skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The key is the restriction that in the uniform distribution the probability density must be the same at all points, and if it covers infinity, it can be neither 0 nor anything greater than 0 if it's going to sum to 1. It's perfectly legal to have a probability distribution across all the reals. In fact most if not all of the well-known ones are; the Gaussian/normal distribution is defined on all reals, for instance. But it varies, and the integration from negative infinity to positive infinity sums to 1.

In fact everything that we refer to as "normal" distributions in the real world technically aren't, as the finite nature of the universe means the probability of the extremes is simply zero (give or take being totally wrong about the nature of the universe in which case all bets are off anyhow) rather than very, very small, and in many cases there's a sharp cutoff at 0, or some other arbitrary boundary, which a true normal distribution doesn't have. But it's often still the best mathematical approximation, with negligible error. (... until it isn't.... caveat emptor.)
While all three are scripting languages, and they do have some similarities, there are absolutely huge differences between their respective communities. It's critical not to ignore these differences.

Python developers are generally more focused on building maintainable, robust, and reliable software. Being somewhat conservative, they usually don't buy into the latest fads or unnecessary hype. This leads to pragmatic software, without hype and without drama.

Ruby developers are often more willing to experiment, even if this means trading away quality and the long-term maintainability of their code. They tend to be more community-oriented, and far more emotional than other developers. While this leads to a vibrant community, it is often rife with harmful drama and some fixation on certain idolized individuals.

Perl developers often care more about short-term efficiency. Many of them aren't really interested in developing software itself; they just need custom software to ease some system administration task, or to process some data. While the community is vibrant, it tends to be more mature than the Ruby community, yet somewhat more conservative than even the Python community.

While these don't hold true for every individual programmer of each of those languages, they are true in general. As a whole, understanding these communal traits makes it more obvious why each of those scripting languages is how it is, and what they can best be used for.
But that risks confusing people who know that factoring is somehow involved in cryptography.
Beauty of Mathematics 
http://mathema-tricks.blogspot.com/2013/04/beauty-of-mathematics-surprising-number_8.html
Riot doesn't pay out the coins you spend to other people though. If you buy $1 of an app with these amazon coins, they have to pay the developer their $0.70 (or whatever their cut is). Because of this, the whole income can be realized when the RP is purchased.
But most people aren't going to be prominent on Twitter either, or be prominent anywhere. Most people aren't known. But they still need jobs. Think about someone who works in HR, isn't LinkedIn useful to them?
> You just give the kid some crayons, an iPad of Dora videos
> and some fruit roll-ups and they are occupied for the afternoon.

Swap the Dora videos for Game of Thrones, and I'd be set for an afternoon there, too.
Good point, it's why it's such a difficult situation to be in. You really do have to block out everyone EXCEPT the customer that's actually using your product.
In your opinion. In my opinon the Gmail web client is a disgusting mess of anti-usability and Chrome is arguably not "the best". Webkit is the best - Chrome is a good browser, but empirically - not - the best for ever type of user. Google Maps / Earth may be the best overall free mapping solution for consumers, but it's certainly not the best for all mapping needs. The client applications are somewhat anaemic.

Youtube - Other than the fact that Youtube hosts all the videos - the overall user experience really, really sucks in my opinion. It never remembers settings, you can't disable autoplay and now they're trying to force everybody to use a real-name Google account to view mature content. Totally lame. I truly hope something better comes along.

I agree with the general sentiment of this article though - that Google was awesome because they were so simple and useful and now they're less awesome because they're pushing this agenda of Google Everything and Everything Online which is annoying to many of us.
I agree. I miss the web of the nineties. Fan pages made by amateurs, crazy color combinations, under construction gifs, minimal ads (just a simple banner), no tracking into oblivion. But most of all the vibrant feel, the helpfullness and the innocence. It was a cozy place.
> Wouldn't my ISP also be recording this information?

