skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a cool looking alternative. But functionally I know it doesn't really meet my needs. The circles make the calendar view somewhat confusing to look at and I'm not a big fan of not being able to look at my tasks in order that they have to be completed within an individual group.

Cool idea just not very useful for me personally.
Summary: in many cases it's more effective to promote the spread of existing indigenous innovation than to try to introduce innovation from outside. Or, to look at it another way, the bottleneck is often not invention, but diffusion.
Can’t Find People? Root Cause Why
In fact we're only scratching the surface when it comes to the generative capabilities of deep models. See e.g. our recent work on using Deep Boltzmann Machines to learn how to draw object silhouettes: http://arkitus.com/ShapeBM/
Gmail "interest based" ads are harmful to mental health, for some
I think this is the best headline/page I've read for a long time.

It neatly states an obvious problem in the headline, then on landing, proposes a service to solve the problem that we know exists. If I had a ruby system, I'd be on this like, well, frosting on a cupcake. Mmmmm, cupcakes. :)
Getting Started with elasticsearch and AngularJS: Part1 - Searching
This is an excellent article about and excellent idea. The use of the word deviant is unfortunate. I understand now they mean deviation from the mean. "Positive Deviance Initiative" sounds like a program for HIV+ sex offenders.
Testers are mostly a labor commodity. Seems like the body shop contracting agencies and big offshore firms (Wipro, TCS, etc.) have this market cornered. Any potential client who really values having a dedicated testing team will build up the domain knowledge in house rather than re-educate freelancers over and over, or require the body shop to build that knowledge base and do that training for them when bringing on a new tester.

And how often do you really need just one tester? What are you going to do, bring in 10 different freelancers?

Freelancers need to wear more hats than just "tester".
Dont want to do UTest marketing and I have reservations about them but they are still around and Forbes made them their 8th most promising company in USA so there is some need they are filling - http://blog.utest.com/forbes-names-utest-8th-most-promising-...

You make some good points which I'd agree with
Why do you think they needed 2 month ?
Certainly not because they are against innovation.
"it is difficult to deny you are not stealing or at least conning content owners out of money they are owed."

I'll do my best... :)

Distribution used to be very valuable. So much so that we see CDs as products.

Before CDs, street performers were happy and paid if street patrons were happy and entertained. Simply put: creative businesses are charities; they always have been and they always will be because 1) their fruits are not material and can be "held"/understood by more than one person at a time, with impunity, and 2) they are non-essential, compared to food and water and shelter and clothes (and if they were essential, due to their non-exclusivity, it would be immoral to restrict them).

Somewhere along the line distribution got all wrapped up in cellophane and people working in publishing formats (cds, books, video game cartridges, etc, etc) started feeling entitled to creative monopolies. And authors', reasonably, wanted more of the distributor's pie. We went from truly prohibitive distribution (manual transcription), to commercial/industrial distribution, to today: instant and autonomous distribution -- if it is worth seeing, hearing, or knowing, the copying is implied. So, if you are charging for distribution today (including "selling copies"), you are in the wrong business.

But that hasn't destroyed/stolen anyone's value either, as you have proposed. We have simply come full circle.

The value of design is in its applications. The most useful ideas are the most valuable, as it should be. It's (obviously) not enough to simply produce a movie and sell the pattern for $5... One pattern is enough for the whole world. You can't recoup the production costs by pretending distribution is hard. It has to actually be worth $5. The reality of this return to the original model is that you will be rewarded according to your contribution, but you're not the one to set the price either because creativity isn't a product. We were just confused for about 100 years. Patronage is different (and scary to Western concepts of "mine"), but it's time-tested and perfectly sustainable (and being seen more and more, for example via Kickstarter). R&D, for example, is sponsored and would be worthwhile even (especially) without patents...

The requirement that creativity, design, and research, be worthwhile, is not a burden on society. Monopolies are. People can only reward you after they have benefited from an idea, namely from "the progress of Science and the useful arts."
The rule of thumb I was told is 1000 billed hours per year. If you want to earn £40k, and are billing by the hour, charge £40 per hour.

That gives you the room to be flexible.

The original article adds extra in as they have a different structure, but they start with $75k and year and end up with $85 an hour. Which seems to me to be close enough.

I used it when I started by company. I think it was good advice.
Oh, there are many businesses at least that exposed. I personally wouldn't particularly relish running one, but that's another story...
Unlike desktops, servers are mostly run by people who have at least some idea of what they're doing.
The blog, Inside the law school scam, is coming to end.
Sudo: Authentication bypass when clock is reset
Balanced (YC W11) Adds Bank Payments to its P2P Payments Platform
I'm not sure the dealer would be willing to refund you for the factory sound system because the residual value of the factory sound system is almost certainly miniscule compared to the cost of labor involved in removing it.

