skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Krugman isn't perfect, but he actually has been one of the more accurate prognisticators (http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/130485/claim-kr...)

More importantly, Krugman actually admits when he is wrong based on new data, as he has done on several occasions in his blog and the NYT. To me, that is the mark of a scientist, one who is able to be swayed by data.

Very few of the Austrians and Chicago types seem to admit to being wrong, and often, contradictory data is simply waved away as conspiratorial (inflation, econometrics). The whole notion of praxeology turns their conclusions into untestable pseudo-science. It takes on the air of a religion rather than geeky engineers willing to hold their ideas to fire of real world tests.

There are two issues at play here: the deep desire of technolibertarians for "free money" and decentralization, and moral arguments surrounding the function of the state and application of force, and the real world where their predictions often fail. It's possible to love Bitcoin, but also admit Krugman is right about it.

Bitcoin is a magnificent creation of cryptography. In fact, the entire field of modern cryptography, from one way functions, zero knowledge proofs, oblivious transfer, to high level schemes involving money, voting, homomorphic encryption, et al, is staggering beautiful. When I first read of Broadcast Encryption, despite its use in DRM, my mind was blown. I love all this stuff, and have a deep affinity for subversive systems.

But Bitcoin isn't the anarchocapitalist utopia enabler that converts the world into Galt's Gulch, because the deep beliefs about how a totally free economy would work in practice don't have to be any more true than the beliefs about how anarcho-syndicalist communities would work when scaled up. The real world is complex, and a mixed set of strategies is more adaptive and stable than a set of purist ones.
Global warming is disprovable at numerous points of evidence.

- Disprove the absorbtion and emission spectra of greenhouse gases like CO2, methane, and water vapor.

- Disprove correlations between measurements of fossil fuel usage and measurements of rising CO2 atmospheric concentrations.

- Disprove measurements of changing carbon isotope ratios in the atmosphere.

- Show that the oceans absorb CO2 more quickly that currently estimated.

- Show that insolation has recently increased more than previously thought.

- Show that measurements of recent global temperature rise are wrong.

etc.
I still don't know why I click medium.com links here, the site does not work on android thanks to shit CSS
The Google Mirror API allows you to build web-based services, called Glassware, that interact with Google Glass. It provides this functionality over a cloud-based API and does not require running code on Glass.

This API is focused on pushing info to Glass, rather than interaction (which I assume will be later)
If nothing go and refinance now. At least do yourself a favor and calculate to see how much you'd save over the life of your loan.
Why not just use Filepicker?
That valid CSS unit measurement sounds like inane trivia to me. I've never had to use anything other than em, px, and % before and I've never even seen it in any open source projects.
Thank you for posting this, chrisacky.
Conferences are for mingling.
Education is far off the low end of the agenda.
We have a slightly different approach to the same problem: if people keep putting out crap code that breaks (or worse, introduces regression bugs) and I will let them go. I have no time for people who do crap work.

You use tests to weed those people out. That's fine, if it works for you.

I'm anal about knowing everything that's happening in my code. I compare git commits to ticket numbers to keep abreast of how things are changing over time. A bug comes through on Goalee and I know which handful of files it will be in. Honestly, I'm quite uptight about this stuff. I catch most shortcuts personally before they go out, and have the appropriate conversation with the responsible party.
Thank you for posting this, danso.
CloudyRec platform will be discontinued from 30th April 2013
You are misunderstanding what "egalitarian" means.
> I've always had an issue with companies hiring so-called, designer/developers when we all know a true designer or developer doesn't fragment their time learning two crafts.

I find it unfortunate that companies don't hire designer/developers more often. I've worked professionally in design and development roles, but it seems most companies want to keep them distinct, so I get typecast into one or the other. I want to be able to exercise all of my skills, especially when they are so closely linked in modern software.

You are right that time is definitely not on your side to try and do it, but I've been designing since elementary school and programming since high school, and had jobs doing both before graduating high school. I had an easy decade head start compared to anyone who might try the same in college. If you believe 10,000 hours to proficiency, that makes a huge difference.

Truth be told, I'm not sure how to accurately quantify my own abilities. Perhaps I really am mediocre at best, as you suggest. People seem to love the work I do though, whether it be design or development, so that is reason enough to continue with them both. Hopefully one day we can find tolerance of those who have an interest in both, and stop assuming all programmers cannot design.
"million request per second distributed system operators" is the definition of a tiny community.
In my experience test-driven development is not time consuming, even for small developments. I don't think we even need to say things like "yes it takes time now but it will pay off later". I have found that it saves time right from the beginning. It seems other people have a similar experience : http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2013/03/11/TheFrenziedPan...
I get the sense that the Lodestone project is now defunct.
Batshit insane.

