skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's funny to me that people are so quick to poo-poo the complicated modeling done for the Netflix prize. When did production-worthiness become the only important thing? It's like saying Watson was useless because it can't play a concurrent game of Jeopardy with thousands of people on the web.

Just like in research, it turns out that relaxing real-world constraints on a problem is often a great way to make progress. I would not have to search long or far to provide much worse uses of million-dollar grants/projects/big-data-software.
In theory, yes you are correct. But you can't tell me all the computer resources that are spent on mining are required to process transactions. There are a whole lot of wasted cycles, electricity, and other resources.
The exploding toilet
I absolutely understand that $1M doesn't seem like much while on wall street, as I said in my original comment it's not early retirement / "F You" money. For the purely money-driven clearly they keep working and living the lifestyle.

But for the people who do leave, as you did, and the blog author, and presumably the others considering which foul acts are better than going to work each day, I have to think their lives are still on a much easier trajectory. If you have $500k and hate your life, you can easily take a year off to figure out a new plan, go to grad school without worrying about cost or lost wages, start a company, etc. If you hate your job as a dishwasher you probably don't have a lot of options, but as a wall streeter, it seems like you should be able to walk away at any point and still be better off than 95% of Americans.

I guess I just wonder how many people do take that opportunity. $500k makes you a BSD in most of the US, but if you've only ever known prep school, ivy league then wall street, I suspect the idea of living and working elsewhere sounds repugnant.
This is known as a partnership, where the partners' personal assets are at risk. This is what the investment banks used to be, way back when. (Consulting firms too, for that matter)

If I had some sort of magical power to enact this kind of reversal to where ibanks were once again partnerships, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
"Minority browser"? What's that supposed to mean? Anything other than Chrome? Or, if we go back a few years, anything other than IE?

In case you didn't know, there are 3 very important browsers: Chrome, Firefox, and IE. Right now, Firefox got around 20%, IE around 30%, and Chrome around 40%.

There are also a few countries where Firefox is the most popular one. For example, in Germany it currently got around 45%.

>a fringe image format

Was PNG any different? People usually don't randomly start to use some image format if it isn't supported by any browser.

Also, ripping two images out of one file and splicing them together requires very little code. In a high-level language it's maybe 50 lines of code. There are many games which do that. It's very simple and it saves typically around 80%.
Whatever Kurgman says, it is good to keep in mind that he is an economist turned partisan-politics hack. Whatever he looks at, he looks at it from his lens of ideological reasoning.
His ideology clearly aligns with the status quo of economic policy, promoting quantitative easing and keeping up the artificial smokescreen of the superiority of the US dollar.

Therefore any competing ideas (e.g. gold, bitcoin) need to be disregarded, especially as economists by now have realized the importance of trust and its cognitive impact on markets.
Microsoft is in serious trouble and they are focussing on wrong things.

As a company that produced Windows8 apps, its seriously disappointing to see huge investments in their ecosystem go waste. Microsoft's answer for that?

1. Throw Dirt at others: Scroogle, lawsuits ....
2. Hide the stats of their decline: Windows8 apps dashboard used to show download trends of your app vs download trends of top5 apps in same category. This provided a way to judge whether platform is growing. For about 2 months (After initial December bump) the stats have been on decline. So now they decided not to show it any more.

It is really disappointing to see MSFT fall and not even make a serious attempt.
A New Way to see Android Mobile Gaming Trends
For tmux, I assign the bind-key to backtick (`) and last-window to TAB. Then do most of my work in window #1. On a US keyboard, I find it pretty easy to move between windows with `1, `2, `TAB, etc.
In his defense, it was Krugman who identified in 2003, that we really needed to have a housing bubble, and advocated that we create one, because it would stimulate the economy.

And he was right- it did! Until it popped.

At the end of the day, Krugman is more a spokesperson for liberal politics than an economist. The liberals want to believe that unlimited spending is not bad, and so they put forth this narrative that it is actually good. They look to Keynes for support, but have to be very selective when they do.

Bitcoin is a currency that is not inflationary. Since unlimited spending is enabled with inflation, they see it as a threat.

What's kinda surprising, and amusing, is just how vocal and vociferous the objections to bitcoin have become in the last couple weeks.

This is not because economists recognize it will be a failure- after all, if it were to fail, they could just let it fail, no need to comment on it.

All of these stories, including this one, are indicators that the establishment economists feel threatened by bitcoin.

The reason is one they will never mention publicly - they can't control bitcoin, and they can't stop its adoption, short of draconian measures, and so it threatens their monetary regime.

Ironically if it wasn't for the mismanagement of the dollar, there wouldn't be much need for bitcoin anyway.

