skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess that's possible, but unlikely. I'm looking at it now, she's still there and so is a girl I had a crush on in junior high. This is fascinating but extremely disturbing, I'm deleting this thing asap. I figure I must have googled her and found her LinkedIn page while signed in, it could have been years ago. In fact that's got to be the explanation for both of them unless they did something extremely unethical with the email address I gave them.
I'd rather have no cars than electric cars.
You hear similar things for their other cars (still high-end though, yes) - basically everything they've demoed has had reviews saying "wow" to the electric, and "even more wow" to the execution of everything else. Why is Tesla doing so well, with the same people, unless the existing industry has been lazy?
The Facebook Home disaster
The main feature of capitalist economy is that it allows people to work on whatever they want

Completely off-topic to the original discussion, but assuming that you intended to imply the quantifier that I think you implicitly intended to imply - i.e., "all people", or even "most people" - you must be living in a completely different world and/or a very cushy bubble. [1]

I expect many people on this site are lucky enough that they can work on whatever they want - either because their interests happen to align with what's currently in demand by the market (as in my case) or because they were lucky enough to be born to rich parents or win the startup lottery.

But take a step back and look outside of that world. Consider, for example, the many people working as cashiers or cleaners. Do you really think that all or even most of them work those jobs because that's what they genuinely want to do, given a choice? It seems much more likely that the main reason why most of them work in those jobs is that they have to make ends meet somehow, and those are the kinds of jobs available to them.

As for the more on-topic part...

Why do you assume that those intelligent people would not engage in some other little value add activity that can make them a lot of money.

I don't. There may be other talent-wasting sectors in the economy (and I guess you always get some geniuses spending their time on whatever the equivalent of card counting of the day is). I have simply pointed out that HFT is one of them (and I do believe that finance in general is the worst offender at this time).

[1] If you intended to imply the quantifier "some people", I apologize for my misinterpretation - though in that case, I would wonder what the point of the statement was. Certainly it doesn't help paint capitalism in a positive light, because every economic system allows some people to work on whatever they want, while the rest tend to have the same superficial choice of job that they do in capitalism. (E.g., you were not simply assigned a job in communism either.)
I would love to see JavaScript integration so we can script vim with JavaScript.

A JavaScript debugger integration would be awesome too.
I think this paper presents a poor security definition for Bitcoin, at the very least because it assumes a non-adaptive adversary (i.e. the adversary cannot change which nodes it controls over time). That is not how things work in the real world; in the real world, the adversary will keep increasing his computational power (the number of "pawns") until his attack is successful. I am also skeptical of a computational model that assumes the adversary's computation is somehow synchronized with the honest parties'; that is not even remotely realistic, and it is very weak.

In other words, that paper does not tell us anything we did not already know: Bitcoin is secure only if nobody does as much computational work as the rest of the network combined (though there may be other attacks on the protocol that have not yet been discovered). If anything, this paper is a step towards formalizing a security definition for a protocol that is similar to Bitcoin, or a step towards proving that there will always be a polynomial time attack against such protocols (as was the case with Merkle's puzzles).
The Liberator Pistol files removed by US DoD Trade Controls
After 20 years in the industry, I can tell you that the cable companies will be very happy with this change. But for those of you who watch expensive content (ESPN is the top), you're bill will go up and you will receive fewer channels. For those of you who only watch what's also available "on-air", your bill might stay the same - the cable companies have no interest in your bill being reduced.
Negative results vary from field to field. In math or physics, a conclusive negative can be very important in deciding what to study next or disproving established theory. In biology, a negative usually just means "I haven't found what I'm looking for yet".
Beyond the OSX support the weakref support is very welcome!
Definitely agree on the virtue of doing stuff as manually as possible. Really hard though mentally as you always want to do things the right way. I guess at such an early stage though, the right way is whatever gets you feedback quickest.
Is it open source? Or we should just trust them without checking? https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Adaemonology.net+wuala
Members of Congress finally introduce serious DMCA reform
“Vaccine” against heroin keeps it out of the brain
I don't think you're wrong. It's a personal choice based on one's perceived strengths. Some people don't think it's a lottery. They think they can replicate success.

Personally, I do think there is skill involved unlike a lottery. But, I still think there's a fair amount of luck, too. In the end, I'm not sure I would start another company that didn't have the option of becoming profitable right away.
State department demands takedown of 3D printer gun files (ITAR)
Children of parents classified as “tiger” have worse grades, are more depressed
Yes, check this article. Have a nice day! http://pandodaily.com/2013/04/24/examining-the-thiel-fellows...
Don't sweat it. It actually has less to do about NC's citizens and a lot more to do with how the auto industry has dug it's claws into the legislatures of every state in the union. Your state isn't the only one in this situation.

