the gate, though -- unless you have a lot of experience or some exogenous source of capital, you'd be doing a local network in some city or region, and then expanding from there.
Compile Time Checking of KVC Keys
To continue the analogy. She will also not work half the time and be messy beyond belief.
I used to play TwinTris on the Amiga a lot: one the best version of Twintris ever (there are several videos on YouTube showing it). Very smooth 50 frames per second "pixel perfect" animation (but that doesn't translate very well in a YouTube video) and an amazing soundtrack.

But I was "too good" at it: there were vertical bars showing how many of each piece got randomly selected and these bars would grow higher and higher as you were playing.

I was playing for so long, even when the game reached crazy speed, that the bar would arrive at the top of the screen and then come back down, a bit shifted. A major video memory corruption would follow and it was only getting worse and worse.

At one point it became impossible to correctly see the screen and you had "lost" to the display bug.

: )
The current state of Virtual Memory is RAM + pagefile/swap partition. The hibernate file would be used to restore just the RAM. You still need the additional pagefile/swap partition to completely come back to that state once you wakeup.
This seems a well timed move by Schmidt.

Google share price has had a lot priced into it recently
(Jumps on self driving cars, google glasses etc) and the
Inevitable drop in QE means the price is going to have to slow. Not decline, just grow slower.

That's not to say google is in particular trouble, but their growth markets for the future are BIG markets, fibre, cars,
home automation - All markets that need lots of pump priming, lots of infrastructure work and that will eventually become ubiquitous.

There may not be a lot of profit in the markets or google may not be able to capture it but there will be a lot of cash, and that maybe google's destiny - PG&E.

Just my two cents (been reading up on profitability and ROI of 19C railways - fascinating)
This seems a well timed move by Schmidt.

Google share price has had a lot priced into it recently
(Jumps on self driving cars, google glasses etc) and the
Inevitable drop in QE means the price is going to have to slow.

That's not to say google is in particular trouble, but their growth markets for the future are BIG markets, fibre, cars,
home automation. All markets that need lots of pump priming, lots of infrastructure work and that will eventually become standards globally

There may not be a lot of profit in the markets or google may not be able to capture it but there will be a lot of cash.

Just my two cents (been reading up on profitability and ROI of 19C railways - fascinating)
Nope. Remember that Project Gutenberg hosts books which have lapsed into the public domain. That's not true for a lot of the stuff mentioned. (A decent collection of Van Vogt is available through Baen Book's Webscriptions program, though it lacks classics like Slan.)

You will find the occasional oddity: a couple of Samuel R. Delany's early Ace Double publications just popped up, and Chip is still very much alive. Chip has been in the business a long time - if they've lapsed into the public domain, it's because he allowed them to.

(It is weird when you see stuff appearing on PG by people you know/knew - Delany among the living, and Terry Carr and Laurence M. Janifer among the deceased.)
Did anybody write this before Aaron's suicide?

And based upon what evidence?
Because Rails is very popular and serves a particularly vital role in the startup world that HN caters to.

I find this less irritating than constant press release spam from commercial products, at least.
This is torture on an iPad. Nothing loads until scrolling stops completely.
Khan Academy might be exactly what you're looking for. It has videos ranging from addition all the way through to second year undergrad calculus. I've found the most important (and difficult) part of learning math is to force myself to practice.

Much like programming, mathematics is something best learned actively. Simply reading/watching videos rarely gets me anywhere.
I want to do this if I am successful in marketing this website and people enjoy using it. Once I've perfected the scoring algorithm, classification, website design/UI and data sourcing (to incorporate reviews & forums), I plan on expanding to video games, tv shows and books.

Eventually it would be cool to do stuff like material goods (cellphones, appliances, etc...) so that consumers have another users to leverage when trying to find something to buy. Imagine being able to compare cars based on what people are writing across the web about the cars durability, performance, comfort when shopping for a car!

But right now I'm working on the website by myself and have a ton of work to do.
A Retailer's Perspective on Marc Andreessen's "Death of Retail" Interview
Thanks. I'll add some copy to the front page to clear up some of your questions.

Payments are all done through Stripe Connect. Right now Teachity isn't taking a cut, but if the site ends up getting enough users then I'll start experimenting with pricing... as a comp, I think airbnb is 6-12%, elance is ~9% of each transaction.

