skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As much as I like WebP, the numbers given in this article are misleading. The original image is indeed 52 kb. If you like optimizing PNGs, you can recompress it (losslessly, obviously) to ~49 kb. Now the same image in WebP is 35 kb, not 11 kb. The only way for WebP to make it a 11 kb image is to compress it in lossy mode.

Granted, even at 11 kb the image looks really good and there are no visible artifacts but when you put the original image and the lossy version side-by-side, you can see that some tones are slightly off and gradients/shades are slightly different.
It's like the saying, "No one's ever gotten fired for buying IBM (either the stock, or their equipment)".

It's safety for the middle manager who can point a finger when his boss comes screaming down the hall when the servers go down.
Amazon Letter to Shareholders 2013
YOU COMPUTER FREAKS Get to me
The fact you can customize Android doesn't mean that you have to. The default Nexus OS is fine right out of the box, and generally reviewed as comparable to iOS. Just because you have the option to work on your car doesn't mean you have to.
Yes, you're missing a crucial distinction: there are different types of defamation. Defamation of a public figure (which the linked law journal article you provided discusses) places a higher burden on the plaintiff than defamation of a private individual. A public figure must demonstrate the falsity of statements made against him, and must demonstrate malice. The justification is that a public figure is more readily able to defend himself or has others willing to defend him in the court of public opinion.

For defamation of a private individual, the burden of truth remains with the defendant (once the plaintiff establishes a prima facie case). See, e.g., Ellenberger v. Espinosa (1994) 30 Cal.App.4th 943, 953. There are slight variations from state to state, but this is the general rule. (By the way, in case you are wondering, in the legal field, citing a case or statute trumps a law review article or Wikipedia every time.)
Ok - but, here's where I get lost...

Some of these people are high-net-worth individuals. I sometimes ask them why, instead of trading, they don't take that money and invest it in new research or technology or product development or services. At least then, there would be jobs created, technological progress, more money exchanging hands. But, to them, it doesn't make sense to do that; they make much higher returns, more quickly through trading.

To me, a lot of this money seems to be 'locked up' in liquidity trading, that would otherwise be doing good things for the economy and human progress. Right now, it doesn't seem like the traders have incentive to do other things with the money.

When a friend of mine 'clicks a button' and makes a few million from a trade, how is that adding equivalent 'value' to the overall economy than if he would have taken that money and invested it in a new start-up? Again, this is my total ignorance, but something doesn't seem right. To an ignorant person like me, it just seems like wealth exchanging hands, but how is clicking a button better than employing hundreds of people?
You're not required to care. The average movie-goer is not required to be Roger Ebert, but Roger Ebert nevertheless tried to educate those who were interested in how to ask for better movies.
The goal is to create a Quake 3 like game, but with a destructible voxelized world (Ace of Spades doesn't do it for me). As you can see, and as others have commented, this is currently only a rough BSP renderer with almost-complete TTF rendering. Q3 is the inspiration, but my goal is for this is to be a different game.
Why Foursquare's Growth Story Is Better Than You Think
FooPlugins.com Release Announcement
Foursquare borrows a massive amount of money to survive
Well, you'd have to increase the salaries of Congress to that level, and that is probably politically unfeasible.
Why do people continue to claim that without state intervention of granted government monopolies, no one would ever create new things?

A patent, meaning a state enforced monopoly, meaning a method of taxation outside congress, is a method for the government to redistributive wealth. By artificially increase price and distribute that money back to investors, government argue that future investing is incentivized.

One is free of course to argue if such incentives actually happens or not, but I do not see how that could ever mean that no more intervention would ever happen if the government intervention stopped. Where does this insight come from, and is there any data to support it? Are the IT market really that unstable that it must get a constant flow of government generated money to justify investing in new products?

And why is this state granted monopolies granted with an exact 20 years duration with no thought of maximizing efficacy of government funded incentivies? Could 10 years give 90% as much incentives as 20? Is there alternative ways maybe thats less costly to society but as effective? Surely, improving the process in how the government intervene in the market is a noble goal?
Fullthrottleondemand Natural Male Enhancement Formula Is the Answer to Sex
How We Launched Our WordPress Plugin Business
> - Paid results absolutely do not take in to account a user's satisfaction.

I think he was referring to how the clicks on your ads are tracked and you have to pay more to get an ad in if it doesn't attract many clicks (and it doesn't place as high, and you may not even be eligible). This is a feature of AdWords advertisements.

E.g. You can say that if someone searches for cheese, then sees your ad you setup for that keyword, then doesn't click, then that ad was not good for them.