PS - Whenever you see someone pointing out that bitcoin dropped %XX in one day, remember the dollar has already failed twice in US history (eg: gone to zero!) and even the latest incarnation is down %98!
are we done talking about the recent announcement from that other social network?
I recommend simply using console.debug, console.log, console.warn, and console.error, which differentiate for you.
This is not what is happening right now. Fact.

BUT, if the project becomes mainstream as the dollar is today, the people of the earth will have a monetary system that doesnt allow taxation through inflation, with no banking monopolies, and globally available.

Isnt that a system that "facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich"??

Consider this initial profit just by hoarding Bitcoin as a reward to put your own assets at risk in this uncertain beginning. Bitcoins can't exist (or anything else, matter of fact), if the people who supports it arent driven by selfish motivation.

I think it's fair that the people who risk themselves in the beginning are awarded, if Bitcoin succeeds.
I clicked through because I thought they had developed a new structure of solar systems.
I too joined Lehman as a graduate in 2007. My experience was different; I was based in the London office and was in a back-office role (IT Infrastructure). I also worked there as an intern in 2005-2006 (or "Industrial Placement" in Lehman-speak).

I have to say I enjoyed my time there. I primarily worked as a developer in a non-developer team, but was continually encouraged by management to pursue this work. This led to work with development teams in other regions, which really helped expand my horizons.

When I started making money from my website (independent of Lehman and unrelated to finance) and wanted to start it as a business, I had to approach legal and my division's MD for approval. They were completely supportive and again encouraged this work.

The downfall of Lehman was a sad but strangely exciting time for me. I remember staying up all night on September 14th watching the number of remote access sessions running, and suspected those users were doing the same as me and watching Bloomberg for an announcement. The following days and weeks saw a lot of interesting events take place, particularly from an infrastructure point of view. Barclays and Nomura (who bought different regions of the bank a few weeks apart) both rushed to connect their infrastructure to Lehman's, which resulted in some curious situations I'm still reluctant to mention publicly!

The most interesting part of it was the transition to Nomura for me. I stayed on there until mid-2010. It was a very different environment to Lehman. Our small team was given vastly expanded responsibilities to build out key services and infrastructure lost during the bankruptcy, and our team truly operated like a startup for about 9 months. We toiled tirelessly with teams in other regions to get services online before deadlines, and got a real sense of achievement out of it.

As things at the day-job settled down, my website became a startup and it was time to join that full time. Again, management was very supportive (incidentally the same management as at Lehman).

I look back on my time at Lehman/Nomura with fondness and truly believe my time there gave me experience I couldn't have received anywhere else.
What sort of chickenshit operation dings people for getting a bunch of bickering morons to listen to reason?

Fuck them. And fuck you if you think there's some sort of more workplace appropriate way to get someone to pay attention when you're being ignored.
Presumably this is only true when you notice that they're posturing. Someone adept at it will do so in a way that conveys the message they're aiming for on a more subtle level.
75 online apps that will let you work in the cloud. - TechCircuit.net
Maybe you could start by dismissing their experience (provided as an example, not as a sum total of the problem) and asserting that they need to provide more data and evidence? It's a pretty good way of marginalizing women in tech if that's what you're shooting for.
s/software/group/
I'll also speak candidly about this issue, knowing that what I'm going to share will offend some people. If you find religious stuff offensive, please just move on and disregard this comment. This isn't for you.

While it's important for communities to be accepting, I also think it's up to individuals to grow a tougher skin. Chuck Swindoll does the best job I've heard to describe this http://www.insightforliving.ca/broadcast/lifetrac/thick-skin
I would normally agree with you, but I think you're failing to make a distinction here.

We, the peasants, get a different level of access to Twitter than say Google or iTunes might. There's no chance that Twitter can afford to cut off access to iTunes as it scales because iTunes is much bigger than Twitter.

Whereas Twitter can afford to bully the small companies of the world, they cannot bully Apple or Google.

In short, using Twitter API's is suicide. Partnering with Twitter could still foster some potential profit.
I'm not sure I've met any, but if I extrapolate from the blue-collar folks I was exposed to I'd think it might be hard to tell.

Anecdotally, of course...

You've probably heard of high-functioning alcoholics, it's entirely possible to a high-functioning crackhead as well - at least for a while.

I expect the point of exposure for most people comes not through continued use, but the point when something interrupts their supply. That's where they end up crushingly depressed, violently angry and indebted in ways that will surely screw-up the rest of their previously well-functioning life.
The resources are required to process transactions securely in a distributed network. You could do the same thing much more efficiently by putting all your trust in a central authority; it's called a bank. But that's not solving the same problem.
So, I don't yet have a Home Phone, however, I'd just liketo point out: when the iPhone debuted - it didnt even have copy paste, video, and many many other features that most other phones had at the time.