In most countries your ISP would not be allowed to log that information, except for a) billing purposes, or b) in conjunction with the new spying laws. Even then, only traffic information is stored, only for the purpose of surrendering it after law enforcement produces a warrant, and it can only be stored for a limited time (3 or 6 months).

This isn't very nice either -- but most places there are some very strict laws on storing, and using communication data.
Once you let any employees go, the barn door is open. Unless the consensus is that those employees (or employee) were dead weight, resumes are already up on Craigslist and job searches are in progress.

Only the naive wait for the end.
Android piracy still sucks
Ahem... Have you heard of Facebook? Or GMail? Or Hotmail?

These are money-losing businesses. As we speak.

Real life is much more complicated.
Phone connections used to be an actual end-to-end circuit that you had to have very specialized knowledge to be able to tap into, which is where that expectation comes from. Email is very much like handing a postcard to your secretary to pass to the mail room to walk up and leave in a bin labeled with the destination address. There are multiple stops en route, and the data just sits there instead of existing transiently. So yes, people shouldn't expect that it magically stays private.

But I'll take it further, to the extent that a secure channel isn't possible by phone today, people shouldn't expect privacy there any more either.

Being able to keep the government from using your information is different from privacy, and that's my big point. These conversations always go the route that Big Brother knowing about something is the worst thing that can happen to you, but really it's not. How many people get fired from their jobs without one bit of government intervention based solely on their employer becoming aware of a message they sent? That's what I'm talking about, you should not expect privacy from unencrypted email. Even if your provider is awesome, the recipient and the recipient's provider might not be, and that's beyond your control in most cases.

> > If they turn it over willingly that's caveat emptor

> I don't know about that. Do you think it would also be reasonable without a court order for them to provide your private emails to a party other than the government, like a reporter or your company's customers or suppliers?

Do I think it would be reasonable? Not at all. But it's certainly not illegal, which is why I say caveat emptor. Pick your contractors carefully and vote with your wallet for the one that will guard your data.
I have been thinking this myself recently, and contrasting how difficult it is being a founder (which pretty much requires a jack of all trades skillset), versus being employable until you can support yourself long enough to risk not having a job for a while (god damn student loans).

It is really tough to strike a balance.
>Edit: The helpful explanation linked in a comment on the question you linked is defective because it applies to all continuous probability distributions.

No, why do you think so?
The deflationary aspect is only important for currencies backing an economy - if you just use bitcoin for quick anonymous transactions, say dollar-->bitcoin-->purchase, then you don't care what the value is doing over time.

It is interesting to consider alternatives though - bitcoin could be the Friendster of crypto-currencies.
Bitcoin Was the 'Victim of Its Own Success,' Not DDOS Attack
I think you are overestimating how bad the "global economic crisis" is. Besides, computers are vital to many companies--they're not an expendable "luxury."
I'm sorry but let me offer a different perspective.

Your startup failure was good. It hit quick. You learned. You moved on.

If I had more time I'd tell you about all those failed startups that suffer a really slow death. Like the YC startups. Pretty much all of them are failed. They haven't seen the light yet. You have. Be grateful.
Basically, PCs are dumb, boring work terminals for old people.

Children coming of computing age when the iPhone was released are now 9 years old, perhaps on their second or third portable gaming device, and lobbying their parents for an iPhone.

What on Earth would they possibly want a slow, dirty, heavy keyboard computer for? You can't even take a picture with it unless it's an Apple.
>"don't be evil" is an accountability dodge.

This is really, thoroughly missing the point. There was never anybody to enforce "don't be evil" -- if they had made it "do no evil" then there would still be no one to enforce it. It's a goal, not a law. If Google violates "don't be evil" then nothing happens differently than if they had never adopted it.

