skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems like a simple matter of too many authors. The spec called for a question of the form "it takes x minutes to do two things, how many does it take to do three?", the copywriter remembered vaguely some brain-teaser question from his pre-SAT prep book and wrote the text of that already having the answer chosen as x + x/2, and then the layout guy picked a nice saw cutting wood from his clipart CD.

Add it all up and it only takes third grade math to know it equals fail.
>We're willingly giving it to a vast network of for-profit data collectors, and they're more than happy to pass it on to the government without our knowledge or consent.

This reads like a typical "doom and gloom" article and I never understood the point of those. Where is the call to action? Even a half-hearted plea to reach out to your Senators would appear to be more productive than this.

Never read me wrong - I'm just trying to see the forest for the trees. My understanding is that people who care about privacy already know all this, and people to whom we really need to reach out neither read The Atlantic nor Shneiner's blog.

P.S. Does anyone have any credible links for RFID-embedded clothing? Specifically, why destroying these chips would be a problem?
Perseverance Follows Passion
Step 1: no longer have some at home - that's passive, just don't buy it no more. Finish what you have

Step 2: refuse to use it outside your home. That's more active, and may require a commitment. You can start by allowing yourself to drink one every other day, to mitigate withdrawal symptoms.

Decaf etc - I can't say how useful it is, I wanted to cut coffee and not replace an habit by another one. No more coke or redbull either, since the problem here is caffeine: the active ingredient in coffee is also present in coke and redbull and the likes (pepsi, monster, ...)

Google plus support group : https://plus.google.com/communities/113447576520287991560

So far, I have been very dysfunctional during the first 2 days, and at my 4th day I feel normal. I was expecting to feel bad for up to 9 days.

It has had an interesting effect: it seems like I need less sleep, something I noticed when I tried to reduce the dosage these last weeks (not quitting altogether), and completely counterintuitive!

It may be just a normal variation due to a very small sample size. I would be curious to see how much sleep I will need in a year from now. Of course, your results may vary.
Online Porn's Effects, and a New Way to Fight Them
I get a seriously bittersweet feeling reading her blog since some of the things she's doing are eerily similar to little "just for the hell of it" projects I did in college many, many moons ago. (Transmitting data with IR LEDs driven by my sound card, using audio tapes to store data, playing with signal processing using audio from FM radio stations captured with my WinTV card, writing everything in Perl [5.005], ...)

I wish I still had the desire to just play around with such things again... :-\
I have experienced the end result of this as I happened to be born in the USSR. There was not that much more value, quite the opposite - "poor" people in the USA nowadays live much better than not just the middle but most of the ruling class in the USSR.
I'm sure you realize this, but to make it explicit: that argument applies to virtually all government activity. From Social Security to Medicare to public roads to even the creation and enforcement of private property rights themselves. All of those things cost money, and for all of those things the government taxes some people and gives money to incentivize the labor of others.

And that's all fine and good to object to: I don't agree wholeheartedly with that idea, but I'm much more sympathetic to it than the average American, let alone the average anything else.

But you should still support a basic minimum guaranteed income, or at least replacing our current system of government benefits with it. Because it does not distort the market in the same way that all those other welfare schemes do. It's virtually impossible to be manipulated to favor any particular person or interest group, simply because everyone gets it. And while most current forms of welfare highly discourage work, the basic income doesn't because it doesn't phase out: instead of having de facto hidden marginal tax rates in excess of 100%, you get a simple and clear marginal tax rate that's the same as the list price.
> ..argh, installing that on ubuntu that requires 110 packages. All that just for a build system?

Don't install lein using the OS packaging system (apt, rpm, yum, etc.).

Instead, just grab the `lein` script (linked to from http://leiningen.org/ ), put it into your ~/bin, set it executable, and you're all set.
Some background on the 18 months they’re referring to:

http://www.europeanpublicaffairs.eu/eu-enforcement-action-ag...
Add quotes around vertx.
The photo in the article is from Wikipedia, where the date is listed as "before 2005".
This kinda sounds like phone and cable companies - sure, there are a bunch of them around, but nearly all of them suck.
Ask HN: is Reddit becoming an asset comparable to Facebook and Twitter?
I noticed a new, spiffed up login, and it just occurred to me that Conde Nast must be shitting their pants right about now. In 2006 they picked up a startup on the order of tens of millions, that can now be mentioned in the same breath as Facebook and Twitter. Am I wrong?
I'm convinced that you could give everyone exactly the same income, and people would work for artificial "prestige points."
And set us back years as well.

Too much perl code is essentially write once and forget. It gets results quick but it is a disaster for repeatability which is an essential part of science. I've worked on bioinformatics perl projects where bugs canceled each other out (ie code that was supposed to clear an array and repopulate it with corrected values did neither so the original values were returned). And I've spent far too many hours trying to figure out what a perl script that is the reference implementation for a certain procedure actually does.