What kind of implications could this tool possibly have for witness protection? It returns data that was explicitly entered in connection with a specific disaster, and you can only search by name. Someone who's in hiding isn't going to give out their original identity, so how exactly do you propose to use this to track them?

Did you even click through to see what this thing really does, or did you actually just assume that "Person Finder" must be some kind of magical privacy-violating anal probe and rush to type out the first paranoid, nonsensical and idiotic thing to run through your head and click post as a knee-jerk reaction?
A second tragedy need not make the first less tragic. Americans mourn tragedies in America more than those outside of their borders because they hit closer to home.
Maybe. BUT 2 things:

* Most bought and expect it to appreciate. Very important. That is the most important retirement asset they have. If their house loses half the money it could mean eating ramen for 20 years after retirement or eating steak.

* Property taxes. Some would actually not like it to appreciate too fast if they are not selling yet because they have to shell our many thousands of dollars a year. Ideally they would like the price to stay low then right before they sell, to spike through the roof.
Samsung Galaxy Note III may sport unibody and aluminum construction
Not bad advice, it seems, but a rather turgid retelling. "Triage, apologize as soon and as honestly as possible, then take your lumps" is more succinct.
If you own a luxury car, you probably don't care about the cost of parking. For extended trips, you're likely being picked up/dropped off by a black sedan anyway.
Even though I'm a programmer, I did take journalism in high school, and worked as a humor columnist for my college newspaper.

In high school, the paper was fully funded by advertising. As such, each student who worked on the paper was responsible for selling a certain amount of advertising each quarter, with your grade depending upon it (no, really! I could have been writing on the level of Normal Mailer, yet if I sold no ads, at best I could expect a D- (in the US, that's the lowest passing grade)). I was there to write, not to sell (and hell, I never complained about the stories I had to write, having gotten stuck with stuff no one else wanted to write about). It took an intervention by my mom to get me out of that class.

Now, I can understand the the need for advertising, but to force grades based upon money raised, especially seeing how it's not the primary purpose of the class? Drama class (yes, I was also a drama geek in high school) also relied upon advertising (in the program bills, plus the occasional fund raiser) but grades there weren't dependent upon the amount of money raised, nor was everybody expected to sell (or at least the drama teacher realized that for some people (ahem) their skills lied elsewhere (in my case, accounting)).

College was a bit different. I'm not sure if there was a journalism major, and working on the newspaper was open to anyone willing to work. I only got involved because I had time to kill on Wednesdays, and all I did was write a humor column (http://www.conman.org/people/spc/writings/murphy/) and it ended because the paper ended in a major scandal, involving student funding and an inappropriate relationship with the student government (which itself was mired in a huge scandal, where the President resigned somewhat suspiciously, along with the Senate Speaker; then the Judicial branch declared the recently held elections invalid, and the Senate responded by starting impeachment proceedings against the Justices---nice to see college was preparing them for life in the US government).

The newspaper tried to go it alone, off campus (and by taking all the equipment from the former on-campus office to the new off-campus office) but it folded in less than a year. I think it took over a decade before a new newspaper (new name even) started.

So yes, I did learn quite a bit working for a high school and college newspaper. I just don't think I learned anything related to journalism though.
Surely that depends on many factors, just like using any other tool or process?

Does each test tell you something valuable?

Is the cost of implementing and maintaining that test less than whatever value the test offers? That is, is the test cost-effective?

Could you have found the same information more effectively some other way? That is, what is the opportunity cost of writing and maintaining that test?
The prices of the three treatments advertised on that site's front page seem a little odd:

https://watsi.org/profile/e86bdd4cc545-yai-min "... but they need help raising the $1500 needed to get him the surgery he needs to walk again"

https://watsi.org/profile/11d44c5c9f10-shwe-shwe "... help funding the $1500 surgery to remove the growth and restore functionality to Shwe Shwe’s eye"

https://watsi.org/profile/77babf5f7d6d-naw-hla-aye "A $1500 surgery can remove Naw Hla Aye’s kidney stones and give her back her health."

Why do all the medical treatments cost exactly $1500?
Bitcoin: Central banks could have caused a calculated stress test?
Not when that describes the vast majority of professional economists.
Boston Hero: Carlos Arredondo
I have to share the story of Carlos Arredondo.