Google's write up is here:
http://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2454010?hl=en
> Having a high Quality Score means that our systems think your ad, keyword, and landing page are all relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad.
...
> Higher Quality Scores lead to lower CPCs. That means you pay less per click when your keyword has a higher Quality Score.
...
> Higher Quality Scores lead to higher ad positions. That means your ad can show up higher on the page when your keyword has a higher Quality Score.
Writing Your First Pebble Watchface
Dan may be random, but he's no "random security researcher". And he has, in fact, hacked "just about everything" a time or two by discovering and exploiting common mode vulnerabilities.

His point of view is worth listening to.
There is not support for this at the moment, but one of core developers mentions one approach for starting to address this need in:

http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2013/04/02/asso...
That's certainly true for interest rate swaps, but credit default swaps are actually quite similar to stocks. For example when Lehman filed and the stock went to 0, the CDS settled at 91.375 [1] meaning that the protection seller had to send 91.375% of the notional value to the protection buyer. Yes, in most cases there is no credit event and even in many credit events the impairment to the debt is much less than 90%, but also most stocks don't go to 0. This case is a good example because the maximum market cap of Lehman stock was 60 bln [2], but the CDS market moved 270 bln in the credit event (see [1]).

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...

[2] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/lehman-bro...
The scientific battle: Print vs. digital reading in the brain
"the rules define them as an adult. "

Define them, or guide them?
> These actors would merely compete between each other

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
I was a bit disappointed in HN when the original post skyrocketed to the top of the front page.

It was disheartening to see knee-jerk reactions by the HN community. We've built such an intellectually sound and interesting community; one that bases its opinion on fact itself, and not emotion.

Let's keep it that way.
That's pretty cool. Too bad they'll probably have timeouts when they can't connect to Mt Gox like everyone else.
Running a company offshore
Does anyone have any experience running a company offshore? Especially as strategy as a tax haven. I'd like to know the pros and cons. e.g.
How did it impact taxes?
How did it impact payment processing?
Did it make it difficult to find providers of services (hosting for example)?

What other challenges did you face?
If you are afraid of ASICs you should look into Litecoin.
It is important to remember that Bitcoin is not a hash function or a signature system. Unfortunately, there seems to be no rigorous definition of "security" for Bitcoin, so it is somewhat difficult to understand what it means to "attack" Bitcoin. I suspect that any rigorous definition of Bitcoin's security would require a definition of money that lacks both authority and intrinsic value.
I think we are in perpendicular agreement. I agree with your statement. I also believe that the system as it is currently regulated, implemented and used is based on a system that is actively working to protect itself and its advantage and that the actions taken by wall street to get/maintain/hide the data/advantage they have is what is illegal.

I am not saying that using or having a better position of data or information is wrong or illegal. I am saying that how they got there in the first place, and what they have done to ensure its perpetuity for them is what is illegal/wrong/exploitative and abused.

The worst criminals of the bunch are those in supposed positions of regulatory authority that are really there to protect the interests of big money.

This includes GS employees setup as Obama's economic advisory.

(Note: often people make the mistake of saying "well do you expect him not to hire/appoint people with intimate knowledge of how the financial system works?" -- No, I expect him to hire/appoint people with express knowledge of how the system works and how it is exploited and abused so that they can identify and go after criminal fraudulent activity.

When you hire/appoint those BENEFITING from the actions of the industry - it protects the criminal/exploitative activity!)
Reveal.js, at least, supports inline markdown blocks. https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js#markdown
"We use Action.IO to build Action.IO"
A quick Google of 'bitcoin laundry' shows a typical commission rate of 1.5-3.5% and portion of bitcoins per transaction (to cover the costs of transferring).
> "gratitude, on any medium, is still gratitude, this is a difference of culture, but to disregard my sentiment is to deny my humanity, not just my culture."

And some people prefer to be compensated in dollars, not bitcoins.

Giving is about giving something that the recipient will enjoy, not about what the giver wants. Gratitude is such a gift.
We do have a pretty printer that we're planning on growing into a gofmt-like tool, but we still have a ways to go with it before we will be comfortable using it in an automatic fashion like Go.
One of the hardest parts about leaving is that after a few years all the friends in the world that you have are in finance because they are the only ones that can afford the restaurants, bars and activities as you. Then when you decide to leave it means giving up all those friends because after leaving you no longer will be able to afford hanging out with your friends from finance. It's surreal to have friends that you can only maintain via your current job.
An Open Letter To TED's Chris Anderson
"If I however invent the first hyperspace engine, You shouldn't be able to buy one, take it a part and make your own."

Why not? What is special about non-obvious ideas, that they should not be as freely transmitted as obvious ones?