FYI this is a good podcast explaining how we got to this point:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/12/171814201/episode-...
Oh definitely, that's why I highlighted the lack of innovation in browsers for handling keys and encryption/decryption. This all needs to happen locally (not the trendy thing these days) and the current tools aren't at the level where that's going to happen at a large scale.

There would still be the key-exchange problem (I can't imagine a system that would make it easy for non-technical people to exchange keys out of band, even if you could explain why that was necessary and what it means), but with good browser tools I bet the number of zero-knowledge type sites/p2p networks would explode.
First Legal U.S. Gambling Site Will Comp You Windows 7
As with most projects, there are a large number of people involved, but only one in the news. I believe Musk started out just funding the startup and got more involved later. Much of the impact comes from attracting some of the best people in the industry by heavily promoting an exciting goal.
AKA copying OKCupid
I'm surprised with he haven't got the usual HN comments which appear every year when this story is posted. That's a good thing, but here's my "inb4" reply for when those comments finally pop up.

Type 1. Last year there was a comment like "I don’t want to crush dreams. But these kids are being set up to fail. They cannot, and will not, live up to these expectations." Related to this are the complaints that these kids only achieved the things they've achieved prior to the programme because their parents were well-connected and helped them out, etc.

Type 2. Accusing hypocrisy on behalf of Thiel, who has two advanced degrees, and who often advocates for a return to advanced research which couldn't happen without higher education.

I think type 1 comments come from envy, even if they sound like something else. That's understandable, since many HN readers probably have similar smarts to these kids but didn't get the same opportunities in their teens. I know I felt jealous when I first heard of the Thiel program.

But - if you look at history, geniuses seem clustered around particular times and locations - ancient Athens, Renaissance Venice, Victorian London, and a few other cultural hubs. This implies that there were thousands of potential geniuses who died in rice paddies (or were killed in war, or who happened to be members of oppressed minorities, or who lived in an era when all the smartest people worked in investment banking, or whatever). It's not just that these individuals were robbed of their potential, it's also the world that was robbed of their contributions. So any attempt to mitigate that trend can only be a good thing, even if it means that some future Einsteins are still dying in rice paddies.

Part 2 is a more interesting critique. My response: I can't speak for Peter Thiel, but I don't think he believes that university shouldn't be an option. Rather, university shouldn't be the only option.
TECHNOLOGY. POLITICS. MONEY. ENERGY. SCIENCE. DATA.
A bill in Congress legalizes cell phone unlocking and fixes the DMCA
She's trying to make a new culture by buying up A players as aqui-hires.

Question is, will it work long term or is it a shortsighted gimmicky strategy?
Tips for Maintaining an Open-Source Library
the site is very slow loading next page after clicking submit... Also, no option to skip the stupidly easy levels.
OP left a quarter-million a year hedge fund job to swing for the fences. I'd guess his floor for "acceptable" exits is in the multiple millions. Your personal mileage my vary.

http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/08/03/why-i-quit-my-job-to-s...
Yow, that backend compilation step taking 20 seconds makes this way less fun than it looks like it should be :-/
paper and pencil...are the only way to hash out your ideas. Too much functionality on storyboard software makes things more confusing.
In defense of carbon dioxide
I really miss being able to easily play online poker. More than that, I miss being able to easily play against Americans.

On another note, now that I'm living in the US I'm left wishing I could use my online poker accounts to easily move money back home to Australia for FAR less than the going rate of "normal" money transfer options.
I have actually had good success with the IRIS software bundled in with an HP Scanner,

But:

a) It is Windows
b) It is a good (in the best sense) example of what is still cripple ware
c) It is not available to people that don't purchase a scanner, even though PDFs and legal documents often come via email
d) It is slow
e) It makes every recipient of that document have to OCR it, as opposed to just teaching/demanding the lawyers and courts to distribute them in their original Word/GoogleDoc/WordPerfect/TextPDF form.
part 2 [1]

-----

[1]: http://enterprisejquery.com/2010/10/how-good-c-habits-can-en...
Huge swaths of astronomy are functionally unreproducible. We can argue about the math but many phenomena exist as a single example and/or that's basically static on our time scales. The best we can do is see if the math seems to produce similar looking structures when (sparsely) simulated.
Box Acquires Crocodoc (YC W10)
Yahoo is really upping the mobile aqui-hires. I wonder if people are excited to actually go work at Yahoo or if they're just happy to be acquired.
The more interesting part of the Tesla is how it changes maintenance habits for owners. I don't know the full scope of what normal maintenance is like, but it seems like there's a lot less to think about.