First son dies in Iraq war on August 25, 2004, becomes US citizen, second son committed suicide, Carlos was beaten for protesting war, was in the VIP section (I believe with the families of sandy hook) and ran across the street to help the victims of the blasts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Arredondo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWHHWB3Jr60

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvRuyGphm78&feature=youtu.be

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2011/12/20/father-loses-second-son

[NSFW GORE: http://i.imgur.com/0TszBK2.jpg]
http://library.mises.org/books/Helmut%20Schoeck/Scientism%20...
I have no ideas about the average length, but I'd guess a normal length would about 10-15 pages. You can check out recent bills passed here if you're interested:

http://openparliament.ca/bills/

(Hat tip to openparliament.ca, it's an awesome site)

In fact, our current government got in trouble in the last few years for passing two very large omnibus bills, C-10 (the "Safe Streets and Communities Act", which makes many changes to the criminal code) and C-45 (the "Jobs and Growth Act", which makes many fiscal changes, among other things).

http://openparliament.ca/bills/41-1/C-10/
http://openparliament.ca/bills/41-1/C-45/

They weigh in at 114 pages and 430 pages, respectively, in their normal two-column (English & French) layout. These are not typical and they caused a lot of commotion in the media and from the opposition when the government tabled them, mostly because of their lengths but also because of the limited amount of debate that was allowed about them.
Your comment is so thick in assumptions (students objectively know who is better at whatever metric you have in mind?) that you are proving the case that traditional metrics are untrustworthy for selecting meritorious candidates.
The one that will produce more value for my company. In many cases, that person is person A.

I don't care if you were pampered and that's why you got A's. If you have the necessary knowledge and are a hard worker, you have my vote.
One of their example API uses includes users taking photo's with the built in camera and sharing them with your service. See "add a cat to that" https://developers.google.com/glass/stories
Ask HN: Do you use a debugger?
If so, (or if not), for which languages?
Multithreaded recalculation in Excel
That really depends on what kind of news we are reading, and when we are reading, sometimes skimming and scanning is a good way to save time if you are just to comprehend the main theme of the news, or decide whether you will continue to read. But, obviously, over-read the news will kill your brains like chronic diseases.
You're right. It's about $3.3 lost per share, which is a loss smaller than 1% of the share price.
Like if you print money and pay people to dig and bury holes over and over again, you can revive an economy.

It is pretty obvious that the economy can be in a state where doing this will revive the economy - because of the indirect positive effect on aggregate demand.

Is is also pretty obvious that there will always be better ways to revive an economy - such as by paying people to do something that is considered to be useful. Then you get both the indirect positive effect on aggregate demand and you're directly getting something useful done (whether it's fixing the infrastructure, cleaning up rivers, taking care of the elderly, or painting pretty pictures really doesn't matter that much).

Keynes actually implied all this in the often quote that Keynes-haters like to bring up again and again without properly understanding it.
It comes down to compounding interest. Same as with credit cards or really any similar debt (or investment).

People are: shown the total amount they have to pay to the bank over the life of the loan. It is hundreds of thousands of dollars over 30 years. And most can see in their statement what gets applied to principle and what gets applied to interest.

If they didn't screw themselves and get a loan with early payment penalties they are always free to pay extra anytime they see fit to reduce principle (and if it is early enough it could end up dramatically reducing the total interest paid).

TL;DR: people need to know more math
Google Releases Glass Mirror API Developer Guides
That right there would be considered extortion in court, and like I said, it is sabotage to actively attack infrastructure to defraud a business (ie, blocking roads for trucks, building a power sink to rip juice from a local area from someone, scheduling trains to intentionally prevent someone else from using them at a certain time).

It is like any other infrastructure. You should be free to use it, and punished if you abuse it.
Where is the + 10,000 button?
Your assumption that a total ordering of paper quality exists, that is holding you back.
Visualizing Greatness
> I think many companies are doing themselves a disservice by requiring people to be onsite and live nearby or commute long distances.

Me too. But I believe that the cramped apartment is worth keeping open as an option.
Webcam Pulse Detector
I've had great success with this technique. In my book automated and randomized integration stress tests cannot be beaten when it comes to hardening software as efficiently as possible. Randomized stress tests come across pathological conditions quickly, and it only takes a fraction of the imagination that it would take to write a unit test to successfully catch each one. Great for data structures and distributed systems, and probably applicable wherever non-trivial unit tests would also be useful...
Thanks I didn't know about Poe's law. My first thought was that it was a joke and a rather good one, but then seeing replies taking it seriously I started to doubt :)
What happens when the topic of discussion is the intersection between the Internet and economics?
They won't have to. The market would naturally have big players find it in their best interest to organize spectrum interference around their usage, and would avoid ranges used by other big consistent players in a region. The average consumer should barely see any change, besides variable range on their devices as other hardware comes up and goes down in a frequency band they use.

But for use cases that require consistent signaling, or really high throughput, enabling radios that utilize vast swaths of frequencies in parallel can increase the throughput.
The paper that this is based on is also pretty fascinating: Eulerian Video Magnification for Revealing Subtle Changes in the World http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/
I have seen in-house bug tracking database backups fail and I have seen upset customers that spread the word to other potential customers. I'll take an in-house database backup failure any day.