Why is the residual value so small? Lack of standardization. A lot of automakers use their own mounting system for the head unit, which means if I bought a Lexus and asked the dealer to take out the head unit, the dealer wouldn't be able to turn around and sell it to somebody who wanted a better unit in their Ford. It goes beyond the mounting system though.

A lot of automakers have their own plug and wiring standards too. If you buy an aftermarket head unit, you usually get a pigtail that plugs into it with unterminated wires on the other side. Then you buy a wiring harness kit specific to your car which has unterminated wires running into a plug that connects to the vehicle harness. Soldering ensues (or wire nuts or electrical tape for the lazy...). Since the aftermarket does have a strong incentive to standardize, the wires on the pigtail that come with the head unit match the colors of the wires in the harness kit, which actually make the process pretty straightforward if you're even halfway handy.

What all of that means is that the unit out of your hypothetical Lexus (which doesn't come with a pigtail with unterminated wires) is going to be hell to get working in somebody else's Ford. Between the physical and electrical incompatibility, the residual value of a head unit has to be pretty close to zero for anybody who doesn't own basically the same car.
http://www.pycoders.com/ if you use Python
Malware Has Speed Cameras in Moscow All Effed Up
What do you mean customers don't know what they want?
Philip, if you can raise your rates, then how is there a maximum income? We raised our rates until supply balanced demand.
Incredible CGI Audrey Hepburn sells Galaxy Chocolate
SFX Entertainment acquires Beatport for $50 million
How do you know if someone browses with JavaScript disabled? Don't worry, they'll tell you.
10 Steps to Success with Your Distributed Network Monitoring
Really interesting stuff.

I had once attempted to build a genetic algorithm for manipulating the synapse weights, specifically because of the problems of traditional back-propagation falling into local minima (unfortunately, some serious shit at work made it drop by the wayside). This RBM approach sounds better than back-propagation, but it also sounds like it would be prone to runaway feedback.

One of the performance problems with neural networks is that the number of cores on a typical machine are far less than the number of input and intermediate nodes in the network. The output nodes are less of a concern as you're trying to distill a lot of data down to a little data, but there is no reason to treat them differently. There are (very few) examples of NNs on GPUs, so that helps, but I've recently been curious to try a different, more hardware-driven approach, just because one could.

Texas Instruments has a cheap DSP chip that you'ns are probably familiar with called the MSP430. It's pretty easy to use, the tool chain is free and fairly easy to setup (especially for a bunch of professional software devs like us, right? right? Well, there's an Arduino-like tool now, too, if not), costs around 10 cents in bulk for the simplest version, requires very few external parts to run (something like a power source, 1 cap, and two resistors), and it has a couple of serial communication protocols built in. I'm quite fond of the chip; I've used it to build a number of digital synthesizers and toys.

For about $50 and quite a bit of soldering time, you could build a grid of 100 of these, each running at 16Mhz, and I bet with a clever design you could make them self programmable, i.e. propagate the program EEPROM over the grid. Load up a simple neural network program, maybe even having each chip simulating more than one node, and interface it with a PC to pump data in one end and draw it out the other. It might not be more useful than the GPGPU approach, but having physical hardware to play with and visualize node activity through other hardware would be a lot of fun.
You are boring
HN dislikes everything, just like the rest of the internet.

Every day someone comments saying that HN is biased against their team (see your sibiling “MS astroturfers” comment), and it’s always a different team, often opposites.

Yes, it’s annoying.
I#m so utterly torn on this. On one hand, this sounds like the first step to a matrix-like learning tool - downloading information into the brain. And is in a nerdy way quite cool.

But on the other hand this totally creeps me out. I am disgusted, that something so possibly sinister is being researched. Something with such a potential for misuse.

After reading this quote:
"We will have a way to exchange information across millions of people without using keyboards or voice recognition devices or the type of interfaces that we normally use today," he said.

I just thought:

"We are the Borg. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile."
Give a crap. Don’t give a fuck.
Yes, we run two webapps on azure, migration was super easy (we were on amazon before) its pretty straight forward couldn't be happier to be honest. We applied to bizspark and got accepted (which was also straight forward). So since we have Azure free for a year we deployed our apps pretty recently actually. TBH, not that any of the services are that complicated, the UI is way better than Amazon's, amazon has a strange way of doing things even on amazon.com. In short, clean, easy to scale, and does the job.

edit forgot this: startup is www.bemvi.com
I disagree. With good testing discipline, you can bring in freelance developers. Developers have the luck of not needing 100% understanding, as this is grown through the writing of code.

Testing, on the other hand, is a simulation of how your system responds to user input, and how your users respond to the system's outputs.