The point of "don't be evil" is to remind Google employees which end is up. It's something they can point to when someone else wants them to Do The Wrong Thing, as an official justification for refusing. If you think that means they're going to adhere to it in 100% of cases then you're liable to be disappointed, but I expect we're all still better off that they try most of the time than if they were to just throw it away and become comic book super-villains.
Going east and west across North Dakota is pretty damn boring.
...and when you searched for "widgets" you'd find a person a thousand miles away who knew about as much as there possibly is to know about widgets, and they had a little website with all the information. Maybe they were a bus driver, or maybe a professor, but they loved widgets and shared that with you.

Now? "Buy WIDGETS with Amazon".
Projects like this are the one hard-to-deny good thing about Bitcoin: it's a very cool toy to play with.
The Bitcoin Petition
My issue with loyalty programs is that they are used for in-store analytics. I don't like being the focus of analytics sometimes.
Google's argument is that they aren't different services, they are all 'just Google'. Say what you want about that philosophy, but it has worked well for many people, myself included.
Given that the poster says "my ultimate goal is to build a general artificial intelligence" I'm not sure that facility in any given programming language (or the lack thereof) is the poster's biggest problem.
The theft occurred on the MtGox web site. MtGix is in a position to defend such a robery and it would behoove it to do so.
Right. On a network governments have access to.
Nebraska and Iowa have growing tech scenes as well. Obviously it is nowhere close to NYC and Silicon Valley, but it isn't all farmland out here either, if that's what you were thinking.

Off the top of my head: http://www.hudl.com/ http://www.travefy.com/ http://www.dwolla.com/ http://www.archrival.com/ http://www.votertide.com/ and even less-traditional sites such as http://www.occupytogether.org/
Panic’s Status Board is the Tetris of Data Visualisation
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57413309-93/larry-page-goog...

"[Larry Page] ... called [G+] the "social spine," reminding listeners that the service isn't just a destination, but a unifying social framework for all Google's products."

First off, Google allows you to have multiple identities with SSO. And I find it hard to argue that it's not a good thing for 99% of the user base. Managing multiple accounts sucks, and being able to share between them (and supporting a very rich set of privacy tools) is a win for most users.

A genuine question: Why don't you want your YouTube account linked to your Gmail?
Great work!

I have two suggestions:

Build an application in Clojure and in C/C++. IMO you should try a functional language (doesn't have to be clojure) and a lower level language. It could be a clojure webapp and a C++ opengl game... doesn't matter.

Here's something to get you started: http://nehe.gamedev.net/tutorial/lessons_01__05/22004/

I wouldn't worry about specializing just yet, just keep doing what you're doing, just up your difficulty level. Already you've done more than 50% of the programmers in the market (most know one language, like Java or C#).
Right, but every dumb person you know browses YouTube as well, and comment quality is pulled down by dumb people more easily than it can be pulled up by smart people.

Anything that requires actual reading already has a barrier to entry to the dumbest of the dumb.
> As in all defamation cases, it is Ms. Allen's job to prove that the allegedly defamatory statements (the accusation of rape) were true and the photo is a significant obstacle for her to overcome.

That's not the case under US libel and defamation law. As with any other tort, the plaintiff has the burden of proof (and thus must prove, among other elements of the tort, that the statement was false). The UK and some other jurisdictions have a reversed burden of proof for defamation or libel, but not the US.
Apache Rewrites History: Why is it Named “Apache”?
My experience with technical questions during interviews is that they did not need a deep understanding of any particular technology. Instead, they mostly rely on some knowledge of algorithms and data structures. Almost all of my coding questions came from the following classes I took at MIT:
Intro to Algorithms (6.006)
Design and Analysis of Algorithms (6.046)
Mathematics for Computer Science (6.042)

