skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you are begging the question here: there is an unstated assumption by your use of the word "sample" that everyone's opinion has equivalent weight as everyone else's. Suppose that each persons vote didn't count for just +1 to any option, but rather added their total karma to an option. Would yes still have won?
I've always believed Silicon Valley to be the Mecca for entrepreneurship by an overwhelming margin, but more and more I'm seeing NYC mentioned as the next best place to start a startup, with Boston being mentioned less and less.

Thoughts?
Are static site generators the new "hello world?"
That blog makes it look like it and tcmalloc are roughly on-par. Do you think there's any possibility that FB leans toward jemalloc chiefly because the author works there, and the author of tcmalloc works at Google?
These guys are claiming 4 to 8 hours, 4,000 feet etc. http://www.uniteddrones.com/aether-aero/
Heck even 10 minutes flying and one day solar recharge would be awesome in an urban area for stealthy long term observation.
Of course, some people owning cars is not the same as society "relying on car-based transportation" (as the grandparent said).

Tokyo has probably the best public transport system in the world, and automobiles have a ridiculously low mode-share for a modern city (12%), but car ownership rates are, relatively, much higher (approx. 300 cars/1000 people). Many people own cars that they use "occasionally," when it makes sense, not as their primary means of transportation. If those people all suddenly lost use of their cars, what would happen? Not much really; the city could cope easily.
You made the cardinal mistake of investing: you bought high, and sold low. Many rookie investors make this mistake because they are unable to control their emotions when the value of their investment takes a downturn. It can be nerve-wrecking to imagine all your money evaporating.

Fortunately, your mistake cost you only $800. So it was actually a good learning experience. From now on, buy low and sell high. For example, the best time to buy is when a (recoverable) disaster or sensationalized story cause a financially strong company's stock price to dip. That's the perfect opportunity to buy some of that stock.
Judging by this interview three years ago, it seems to have crossed the minds of the Chrome OS team, but it would be strong to call it a "plan".

JS: And this also gets at another issue. I know that Sergey made some comments that were widely reported about a future merging of Android and Chrome OS, and to me this seems more like a statement of the obvious. In the sense that, once the hardware is full-featured enough to support all the things that you have on Chrome OS, then why do you need something as stripped-down as Android.

MP: Yeah, it's unclear. We get a lot of questions like this, and the truth is, I don't know the answer. We're so focused on shipping release one right now, we spend less time than the outside world speculating about what we're going to do next... how will we integrate this with Android... how will we do any number of things like that. -- http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/01/chrome-os-interview-...

The interview as a whole shows where Google's head was at regarding Chrome OS just a week before the iPad was announced, which is itself fascinating.
what else are we going to do when snowed in all day aside from chat on HN?
How would you add comments to something like this, if you wanted to have comments for some (probably idiotic and ill thought out, based on most blog comments) reason? Would you be able to embed disqus or something?
He is not explaining how things ought to be, he is explaining how things are. I think you guys agree.
Being arrested is way different from having been convicted of a crime, but it seems that border agents across the world don't want this pointed out. I've been asked a similar question often enough at the US-Canadian border("Have you ever been in front of a judge?").

Unfortunately, you do have to treat these encounters like you would police questioning. Don't volunteer information, and give very simple (yes/no) answers if you really need to answer.
An Artificial Ear Built By a 3D Printer and Living Cartilage Cells
It's also in his fifth paragraph.
That seems to be a common theme with bitcoin eccentrics.

1. Replace currencies with bitcoins.

2. ???

3. All financial and economic problems are solved!
The Rise Of New Shanghai
Yes, again, I totally agree that there many ideas for making bitcoin more usable, but they all unfortunately tend to undermine bitcoin.

Bitcoin's fundamental core strength is being distributed. That's also the thing that makes it mostly unusable.

Sure, if I just trust someone else to manage my wallet and verify the block chain for me, it becomes usable. This is the exact reason why people keep getting taken by bad "online wallet" services -- they can't bear to do it themselves.

Mobile wallets are a great example. There are two types of mobile wallets: the kind that wingnuts struggle through using because they're bitcoin fanatics, and the kind that are actually interesting for people drawn to convenience. The former actually verify the block chain, the latter are a thin client over an API to someone else that's managing that off the device.
nedmalloc [0] is my absolute favorite and pretty much owns everything else in terms of performance (esp. multi-threaded memory allocations), though I would not use it at the scale Facebook and GitHub are running on. It has subtle bugs that creep in and get fixed down the road. jemalloc and tcmalloc are very heavily tested and vetted, though and are great options. Basically, anything other than the default allocator on Windows/Mac/Linux is fine :)

The author of nedmalloc is working on a very exciting C++ API (actually, I think it's API-complete now) to make it a drop-in STL allocator. I personally use the C API in my C++ applications without a problem, mainly as a pool allocator. For me, the Windows allocators (both the old default and the new "low-fragmentation" default) are absolutely abysmal at deallocation. Pool allocators in general make that go away.

