skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The worst thing is that the years are not in order, though one would assume that they were. It makes it look like the years are getting hotter and hotter as time moves from left to right.

Which is what you did. There's no "large jump" in 2012. 2012 was one degree warmer than 1934, which in turn was a quarter degree warmer than 1999.

Besides, using the most extreme six points in the last century to paint a trend is awfully stupid anyway. With all of the data that was omitted, the temperature could have averaged 53.5 degrees from 1921 to 2006, then dropped to 45 degrees from 2007 to 2011 - indicating that we were suddenly falling into a new ice age punctuated by sparse years of extreme heat - and this graph(esque monstrosity) would look exactly the same.

This is a perfect example of information presentation that makes the people exposed to it stupider than they were before they saw it, because now they think that they know something.

edit: to be clearer - all this graphic is saying is that 2012 was the hottest year in the last 100 years.

Here's a mind-experiment; find a record value of anything that occurs in sequence. Take the previous 99 values of that sequence, and eliminate all but the top five values. Arrange those values from lowest to highest from left to right, ending with the record value.

Number of Participants in the Sleepy
Hollow Hog-Calling Competition During
Record Years of Participation in the
Sleepy Hollow Hog-Calling Competition

56 **
55 **
54 ** **
53 ** ** ** **
52 ** ** ** ** **
51 ** ** ** ** ** **
1991 1915 1914 2006 1931 2012

Have we learned anything?
LOL, he says "your language is the language of Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible"... I wonder if it was meant to be funny , out of ignorance or arrogance...

As I've posted before, there is this sort of inherent imperialist bias people have with someone who does not have a good command or English. A hundred years ago, it may have been an indication of class (and to some degree still is today). But to look down and be utterly dismissive of someone because they have an accent is just plain dumb.

In PGs defense, just because someone is dumb doesn't mean people will cease to engage in such behavior. And given that the entrepreneur is the one on the selling side, it may behoove him/her to brush up on whichever accent is appealing to those to be sold.

I personally have several accents in English and I subconsciously switch from one to another depending on whom I'm speaking with. If necessary I change languages all together. Reality is, I am better able to connect with the other person this way.
I agree Apple did well by getting entrenched in the education market in the US.

Combined with Tandy's failure to follow up, and Commodore's incessant bungling in the US market (such as repeatedly pissing off their dealer network by letting their dealers absorb unannounced price changes) and decision to send most of its stock to Europe where they got higher margins, that explains more of it than lack of alternatives.

In Europe, Apple remained virtually unheard of until the Mac compared to Commodore, Atari and homegrown brands.

Largely thanks to its European market, Commodore still massively outsold Apple in terms of units shipped up until well into the Mac got popular - it's just that by the time the IIe started getting traction, Commodore had abandoned the high end and gone for volume, and by the time they went after the high end again, it was 1985, and Commodore's brand and sales channel in the US was even more tied to the cheap gaming image.

But if you wanted sharp, readable 80-column text you had several alternatives at the time of the IIe launch, at around the same price range, both from Commodore and others (from Commodore, the later entrants in the PET range - one is actually on display in my local library - as well as the ill fated Commodore B128-80)

Most of the other entrants that could compete for productivity applications in the same price range were from small unknown companies or insufficiently compatible with anything to get enough software, though, and so had little chance.
Swiss banks to divulge names of wealthy US tax avoiders, pay billions in fines
Considering any low-latency firm worth talking about will be able to afford viewing the full order book (which apparently you can get for $750 a month http://www.nyxdata.com/arcabook) they don't need to create and withdraw trades constantly.

They will however do this on dark pools, as dark pools specifically don't publish the order book. But no common investor will be trading on a dark pool, so this professor wont be able to "cheat" (with as much scare quotes as possible, as AndrewBissel and others discussed) them out of $377k. I don't know the regulations for dark pools so I can't say if this behavior violates them or not, but I'd assume not as dark pools are typically set up to thwart HFT so they'd pounce on any opportunity to keep them out.
See here for a library of simple prose:
http://splasho.com/upgoer5/library.php

Or there's always the simple english version of Wikipedia:
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

The original "Up Goer Five":
http://xkcd.com/1133/
I tried http://verbling.com quite a few times, it seems a great idea and use of technology. Maybe Verbling's founders, would make a deal for all YC applicants. For example, X hours of free 1-to-1 accent crash course with the appropriate tutor. Or, Y hours of free courses for foreign YC founders as part of the offering.
Since there are no comments on the OPs blog, I will just post this here:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/programming-abstraction-l...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymF94cFfzUQ
Minecraft Decision Engine
And yet, here we are seeing the no-fly list practice come under judicial review. Things went further than they should have, but ultimately the system may eventually work the way it is supposed to.
> The state believes that parents do not own their children.