Take some version of those classes (maybe OCW, edX, or Coursera) and you will be good to go — at least for technical interviews. If you like reading then Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein is the book that these courses cover.
yeah, that's what I ended up doing. :) first time using git. These old bones have been ground up bad by CVS/Subversion :P Here's the announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5535827
I'm sure some people managed to cash out at the right time, but Bitcoin is taking a bit of a tumble as of late and I'm waiting for the inevitable stories titled: How I lost $25,000 investing in Bitcoin or How I lost my family home investing in Bitcoin. All of the publicity lately has driven up the price and brought some new interest into the foray, but unless you got on the train 1.5 years ago, you're in for an unpleasant surprise when you're not making copious amounts of cash. There are the lucky ones and then there are the unlucky ones.
>As a developer and a bit of a designer, I couldn't picture myself coding on a tablet nor designing on one

That pretty much describes me and the thing is that even though I still need a PC for the same reasons as you, I haven't felt the desire to upgrade as before. The reason? Pretty much exactly what the article states.

I used to upgrade every couple of years, and maybe slightly more frequently. And, I would see significant performance/productivity gains per upgrade.

But, unlike before, I don't feel any performance "pain" with my current desktop or mobile workstation. They are both 3-4 years old, Windows 7 64-bit machines, and pack plenty of power/memory for my (heavy) use. So, I no longer feel a need for better performance.

Seems there was a time when software (including the OS) pushed the hardware, such that users were ever hungrier for more power. But, now it seems that hardware has gotten out in front permanently for all intents and purposes. A slightly above average consumer rig with sufficient memory can now handle just about any task most folks will throw at it and with relatively no latency.
Macintosh SE Easter Eggs (via EEVblog):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6OTAG1Ersw
"There is no capital nor wealth creation to speak of; only as much money as was put in. While somebody may buy a bitcoin for $1 and then sell it for $200, no value was added in this process, so it is simply a transfer of wealth. The people who profit will do so by taking from those who lose.

As the deflationary feedback amplifies the desire to hoard, the exchanges will become illiquid. Eventually, buyers will give up while waiting in absurdly long queues, and demand will loosen. Soon after, things will turn pear-shaped as the world's fastest liquidation occurs. The exchange rate will fall faster than orders can be fulfilled, so that less than $2.5 billion is recovered. After all, it was never really there anyway."

Nailed it.
How does that change anything I wrote? White slaveholders held white slaves in ancient Rome but it would have been justified to kill them all as well, too.
They have $350M in debt. Does $100M+ in revenue justify $650M worth of equity? Doesn't sound that crazy to me.
It's still a decently authoritative source for music.
"No, it's not meant like that at all."

Cool, so it's your baseless opinion vs Google's public stance on their motivations. How productive.

"I, for one, never wanted my YouTube account linked to my Gmail account etc."

I'm sorry that you feel entitled to have Google bend to your will with regards to their high-quality services for which you pay nothing.
Mozilla JavaScript API For Web And Payments Released
Child pornography isn't even on the top ten list. It doesn't threaten anybody's rice bowl. A crusade against child porn might get you elected, but actually doing something about it doesn't matter to governments. If it did they would have shut Tor down already.
Might I suggest transferring the 10 btc to a custom wallet with a single address in it, encrypting the wallet and simply putting it online for everyone to see/download. The winner gets the password to the wallet.
Think of bitcoin as the bank account, and zerocoin as ATM withdrawals of cash. It's a leaky metaphor, but it fits.

Since withdrawing money from an ATM is not money laundering, it works.

What makes it anonymous is that anyone can now start a 'bitcoin account' with purely unconnected zerocoins without any AML paperwork to go through just like a real life equivalent of dumping stacks of cash at your no questions asked numbered bank account service.
I used to decry notebooks/laptops as a way to get "real work" done, but nowadays they are commonplace.

Beyond work, everything else is easier/better on a tablet/phone.

At this point the only reason I have a windows PC any more is for "HD" gaming and the occasional windows only software.
If you want to get a sense of all the samples that go into a Girl Talk song, I recommend the following which provides real time info of each sample as the song plays:

http://readyrickshaw.com/toob/node/63
-and-
http://alldaysamples.com/
Apple Will Pay for Those Water-Damaged iPhones After All
An additional twist is to price things in prime numbers so that buying multiples leaves a residual balance.
As an anonymizer and common middle currency for different economies, with that process, I can see the value. It could be particularly useful for making online purchases without giving buyer credentials.
"As the deflationary feedback amplifies the desire to hoard, the exchanges will become illiquid."