0: http://www.nedprod.com/programs/portable/nedmalloc/
>>If this story went down exactly as Mike suggests the agent will lose her job or at least her federal law enforcement qualification.

I hope you are right but I'm cynical. Her boss will probably not want to admit that one of his employees is such an incompetent idiot because at the end of the day it is a reflection on him. When an employee screws up it is always the manager's fault.
So to use dropbox for publishing, the author recommends registering two accounts on dropbox.com. Would that carry a risk of account termination? Sounds like an easy way to game the free space for invites bonus.
Switch LED bulb: The long-awaited light bulb is finally here.
Try, as well, setting the value of tcmalloc.max_total_thread_cache_bytes to something larger than 16MB (the default). Reasonable values might range all the way to 1GB or more. Best to experiment and get data.
A homework in algorithms
Yes, more or less.

Remember: DHS exists because after 9/11, politicians got a bug up their ass about how many different federal agencies there were with missions that involved interior security, and decided there should be one cabinet-level authority managing all of those functions. It was not a well-thought-out thing; it is literally a meatball of different security, law enforcement, safety, military, and even scientific agencies.

Which makes it an odd subject for directed contempt.
Distributed Balance
Anything that is closed but looks exciting makes people apply for it.
Having a private beta for which users have to apply might help. Once you have a list, you can identify people from the applicants.
Best post I've read yet on HN. The feels man, the feels.
You didn't answer my question :-) That's okay of course. When I read her thesis it struck me as so patently false, I found myself asking the question "What sort of event set this off?" not "Are there insights here I should consider?"

A neighbor of mine had his home seized by the bank, it was underwater, and they weren't willing to negotiate the terms of the loan. He posted a piece that was not a whole lot different than shaney's except that he asserted that Banks were an immoral and illegal institution run by the 1% to fleece the rest of us of our money, he made several "points" about how what they said they were doing one thing, when the reality was that those activities were just a cover for taking more of your money. He uniformly ignored any market impact banks had and screamed in rage at their inhumanity.

He wasn't successfully making any sort of argument that banks have no reason to exist other than to fleece us. Nor did he develop any insights about how banks might be improved, or what we could use to replace them. He was angry, and hurt, and sad, and bitter. Banks, and the shadowy 'them' that run them, became the focus of his anger.

I get it that you and harryh saw a deeper question about culture in the article than I did. I just saw what looked, in form at least, venting and anger. Just like my neighbor's bank screed.
I always click on the comments of a post before I go to the article. Primary, the comments give me a good idea of what to expect but also because Hacker News comments load a heck a lot faster than most of the websites that are linked to, so I get the content faster.

The comments are usually more informative than the article anyway.
If the ebook reader market is dominated by one manufacturer that supports both DRM'd and open formats, and some author refuses to sell books in an open format while complaining about DRM, then that's not the manufacturer's fault. It's not reasonable to expect Amazon to support every hair-brained DRM scheme that a publisher can come up with.
Rational posts have no place on the internet. I think we're supposed to respond with large blocks of angry text and swagger if possible.
Yeah, if posting comments and replying to comments is a design rip-off, then every forum in the world is also a rip-off. Hacker News looks nothing like Reddit, and the internet can support more than one discussion site (obviously).
Apparently the 3 customers are Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/02/twitter-tumblr-pint...
This is why the founders wrote a constitution circumscribing the powers of government.

This is man bites dog. Person in power (cop, bouncer, immigration officer, DHS, whatever) abuses power. It's as typical as it gets.
Hyperink's Kevin Gao: Future of online book publishing, Amazon, and Y Combinator
There is no reason for being afraid of new technology! At this point we've survived the advent of the radio, television, personal computers, the internet, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Smartphones. Almost every one of these was met with "that's going to ruin society!" and none of them did. Sure, it changed, in a lot of ways, the way we do things, but that doesn't mean its ruined!

Technology isn't a thing we add to our lives anymore, its an intrinsic part of our society/culture. Most people can't imagine being without a cellphone and we're probably getting close to the point where having a smartphone feels just as essential.

What I wanted to get at is that both sides probably see each other as unreasonable. He wants more attention and dislikes that his girlfriend is using her phone while they're together, she obviously feels or thinks that its okay to use her phone while they do things. The problem is he wants her to go against the new societal norm. Like the OP stated, people these days socialize with their smartphones present, its normal, it would be normal for her to use her phone in a social context. (Granted, she may have taken it a little far.. I may have taken it a little far, also.)
It's not a balanced transaction.

You have to ingratiate yourself to them to have them treat you properly, and the only reason for that is their authority.