I think the fundamental problem here is that some people believe that children simply must be owned by somebody so when you say "parents do not own their children" their mind automatically inserts "...instead, the state does."

Of course children are not owned at all. Neither parents nor the state owns them.

If parents abuse their children, it is the responsibility of the state to intervene; just as if a homeless man mugs you, it is the responsibility of the state to intervene. If somebody abuses their elderly parents, it is again the responsibility of the state to intervene (yet nobody thinks that implies that the state owns the elderly...). What do we pay them for, if not to provide protection from other dangerous members of society?
I do care about the morality of it. I don't believe in fear. You should earn the respect and love of the people. Not instill fear in them. Even if you've conquered them, I believe this is still possible, if you treat them as fellow human beings and treat them nicely.

IMO no self-respecting democracy should follow this disgusting condemnable tactic of fear..
31 small nodes arranged in a binary tree. Communication between parent and children.
China’s Tencent is giving away 10TB worth of free cloud storage
Very nice. I would suggest adding url support to be able to go back and forth between slides (using browser's back/fwd button), emailing dirct link to certain slides, etc.
Came here to say this, but take it further. Power is a function of survival and reproduction odds improvement. It may be that something else begins to shift that balance, but that flaw will never go away. We are just animals.
Front running is when a broker purports to act as a fair middle-man between a trader and the market, but instead fraudulently manipulates the market to cause price degradation to the trader. It has nothing to do with HFT.

HFT is not gambling. Markets are predictable, in the same way that the value of wheat in November is predictable from the amount of rain in May. HFT simply extends the prediction process to short timescales.
No, I got it and I don't think there is anything particularly wrong with the point itself, per se.

The basis of the point, though, is one report from an advocacy source - and here we are talking about the moral philosophy of law and statism and the Prussians and Plato. Meanwhile nobody's actually found and referenced another report of any kind. Maybe from German media. Maybe a publicly available court document. Anything.

This sort of anti-pattern makes me think that stuff like this should be mercilessly flagged off the site. If you're particularly keen on talking about it, write it up, as soberly as you can, put up some links and post that. Linking the advocacy post itself is near-guaranteed to generate almost exclusively heat at the expense of light.
The project is very cool. But for the life of me, I don't understand the "taking my phone out and checking is too inconvenient/time consuming" mentality. I stopped wearing a wristwatch, b/c I could just look at my phone, heck, I've shed as much stuff as possible since it can all go on the phone. Then out comes the pebble, and other "smart" watches. Seriously, I just don't get it. Isn't there a point beyond which such things just become frivolous?
At a very practical level, society needs heterosexual unions (however brief) to survive, but it doesn't need homosexual ones. Why does stating this basic fact lose me the respect of my liberal and queer peers? It's about as accurate and offensive as a t-shirt that says, "We are the descendants of apes, not Adam and Eve."
You do realise that the S4 and the S4 Mini are quite different? When reviews talk about the S4, you cannot extrapolate to the Mini due to different chipsets (quad core vs dual core), differing amount of RAM, resolution etc. I'm sure you know now.

Also, the only features of the Nexus 4 i would class as "starter" is the price (really cheap, accessible to a lot of peopl) and maybe the fast updates. That's about it. The camera is good, not the best, but more than good enough for casual stuff like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
You can do cheap properly. Look at WestJet in Canada (also in the States now, I believe): cheap, no frills, and great service with friendly staff. One of their claims to fame is that, when starting out, they lacked the money to pay competitive wages and so had a very generous equity scheme. This resulted, at one point, in over 40% of their staff being millionaires. When you have that kind of stake in the company's reputation and success, the level of give-a-shit rises substantially.
Aren't all of those problems solvable?

1) Use ticks less than an hour. Say, one second. Or even one minute--however long it takes to settle an auction. You will quickly get a sense of the price.
2) If there are multiple bids on the books, randomize priority at the bid level. The goal is to remove HFT, not create a new HFT with more granular resolution.
> Poor is not being able to scrape up enough money for a plane ticket and hostel accomodations

Why? Even a poor person in the US should be able to scrape up enough for at least that, if nothing more. I took a two month trip to Colombia on $15 a day, about $1500 after the plane ticket. One can easily save up that kind of money in two months with even a crappy job, if you're serious about it.

I don't think it's really possible to be "seriously" poor in the US. The amount of ambient wealth floating around here is tremendous compared to other countries. I'd much rather be destitute here than in, say, Rwanda.
They can police it just as well, in complinance with the law by granting him a license.