I love how every product launch of every 1.0 is always "GAH! Why doesn't this debut item have all features that my 10th generation other thing has!!!"
What about `console.info()`? Or is it a bit too adventurous?
Someone who isn't targeting people who own a flagship Google device. There is probably very little overlap in the Venn diagram of people who go out of their way to get the pure Google experience and those who will truly enjoy and use Facebook Home.
Show HN: launched App marketing tool
Ah, my mistake, you are correct. That being said, the example has another flaw: it is based on completing an infinite number of finite time tasks in finite time. That is to say, adding and removing an infinite number of balls will take an infinite amount of time, but we're only given an hour to do it in.

Note that this is different from Zeno's paradox, wherein the two racers each have to move an infinite number of ever decreasing distances in ever decreasing time (as opposed to constant amounts of time).
Regardless of what happens going forward, Bitcoin has been a huge success by basically any metric that would have been put together >2 years ago.

I don't think a lot of people who haven't been following the topic since the project was first put together really get how much larger and mainstream Bitcoin has become in such a short time with (relatively) so few hiccups compared to what seemed realistically possible when the experiment began.

Also, I think there are a lot of companies that are now considered integral to world economics who, if they had publicly and transparently traded from inception, would have fluctuated just as much in their beginning years.
Without going into detail, there's a lot more going on internally that doesn't meet the eye in addition to varying ticks most folks wouldn't notice outside of spending significant amounts of time around the person.
Google acquires Behav.io
It looks like it's possible for authors on Gumroad to issue refunds:
https://gumroad.com/faq
Not so obvious. The critique is also of the fact that the resources to process a bitcoin transaction are intensive. Yes, I know this is part of the elegance of bitcoin. Elegance by one measure is cumbersome by another.
I haven't looked through those 1k+ apps; I looked at the first few and would say you're completely wrong -- the apps don't hide the features we've come to expect of a homescreen of a smartphone. As I wrote elsewhere...

Oh well, they thought they could simply "take over" the entire, front-facing experience of the phone. They probably would have had better success trying their hand at releasing a better widget, surfacing the same experience without removing the notifications bar, apps tray, etc. Being resizable and able to coexist with other widgets (eg. 1x4 Search, 4x4 FB, 1x4 App tray) would appear to be a lot more welcoming.
The "cyber-" prefix is actually much older than Gibson. In English, the use came
from the term "cybernetic" and that term came from or was based on Greek.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cyber-

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cybernetics
Gah. Sometimes I am so twentieth century. I keep forgetting such things can be done via Skype these days. (You can tell I'm not a Skype user, right?)
Couldn't the real life costs of mining the coins be a base for the bitcoin value ?
Ok, let me rephrase my prior point. If I have my PC mining and then disconnect it, does the Bitcoin network suffer in any noticeable way? If there is no noticeable benefit from my single PC then the resources being used by that PC aren't contributing to anything of value.

Yes, resources are required, but the amount of resources used far and away exceeds the amount of resources required.
In case of touch tone dialing there is another aspect: classic analog or hybrid (analog call path with computer control) switch has relatively small amount of touch tone decoders (2 for 50 lines and ~10 simultaneous calls being relatively common ratio for PBXes), mechanical pulse dialing-only switches are similarly limited by number of step by step switches. Thus dialtone indicates that: (1) line is reasonably usable, (2) switch has at least theoreticaly resources to connect some call (not necessarily any) and (3) switch actually has resources to decode number you are going to dial.

I have seen hybrid PBXes where dial tone is generated by same part of circutiry that decodes DTMF.
How many reviewers understand that this is a tool that they have never used before? All of them, I would imagine.
Your quote is relevant, but it's a shame he doesn't address the implied claim that bitcoin doesn't "facilitate transactions". And while it is relatively small in that use now, he really needs to make a compelling argument to why it won't work that way in the future.

Further, it's worth pointing out that Krugman endorses a monetary system that makes people poor, via inflating the money supply by printing funds to underwrite policies that benefit, primarily, politicians.

A currency whose supply is fixed, or whose inflation rate is constant and predictable (like bitcoin) is better for facilitating transactions.

When you have a variable (and often high these days- in the US money supply is up over %50 in recent years) rate of inflation, it wrecks havoc with prices and other signals causing malinvestment and worsening the economy.

Something that Krugman, to my knowledge, has never answered for.

---

Since I am not allowed to reply to the person below me:

It's quite silly to to say that a limited supply of a currency is bad for it. There is little incentive to hang onto bitcoins. A simple example will prove this to you: The amount of computer you can get for a given amount of money improves dramatically every three years. You could just hold onto your money and buy a much better computer. Thus, relative to computers, the dollar is deflationary.... yet people still buy computers.