Refunds are tricky. Everything is run through Stripe so I can't directly issue refunds above Teachity's cut. If people have a really horrible experience/no-show tutor I can ban the tutor and give refunds out of my own pocket although that wouldn't be sustainable. I'm working on a feedback system, so hopefully that will head off most problems... although you need enough reviews for that to be effective in the first place.
How can I access the deep, dark Web?
Note that I was commenting on the article from the parent to my comment, not to the one from the OP (which I found much less persuasive, and where the historical focus does seem like a real weakness). Even if a monopoly is the best way to incentivize pharma research, patents aren't the only way to achieve it - even today there is a complex set of mechanisms outside of patents, such as clinical trial data exclusivity for FDA approval.
I would encourage you to try talking to people who actually own and operate small and midsize labels. The effect of piracy is clearly visible in their sales charts; but based on the cultural treatment of it, they consider it a cost of maintaining good relations with their fans.

Their fans are hurting them, but since they like their fans, they struggle to find a way to make up the difference somehow.

Piracy is a good way for new bands to get discovered, but that benefit fades over time. When you have a devoted fan base and you're trying to sell your 5th album, having most of them download it for free offers no benefit to the artist or label.
Are you a Duck Entrepreneur?
This whole web page reads like a crazy paranoid snake oil salesman SEO spam landing page. What the hell.
Really great demo, quite effective! It's a nice trick using various kinds of noise. The visible mesh hides some of the innaccuracy, and the Perlin noise is a nice way to provide some motion to show the depth. Here's a quick video of me frozen in the white carbonite wall behind me: http://vine.co/v/bn3JJA7bX5d
D3 has an amazing projection system for creating SVG maps from GeoJSON.

https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Geo-Projections
Go look it up yourself.
Even if google itself isn't going anywhere, if the stock market falls over again it could cut a big chunk out of the value of everything, including "safe" companies like google.
Tech Alley? Toronto’s Vibrant Startup Scene
There is probably 10x more value in YC if you launch before or during YC than after demo day.

Why?
Update your ruby-build plugin, it's there.
Thanks for catching those bugs, I'll fix them up.

Classrooms are created when a bid is accepted so there's no way to navigate to one of the actual classrooms beforehand. I should probably incorporate a screenshot or preview of the classroom on the home page.

I guess I wrote that copy in a fit of optimism! Corrected it so as not to be misleading.

Thanks for the feedback.
Writing prose, even highly structured prose, is an unevenly distributed skill. Thankfully, it's also perfectly possible to get better at it. Would that more academics (lawyers, &c.) would try.
Their work on Google Fibre is definitely an interesting one and there is a huge opportunity there if they can get navigate their way around the massive players there already. But Google is playing smart by lobbying governments to open up competition.

The car opportunity is pretty much non existent for them. All of the top 20 car manufacturers have had projects for years and Volvo, Toyota already have plans to launch in 2014. They may look to someone like Tesla for a partnership but they are niche.
Very true.

I guess I'm looking at it from a World perspective - and in the countries that carry the most weight this seems to be clearly illegal.

Interestingly, even when it's not, a la Mega, the police hired buy the rich don't even care if what they are doing is illegal.

I have no doubt this will cause enormous upheaval and hopefully change in the coming years, as more and more people become aware of how much they are overstepping their authority.
Writing C code on an older machine kind of taught me that programming is mostly about just one thing:

Managing memory in the most efficient way.

Writing PHP or Ruby code spoils you. You completely forget that memory even exists, until you need to do something heavy. It's a good lesson to learn if you want to move beyond just basic web dev personal project stuff. But if all you need is to automate some calculations or store an email list in a db I wouldn't bother.
YouTube is driving billion+ in ad revenue if I remember correctly.
What Comes After the Cloud? How About the Fog?
How the future of IT might play out.
I know YC doesn't like to accept applicants who are still in school (and who aren't dropping out). Makes enough sense, considering students at all levels can expect to spend ~40-60 hours/week on their studies. But what about part-time/evening students? The commitment for them might be much lower, say ~10-20 hours/week.

Should students in this latter category even consider applying if they have zero intention of dropping out of school?
Advice for Up and Coming Front-End Developers
There's no reason you can't have immutable variables and pure functions in imperative languages, though.

Not that I don't support your quest to learn Haskell, Haskell is awesome and I hope you enjoy it :)
Agreed.

Nothing to do with the age. You have a personality that represents maybe 1% or 2% of the global population.

Historically cities were the place were a significant critic mass of people interested on a specific topic could meet, as it could put millions of people in the same place, you will have 0.01x10e6 = x*1000 ->thousands of people sharing, learning upon each other, growing, and truly understanding you and you them.