Their certainly still are scientists who use it but python and R are gaining ground for good reason.

Wiring together analysis pipelines with pipes as they describe is, however, an excellent technique regardless of language.
Or if I have to pay for it, the NSA should at least be willing to send me a copy if I lose my own backups.
Yet another reason Lisp > Python!

[1]> (+ (/ 12 13) (/ 7 8))

187/104
We have a certain amount of work that needs to be done, this work takes a certain number of people to do it, call this number X. We have Y people who are willing to do the work.

At the moment, Y>X. If we give a small BI, then Y would decrease. This is not a problem, as Y>X. The question then becomes how how the BI should be. Given our current unemployment rate, the answer is greater than 0.
I've found a couple. Doesn't seem like anyone else had the same use case as me but in case someone does...

When: http://when-app.com
Doable: http://doableapp.com

When "rips off" Clear's UI and looks interesting. Doable has a very custom UI and looks like it has a couple more features, e.g. statistics. It looks like neither supports date-fixed tasks. If you need both you'll likely have to use Reminders or something in addition to one of these.
This. It's a lot easier to do it that way.
Anything from 5 minutes (not to say 0 seconds) to ten years. Of course, if you're in the later situation, don't burn bridges!
love how VB was able to introduce maybe 1/3 of the people on this site to programming but everyone dismiss it as pure garbage.
One of the things I appreciate about Ryan and the information he shares is that he provides very detailed information and a lot of it. He leaves it to the reader to determine what parts are helpful, which varies by what stage each company is at to your point.

However, I'd rather have too much information and be able to determine what is helpful myself at that point in time than to have someone choose to provide less information.
What would you think the odds are that we institute a minimum income policy and a large class of people still systematically make bad life decisions? Because I think it is quite large.
I read 2x2 and thought,"that's not a board!" and wondered why s/he was cutting it lengthwise to get 1x2.

If it was dressed, that 1 might be very small indeed.
This is neat.

What worries me about this and similar efforts (like https://github.com/takeoutweight/clojure-scheme) is that clojure's standard library design assumes that the underlying runtime will be do some kind of polymorphic method inlining.

For example: the sequence library is all defined in terms of ISeq, which basically requires a "first" and "rest" to be defined for the data structure in question. These are polymorphic: there are different implementations of these for different data structures (list, vector, map, etc). So a dispatch step is required to choose the right one. In clojure-jvm, this is implemented using a java interface; this means the jvm will inline calls to said methods when they're being used in a tight loop. And if you use the standard library, calls to 'first' and 'rest' are going to be inside nearly all of your inner loops.

Compare this to a normal lisp or scheme: 'first' and 'rest' (or 'car' and 'cdr', whatever) are monomorphic. They only work on the linked-list data structure. So compiling these directly down to C functions makes perfect sense and incurs no performance penalty.

So in summary: clojure assumes theres a really smart JIT which is helping things along. This means it's not as suitable for alternate compilation targets as you might want it to be.

I wonder if there's something clever you could do here. Vtables could be reordered based on expected usage, certainly. Clojure can already do some measure of type inference, so this could be used for AOT inlining when it's available. Even if it's not, perhaps several versions of a call could be speculatively generated based on what the compiler does know already. The normal polymorphic inline caching technique could perhaps be abused to apply here. But it's hard to see how any of this can work in absence of a profile or heavy hinting.

(not a compiler writer, just interested in the problem)
People have made this argument for ClojureScript as well. In the case of ClojureScript the benefits are considerably less clear as we rely on the ability of Google Closure to do fairly amazing optimizations on the generated JavaScript source.

That said I'd love to see a serious Clojure-in-Clojure targeting LLVM.
> It's not like it's some controversial opinion what he said -- it's both self evident and common place.

As someone who has written more than one compiler, I don't see how it is self-evident at all. It's also not at all that common-place compared to generating C or asm output textually.

> It's about having more structure and less of an ad-hoc pipeline, which helps with better tooling, error prevention, etc.

Those provide some benefits, sure. At the cost of massive amounts of complexity in the case of LLVM.

> The only benefit to using C for something like this is portability, which is something else altogether.

Now it is you who are wrong. Other people have already pointed out, for example, that C provides an easy-to-read intermediate format, and is simple to generate, as other benefits. Not having to deal with a massive C++ codebase is another.