The rest of it makes perfect sense, but why would we think this, rather than that market forces will drive prices up, and people will sell as a result, fulfilling demand?
You realize that Amazon can already run all the analytics they want when you buy anything from Amazon, right?
Ask HN: Is there a good off-the-shelf product customization app?
I work for a jewelry manufacturer and want to build an experimental website to allow custom designed jewelry. The software would need to embed into a Amazon webstore and have this basic functionality: Allow users to select options to design a product through a database of pictures we supply, like: Design a Ring >> Diamond or Gemstone >> (if gemstone) white or yellow gold >> (if white gold) choose a setting >> (setting is chosen) select a gemstone out of 14 choices

Anyone know anything like this? Google seems to have mostly enterprise solutions.
Is it optional to show who you tip? I'm curious about who's contributions they're thanking.

I'm guessing the people who've written the FOSS heroku runs on, but very curious.
What's Inside Successful Entrepreneurs' Arsenals?
market forces will drive prices up, and people will sell as a result, fulfilling demand?

I'm no economist, but I'm pretty sure this state of affairs is not guaranteed.
There's that, and also the fact that cpus aren't getting faster as much as they used to. I imagine if my cpu was still doubling in single-core power every couple years that there would be dev tools that could make use of that power and I would want to upgrade.

And games would definitely be doing much more as well.

But it's not practical to make software that will take twice as long to run if cpus only speed up 10% every two years.
This is good for cashflow, but depending on the accounting interpretation, it's neutral for the balance sheet.

Subscription schemes and prepayments create offsetting liabilities.

That is:

I give Example Co. $100 now.

They book an increase of $100 in their cash at bank, but they also book an offsetting liability -- services owed -- of $100.

However, from a cashflow perspective, $1 now is always better than $1 later.

I am not an accountant, this is not accounting advice.
It contains the sentence "For any distribution, the sum of probabilities always equals 1" without the caveat that the sum is of a countable number of probabilities. It applies to every continuous distribution using the same argument, but with "the sum across all naturals" replaced with "the sum across the appropriate universe."
I've felt this way since I built my last desktop in 2008. I was sort-of waiting for the "gee its time to upgrade" mark to roll around in 3 or 4 years, but it hasn't happened yet. Any games I want to play it still runs very well, and it still feels very fast to me even compared to modern systems.

When my friends ask for advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just plain hard to be disappointed with anything new.

I think I can pinpoint when this happened. It was the SSD. Getting an SSD was the last upgrade I ever needed.

~~~

Something does worry me slightly about the large shift to tablets, which are great devices in their own right. It's hard(er) to create new content on a tablet, and I don't really want that becoming the default computer for any generation.

I think its extremely healthy to have the lowest bar possible to go from "Hey I like that" to "Can I do that? Can I make it myself?"

I think its something hackers, especially those with children should ask themselves: Would I still be me, if I had grown up around primarily content consumption computing devices instead of more general purpose laptops and desktops?
...as long as somebody else is telling you what to do.

The Sex Pistols were really the creation of their manager Malcolm McClaren. Which really is kind of apt, because if you don't cultivate your talents, your successes all depend on someone or something else.

Piss and vinegar definitely helps though.
I've found grim proof of this by observing people at shared computers in public libraries. It's not simply people watching a video now and then, but dozens of people spending their entire allotment of time watching YouTube as they would watch TV, amidst a sea of free books.
> The exchange rate will fall faster than orders can be fulfilled

Is that possible? In the event of a crash all buy orders will be fulfilled, ordered by price/time. The exchange rate can't move if there are no orders being executed.
looks like a high school homework assignment to me.