Also, why should the first person to file for a patent on an idea be the person who gets the monopoly on the idea? With 7 billion minds on this planet, even for non-obvious ideas, it seems highly likely that other people will independently come up with the same idea. It seems so arbitrary that the first person to file some paperwork is the only person to be rewarded.
It's really easy to implement an image of a down arrow so it takes no work to look like they're 'keeping their finger on the pulse' as it were.
Optimize WordPress Queries
I'm not sure I understand the question. I've used an ORM with a codebase that used different databases in development and production, so in that sense, yes. But if you mean "swapping" a production database for another, that's not really how I'd describe it. If you're switching from one database system to another, that sounds like a major migration, not just a "swap." You can't exactly just drop a SQL Server database into PostgreSQL and assume all is well, can you? So I'm not sure where the ORM angle comes into this — a major database migration is a task in itself. (Or maybe I'm just a bad sysadmin? Entirely possible, I suppose.)
Well, if that's not a clear sign that the bubble's about to burst, I don't know what is.
When moving to San Jose I found a realtor who'd been working for 30+ years, at the top of her game, head of the Realtor's association, glowing recommendations, on and on and on.

She absolutely didn't get it. We were looking for a SFH, she kept pushing us to condos. We had a budget of X, she kept pushing to to X+10%. We'd make an offer N on something, she'd pressure us to offer N+20% (we didn't win any bids, but looking back at the sold records it was never on price).

She wasn't always forthcoming about helping us analyze the property. Until we flat-out said "this one's not for us", she wouldn't ever point out something wrong with the house unless it was glaringly obvious (one home that reeked of dog piss, for example). She obviously had experience in checking out houses, because as soon as we'd write a place off she'd rattle off 12 things that she saw wrong with it (dry rot, obviously unpermitted construction, etc).

It just felt lazy to me how she used cash as a crutch. Rather than getting creative with offers & cover letters and actually, you know, selling us, she'd say "let's throw more money at it!". She even had the gall to tell me that cash offers are usually higher than asking. Not even kidding.

It frustrates me to no end, because I'm the type that's on the phone with my mortgage broker every day asking what I can do to push the deal through. If you accept my offer, I won't sleep until I've done every single thing I can do to make it happen. I once got a short sale done (funded!) in 30 days (!!). You want me to buy your house.

But sellers can really be dumb, too. This one house I put an offer in, the sellers accepted a "higher cash offer" that fell out of escrow in a month. I re-offered, 20% down, no contingencies. Not even an inspection. They went with an offer that was $5k above mine, and then it took 90 days to close. Oh, and the house was vacant. Really guys, was that $5k minus commission worth carrying your house another 1 month + 2 months?

Anyway, I got so sick of it all I just rented. I'll probably end up with new construction when I've got my fortitude back. But man do I hate dealing with real estate.
Good explanation. I always thought this was a good one too: http://kestas.kuliukas.com/RainbowTables/
This is the most biased article that I ever read on HN.

Did someone forced the millions of users to use appgratis?
It's not like you create a recommendation app that promotes shitty apps and 10 million users suddenly use it. No, that app has to bring some value. I'd never use such an app, but there are many more others who are. Let the economy speak for itself and as long as the app is not doing illegal things let it be supported or killed by the market.

It is like saying that google should be closed because it shows shitty pages for some searches.
ICIMS Social Distribution on Facebook
Because for Wall Street to succeed, Main Street must fail? Why would Main Street transact with them at all if that were the case?
It's about who your customers are and how they would want to be associated with your brand.

For example, consider a washing machine repair service, it's somebody you are going to use infrequently (hopefully!) and even though you might give a recommendation to your friends, it's not something that you'd associate with and steer your friends towards. In fact it's not really that helpful as it's highly unlikely that they would need those service right now.

Now think of a clothing boutique. It's a brand that's "cool", you want to let people know you go there. You go frequently, you want to tell you friends that you saw X and thought it was neat, or you bought Y. You share these events and other updates with your group, you are providing useful information and showing your tastes to your friends.

I'm not sure if there's a distinct work/not-work axis, but there's definitely categories of businesses and customers that work better than others.
It's true; I fall victim of my C++ habits. A style guide is floating around the Rust mailing list; I see no reason why further code couldn't follow it more closely.
I agree with mgrassotti's sentiments.

No matter how good or technically important the person may be, if they're not someone you can casually grab coffee with, it's gonna be really tough to work with them. Since you're at a small startup, this rings even more true. That person is probably not fit for your place (culturally).
> That's not really necessary. If you need approximate comparison/equality, just compare up to a fixed depth. You'll get an answer that is one of: gt, lt, eq or unknown.

I was trying to (provide a user option to) rule out "unknown" as an answer. Though, you can do that with your method, too (with the same kind of risk of error that you'd have with resort to floating point approximation, so in that regard its no worse than my method.)

> There are some cases where your system provides better results, comparing two equal irrational numbers for example, but I can't think of a use case for that.

I suspect that doing symbolic calculations with a standard set of reduction rules may be more efficient over multiple manipulations involving irrational numbers than manipulating them in lazy Cauchy sequence form, at least when you actually need at some point to do comparisons or numerical approximations (and, certainly, for display, either a more traditional symbolic form or a numerical approximation is going to be preferred to any kind of direct representation of a lazy Cauchy sequence.)