If your tester can't simulate a user, then you can make your services as micro as you like - it'll make no difference when you get the phone call saying the system doesn't work as expected.
Why You Should Start Benchmarking Your Twitter Statistics
I had to think about this, but much of the dust will not shoot straight up like a column (with no tangential component), but will be shot sideways, conceivably with enough initial momentum to attain orbital speeds (which are lower on Mars than Earth), with less drag to hinder.

Don't know if it would be 1000 years, but I'd guess it would coalesce into a ring like structure over time anyway.
A new Light Table experience
Check out the rest of Geoffrey Hinton's work as well- http://scholr.ly/person/3595934/geoffrey-e-hinton
Mayer, Paid To Have A Nursery Built At Her Office
Also I feel like smaller shops that do test would rather write their own automated tests (we are all developers after all) until they get enough traction to afford a fulltime tester
One of my friend always take his personal laptop to the onsite interviews and asks the interviewer permission to type code on his IDE for whiteboard exercises. He didn't have a problem and infact most of them are more than happy to allow him to do so.
Debit bank accounts with Balanced Payments (YC W11)
We have this for PHP: https://security.sensiolabs.org/

You should consider building something similar.
Interesting map, zooming into Utah (where I live) shows that the local ISP Xmission is running 3 exit nodes. The map shows 4, but two of them have the same IP address.
If you're interested in seeing what Objective-C would be like with a more Smalltalky environment, you might find F-Script interesting.
I cannot agree more, this is one of the most interesting books I have ever read.
Curiosity's dash cam? Better be playing house music.
AT&T was a government mandated monopoly with gauranteed profits for a while.
I've been working for several years as the "applications developer" for a neural net lab. The neural lab has spent 11 years developing and refining a neural net pipeline - a series of neural nets which given one or more photos of a person's face, the pipeline performs forensically accurate 3D Reconstructions of the person's face and head. The system is used by government & police agencies the world over when trying to determine what a "person of interest" looks like given random photos of their subject. I've additionally exposed an "entertainment" version of the technology which can be seen at www.3d-avatar-store.com. There one can create a 3D avatar, get a Maya rigged version for professional quality animation, as well as license my WebAPI to embed avatar creation into your own software. And the best part is the avatars look just like the person in the source photo.
I'm challenging myself, I wrote a post about it here: http://www.gerlandopiro.com/2013/01/27/starting-the-5-dollar...

I've updated the line to be more clear.
Great list.

You mentioned that you would model revenue, and that makes sense. You should also model expenses. Subtract expenses from revenue per month and you will get projected profit/(loss).

Add your losses up so you know how much money you need.

Obviously this is all magic, but modeling is not necessarily for use in projecting future profit. Modeling is a great tool to understand your business before things happen.
Yeah, brakeman is awesome, here is a railscast for anyone interested: http://railscasts.com/episodes/358-brakeman
I think you are forgetting the upside to this.

Imagine what it does for peoples empathy when they can feel each others pain.
USPS is expected to remain profitable as a commercial business, but to some extent is still treated as though they were part of the federal government. Their ability to make tough business decisions when they need to is crippled by a slow, ineffectual congress which refuses to allow that. I think the lesson here is that you can't have it both ways.

If USPS were allowed to make their own decisions, they wouldn't necessarily be in this mess.
ITunes U hits 1 billion downloads
This is actually a little more in-depth than some of these types of lists get into. I really liked some of the metrics tracking that they suggest adding in. It's unfortunate that this is getting posted to HN, though, before their actual site is live so that could check it out.
I'd say the psychology and politics of testing are different from other things, really quite strange.

It most white collar work, there is strong pressure to tell people what they want to hear. Well, it makes me very happy to get a clean bill of health from a tester, but if I was expecting that to happen, I wouldn't need a tester.

Testing takes a kind of special discipline that the average office worker doesn't have. Whenever I've been an organization that has tried to press ordinary people into a tester role, it's always been highly ineffective.

That said, there isn't one formula to make a good tester. Some testers I know are very systematic, they belong to quality control associations, others are expert in project management, requirements, etc. On the other hand, one of the best testers I worked with had bombed out of every other job we gave him because he was always able to screw up anything we gave him. As a tester, he was great, because if he couldn't break it, nobody else could.

All of these things, I think, point to a need to a longer-term relationship with a tester than you're going to get in a freelance situation.
There is one niche area of testing where it is more common... security testing.

