skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's what's going on, what will
illustrate the central limit theorem (CLT)
and what will not:

For positive integer n and for i =
1, 2, ..., n, let real valued random
variable X(i) be so that

P(X(i) = -1 = P(X(i) = 1 ) = 1/2

Assume that {X(1), ..., X(n)}
is an independent set of random
variables.

Easily the expectation
E[X(i)] = 0.

Let real valued random variable

S(n) = X(1) + X(2) + ... + X(n)

Easily E[S(n)] = 0.

For n = 4, S(n) can take on values
-4, -3, ..., 0, 1, ..., 4.

The animation in the OP should
converge to the density of
S(n) where n = 4.

By the CLT, as n approaches
infinity, the density of

( 1/sqrt(n) ) S(n)

will be Gaussian with expectation 0.

By the strong law of large numbers,
as n approaches infinity, the
probability
random variable

(1/n) S(n)

converges to 0 is 1.

For increasing n, S(n)
is a martingale and
is a discrete approximation to
Brownian motion. As n approaches
infinity, the density of
S(n) approaches 0 everywhere on
the real line and in its limit
is not a density.
There's a Viewsonic VP2290b on eBay right now: http://www.ebay.com/itm/190846605823
Well, for one thing, NaCl was a stunning failure because it required platform-specific compiles. For another thing, it only worked on the Chrome Web Store, and nobody gives a shit about the Chrome Web Store. It also didn't work on Android...

But yeah, I'm sure it's just because all code-in-the-browser technologies are doomed and asm.js is too, not because Google's execution was completely incompetent.
The question is whether the world is better off if Buffet had taken your advice. Not clear that it would be?
I do - an excellent point. Don't get me wrong, I love coming out there to visit. (Especially in June/July/August.) But the cost/benefit seems way out of whack unless you've already done a startup & have an inside straight to more startup $, or already have family in the area.

It's not just me:
http://www.quora.com/Silicon-Valley/Whats-the-dark-side-of-S...
Yeah it's just the other activities like the occasional overleveraging that destabilizes the global financial markets and causes depressions. Or, leveraged buy-outs that fuck the rank and file of a company out of their contractually agreed upon pensions.
Local governments are also involved in the stock market. High frequency traders make money by acting as an intermediary between buyers and sellers, and thus not creating actual wealth. Instead their supposed value is the "liquidity" they add. That means that the price of "adding liquidity" is a lower return on a stock or bond invested by a local government. Which in turn means that the local government might have to cut funding services for the poor. Even if you give away the money you earn, you are still robbing the poor so you can give to the poor people that you like.
I think he means equity in pure financial terms. Really it's more about liquidity.

If you buy a house in a good neighborhood with good schools, your property values will likely trend up, even if they are higher to begin with.

If you buy a cheaper house in a bad neighborhood with poor public schools, you'll have to offset the monthly mortgage cost with private school tuition. This extra cost doesn't give you additional equity in your home, and there are no tax breaks like there are with mortgage interest.

In both cases, you'll have a place to live, and hopefully provide your kids with a good solid education. But if times get tough, you can always sell your house and reap some investment if it's in a good neighborhood. That is not always the case in a poor neighborhood.
10bit colour eliminates banding on gradients.
If you live in the future, there is no poverty

If you live in the future, there are no diseases

If you live in the future, you can live for 200+ years

If you live in the future, we stopped using fossil fuels

If you live in the future, computers don't track us

If you live in the future, facebook doesn't exist

so lets get back to work..
I don't think so. Documentation is for people. Discoverability is for machines. Notice I suggested it's the scientists' routine which does the discovery, not the scientists themselves.
Bigger than techCrunch
Kind of interesting to think about slowly building up and aggregating more layers - e.g. activity, location, shopping, internet, phone, financial, educational, medical, legal, work, relationships etc - and interesting how much of this exists already.

So if this comprehensive personal dataset becomes the norm at some point in the future - what happens when this is under somebody else's control against your interests (whether an illegal attacker or a legal authority)? And what about more gray areas, such as marketing, insurance etc (which would likely encourage the creation of that kind of API in the first place)?
I generally like Elixir approach, but find that in many cases it's more verbose than standard Erlang syntax.

I like Erlang way of using lowercase for atoms and uppercase for variables, in Elixir they use ':' sigil to denote atoms like in Ruby, this makes code much more verbose, since atoms are widespread in Erlang and also used for module names.

Elixir should take good parts of Ruby, not sigils, which are inherited from Perl. They are the reason I dislike Ruby's internal DSLs, b/c they are not English, but English with sigils.

If possible I would get rid of commas, I.e. [1 2 3] instead of [1,2,3] .

I agree about f.() being ugly. if function names were lowercase and variables uppercase - there would be no need to introduce new fun call syntax.