If you consider the change in routine fueling habits, too, that's pretty amazing. Plugging in at night vs weekly trips to a gas station is a big deal.
Treehouse CSS Animation - CodePen
> And train yourself to rely less on your smartphone, while you’re at it.

This pretty much sums up this "review" for me. It's not a hands-on article so much as a reaction to her husband's device usage habits. May as well be about cell phones.
It seems to me that they're using a tree-based structure to avoid hash-checking the entire file, but do hash checking in blocks and update it. Since they're using MD5, this probably makes it easier to find a collision and change a specific block.

Looks like they're using AES in CFB mode, which would probably complicate things, but I don't know why people don't use CTR mode more (it looks like it has many advantages to me, but I don't know much about crypto anyway), although in this scenario you'd probably want to use XTS.

Anyway, "proprietary" and "cryptography" in the same sentence is generally a big red flag to me.
If you try to design a system of publicly traded companies from first principles, then the purpose of exchanges should be to provide a service to publicly traded companies. That service would be maintaining the authoritative record of who owns how many shares of the company.

Given this notion, competition is a good reason for the existence of multiple exchanges, because it means companies can change which exchanges their shares are traded over. However, it is not a good justification for the fact that trading of the same stock happens on multiple exchanges.

As for the social cost, you do realize that HFT does not come for free to society. At a minimum, society must somehow pay for those well-paying jobs to developers. And what do those developers give back to society? Before you answer, please consider whether you should distinguish between algorithmic trading and HFT. I do believe that algorithmic trading is useful to society (because it can do the job that screaming traders used to do better and cheaper), but the subset of HFT is not useful.

The only things anyone ever seems to be able to answer for HFT two-fold: one, that stock prices change faster, and two, that the spread is smaller. But one point one, nobody in the real economy cares about that, and to point two, the decrease in spread also doesn't matter to anybody in the real economy, because what you really care about there is the fluctuation of the share price over a larger timescale such as one full day. I have not seen any evidence that this fluctuation is affected by HFT in any way.
Referrals, events, participation in the ongoing mentorship, etc. Everything except the 100k.
> but it makes a few dodgy ones as well - like trying to give Chimpanzees human rights.

Hilariously, everyone replying to you has missed the point.

NZ has so many things fundamentally right they actually have time and money to debate and discuss giving more thought to the treatment of animals.

Meanwhile, America is stuck bickering about basic healthcare, gay rights, gun control, abortion and education for HUMANS.
Box Acquires Crocodoc
The kind of feature-focused, "logical" startup messaging that this article takes issue with isn't usually a result of "abort(ing) the creative process." It's probably more a reflection of:

(a) where these companies are in terms of product-market fit

(b) the companies applying an analytical, test-everything mindset to all aspects of marketing, including branding

Most startups at the stage that the article talks about (those in incubators or fresh out of them) are testing out various different messages to see which ones convert the most effectively. A/B testing the headers and supporting copy on your homepage is an obvious way to see which features & offerings are most compelling to visitors, so you'll see a lot of companies change their top-line messaging frequently as they learn more through their various sales and marketing channels and try out new positioning.

Also, the majority of these early-stage companies aren't entirely clear on the emotional and functional benefits that they're delivering. Figuring out the functional benefits is much easier-- we help you "store your photos more securely," "have a frictionless extra-marital affair," etc.--but clarity on the emotional side often comes later, as users develop a relationship with the company and start to give feedback.

With that said, I think most startups wildly underestimate the importance of branding and the role it can play in driving growth. And, for that matter, the amount of up-front brand research that can be done to figure out what kinds of emotional ties they can foster between consumers and their brands from the very start.

Mike Troiano (CMO Actifio, former Principal at Holland-Mark) has a few great presentations and talks about how startups can develop strong, flexible positioning that can adapt through the various stages of a company's lifecycle, including this one:

http://www.slideshare.net/MikeTrap/telling-your-story-115847...