This is for a small niche industry where everyone knows everyone a bad word or hit can mean the end of the company.
Well, they saved quite a lot by not paying the billion and a half dollars that they owe Washington state in taxes, so they can afford it.
It wasn't a particularly long post, but I directly stated that we need to do we can to help them at the same time that I stated that they're not going away.
Here's the response I got from my support ticket:

>Thank you for your inquiry, and I certainly understand your concern. We are still conducting an active investigation and unable to disclose most information at this time. This being said, we do not yet have any evidence that any payment information of any customers have been compromised. We will be releasing further information regarding the incident soon, so please keep watch of our website and blog for said information. If you have any further questions, please feel free to ask.

That actually sounds pretty close to what you're asking for, although I have to say it didn't make me feel much better. It would be nice if they would make a public statement too.
Agreed, I just was using it as an example. Taking action doesn't have to mean restricting our freedoms.
It's marketing. However, it's awesome to see them spend money to help people directly, rather than on advertising or something like that.
I couldn't resist trying it out from a non-boston IP to a non-Boston number. Still worked. It's cool to see that they trusted people enough to not put any sort of controls on that.
FWIW, no charges on my card used with Linode at this point.
Obsessed With Google, Copyright Holders Ignore The Actual Pirated Content
I am willing to play chicken. Flash must die, and more than that, the standards should make no additional allowances for broken behavior, such as allowing websites to discriminate between Platform A and Platform B.

In practice, as long as Javascript remains in its present form, they will be able to effect this sort of discrimination, but the W3C doesn't need to actively promote brokenness.
unfortunately, integration tests tend to take a longer time to run. unit tests tend to run instantaneously.
I have seen continuous exponential decay applied to this problem.
Pause for a moment to reflect on the extreme assumptions you are making.
Because interference is traffic congestion, not me ripping the road out of the ground and hauling it away on a truck. If a frequency is busy, you just get noise and reduced range. The difference is that you don't have as many independent protocols running through the air as you do on the streets.

You can still use it, but your usage is diminished. On the electric grid, there is a peak voltage the line can feed to all recipients before it is maxed out and can't provide more juice. If I am on the grid with you, I'm diminishing the maximum power you can take off a sufficiently strained grid. It isn't stealing from you to use it though, and in the case of power there is very little litigation about people consuming too much electricity (from what I know).
Transceivers need not be large, consider the Baofeng UV-3R/5R or the Yaesu VX-3R. You can put them in your pocket (though I wouldn't transmit with it in there).

You also don't need high-power for long-distance work; the Elecraft KX3 almost fits in your pocket and only puts out 10W (it runs off of 8 AA cells), but many of its users report regular worldwide contacts. (Mine is in the mail, so I'll let you know.) The key is to have a decent antenna.
> ... At this point, it started seeming somewhat impractical to go and patch rails and all these other gems that I use, so I decided to investigate the amount of effort that would be required to actually solve the problem in MRI. ...

I admire James. Wading into the interpreter takes balls.
My opinion is that "Software Engineering" is an artisan trade. What it isn't is based on science. What is rigorous is usually based around theoretical mathematics.

Let me put it like this: there are very very few designs in software where there are limitations that are based on intrinsics. Whereas if you talk with a chemist, it's very clear that there are actual properties underlying what they do, and these physical properties do things like go "bang" when you screw up. Or if you're building a circuit, you use the underlying equations of the resistors and other components to drive the design. Very little of that exists in computer science.

This doesn't make what we do immoral or bad or demeaning. But in my opinion, this conflation with physcial-based sciences produces a confusion of the mind.

I'm prone to consider computer science "algorithmic mathematics" and quality software engineering "software craftsmanship". It reminds me far more of house building than circuit design.
So you concede there are no natural monopolies that are not structural?

That is all I'm saying. If you agree with that, we aren't arguing anything.
And here we see how ridiculous is the claim that technical and educational issues are the drivers of a conference.
Show HN: we're a Boston startup...our site is now a photo tribute to our city
To say Creative and Not Creative is just a mindset makes about as much sense as saying height is a just a mindset.
Infosys helped make the world flat, except its own management structure
$10,000 in sales of my C++ book: easier than I thought
"Sometime in the next 20 years, maybe sooner, there will be another '70s-style raw-material crunch: a disruption of oil supplies, a sharp run-up in agricultural prices, or both. And suddenly people will remember that we are still living in the material world and that natural resources matter. "

Very true, in consideration of the article on the Rent seeking economy recently posted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548730). Vanity, thy name is apps.