Also agree about docstrings moved inside the functions (like in Python and Clojure). Same apply to dialyzer typespecs.

I think single assignment should be default, but there are should be way to explicitly override it, i.e.:

a = 1
a = 2 - bad match, but
'a = 2 - ok
But he isn't 'the' authority in FP, simply 'an' authority. And this particular thread seems to be more grounded in discussing FP concepts than Erlang.

I had a similar thought when reading the article, unaware to who wrote it... I wondered how currying and the like factored into the language, and thought that comparing |> to unix pipes was a big simplification. And whilst this simplification might be intentional for the article's purpose of giving an overview, it instead read - to me at least prior to realising who the author was - like the author was not fully informed on its use in other FP languages.
yes, i do think of it that way: as we leave all this data exhaust behind us, i keep wanting a system to have it all in one place – or at least, an "interface" that shows it to me in one place, even if that's not how the backend really is.

thanks for the book recommendation - i will check it out this weekend!
I don't think moxie is suggesting that they are durable because of their origin, but something more along the lines of what you're saying. I think the point is that they aren't the sort of thing a modern democracy would come up with on its own, but they're very hard to get rid of once you've allowed them in.

(Not meaning to put words in anyone's mouth — just offering the thought the way my brain processed it.)
His logic is simple: The more he makes, the more good he can do.

It may be his logic, but it's not mine. And it doesn't have to be yours, either.

I believe "doing good" is something to be done all the time.

If you wait until the time is right or the conditions are right or you have enough money or time or something else, you will probably never get around to doing good. And even if you do, how much good will not get done while you're on your journey to being able to do good.

You do good by the way you treat other people and in the hard work and good deeds that you do. And it can be just about anything. You don't have to do charity work or walkathons or open source or make giant donations for all to see in order to do good. If your work provides value to someone else, then you're doing good.

It's up to you to decide how good your doing good is. And the best time to start doing good is now. Every little bit matters.
This is spot on. Really important to recognize that a large swath of the population still makes phone calls, cares about voice communication and doesn't care about data as much. This probably also speaks to the rising popularity of some of the voice and video apps - a segment of the app universe that might be able to pull these customers into the data world over time.
Join Wall Street, make some money, and then start a company that actually does something useful (i.e., not make photo-sharing more beautiful or social marketing .01% more effective).

Giving money away is an effective way of actually accomplishing very little, unless you're doing it like Bill Gates and can have very tight control over what your money is actually doing.
+1 for Scott, Agreed, Android replaced MS.
I fail to see how earning 100K and donating half of it as effective as working to save a life for $500 instead of $2500 over time. Like all things in life, a balance is required and no one way is going to be a cure-all.

I applaud people that live frugally and donate what they have to worthy causes, but maybe a bit more introspection is also required to figure out why the career path has really been chosen.
I'm very sorry to hear about your wife's condition - C. diff is a nasty and unpleasant infection at the best of times, and recurrent C. diff is downright terrible.

There's some new drugs - evidence for example that Fidaxomicin may work better than Vanco, and increasing use of fecal transplant and other techniques.

My dissertation was on the effect of routine fecal transplant in post-CDI patients to prevent recurrence, using some models based on diffeq transmission models (but stochastic rather than deterministic).
Props to RTP too. Not to mention better basketball.
couldn't one also keep track of the 'source' from where a data point comes (i do this, but don't reveal it in the API - yet)? this way, when it comes to discoverability via some algorithm, you could always separate the 'verified' bucket from the 'unknown' bucket?
Startup Rookies: Web Startup For Dummies
www.webstartupfordummies.blogspot.com
Meanwhile his employers will drain the third world by speculating on food based derivatives.
> If you want to save the world, save the world first.
> Stop. Fucking. Waiting.

I don't understand what you're suggesting. Is Trigg (the programmer who joined Wall Street) "waiting"? What does "not waiting" look like?
I think it's good that he gave money to something more innovative than the Salvation Army or some such, but generally if you're taking the conservative approach to "world-saving" (working and donating), your donations don't have great leverage or relevance. It's why GM couldn't make Tesla...

How many times do they go into it thinking this and just end up with a bunch of cars and naming rights to a building at Harvard at best... We see it the vast majority of the time.
If researchers in this community are going to sell security vulnerabilities to the government, I think that fact should be well known.

daeken's work on hotel locks got a lot of press, but the fact that he had two years earlier sold that info to a company for "law enforcement purposes" hasn't gotten nearly the press attention it deserves.

Martin Muench and Chaouki Bekrar have openly embraced what they do. As much as I dislike the path they follow, I have to at least respect them for being up front about the business they're in.

If you're going to help governments covertly break into people's homes, computers, and smartphones, you should wear it with pride.
Why not? Without FB, I wouldn't be able to connect as much with all the people I've met in multiple places around the world. All people that I care about.