Psychic bribery is a fine term for it.
ShmooCon FireTalks Saturday Videos
I wonder if this could be related to Negativity Bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias).

I did notice the same thing and found it interesting.
Keep in mind that all the white house agrees to do is to send out a PR piece justifying their current position if the petition threshold is reached.

I don't see online petitions as very helpful in any way.
The cynic in me wants to say, "Just wait until descendants of Alexander the Great sue you for copyright infringement."

I think this effort is great. I hope more and more history can be put on line and made accessible. I am a firm believer that knowing the past is the only way to know where you are going.
Shameless self promotion: we've entered closed beta, and will be opening up to everyone soon – https://gemcanary.com/

We don't do code analysis, but we think it's a useful service.
>Because anonymous forums on the internet have proven for a decade sane discourse goes out the window due to the Internet Fuckwad Theorem. It is an entirely different dynamic to be in someones face and have to fear consequences beyond words from your behavior

Heh. And here you are, in said forums! Somewhat perfecting the voice of righteous judgement! Bravo, but no. I see what you came to represent here, but if you think trumpeting loudly some bad-ass anti-establishment intellectual philosophy while standing on the tiny issue of "the right to cell-phone-unlocking-regardless-of-lender-contract" as a basis for your purist reasoning, then you sir/ma'am, live in a first world overrun with problems of the same degree! There is wisdom in "choosing your battles," and this, my dear zanny, is not the one. Trust me.
Airbnb Continues Growing, Building Castles In The Sky
> As a footnote, you creeped out my co-founder who found himself talking to me across the table one moment, and reading me quoted online the next. A good moment!

HAHAHA.

> Part of me not seeing that is that I'm actually not sure the 'positive' reasons are that obvious

Definitely subjective. I guess my real idea behind the statement was that people who agree might think they're all agreeing for the same reasons.
I am personally fairly pleased his boat was taken, he's the one that inflicted TechCrunch on the public. But logically, I'm displeased that the government is doing things in this way.
My guess is that the meteor team will also be the heroku of the meteor ecosystem.
No, DHS did not "steal" your boat. They confiscated it and you'll get it back by following some lengthy and convoluted appeal process.

But I seriously don't understand Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and why they have to be such utter dickheads on the Canadian border. Their Canadian counterparts (CBSA) are just as effective and efficient and somehow manage to be generally sane and rational.
The level of prescience is astounding and this is almost 17 years ago.
This highlights a problem which isn't unique to Australia. For example, if a potential employer (or whoever) asks you if you've ever been arrested and your record has been expunged or you've been pardoned, you are expected to lie and say "no". That is how the system works.

It sucks, but learning how to deal with these sorts of things is part of the price one has to pay when they have a run-in with the law. I'm not sure it's analogous to the boat thing. The agent really was wrong to insist on processing the boat with the incorrect information.
Makes that they did that instead of addressing the actual security issue of 9/11 which was lack of intelligence sharing between FBI/CIA/etc I guess.

Or maybe that's what the de facto merger of military and CIA is supposed to accomplish.
Well, when you build a bureaucratic monster there are all sorts of costs.

Completely unrelated agencies having to carry the ill will engendered by the ones that suck is one of those costs.

Perhaps they should have considered that.
The electricity needs to be factored in, it's not free.
If tech were really like that, maybe Tent and Spideroak would be more popular. If only.
Not sure if it's ok to comment on my own submission. I'm new to HN and I'm just not sure of the rules.

The site attached is my site and I'm hoping to share my experiences with mental disorder as way to help others with similar distress (even help myself). Please leave some comments here or on the site. I'm interested in hearing other's thoughts on my writings.

Regards
Not that cynical. It's more than just "being nice to people." You could end up annoying someone in such a position just by being nice, but asking too many questions. Maybe they had a bad day, and you're smiling too much.
The author's choice is still subject to fads, to what's in vogue, to the zeitgeist.

And as of late, the static generation fervor has been getting stronger.
Sorry enraged_camel, but I think most people would consider this very bad investment advice. There's much, much more thinking that needs to go into speculative investment decisions than just the phrase "buy low sell high". In fact, that phrase is pretty useless advice on its own and often invoked as a joke among investors.

(Though there is truth in your specific point that people are at risk of making irrational decisions they regret when investments go sour.)
Exactly. "So what if we told you that, by our calculations, the largest U.S. banks aren’t really profitable at all?".

I would want to scrutinize the calculations.
You think CBP was sunshine and roses before it got folded into DHS?
Hell yeah! Good luck - looking forward to seeing what you come up with :)
The thing that makes bitcoin different than other online payment systems or virtual currencies is that it's distributed. That property, however, is also what makes it difficult to use.