"We'd rather not bother you, but this guy who charges us by the hours insists that we spend many of his hours sending weird pointless letters. To wit: To whatever extent you need to license our mark, you hereby have a license to use it to show if our site is down or not. Have fun."
Weak sauce. There was a time when you could trust the Swiss to stick to their privacy / confidentiality principles, but they caved into pressure from the US government some time ago. It's sad, really. Switzerland is a sovereign nation, not a freaking US colony. :-(
There are something like 20-ish papers here. I have skimmed several of them without any clear answer to this question:

How exactly do you stop sockpuppetry while maintaining anonymity?

In order to ensure that a person cannot create more than 1 account, it would be necessary to observe some property of the person that is difficult to alter (such as their appearance, or their social security number) for uniqueness on the network.

Now if this network is truly anonymous, then it must be disjoint from every other network. And there is at least one other network ("real life"), so whatever this property is, must be something that an adversary in the real-life network would not be able to compare to the anonymous network.

And so certainly, it must not be some property that a person in the real-life network could observe by following you around or ruffling through your drawers and then compare to the answer you gave to sign up for the anonymous network. So it must be something in your head (like a password).

But if it is in your head, isn't it easily changed, and this property would be exploitable to create sockpuppets?

I must have missed something fundamental here, possibly in terminology. Can somebody who is current on the research here enlighten me?
I think Light Flow allows you to disable LED at night (or set a max blink time, at least).
Generally, the most relevant academic community would be the NIPS community and I have not noticed any Numenta papers at NIPS, but please point me towards any I have missed if you are aware of any. I expect a lot of people have an opinion along these lines: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=225476&cid=18...
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see numenta produce something of value for the ML community, but it doesn't look good so far.
Probably the informal "odd, unusual, or unexpected" rather than "made, done, happening, or chosen without method or conscious decision" (definitions from google)

See Disney show: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Random!
Is the order book visible between executions? If yes, then nothing changes, the HFTs just keep piling on offsetting orders as the orders change. If no, gigantic inefficiencies result as investors blindly toss orders onto the market.
Vagrant debian preparing script
What mess? The mess created by the Commission themselves? Why should he be on the hook for their highly-questionable actions?
Why Does The Brain Sleep?
The way this is usually handled is anonymous credentials. You force someone to identify themselves uniquely (full name, passport, SSN, DNA, photo, etc). You then issue them a credential that is anonymous (i.e. when shown, you can't link it with when it was issued or previously shown). Furthermore, you set up these credentials so that if they are used too many times (i.e. cloned) then the identity is revealed.

You then require them to show the untraceable credential each time they submit a message.
schrodinger's ladder?
Useful guide for Italians: http://urli.st/q2t/2dt
Some of the HN discussion when Loon was announced focused on the vulnerability of the balloons. The approximate conclusion was that the balloons were usually far too high up for any kind of effective attack by firearms.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure Assad has the military capability to take them down.
Just when you think TechDirt couldn't be a bigger rag.
I wear a watch when I'm on a motorcycle or have a client meeting - - then I can see where my day is at without digging in my pocket. But yeah, signs like this just don't make sense to me.

I have a desire for minimalism above all.
I think what you've done is pretty cool. Obviously it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but for me, I think it's more useful than those "distraction free" writing tools that are so popular today. My challenge when writing long documents isn't the noise around the screen, it's simultaneously managing a whole pile of thoughts related to the structure.

I really like the simple approach you've taken to the UI, but that's subjective. My main criticism about the app would be that I'd rather pay $20-$30 for a native app than subscribe to a web app.

In any case, good luck, I hope your app is successful.
This is a nice project. I wrote my own version earlier, but it was not nearly as slick! I wanted fancy SVG-based animations, but never got it to a working state.

Coincidentally, I think some subtle animation would be great--maybe just have the slides slide in or out. They are, after all, slides :P.

I currently use a very similar tool written for Emacs's org-mode. Org-mode is incredible. I mostly use it for notes; the slideshows are just another nice feature. I think the results[1] are quite good, given that it's just as easy as this except better-integrated into Emacs.

[1]: http://jelv.is/synthesis-slides.html

I put this presentation together at literally the last moment before speaking--I wrote the last slide just as the previous speaker was taking questions. Despite the bad timing, I think it worked reasonably well.

It's great, but I do sometimes have to modify the CSS for certain slides by hand. Happily, this is very easy, and I have never needed anything complicated.

I use a modified version of an elisp script written by some Googlers[2], but org-mode can output slides with a bunch of other backends[3] like Beamer or S5. You can even use Emacs itself to give the presentation! I've seen a presentation this way and while the aesthetics are questionable, it confers an undeniable hacker panache.