From those potential thousand people you will probably only get to meet hundreds, if you do have the opportunity. If you don't you will feel isolated and misunderstood all your life.

Now with Internet you have thousands of millions of people in the same place. There are barriers of communication, but they slowly go away(kickstarter success depends on video communication which makes for a more personal communication). This will only improve in the future.
Seems like mainline Firefox doesn't support this yet, but Chrome does.

It was interesting using Manycam to use the area around my mouse pointer as the video source and let it do the effect to itself recursively.
As an American consumer, I don't find this confusing; taxes change even among individual small cities, and they can change multiple times per year. The taxes really have nothing to do with my actual purchase: it feels more like a payment processing fee, a "cost of living". Yes: I realize that as a non-American consumer this sounds insane. People have different expectations and subtle details can change opinions; I pretty much never hear an American complaining, however, that they didn't realize there was a tax on something.
or fringe.
Are you talking about the prosecutors or their victims?
Heh, my photoshop skills are sub-par. I've been putting off replacing the banner with a more robust site intro/overview, sounds like I need to make that happen.
And of course I'm sure that's not hard to account for with some simple financial instruments.
Nice! Have you thought of putting "NO MONTHLY FEE" somewhere on the homepage? I missed that part, and pretty much just assumed it because of the other services.

I'm probably not going to figure out the api to print a stamp though. Is a non-api + non-signup version in the works? That's what I'd really want next time I need a stamp.
A slightly more modern anecdote: I've played most of Konami's music arcade and console games regularly (e.g. Beatmania IIDX, Drummania) ever since I started middle school. The learning curve was relatively huge for me and it took a while to have build up enough dexterity and speed for the hardest difficulties. Fast forwarding to the present time, it's hard for me to consciously _think_ about the notes anymore. Doing so just causes my accuracy to drop drastically and/or cause me to lose all focus.
Paralyzed Man Uses Thoughts Alone to Control Robot Arm
So what is the state of the course?

Is this basically a self-paced, self-taught series of notes?

Either way, looks like a nice resource, so thank you.
http://investor.google.com/corporate/2012/founders-letter.ht...

> Larry, Sergey and Eric have agreed to subject their
> shares to a Transfer Restriction Agreement. This
> agreement will maintain the same link between their
> voting and economic interests that exists today, even
> if they sell some of their non-voting Class C shares.
> If the founders or Eric wish to sell or transfer their
> non-voting Class C shares, a “stapling” provision in
> the agreement requires them to either sell an equal
> number of Class B shares, or convert an equal number
> of Class B shares into Class A shares. No other
> stockholders will be subject to these restrictions
> upon the transfer or sale of their shares.
I do derivations all the time. I just do a series of algebraic transformations, starting from what I have, and getting to what I need. Some might say that I'm doing a proof. But I never use proof by contradiction, contrapositive, induction, or proper proof techniques.
The rabbit-hole goes deeper... Search for gwan with hnsearch, this guy is the losethos of webservers or something.
Hmm, you should be able to navigate to the project board without signing in. You would be able to see all the jobs that have been posted by students + the broad category buckets. Or did you mean I should highlight the categories on the home page?
I agree that content is key and I'm putting other resources into generating that content. I'm not trying to do anything big or amazing; rather I'm trying to create a place for my friends and I to exercise our creativity that's more than just a blog. I'm an economist and will be converting a lot of what I would put in my blog into essays and responses about current economic news. A good friend of mine is already doing something similar for travel, and has expressed interest in contributing. Same thing for sports. I have some friends who are chefs that are interested in writing about food, and others who brew their own beer.

Right now, I am (irrationally?) optimistic about content. This is as much about my friends and I creating something as it is a serious attempt at journalism or literature.

So, assuming that content is covered, would you expect the skills I mentioned to be sufficient for building and running a site?
Except advancement of western civilization was much more due to technological innovations than 'gaming IP laws'.
Looks very nice!

A couple of notes - I don't understand why I need a password if I log in with Github. The point was avoiding another set of credentials.

Second, I should be able to use APIs with free tiers without a credit card and/or at allow more payment options (Google Wallet/Amazon payments/Paypal etc)
Interesting that you're appear so dismissive of Google's self driving cars.

I'm not claiming you're necessarily wrong, but I am intrigued about the other self driving options and how they surpass Google's solution?