But that's just an intuition, and certainly not in an area that I am an expert in.
What makes you think AppGratis offered to remove the push feature? It would drastically cut down their marketing power from everyone who has the app installed and accepted push to only people who happen to open the app each day.
It shouldn't be inactive if you have types a post. If, after typing something, it's still inactive then that is a bug! Please let us know what browser you are on in that case and we'll get that fixed.
On-Q-ity, a Cancer Diagnostic Company: R.I.P.
Unlike Bitcoin, stock in a company has meaning beyond the stock market, such as voting rights or equity in the company. Bitcoin makes no guarantees at all -- even fiat currencies like USD carry some sort of legal meaning (e.g. that you can use the currency to pay taxes or to settle debts).
What people neglect to mention is that it rose just as fast.
This would be all fair and good if the risk they took along the way actually accrued back to Wall STreet. But the upsetting pattern that's in place is private profits, public losses. Wall Street isn't so much an engine for extracting value in the way you described as extracting value from the American public: take huge risks, keep the upside in the good years, and ask for a bailout when things go wrong.

I've seen some analysis that says that if you back out government interventions, investment banks have basically been net zero / net negative for their equity holders since they stopped being partnerships and started going public.
Where is the fraud in as you put ti "aim[ing] high and fail[ing] miserably?"
I think the flip side is that engineering companies don't get to hire the best of the best.
If you are self-aware of these things and able to make an effort to change or work-around them when they give you trouble, you are extremely high-functioning.

I can rattle off a list of problems that short people have (trouble reaching things, inability to chase down a bus, etc), and realize that I am short, so I have to make extra effort in some parts of life to cope with that. (And in some areas of life my particular height is an advantage.)
Not sure what you're ?ing about.
How to Validate Your Start-up Idea
Google AppEngine 1.7.7 lowers pricing a bit
I see the alpha is available.

Can I find a how-to-use video or blog post somewhere?
'for these people,' is just as offensive. What do you mean, "THESE people"?

The meaning and intent matters, not the phrase.
Ah, thanks. From the title I thought that someone had single-handedly re-implemented all of Quake 3 in Rust, which seemed a bit implausible.
Bitcoin will not succeed until it's pegged to OPEC oil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Shock
MIT's Luminoso Claims It's Cracked the Code on Text Mining
Billing enabled apps will no longer be subject to a $2.10 minimum weekly spend. Instead, apps will only be charged for their actual usage.
About to? It's down over $150 in two days...
I read Liar's Poker, and the above article.

I probably wouldn't like the environment at such bank. But yet, making U$ 20.000 a year, a million dollars is the stuff of dreams - 50 years at my current salary.

The freaking lottery here in Uruguay doesn't give a million dollars !! (the current Cinco de Oro pool is U$ 125.000)

PD: Yes, I'm quitting as soon as I get something else that pays the bills. I neglected to stay up to date in tech and am struggling to get a good job on the open market.
His point of view is certainly worth listening to, but Dan should know better than anyone that the fact that even he can't break something is still not an argument for (or even a suggestion of) its security.
The bit about stolen money being forever traced is very interesting, and leads me to an idea: can an ethics flag be added to the mining software to make your client refuse to process transactions on stolen bitcoins?

Although now that I think about it, one could allege that your bitcoins, which really belong to someone else, have been stolen, and thus effectively prevent that person from spending those bitcoins. So you would need to have a very high bar for determining those bitcoins were really yours.
>AppGratis simply served a need, both on the consumer side (App discovery) as well as on the corporate side (app promotion)

This exactly. I am sorry to say this but the submission appears lopsided.

The submission accuses appgratis of being "black hat", but doesn't explain how.

Does AppGratis run botnets which download apps?

If it is genuine users downloading apps - the business is white hat. It doesn't matter if the users get points, dollars or karma for downloading stuff.(I haven't used appgratis)

If instead of hurling accusations at appgratis, the author should have just said that

1. Apple runs the appstore.
2. It says you cannot have an app which mimics the appstore and
3. appgratis has no business taking over apple's territory.

Because that is what the post ultimately boils down to. For me at least.

I am sorry if the author of the submitted post feels offended. But it hurts to see people kick someone in the nuts when they are down.
One aspect of Light Table that I find really cool, that I haven't seen discussed, is its utility to people who are just learning to program.

I think its (current, anyhow) relative simplicity and instant feedback make it a really amazing tool for education. I think the difficulty and foreignness of setting up your stack is one of the things that makes programming seem foreign and difficult to people, but Light Table makes it look cool and easy.

Or maybe it doesn't, I can't tell. I've been doing this too long, I think. But I'd love to see someone in a position to try Light Table for educational purposes do so and report back.