You may disagree that these other benefits are worth it, but for me at least they are (just taking a break from a compiler that generates textual asm because I find even that preferable to dealing with LLVM).
True enough. The idea for Big-O notation is really cost = O(whatever) * (algorithms constant difficulty factor) + (algorithms overhead). My point is if you start adding difficulty factors then the same terms often wind up in your other algorithms. Granted string comparisons are generally O(log k) and pure Radix would end up as O(k) but you can also short circuit a MSD Radix sort if the buckets are small enough which effectively drops things back to O(log k) assuming sparse inputs. (if it's not sparse your not going to be doing anything past a depth of about 4 anyway.)
Austerity is perpendicular to this. You could very easily have a basic income but insist on a strict balanced budget, which would be austerity. You could also very easily have a basic income and a government deficit, which would be anti-austerity.
"go to mars"
Why not just build a wall as a sound barrier to push the noise upward and over the bike lane?
BI is NOT communism. We are not trying to abolish private property or wealth disparities or social classes. In fact, we're trying to make the market even free-er: right now the supply of labor is rigid (everyone must work to live) but supply exceeds demand so the free market sends the price of labor to 0. There are two alternatives: let the supply of labor drop via BI or establish price controls on labor (or pray for the economy to keep growing, but that ship has sailed). Price controls shift the problem around and don't solve the underlying issue: supply exceeds demand. Unfortunately, we have chosen price controls over letting the market equilibrate itself.

ANY solution that solves the supply-exceeds-demand issue of labor MUST either create leeches (decrease supply) or continuously grow the economy (increase demand). I think it's easier to create the leeches and call them a cost of doing business. BI is the supply-side economics of labor.

Incidentally (this is unrealted because BI is not communism), I'm not convinced that the USSR failed because of communism/socialism/stalinism/capitalism/whatever. I'm no historian, but it looks like what happened is that the US fought an economic war with the USSR via an arms race. We spend a $ on our military to force them to sped a $ on theirs. They ran out of money first because they had a smaller economy coming out of WWII. This opinion is not very well researched or highly informed (I base it off starcraft strategy, heh). Please tell me if I have gone wrong; I will be neither surprised nor offended.
What was the name/domain?
I'm a fan of Disqus or Facebook/G+ comments. Disqus has none of the flaws that LiveFyre has. (although they are both flawed. Blog comments are kinda broken)
> I remember watching shows as a kid in the 1970's about how you couldn't get Californians out of their cars.

Southern Californians. I think Northern Californians (bay area) are much easier to get out of their cars.
More moving parts being more error prone is not generally a controversial opinion.
I'm somewhat shocked at the crime stories on my facebook feed (armed robbery, car break-ins, etc.). I never experienced that when I lived in Atlanta or outside of DC. The difference is made because here my friends are forced to move into bad neighborhoods because the cost of living is too high. In Atlanta, you can afford something nice where your chance of having a weapon pointed at you is low. Here, startup employees are moving to places like Oakland, the Tenderloin, and East Palo Alto that aren't safe.
When I think of sync, I think of Dropbox's or any other cloud storages "all files are exactly the same in every location". LiveFyre's implementation is essentially Facebook crossposting.
7 - 7.5
It has grown quite a bit. It doesn't make much money, so it's probably more of a side project for Nast.
Would this be a good time to migrate from Ubuntu?
So I think Austin is totally overrated (Sorry Austinians!) Austin has horrible traffic, oppressively hot summers, costs are rising etc. In Austin you're going to have the "85%" rule. Everything's going to be 15% easier than the Bay Area (Costs, hiring, housing) But the Bay Area is just that much better that it's not worth the trade off. (I really don't have anything against Austin I just think it's window closed 5 years ago and keep hearing the 'it's cheaper and better lifestyle' stuff so regularly)
Super cool post. I'm glad there are people in the world working on these things, at least in a hobby capacity and sharing with the rest of us. I worry that doing something like this might get one in all kinds of stupid trouble with somebody in a hot minute (especially in the US). Can't say my fears are well-founded, if only so through the various hyped up horror stories you hear about hackers getting in legal trouble for unforeseen reasons.

Regardless, I wish her all the best!
Universal income should be popular as every voter would benefit. Alaska has a provident fund with payments to every resident. It might happen in Europe next as a backlash to the austerity programs in place now.
Looks like Bing is better in this aspect.

From its policy:

We store search terms (and the cookie IDs associated with search terms) separately from any account information that directly identifies the user, such as name, e-mail address, or phone numbers. We have technological safeguards in place designed to prevent the unauthorized correlation of this data and we remove the entirety of the IP address after 6 months, cookies and other cross session identifiers, after 18 months.
Facebook didn't give LiveFyre permission: the data is public (and the API access is public too and can be accessed by anyone)

But the data they use doesn't share back to Facebook. Now that I think about it, Facebook wouldn't like that.
They actually started with a 50 friend limit. The problem was when they had it at this, most active users had less then 20 friends they followed with Path...