Testing in this space is often more a function of the technology stack than the industry of the client. This allows security test companies to build up great expertise without knowing anything about the client's specific app or industry.
"The Sky So Big and Black" by Johne Barnes is also a interesting read about Mars-forming. (And memes, too!)
In colder climates heat is used for heating, you know? It's not 'dumped' anywhere. District heating networks are already in place in most countries, and it's trivial to connect the server farm in the heat network, possibly replacing a fossil fuel plant.
The idea is cool and the browser looks like it would have some pretty neat features. But realistically I feel like there's already Google plugins and extensions that will let me do the majority of things shown in the video.

Not to bash on the product, but the logo also reminds me of and makes me feel like I'm using a spam filled search engine that's going to add yet another junk tool bar to the top of my browser.

Definitely love the idea of revolutionizing the web browser though.
I signed up with uTest a while ago and have never done anything else with them. I'm generally underwhelmed. Seems much more geared for crowdsourcing a testing effort, which - with all due respect to innovative business models - seems less than optimal for doing anything other than low level manual testing.

If I ever went independent (or engaged a freelancer), I'd expect an LLC/s-corp with a professional online presence, reference sheets, sample work, and slighly better than LegalZoom-grade contract templates. Consider it my smoke test of potential partners :)
Any YC alums and/or mentors going to SXSW?
I'm neither one of those. I just wanted to see if any of you will be down there and if you're open to grab a beer and/or good eats with a socially normal startup founder from Chicago. Instead of expecting serendipity, I thought I'd lob this out there and try to lock down a few hang-outs before or during the organized chaos.
Q: Is there a start-up scene in New Zealand? A: Of course
True on MySql with InnoDB, wouldn't be true with postgres.

You'd have to use TRUNCATE CASCADE on postgres to avoid the foreign key error.
What do you mean by "bircher"? I found this: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bircher
Here's a page that gives a high level overview of the technology that he has helped to develop:
https://www.numenta.com/technology.html

On Intelligence has dramatically changed the way I think about thinking. It's an awesome book.
I wonder if this could have some great research applications. A year ago I watched some lectures from Stanford on ethobiology (i.e. the branch dealing with the biological processes underlying behavior) on YouTube by Robert Sapolsky, and he talked a lot about the difficulty of figuring out what parts of the brain (and which interplays of brain centers) are responsible for behavioral patterns, especially when it comes to the more complex things. One joke was something like: "You know that feeling when someone calls you and you don't really want to talk, but feel uncomfortable with saying that actually you're busy and would rather just read a book than talk? I think we've found the brain center for that." We have learned a lot from what happens when people have certain parts of their brains damaged. But maybe we could learn much, much more about the brain by being able to fiddle around with many different kinds of signals to different brain centers, and trying out hypotheses by stimulating several centers simultaneously in order to produce (or not produce) certain behaviors?
One argument could be that the "subsequent explosion of IP and mobile services" occurred in spite of telecom deregulation, and not because of it. That's probably false, but there's also likely a sliver of truth there. Imagine how much more innovation we might have, were the telecoms not de facto monopolies.

Also, I'm not sure many folks are arguing for total regulation -- instead, like smutticus, I think most people would like to see a more competitive market than the one we have now.
Arrow up, enter
Or ctrl+r <something> enter
Can be very dangerous if something other than your routine is in the bash history.
That's not how a market works. First it overshoots its "true value" because of a buying frenzy and then falls back down, rinse and repeat. I can't speak to whether right now it is still on the rise, or if has overshot its "true value" and then it's going to drop. Some people believe the former, others believe the latter. Differing opinions is what makes a market.

So far, momentum is on the upside, but don't think that it will just neatly and asymptotically reach its "true value". Expect a lot of volatility. The fact there isn't a lot of volatility here means that consensus is that prices will continue to rise.
On Remote Working
On the bright side, it could take care of the 32-bit time_t problem.
Climate model temperature projections not consistent with actual past warming
Resist the urge to follow up with the company, try to put the whole thing out of your mind. You probably won’t be able to, but remind yourself that there is nothing you can do and concentrate on other things. (Also, feel free to write thank you notes, but I’ve never known a programmer at a geeky company who gave two shits whether you did or not.)

This is good technical interview advice, but I've never gotten a job that only had technical interviews. Programmers might not appreciate a thank you note or call, but managers probably will. They're trying to figure out whether you're someone who will follow up and be responsible rather than someone who knows what a binary tree is.
>How can anyone look at the subsequent explosion of IP and mobile services and conclude that telecom deregulation in 1996 wasn't a smashing success?

By comparing to the results in other countries that didn't deregulate common carriers, which have the same innovations at lower prices and with fewer restrictions on what you can do with your devices.
I know this isn't Slashdot, but imagine a Beowulf cluster of them :)
>Any PKI based system is a shit idea unless you are personally in control of the trusted root CA, which in this case you're not

With UEFI secure boot, you can delete Microsoft's key and add you own.