I've also met a ton of new people that I otherwise wouldn't have met (e.g. from groups). I connect with the CS community at my school through FB. I connect with people in my class through FB. A lot of discussion happens on FB that I'd otherwise miss or not have the chance to participate in (everyone is extremely busy)
If you're a long term investor like a government who invested in an index tracker, HFT and the like have a relatively small impact on prices compared to trades by other large institutional investors.
Infringement? What?
It's disappointing that every new display I see is still stuck with the archaic 16:9 resolution.

Sure, humans may have more periphery side-to-side. This is great for television. But, when you read a book, I doubt you read it horizontally.

So, if we do a lot of text manipulation with our computers, why not use a taller aspect ratio, like 3:2 or 4:3?

It makes no sense why this display still has less resolution than some ThinkCentre monitors from the early 00's. It makes no sense why there's still that crap 1366x768 being sold now.

We went from 1280x800 to 1366x768 (fewer vertical pixels), from 1440x900 to 1600x900 (same vertical), from 1680x1050 to 1600x900 (far fewer vertical pixels), from 1920x1200 to 1920x1080 (fewer), from 2560x1600 to 2560x1440 (far fewer).

You could keep the vertical resolutions the same, and simply increase the width, but that would be more expensive to produce, and for the same cost, you'd get a more proportional 8:5 display, so why would you bother?

It's an extremely sad, sad, thing.
And has been used as such by mozilla for years: it's their official vendor prefix for CSS properties their official vendor prefix for non-standard javascript APIs (either draft standards or proprietary extensions, such as Firefox OS APIs):

* https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/M...

* https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MozActivity

* https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/document.mo...

* https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/window.requ...
Friend of Boston Marathon bomber was unarmed when he was killed by FBI agent
Changing the subject.

The subject is conservatism. A conservative is not someone who rejects all of a thing, but someone who is skeptical and suspicious of new things.

As a result of many past issues with novel food products, people have become increasingly conservative about food. That doesn't mean that they reject all industrial or scientific agriculture, but they're likely to be suspicious of things that haven't been around for more than one or two generations. They're quick to reject novel changes in the food supply and very slow to accept them.

Along with having been burned in the past, I can think of another reason why this might be rational. The cost function is weighted heavily on the conservative side. It feels like something that could be modeled well with game theory.

The cost of food conservatism is likely a small increase in the amount of money paid for food. This is a very small cost for most first-worlders, where food is so available that obesity is a health crisis. The benefit is that the risks, if any, are well-known and are known to be tiny.

The cost of food liberalism, by contrast, is an unknown chance of getting cancer, heart disease, diabetes, allergic reactions and inflammatory disorders, etc. The unknown chance is probably very small, but many of those health effects have astronomically high costs that possibly include death or permanent disability. But the benefits are small to nonexistent, especially for your typical first-worlder who as I mentioned is drowning in food.

The same calculus underlies decisions to take out insurance policies on unlikely events such as floods or tornadoes. Statistically you'll probably be better off not buying insurance -- otherwise how would it be that the insurance company could make money? But you'd rather trade the risk of losing everything you own and having no recourse for a small amount of money that you're not going to miss.
"Biggest concern about moving to SV *"
should probably read 'Austin'
You could say that about all incentivized pay, i.e. salespeople, developers rewarded for hitting milestones, etc.
How much social harm is caused by buggy software? Was Windows 95 a "fuck the world" on the part of Microsoft's programmers?
Yeah, every pitch for a SF company should include this http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/201... in fine print.
The whole thing is complicated (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers_suicides_in_India) and the Daily Mail has a history of being an awful source.
Agrees with what interpretation, Niels? That it's "reasonable OR with a validly issued warrant", or that it's "reasonable AND with a validly issued warrant"?
A cool idea, but it seems like a strange tangent for a system that was intended for storage of transaction information. Surely a lookalike system built around permanent and crowd-affirmed data would be better?
I think if your data is append-only, this should work good enough. You implement your data appending logic, and you use json_fdw for querying your data. But this requires starting PostgreSQL service, I'm not sure if this is acceptable in your application or not.
I like the idea of this. I know there was a post recently about a guy selling 24 hour chunks of data about himself.

Is there an opportunity here to create a secure data store for your own structured data hosted securely somewhere else and that providers would pay YOU to access?

Of course you'd give free access to it for your doctor who needed to pull some info. But what if you had total control over your own API. This is a kind of like Facebook but I would never let facebook hold some of my most personal data. I would like to control authorization to my own data though to certain people.
It's Mozilla's "moz". Quite literally: http://moz.com/blog/what-does-the-moz-in-seomoz-mean

(the "moz" in DMOZ comes from mozilla through its original domain: Directory.MOZilla.org)
you're totally right on all these points: for the time being, i've only put out information that's okay being 'public', but i imagine when you do want to share a set with a small group (let's say your physicians), you'll want an additional layer of access control.
Interesting article. However, it presupposes that all "generalists" (whatever exactly they are) are the same. This is obviously wrong and therefore IMO it weakens the entire article and invalidates the sub-title.