So they upped it to 150, and now they are seeing users in the 50 range they originally wanted.
These people applied to die on Mars, or possibly on the way to Mars.
I had similar thoughts. However, in the last year I've made a big effort to at least understand what makes design tick. I don't expect to ever become a guru designer, but there are benefits. A little knowledge goes a long way towards working better with designers, and much more useable prototypes.
You can do polymorphic method caching/inlining with a hybrid ahead of time / JIT compiler targeting C reasonably easily. The code fragments required for caching at least will be small, and code to generate them at runtime is not a big deal. I'm playing with a Ruby compiler, and Ruby badly needs these type of optimizations to get fast, so I've spent a fair amount of time looking at it.

For a fair amount of cases you can do static analysis to get good guesses at likely types, even for cases where you can't be sure. E.g. speculatively even looking near call sites by method name to see if you can guess the type of objects that will get passed in looks to get you a reasonable chance at guessing at the top contenders to let you speculatively generate inlined versions without creating too much junk. But to get the most performance out of this you're likely to need to be prepared to do some very basic JIT.
I'm a little curious - have you done machine learning work that's made it into a real product?

I tried doing it a bit with my last project. My results were basically terrible. It turns out that getting useful results out of heterogenous, vague, fuzzily-specified real world data is really hard.

I'm tight with a few folks in Search Quality whose job is that sort of data-scientist machine-learning work, and they're really good at it. Y'know what 90% of their daily time is spent on? Compiling golden sets. Labeling training data. Running MapReduces to collect basic statistics about their data set. Running MapReduces to identify representative members of their data set, and outliers that should be excluded. Shoving data into R to visualize it. Futzing with numeric coefficients. Building webpages and tools so they can visualize the data and results, futz with the numbers online, and get feedback in real time. Collecting test sets and running your algorithm against them, and then trying to figure out why your losses are losing.

Machine-learning from a practitioner's POV is not at all like the textbooks and theoretical papers suggest. I'd estimate that less than 10% of one's time goes into the "fun" part of machine learning - brainstorming new signals and writing the code to extract them and feed them into your classifier - and 90% is on the kind of grunt work that hard science grad students do all the time. You get paid well for it, but that's because a lot of the work is really boring and time-consuming. I suspect that I get a far more frequent rush of accomplishment as a mostly-UI guy than the data scientists in my department get.

It's a tool. It works well in some cases, but it can take a lot of effort to get it to work well.
Somehow clicking through these profiles makes me feel uncomfortable. Why does everything have to become some kind of public popularity contest.
Fascinating, didn't know all that. But I guess for basic imaging these aren't a big deal. It's what the Windows installer has used since Vista.
Certainly. Wheezy is the new "stable", which will get security support for a year past the introduction of the next stable release. It's an excellent choice for servers, and right now it's not a bad desktop release.

In another year or so you might want to move to the testing release for a desktop that needs the latest features.
This feels like there is definitely a bit of a chip on his shoulder about the Bay Area. Having said that, I think he makes valid points. Mostly around employee retention and loyalty. Boston is also really "two cities". Once you get on the other side of the 128 people are the opposite of transient. They're there for life. What's interesting to me is that we're even having this discussion. For the longest time Boston was the Number 2 after the Bay Area. It has really slipped though relative to New York, Austin and other secondary markets over the last 5 years. It's a "no nonsense" place (the weather and puritan streak will do that to you) that values intellectualism. So it's no wonder with the explosion of mobile and consumer/media apps it's fallen behind and still focuses on B2B and medical.
This is a very self-aware article, and very astute. I would add that developers should not be afraid of design: in many ways, it is no different from programming, in that it follows some logic and rules, and that you can learn it, with time and the gumption to do so. Learn by copying the greats, learn who the greats are by watching who others watch, and just study what makes things look good.

Design is not some scary magical quality you're either born with or not—I am convinced you can develop an eye, and you can learn by imitation and attention.

But by all means, don't overstep the boundaries of your expertise. Good advice for any work.
490 people times $38 application fee.
$18620 collected thus far.

Maybe someone could start a site to send people to the sun? I'm sure it would work if they went at night.
Elsewhere on the website, they discuss a few reasons why they think they are more likely to complete their mission than others who have attempted. Sadly, a couple of their points seem a bit iffy:

- Simple rovers – Through the use of relatively simple rovers, designed to conduct basic settlement construction prior to human astronaut arrival, saving both time and cost.

I'm not a professional aerospace engineer, but construction robots seem just a bit more complicated than picture-taking robots. (oversimplification, but you get my point.) If it's so much easier, how come robots aren't building houses here on earth?

- No new developments – The entire plan revolves around the use of existing, validated technology

The falcon heavy hasn't even been built yet, I don't know how they can say this.
Yishan made a post (which I can't find) that Reddit is not making much money, if any, which is why they're pushing Reddit Gold more recently.

Any other traditional revenue streams (like more aggresive advertising) will annoy the Reddit userbase, so it's a dilemma.
> This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as:
> Linux 3.2

For anyone else wondering, Ubuntu 13.04 has the 3.8 kernel and 12.04.2 has the 3.5 kernel (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack).