skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds like they made Nate an incredible offer and were willing to meet any of his demands. It sounds like they would have done anything to keep him.

Their offer to him was already grating to many others at the Times, I imagine. They offered him quite the little staff, and expansion into any topic he wanted.

I don't think his decision to leave was about their offer, that, or ESPN/ABC just dreamed bigger and gave him a bigger offer.

Either way, I'm psyched to see that he's getting brand separation and returning to his website along with a staff and the ability to write about whatever he wants.
No. That is your normal state of affairs: when you're "sitting still" in space, you're "moving through time" at the speed of light. I'm using scare quotes here because, of course, there is no such thing as "sitting still in space" because all motion is relative. The point here is that "light is always moving at the speed of light relative to you (no matter how you're moving)" is the same as saying "you are always moving at the speed of light relative to light (no matter how you're moving)". The way that works is, as I said, that this constant speed is a measure of your motion through spacetime, not through space alone or time alone.
I take it you were offended?
And there is nothing Cameron can do about it (fb)
The geeks are winning that culture clash. ESPN.com now includes a lot of advanced metrics in their stats and last year in the Mike Trout vs Miguel Cabrera MVP race they discussed why Mike Trout was the favorite of the new school at length, constantly discussing his obscene WAR[1].

Nate Silver was ahead of his time on those advanced metrics but he was undoubtedly one of the pioneers. If people had been more receptive to his brand of statistics five years ago he likely never even goes into politics. Sports was his first love (along with poker, which he goes out of his way to not mention these days, unfortunately. He even obscured his username on the largest poker forum[2], so it would be harder to find with search engines).

Completely random thought that probably means nothing, but is worth noting: he's openly gay[3]. With the tide on gay athletes turning sharply and quickly, I have to think that factored into his decision. Perhaps he is hopeful he can play a role in that, being the champion of the gay athlete or at least the one guy at ESPN they know will be on their side.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wins_Above_Replacement

[2]http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/members/4548/

[3]http://gawker.com/5969477/sexually-gay-but-ethnically-straig...
Traditionally, but not recently. Sports has been very focused on statistics for at least the last decade, probably longer. Most large sports organizations have dedicated statistics departments and make many of their decisions based on the same.
You, sir, have a very poor sense of timing.

And the position of this on the home page tells me that a large collection of good hackers find it interesting. If you disagree, flag it and move on.
> but can the breach allow attackers to upload modified apps in the name of the developer?

It doesn't look like they can. Uploading apps to the app store is done via iTunes Connect. That's always been a separate login from the developer center, and it has not been down during the current dev center outage.
For me, the big confusion comes from the fact that if you simulate people, you almost inevitably have to deal with data about people. How can those two be mutually exclusive?

Without a clear definition or concrete examples of what the OP meant by "simulate people" versus "data about people", the post is almost devoid of information (to me; apparently, a lot of people understood what OP meant).
The grandparent was talking about 1% per month, though. That would equate to (with compounding) a 12.5% annual interest rate, which no remotely safe financial instrument is paying.
from all the stuff that Google+ loads without you even having to click anything, you're worrying about 40k of "wasted bandwidth" for a profile image?
We want policies that increase opportunity,and we need to know when we are failing.

True. Unfortunately there's quite a bit of debate about what policies are best at increasing opportunity.
Compare to good old Zynga: "One Journal source said that Zynga executives were especially concerned with not creating a "Google chef" scenario."

http://m.cnet.com/news/zynga-to-employees-give-back-our-stoc...
ok I'll bite. how, exactly?
Amazing. I wonder if it's possible to read movements away from the screen? One big drawback of touch/motion is that it covers the screen, but what if we put the detection device lower?

The feedback is tight as long as you can continuously see your input, and motioning lower could help with tiredness.
Their marketing worked on me. I pre-ordered one. Like many, I suspect, I ordered mine because it looked like a cool toy, not because I thought it filled a need.

I've only played with it for an hour or so in total, but so far I'm returning it. Maybe it's a training issue (on my part; the device doesn't learn, as far as I can tell), but it just doesn't work very well for me.

The demo apps suggest a severe lack of precision when I'm using it, and complain that the room is too bright. Coincidentally, it's a stormy, overcast day, and my office lamp burned out this morning. This is as dark as it'll ever be in here during the day.

I'll definitely give it some more time (you have 30 days from when it ships to return it), but I'm not that interested in learning how to move my hands in a Leap-specific way, or in permanently darkening my office.
Well, they picked an industry that has always had that problem. People mostly don't think about it now because everyone but ADT went out of business.
Do you have any other resources about using webkitgtk with python for this sort of purpose?
Try this:

http://blog.rongarret.info/2011/09/faster-than-light-probabl...
With First U.S. Game Launch, Playtox Bets the Farm on HTML5’s Potential
I think 37signals did a really good job of a pricing page. http://highrisehq.com/signup

Keep it simple. Give people a few options to pick from. Tell people what the most popular option is. You could always A/B test different versions to see what is working.
> less ominous than Carl Sagan's pale blue dot

Certainly, seeing how all we get to see now is a mere white dot....
As a noscript user I'd like to see an explanation to why I should enable javascript on your site. If you put a link to an explanatory page along with the "please enable javascript for a better experience" header I think that would be useful.

Of course getting the explanation down is going to take some effort you don't want to be condescending and you do want to give a meaningful explanation - perhaps with pictures, animated gifs? - but don't want to make it into a dissertation either.
30 Tech Skills That Will Instantly Net You A $100,000+ Salary
Thanks for taking the time to stand up for yourself. I probably wouldn't have called Mayer a cupcake princess in my comment, but people are taking it a bit too seriously. The comment was mainly about frivolous Google UI changes, which have also been irritating me recently (and I imagine since you brought it up, many others). Why can't we keep talking about that rather than point fingers and try to out-PC each other?
Don't forget WiSee!
I agree. Everything about this stinks.

Further, I'm not one to put folks into stereotypes based upon where they're from, but I do note the exceptional security violation earlier this year related to the Google Certificate being compromised by a Turkish ISP. Not that the two are related, but that's my most recent thought with respect to Turkish Security research.
Switzerland couldn't win an open war, but the intent of their army is not to win an external war, but to prevent an invasion. In other words, make an invasion as hard (and expensive) as possible.
#RoyalBaby - Twitter Blog
Yes. I will be very happy to carry not only my data (as I do now) but my whole computer in my pocket, plug it into a keyboard and monitor at home and at work, and use the built-in screen (and perhaps a foldable bluetooth keyboard) elsewhere.

I know about the cloud. I distrust the cloud. The cloud is not for me.
Sounds pretty cool. Also, for those operating in "java land" there are Commons HttpClient[1] and Apache Tika[2] which, together, are a pretty potent combination for scraping web data.

[1]: http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-ga/

[2]: http://tika.apache.org/
I absolutely love CloudFlare! I save money by paying ~$25 a month for their service, because my bandwidth has been cut by over 65% since I signed up (the lightning fast loading, caching, security features and more are just icing on the cake). Instead of having to deal with optimzing my site for speed, they do it all at the click of one button. It's the best service I have ever signed up for, and I love it!

If CloudFlare ever offered optimized hosting (with PHP + MySQL), I would sign up in a snap and move all my websites there.
> its practicality has been critiqued quite a bit

That is quite the understatement. From the original article:

"[I]t depended on large amounts of a little understood or observed type of “exotic matter” that violates typical physical laws"

But other than that, there's no problem :-)
>Perhaps that genre of ESPN commentator is finally on the way out.

There is room for both, IMO. The 40+ year old crowd are largely comprised of people who are "done learning things" (a quote my father actually told me when I told him about my baseball research), so you need to have the Joe Morgans of the world.

But since all of the winning teams in baseball rely on an analytical approach, it's never been more obvious that nerds dominate the level of the sport where decisions are made. And commentators are shifting as a result of that, since it's just natural.

But you do need both, often because the people in the 2nd group tend to have worse social/presentation skills than the individuals in the 1st group. No slight intended (I belong mostly in the 2nd group, for god's sake), but it is not an unfair generalization.
Their indiegogo page is way better. Skip the standalone site and go straight there:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/canary-the-first-smart-hom...
There was an extremely depressing AMA on reddit a while ago where a patent examiner explained that what all of us consider "prior art" will be completely ignored by a patent examiner:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ww982/iama_patent_e...

The bar for prior art is very high - it has to be published in a recognized medium. Most specifically, unless it has a date that the patent officer can verify and cite (and a self stated date on a web site is not "verifiable"), it can't be considered because it is not possible say for sure it came earlier than the patent filing. So - some random thing on the internet - not published. Even an actual real product made and sold by a company - not published. Even standard industry practise, established for years, if not written up and "published" somewhere, may not qualify as prior art. In one comment he says:

"You may be right, that is how everyone does it. But if there is no documented prior art for us to search, we are out of luck rejecting it."

This explains why so many things that software developers routinely do end up in patents. Some of them are just so obvious that publishing it in a formal way is redundant. Yet that is the same bar that the USPTO is applying for rejecting patents. So the patent system itself is enriching the pool of obvious patents that get through.

Anyone using this Ask Patents site really needs to sit through a mini-tutorial explaining these things before they start, or they will waste more time than they save.
He does the same in "The Elegant Universe", using the metaphor of a car driving at a fixed speed (c) across field that is space in one direction and time in another. That was my big "aha" moment with special relativity: understanding that "space" and "time" are dimensions in essentially the same way that "length" and "width" are dimensions -- with the caveat that we always have this tremendous velocity (c) across one or the other.

Then you contemplate the kinetic energy that must be associated with c, and e=Mc^2 pops right out at you. Absolutely blew my mind when I first grokked that intuitively.

In the end, Greene failed to convince me that string theory was particularly interesting, but his descriptions of relativity are absolutely first-rate.
Boeing’s “Commercial Space” Spaceship, the CST-100
One of our HN Kansai members developed a few demo applications for the Leap Motion Controller: you can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b67QedK9jhA
Don't forget that javascript performance on mobile is abysmal. If your use of javascript is much more than light fluff, its going to seriously annoy mobile users.

http://sealedabstract.com/rants/mobile-web-apps-are-slow/
I think the problem is that they're trying to make significant profits from the hardware or they just designed it to be expensive. If the product was sufficiently high volume and they got most users to sign up for remote hosting they could make far more money.
Singing Happy Birthday makes cake taste better
Google newsletter goes to gmail spam by deafult
I think it is ironic.

I have two gmail accounts. Account 1 is forwarded and delegated to Account 2, what I use daily. Account 1 received new gmail tabs and email about it in inbox. In account 2 email went to spam by default with warning: Be careful with this message. Our systems couldn't verify that this message was really sent by google.com. You might want to avoid clicking on links or replying with personal information. Learn more"

Two things: How to avoid forwarded emails getting stuck in spam

and don't forget to check your spam folder once in a while. This time it is just forwarded announcement letter but next time it might be something more important.
I wonder what cool things can be done with a Raspberry Pi and one of these motion controllers! Both are very small in size.
I agree with you. While it's sad that this person has died, it doesn't really seem newsworthy.
This is What a Troll Looks Like
Guess what: not everything on HN is meant for you. Just move along.
Original Schindler’s List for sale on ebay
There is a big difference between "focused on statistics" and a valid statistical approach. Quoting ERA, Wins, RBIs, and even advanced metrics like WAR/FIP/VORP is totally different than validating methods through regression, machine learning, and the like.

Everyone is happy to point at "stats." Almost nobody wants to hear about confidence intervals.
> PS. Fighting against racism, is mixing a lot of races together.

The program serves highly segregated communities, your suggestion is rather a non-starter.
Ask HN: Best (up to date) comprehensive Django tutorial?
What's the Django world's equivalent of, e.g. Michael Hartl's tutorials and books in the Rails world?
Nobody seems to have poked any holes in the math since Alcubierre first published, and it's not for lack of attention.

I'm not sure what they say about causality, but there's been some work suggesting causality doesn't have to be absolute. Imagine a billiard table, with a wormhole that curves and goes three seconds backward in time. You aim a billiard ball through the wormhole, such that it will emerge earlier and knock itself off the path, never entering the wormhole, and creating a paradox.

But what actually happens is, the ball emerges on a slightly altered trajectory, striking itself a glancing blow, and the ball enters the wormhole.

And why did it emerge with an altered trajectory? Because it was struck a glancing blow.

Physicists have worked out some math on this, and haven't managed to find any scenario that results in inconsistency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_princi...
Poll: What do you use for Unix process management/monitoring?
I'm setting up production infrastructure for an new project and would love to know what you use for process management
DJB's daemontools
Brainbows
For Indians with in-demand qualifications like technology:

First year snow is fun specially if you never seen snow or live for extended period.

Second year snow is okay.

Third year oh! crap snow again.

Fourth year snow is drudgery.

Fifth year snow again! I can't wait to get out.

Sixth year, as you reaching snow season, I got my Canadian citizenship, I am moving south.
LiveJournal has that ... you can have several avatars and choose for every post and comment.
I really love ZeroMQ. We used it at LogNormal for all of the back end RPC. We did run into one issue though. If your 0MQ servers (the ones that call bind) run on a virtual host, as do your clients (the ones that call connect), and if that virtual host reboots, then the clients do not automatically reconnect to the server. I didn't quite have the time to investigate this, but from what I could tell, it only happens with virtual hosts across a reboot. It may have to do with iptables rules that we have in place (we have an IP whitelist), but I can't be certain of this.
At least it wasn't that annoying Kaspersky nut, We never would have heard the end of it.
Before this was "Hacker News" it was "Startup News". Due to historical / cultural reasons, a large base of the readership of HN are people from, or with connections to, Silicon Valley and the companies there. A lot of people on HN have probably been touched by Mr. Desimone in some way, and more than a few people here may have known him personally. IOW, he might not have been a "hacker" (or maybe he was, who knows?) but he's part of the "HN family" in a sense. That's why his passing gets a mention here, despite the fact that he may not have been notable to hackers in any other regard.
Big fat disclaimer: I work for Intel, but these thoughts are my own, and I have played no part in defining the UEFI specification.

I'll be the first to admit that the UEFI specification is not perfect - and I use it in my day-to-day work, so I feel like I have some room to complain about it. :) Some parts are under-specified, but the boot procedure is documented fairly clearly, at least by my reading.

In particular, for OS installers, see section 3.4.1.1, "Removable Media Boot Behavior"; the default is to load \efi\boot\bootARCH.efi, where ARCH is ia32, x64, or arm. Notice that there is no mention of \EFI\Microsoft\Boot anywhere in the specification; that path is used internally by the Windows bootloader, but it also has a bootloader in the standard place on the install media.

Each OS installer is expected to create an NVRAM variable pointing to the device path and filename of the bootloader for that OS; there's no hardcoded Windows-specific path or anything like that. Windows plays by the rules and creates a boot entry pointing to its bootloader; installers for other OSes can do the same. The firmware should provide a way to select from these boot entries on systems with multiple OSes installed.

Now, whether the firmware actually implements the spec correctly is another question, of course... In reality, many implementations are indeed only tested against Windows, but that's no different than the state of affairs with the traditional PC BIOS.

If the firmware has hard-coded checks for "Windows" or other special bootloader paths or names, it's a bug in the firmware, not a problem with UEFI itself.

(Another small factual inaccuracy: traditional PC BIOS systems start up in 16-bit real mode, not "8-bit mode", but either way, it's not a pleasant programming environment; EFI's flat-mapped 32- or 64-bit mode with C-based APIs is heaven in comparison.)
Which specific aspect of this package constitutes an "unlawful circumvention device"? If the Snaphax class instantiated a different low-level class from SnaphaxApi, that was written to a slightly different API, would it still circumvent? If so, why must the entire package be taken down? If the code here was used but pointed at a proxy, would the distribution of code itself still have limited commercial purpose and be designed or produced primarily for the purpose of circumvention? The actual USC section (Schaffer has the wrong subsub: it's (a)(2) (and maybe (b)(1)) not (a)(1) that governs "traffic in any... device") refers extensively to copyrighted works: what copyrighted works are referenced here? Do Snapchat claim copyright in their users' images? If not, what do they mean here?

Without specific answers to many of the foregoing questions, this message amounts to asking OP to forego all use and value of work that OP has personally performed, merely on Snapchat's say-so. So, actual meritorious C&D's require some actual work on the part of the sender. This letter took some knucklehead five minutes, so that's about what it's worth.

C&D's are usually courtesies to avoid...

...the expense of an actual lawsuit. In many cases a vague and overbroad (see above) message is mere bullying, attempting to imply threats that would be impossible to articulate or enforce. Papers filed in a court are held to a higher standard, and penalties are enforced. The fact that OP might be well-advised to retain counsel in response to this turd is an indictment of the USA legal system.
I believe drunkenness has been considered under English law to be a mitigating factor where intent is concerned, though not where the question of the crime itself was concerned. However using drink in getting up the courage to commit a crime is also not allowed - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intoxication_in_English_law

I'm not sure how much this would fly now, as it all seems to have been debated 100 years ago.
Readers prefer reading human narratives over rational analysis in all areas, whether sports or politics. It's not even really about a distaste for mathematical analysis so much as a distaste for cold rationality in general. There's lots of fascinating strategy involved with blocking schemes in American football ("if I step here, he'll step here, so instead I move this way...") that are analytical but not numerical. With the occasional exceptional comment by John Madden, these are rarely discussed.

So you are right about the typical role of stats in sports. Commenters like chasing and lnanek2 are mistakenly keying on the fact that sports, having well-defined rules and human-constructed elements, are very easy to measure and so lots of numbers exist. As you correctly point out in reply to chasing, these numbers are simply thrown out there without actually being used in a coherent analysis.
Unfortunately I think that you've hit the nail on the head--there's simply too much to be gained politically by not fixing the root causes.

Maybe we could convince them that ending the war on drugs would free up more resources for, say, locking up homosexuals that also carry guns?

That'd make everybody happy again, right? :(
Scrapy: another web scraping framework
"I'm crushing you! I'm crushing ..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwlAvsPvPfg
The pharmaceutical and biotech industry would be almost non-existent without intellectual property protection.
I wrote a backend system using Phantom and Akka to generate graphs using D3 and rasterize them into PNGs and put them into user-specific emails.

Phantom has some quirks but overall it's pretty solid.
What's wrong with pink...?
No argument there, just saying it doesn't seem to violate fundamental principles.

The exotic matter is negative mass. In theory there is such a thing, and a quantum effect produces it at a very small scale. Whether it will ever be possible to produce it in large quantities is another matter.

But at least the quantity required isn't quite as large as it used to be. The original configuration need a negative Jupiter mass. Now it's down to several tons.
Well, one thing is for sure: the guy driving this thing has the power to destroy all of humanity in an instant, should he decide to crash into earth.

Interesting thought imho, the way to ensure our species survival also has the potential to do just the opposite.