[2]: https://gist.github.com/kinjo/509761

[3]: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/non-beamer-presentatio...
> No, no, and no. It would lose you the respect of your liberal and/or LGBTQ peers, but the school can't stop you unless it stops all controversial or political speech on clothing (which is a Time, Place, and Manner restriction).

What about the argument that it creates a hostile learning environment for GLBT folks and therefore denies them their right to an equal opportunity for education? What about the argument that such a T-shirt amounts to reinforcing discrimination regarding gender roles? In other words, to what extent does this put schools in a circumstance where if they tolerate the t-shirt they get sueed by one group under Title VII and if they don't tolerate it they get sued by another group under Section 1983?

The problem as I see it is that both sides end up with colorable arguments.

Moreover suppose the school decides to teach Aristotelian social theory and starts out at the married household level. Is this discrimination? Is this a one-way street?

Aristotelian social theory basically states that men and women come together in procreative unions which form households and these form the basic mechanisms of cultural transmission and development. Households come together to create communities. Therefore instead of the Lockean two-level contract (individuals and states) you have three (people and households, households and state). Aristotelian theory thus supports localism and local culture in ways that the theories of folks like Locke, Hobbes, and Hume do not.
So Turkey is helping preparing the first strike tomorrow morning. The UN inspectors are out finally, the chemical theatre took place again, and finally they strike can begin. Reportedly Saturday until Wednesday.
But who outside of China would put anything of importance on Chinese servers? I guess if you just want to back up your cat gifs...
How can I win at Rock, Paper, Scissors (programming)
Looks like we've hit max depth.

It doesn't. That's an obvious biological fact. But depending on context, one could infer that it's part of an argument that homosexuality is unnatural and therefore wrong. If I told you that the love you feel is an abomination, that we should teach our children to be disgusted by people like you, I'm guessing you wouldn't be excited to strike up further conversation.

It's (in my mind) a horrible thing to say, but we still have the right to say it.
You also needed a special cable to upload software written in assembly onto the calculator. I started teaching myself Z80 assembly in order to program the TI-85, but I never got the cable, so I never got to try it.
FX brokers like LMAX, while still targeting retail investors, make money (almost) exclusively on commissions, rather than adjusting the spreads.

Many liquidity provision strategies are also infeasible given the unreliability of the APIs available and the high fees, and in general many intraday strategies that work in other markets and would work with lower commission for bitcoins are devastated by such high fees.

As for stocks, if your volumes are decent, trading costs are negligible. With bitcoin exchanges, that does not seem to be the case...
1. Laws are a system of agreements that a community agrees to. The "law" created by this action will be weakened because it is the outcome of political circumstance, not a defined and objective system.

2. Intervention by the U.S. may backfire by incentivizing dictators to stockpile chemical weapons. One of the major reasons that a boots-on-the-ground invasion is not an option is the presence of these weapons.
Have those researchers released any source code?
> As they should be underfunded. Keeps their power in check.

No, changing laws keeps their power in check. Underfunding them simply makes them less effective and more arbitrary.
About 10 minutes after I posted this, you commented on one of my Quests and ended up turning it into a stencil, thus answering my question before I got back here to read your actual answer!

It's a neat idea, I'll have to check out the meta-quests.
Seems to have worked for Clinton: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Iraq_(1998)#Distract...
No way. MTG is super awesome; the fact that Mt.Gox is indirectly linked to Magic only makes it cooler.
Well if this straight up didn't happen, then there is nothing here to discuss.
Indirectly, they are. The market price is the average predicted price by all the HFTs. The high-frequency shops are picking up pennies in front of a steamroller so that the rest of us can ignore short term fluctuations in the price.

This does not help pension funds all that much. A pension trader might decide to acquire a $1.5B position in some stock that usually trades $250M a day. To avoid being a market mover, large investors take weeks or even months to adjust their positions. HFTs arbitrage between the milliseconds, while retirement funds arbitrage between seasons (to the extent that they arbitrage at all, rather than investing for a share of the profits).
> That was exactly the issue during the crypto wars. The cat was out of the bag by the time NSA agents showed up in Rivest's office and started treating it like a crime scene. The DOJ brought up stories about common criminals using PGP to avoid prosecution when Zimmerman was testifying before Congress. The crypto wars were an effort to prevent cryptography from becoming commonplace, not just about a few high-level targets using it.

Right. I totally get that. I am just saying it is totally different now that the government has given everyone strong incentive to use crypo as a matter of course. If people don't trust the government to be responsible regarding wiretaps, the government won't be able to wiretap.....