It's true that if you re-centralize things by trusting someone else with your wallet, or outsourcing block chain verification to a central party, then it can be quite usable.

From what I can tell, nobody is entirely comfortable with the direction that's headed, which is why there's a lot of handwaving about things like javascript-based cryptography, which just doesn't work.

localbitcoins is cool, but a friend bought some BTC off me the other day, and it took over an hour (for the above reasons).

Don't get me wrong, I think all of this is really interesting and amazing in a lot of ways, but not "easy peasy" as the parent commenter was saying.
>This is man bites dog.

I'm sorry, but you have it backwards, the point of that aphorism is that the event is unusual.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog_%28journalism%29
I was having huge problems with fraud on my website also. A lot of stolen credit cards being used from Vietnam.

Using Braintree as my processor, I send an authorization request for the card. If the auth is successful, I send the data over to MinFraud for a check. If the fraud value is < 25 then I submit the auth for settlement, otherwise it gets voided and the user gets a message that their purchase didn't pass our fraud check.

I also log all minChecks and I manually check any request that has a value > 10 or so just to make sure it looks legit.

The biggest change I had to make to support this is that I had to add Country, City, and Region (State) boxes to my payment form. So user's have to put in 3 more pieces of information that they didn't have to with a plain (a la Stripe Purchase button) payment form.

However, that information has saved me from numerous frauds. Also, it appears that once the fraudsters determined that they couldn't use my site anymore, they've stopped trying.

I am VERY happy with their service and it's very inexpensive.
Ah, thanks for that.

I had a lot to do with the question of "where the hell are we & how the hell do we get to where we should be" in real time and to fairly tight tolerances (at scale) - sadly/luckily at the time it was left to the pilot to follow the blinking light rather than deal with the mechanics of moving control surfaces directly.

The main thrust of surveys like [1] though was enhanced final product accuracy through sensor fusion strategies, using calibration flights to tune filters to remove induced magnetic field effects from aircraft headings, using lidar, microwave, accelerometers, differential ground GPS, temperature, pressure, and humidity to get good estimates for actual height clearances, estimates for the mass of air column, etc, etc, blah, blah, old guy stuff.

That's a single survey of many, performed over decades, and it was interesting in the evolution of processing to watch it move from post processing to in line processing. Which of course prompted the question.

The paparazzi (seriously france? this is for drone RC craft to snap pics of celebrity boobs?) project pages look interesting, so I'll dive into those.

[1] Fiji, 1997
"A combination of helicopter and fixed wing aircraft was used to fly the survey with a total of 160, 000 line kilometers of data acquistion (~80,000km per aircraft type)"

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
You're welcome. By pushing the boundaries you create something with the potential to sustain as more than a throwaway gimmick.

I agree the fragility of content in the online world is.. worrying, if you take a long term perspective. I imagine the licensing of this content is the major risk here, as presumably BT are holding the copyright (even without the legal hurdle I doubt anyone could download the whole thing, without considerable effort).. all it would take to kill it is for BT to lose interest.

If you care about the legacy i would push for BT to allow the data to be shared (eventually), although i doubt this would work (mostly for bureaucratic reasons). If you have access to the work then i know what i would do; make 2 back ups to be stored in safe, separate places, to be released upon retirement, death, or BT losing interest (or ceasing to exist!). As raw as possible (they will have better image editing and stitching in photoshop 2110!). If this were free in the wild i guarantee it would last for at least 100's of years; storing a few TB of data is only going to get easier, and it's cultural/historical significance is only going to increase over time. [hint: do this]

IMO there are few works able to offer the quantity of insight into some aspects of early 21st C life, or the state of London.
Intelligence sharing was indeed one of the key reasons they thought it would be smart to make the DHS meatball.
There are lots of scenarios where people have found the job, culture, and coworkers that they love, but are not yielding the greatest ROI of their skills/knowledge/experience and connections.

The willingness to leave something you love, to go do something that will be much more profitable, is not so much personal choice as cold-hard economics.

A good example is how a lot of lawyers will do not-for-profit legal work, because they feel like they are making a difference, and improving the world. They are making a personal choice to do something that is important for them (or perhaps they are burned out in the corporate grind).

I've also seen lawyers leave the organizations that they love, because they also realize they need to make a lot of money - usually to pay off ludicrous college loans - but also just to leverage their position for some period of time.

At the end of the day, every decision is "personal" - but I think there is a difference between the emotive, "I chose to do this because I love doing it" verus the colder, "I chose to do this because it maximizes the risk-adjusted net-present-value of future earnings."
Here's Who Needs a Chromebook Pixel
Of course they stole it...
> Apparently you also assumed that the poll result is representative of the community.

Fair enough. The poll results may not be representative either... but the sample size is larger and the effort required to participate is lower, so it's more likely to be representative than comments.
China is Watching You