Tl;dr version of presentation: Find a way to squeeze your points of differentiation, functional and emotional benefits and mission into a pithy tagline, but be prepared for it to change numerous times as your company evolves
You need a legal standard because the Russian censorship you describe is a matter of existing law. Also, note Yahoo's experiences with France.
A multi-billion dollar bet is easy to justify in hindsight.
I think this is pretty much correct, but Tesla only has to carve out a niche in each market it enters to be successful. They will enter a high volume market soon. Also, the EV feature comes with side benefits of decreased weight and size. For smaller cars this will be a bigger win as comparable gas powered cars have less space to use on passenger satisfaction. So you're missing that in your comparison. How much interior+trunk space does the model S have over the M5?
Video.js 4.0 released - lighter, prettier, more stable
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan
Great point. Seems like designers are missing out on the whole "rising tide lifts all boats" thing.
There are a lot of ambitious projects in this arena such as PyPy. Numba's approach is focused on getting computational codes faster. It's hard to say what "fast" means in many situations, because people don't realize that Python is actually quite fast for most tasks.
It may seem that way, but we cannot simply say that this is a fact. The founders might have some plans that would turn this market on its head. Though, at the same time, I see where this sort of behaviour comes from. Its the same reasons Dropbox clones got millions of dollars in funding, even though their product is a straight copy (and crummier).
Firstly, we have done similar things. For example, we have/had http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METEO_System for weather reports (use "machine translation weather reports" to google Scientific literature. Among others, that finds information that work is being done on a Croatian version of this). I think there have been successes in the medical field, too, but cannot find them.

However, this 'knowledge engineering' approach to AI has fallen somewhat out of fashion a bit in favourite of statistical methods (however, I don't think anybody does statistics 'from scratch'. For example, in NLP, you could try to statistically learn the definite articles in English, but hard-coding that 'the' is the only one will get you results faster.
terrible. took forever to get back to HN.
Australia, at 23 million, has one of the most liberal welfare systems in the world [1]. The economy is doing just great.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits#Australia
(Everyone gets money for nothing, forever)
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 11.10 Desktop and 8.04 LTS Server reach end of life
I actually don't disagree with any of this, as far as I understand what you're saying.

>> The point of what I was saying was to refute the idea that somehow our programs are so complex and have such amazing behaviour that they will not be reducable to a core set of rules. If the programs run on a computer they must be computable and thus reducable to a core set of rules. That's it.

Considering a piece of software as a mathematical construction -- let's say, for instance, a C++ program compiled by the LLVM, and the LLVM bytecode expressed as machine instructions for the given chip, reduced to pure binary math, I totally agree with this.
Crocodoc Joins Box
It has three very serious problems:

1. High price

2. Low range

3. Inability to instantly recharge

(3) would be fixable by mechanically unloading the battery and loading a new charged one; not sure about the rest.
Geofences and AppleScript: The Automators Dream Team
It would be way more fun to write up a personal character sheet than a resume. We need an open RPG system for real life!
Funny, but in all seriousness, it's easy to blame the client. As consultants it is our job to have the skills to navigate these issues and help guide our clients through the process.

I think anyone who works in consulting can relate and get a chuckle out of this, but we need to learn to work with it rather than become cynical, if we want to be successful at what we do.
I feel like the naming of all these technology startups is finally reaching a point of no return. Out of context, "Box Acquires Crocodoc" sounds like gibberish.
Does H.P. Lovecraft belong in the canon?
IIRC, Dropbox uses Crocodoc for their online PDF previews. Might get awkward.

It's a shame, since Crocodoc seemed way better than anything else out there for doing HTML5 previews.
This is absolutely ridiculous, and misses not only the point of open source, but the entire point of the creative economy.
olympus actually misunderstood me, and you were spot on :)

Brokers do charge interest rates and the rates for TESLA really were 45% (current) and 85% (once upon a time) annualized, mostly because of a deficiency in available shares. At that point it was costing 60c per share a week just to keep your short position.

Theres plenty of discussion here: http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/15183-Cost-to-...
Should definitely build this with the gcc go compiler (which featured a couple of days ago on HN) that produces larger binaries but faster code :)
I really like this, but I'll have to give it another try in a few hours after work when the HN rush subsides and gives the server some time to breathe/compile the challenges.
Sorry for the slow response times on the challenge submissions everyone. We only have so many Mac Minis running these things . We are looking into ways to speed it up
They probably have a standing rule that documents go out in PDF, for the simple reason that more people can view PDF files than can view Excel files.
It's really critical that we don't confuse research that's nor reproducible with fraud. Very few scientific theories survive unmodified over time, so lack of reproducibility isn't a criticism and we really need to move the debate past this. Every theory is expected to be inaccurate as it only explains the data using the understanding of the time, but this isn't an indictment of the research or the researcher and studies of outright fraud indicate that that actually only happens around 1% of the time.

Reproducibility isn't about calling out people whose work isn't reproducible, it's about identifying and promoting the most robust stuff.