Even if all "generalists" had equal aptitude in the same set of technologies, there remain varying degrees of creativity/experience, varying preferences of technologies to work with, varying preferences for problems to solve, varying ability to weigh cost/benefits of tasks from the strategic business perspective, etc. I've worked on many "generalist" teams and, because of our technical and non-technical differentiation, there was never any awkwardness about "who does what".
I don't have a lot of experience with imgix, but http://filepicker.io will resize your images on demand server side, and its all hosted in your S3 bucket/pretty reasonable pricing.

Example:

640x400 and formatted as a jpg

https://www.filepicker.io/api/file/rHA62UiiQyCZdEyw6rgw/conv...

200x200 and a png

https://www.filepicker.io/api/file/rHA62UiiQyCZdEyw6rgw/conv...
It was on HN[0] a few months ago that they don't give you access to minute by minute data, only daily totals.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5001301
Agreed in general that you don't need to be a millionaire to do good. But his words "The more he makes, the more good he can do" still makes sense. He is using the word "more" and talking purely in terms of financial ability. In order to do good, money comes second because you have to be *willing" first. But once money comes in the picture, it makes it a hell of a lot easier for someone who makes $100K compared to someone who makes $50K.
Any site to get jobs there?
It seems a little buggy. There seem to be several state combinations that cause it to lock up.
Yes. The screen is the best ever notebook screen i had.

After upgrading to 10gb RAM and SSD, it's a really good computer for developer.
> rather than having their allowable contributions restricted by an intermediary who will usually use that power for extortionist purposes and force the other person to serve his career goals

What you're describing is a borderline sociopath, not a result of closed allocation.

You make a lot of conjectures. Do you have any evidence or verifiable experience to back up these claims:

> Employee and company actually have a common interest that is typically thrown under the bus in a closed-allocation environment.

> Also, the quality of projects that exists under closed allocation is inferior because people can't vote with their feet.

> However, open allocation is almost always strictly superior to the alternative, which is closed allocation.

Sounds like you should be a management consultant.

> Is that a threat?

Sigh...there's your persecution complex again. I wish I had the power to delete your posts from my own feed (perhaps a browser extension?).

Michael, I mean this very, very sincerely, and out of genuine concern -- please do consider the possibility of talking to a counselor. I don't know a thing about you or your situation beyond your posts here, but I've seen you bring up suicide in another thread (not to imply that you're suicidal), and your inability to move on from an ostensibly bad experience at Google suggests to me that you might well benefit from a professional ear.

Edit: I'm only saying to you what I would if I knew you in person.
In 1989 a 7.1 earthquake cause over $5bn of damage (excluding damage to roads, bridges, and State buildings.)

(http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001498.htm)

Wikipedia doesn't show many > 7 earthquakes. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquakes_in_California#List...) (but maybe they have a weird inclusion criteria?)
The Process of Compilation in C++, Java and .Net
It depends what aspect of HFT you want to get into, but experience can generally trump accreditation. That is you won't get hired out of uni, but you can get hired somewhere working on similar tech where you get to prove your worth before transitioning into HFT.

That said if you want to make 100k there's plenty of tech roles outside of HFT where you can make that amount.
slotting into the first argument position is not weird, it's the functional idiom for the pattern "take a single value and apply a sequence of transforms (some of which have side inputs) to it". in an object-oriented language it would be foo = bar.f(args).g(args).h(args) where bar is being "piped" through the functions f, g, and h.
High frequency trade and similar "financial instruments" are mostly created to enable banks to create even more empty, debt driven money. So although it is nice that this guy gives some money to charity, his everyday job leads in the long run to financial crises and to poverty that cannot be equalized by all wallstreet workers giving money to charities.

Besides, the article sounds like some expensive Public Relation action from wallstreet companies. I guess they have hard time to find decent employees...
Exactly. But I'm still leery of when people join Wall Street for altruistic reasons. :-)
"Today, nobody cares…
But tomorrow, they will…" - Wasalu Muhammad Jaco

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge4BEdyZ8bM
It's more about money. This data is worth a lot of money to marketers, retailers, pharmaceutical companies, etc. They have no incentive to share it freely or, I suspect, at a price reasonable to most individual consumers. (Maybe I'm wrong here?)

There was that interesting article a while back about how Target was able to figure out a teenage girl was pregnant before her own father did:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...

It glosses this point:

Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.)

I'd be very curious, and a little scared, to see all this kind of information collected on me.