It would appear to be a widely held belief, that Google is the pioneer and leader in the field, at least with respect to the software/AI.
This article doesn't go at all into the details of why NES Tetris is unwinnable and doomed to fail. Let me plug that gap.

The brick wall limitation comes at level 29, after 290 lines. At that time, the pieces drop so fast that they cannot reach the sides of the well before locking into place. The code rate-limits sideways moves of a piece to about 250 ms intervals, so if the game is running fast enough that the piece reaches bottom in less than a second, it's impossible to translate the piece five columns over to the edge. It's not a human limitation; it's literally impossible to keep playing even going frame-by-frame on an emulator. To go beyond 290 lines (or 293 if the 290th was the first of a Tetris), you'd have to stack up pieces on the sides ahead of time, and the absolute limit is about 310.

Modern Tetris games are very carefully designed to avoid such limitations. Modern Tetris games always allow at least a half second after a piece lands before locking it, allowing further moves and rotations. http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Tetris_Guideline

So the game of NES Tetris becomes not how long you can survive, but how many points per line you can score in that fixed duration of 290 lines. If every single line of the 290 was a Tetris, the total would come to about 1,500,000. So to reach the game's score cap of 999,999, about two-thirds of your lines must be achieved as Tetrises.

Gameboy Tetris has no such impassable speed tier. You can play Gameboy Tetris forever and many players have scored 400+ lines and 999,999 there.
All of the top 20 car manufacturers have had projects for years and Volvo, Toyota already have plans to launch in 2014

That's interesting. I haven't read anything like it. Do you have a source?
Thanks this is great feedback.
Google bought Android two years before the iPhone came out.
Microsoft Defends Surface Pro’s Limited Battery Life, Storage Space
Apply for practice and to think through the questions, but realize that you are up against thousands of smart people who can give every waking moment of their life to their company and you can't right now.
No need for "S". Hoarding is accounted for by a drop in V.
Oooh good call!

Yes, that's in the works.

But for now you can still use it! Just copy this curl command: https://geteasypost.com/docs#postage-buying Then, replace the To, From, Weight, etc with your own info, paste into iTerm or whatever you use. Once you get a piece back that's right (with that test API key), use your secret API key and buy it for real.

I'll even load your account with $5 to get started. Email me at j at easypost dot co (same to anyone else reading and interested) :)
But not to me :(

"Unfortunately, we have decided to cancel this order because it appears to be high risk. We do not send out any bitcoins on high risk transactions, and your bank account will not be charged."

I have no idea why I was flagged as "high risk", I'd be interested to know.
I'm a Brazillian living in Dublin, Ireland. I will launch my startup in the end of February. Is it a good idea to apply? Any numbers about how many applicants is from abroad?
Dave McClure is about to start a live 1 hour interview for This Week in Startups
> I guess I wrote that copy in a fit of optimism! Corrected it so as not to be misleading.

We have expert tutors, teachers and advisers from around the globe standing by.

Glad the optimism hasn't worn off :-) Stripe only works for the US and Canada, so...

And Welcome to the world's premier online learning marketplace! is a bit spammy, and yet twee at the same time. Quite an achievement! ;-)
I agree.

I would say that people who have not spent a lot of time playing with math are not going to have developed the kind of intuition that will let them understand the subject, or see how to apply it to novel problems. Also there is a dearth of math material aimed at people who don't already have a strong math background. Therefore people who you find who can handle math usually also have a background in proofs.

But it is perfectly possible to explain useful and subtle math points to people who can think well, even though they may lack math background. However as I've found writing articles like http://elem.com/~btilly/ab-testing-multiple-looks/part1-rigo..., it is deceptively harder to do than I'd have thought. Unless a mathematician has specific reason to believe that it will be read by people who do not normally choose to read math, they can't be blamed for not making that effort. (Incidentally the next installment in that series should arrive next week.)
This is kind of a weird way to evaluate Google in particular since they already have a dual class share structure. Just check their executive pay levels and acquisition patterns, which you should do anyways. You don't need to make a probabilistic argument when you have direct evidence.

Meanwhile, in many instances shareholders tend to be capricious and uninterested in long term health, especially when particular shareholders are heavyweights but in unrelated markets (e.g. hedgefunds under plurality voting charters)

edit: also what jmillikin said, which is particularly apt since the study you cite did not claim those results as more likely in dual-class companies, but found them correlated with the growth of the divergence between insider voting rights and cash-flow rights.
I'd rather have an ultrabook
I'm on OS X too, took me so long to figure out I need to scroll. Is it a web problem or an OS problem?