This is the kind of argument Krugman gives because he wants to excuse the inflation that has destroyed the dollar, and the economy.... but it is nonsensical. People still buy computers.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=RSI
"Interested is interesting."

Don't treat this opportunity as in interview. Be genuinely interested in his life, his story, and his company. If you show interest, he'll open up. Ask the questions you have based on the current context of the conversation. Everyone has a story to tell, all you have to do is be inquisitive.

You may just end up with a friend and mentor.
Can you explain this in more detail for those of us who don't fully understand how bitcoins come in to existence, because it sounds like one of those things that violate some laws of thermodynamics, like the "hydrogen generator" that you strap to your car to increase fuel economy.

I ask because I know I've heard about people building huge computers with lots of expensive video cards for the purpose of mining bitcoins. Why would so much computing power be required to perform a simple task like processing transactions? Isn't there additional work necessitated by the intentional complexity of the mechanics of bitcoin mining?

I don't know very much about how bitcoins are mined, so I'm speaking from ignorance here, but I'm hoping you can see why the layman observer would need more of an explanation than "Because, of course!"
Agreed with you overall. Just one caveat.

>In short, using Twitter API's is suicide. Partnering with Twitter could still foster some potential profit.

If you're smaller than Twitter, be somewhat wary of what might happen to said partnership in the future. Make sure you don't become obsolete in Twitter's eyes.
Ember is missing.
Here's a potentially troubling question: Is it considered Xist, for whatever variable X you're concerned about, to infer anything about some proposition Y based on the observation that X = x? That is, is it Xist to rely upon prior knowledge that X and Y are correlated? Or is it just Xist to make stronger predictions about Y than are supported by the data?

Another way of asking the question: If we constructed a perfectly unbiased Bayesian robot and fed it the true distributions of X and Y, would we observe its predictions about Y based on given values of X and conclude that the robot is Xist?
The preponderance of comments that "this has happened to me and I'm a guy so the world's not sexist" is so discouraging. It's logically inconsistent and a giant sign of a defense mechanism.

It's a problem and you might do some of these things inadvertently, so maybe listen a bit more and figure out how to keep yourself from not doing things like assuming women at a tech conference are in marketing instead of engineering.

The fact this thread is filled with a bunch of guys mansplaining how this wasn't sexist behavior is very telling.
How to get employees for your startup
Awesome! You should shoot me an email. I'd love to discuss both books.

DMd the email to you earlier.
And as a mobile subscriber you can usually pay for a custom "ring-back" tone. So you can bother anyone who calls you with the latest Rihanna hit.
I suppose he actually compared the costs of mining with the costs of minting paper money? Because that sure seems to missing...
It's certainly not being used as a currency, its original intention. It's being used by speculators to get rich. Sure you might find a few examples of buyers and sellers using bitcoin currency, but you'll find a lot more speculators buying and selling bitcoins to profit from the spreads.
I'm male, and have had all of these things happen to me. To me this just screams "I'm looking for a reason to espouse my reasoning for my feminism at people". yawn
Intro to Byobu
The reason why she got pulled aside was because she wasn't coming across as alpha. Sounds stupid?

Having to use drastic measures such as saying: "Put down the crack pipes" shows insecurity. If she had simply stood up, maybe consistently told the guys:"Hey, hey we don't have these...EXCUSE ME!" and then explained in a calm manner what was wrong, she would have earned respect.

However, this way she more looked like a hysteric, loose cannon.

You have to really be confident (full) of yourself as a woman with a massive personality to guide men in a male-dominated environment and that takes lots of practice and time.

Marissa Mayer I'd say is an alpha.
> "This is materially affecting your perf score."

No one said which direction the effect went.
I, too, am reminded of a frog being asked by the scorpion to help it across the river, when it comes to companies like Twitter.
Email Split Test Tricks So Good You’ll Kick Yourself You’ve Been Missing Out
Unlikely that it will help facebook's monetization problem http://truvoipbuzz.com/2013/04/facebook-home-mobile-monetiza...
Well, another depressing comment thread. A huge pile on of comments essentially of the form "I'm male/white/straight and have ALSO suffered some of these things, therefore you probably haven't experienced discrimination and you should just lighten up".

Honestly? This is the best you can do? It would be fantastic if people would take a step back for a moment and try and deeply consider why your initial reaction is not disappointment and anger, but an attempt to deflect or belittle the problem, regardless of whether you made a conscious decision to do so. Of course you're not all sexists/racists/homophobes, but tending towards trusting people would probably benefit us all.
How much does it cost to change bits of data on a computer? That's what happens with quantitative easing. Bernanke isn't calling up the printing presses to print $2 trillion in paper currency.