skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>"For example, with the FourSquare online social network, under majority threshold (50% of incoming neighbors previously adopted), a viral marketeer could expect a 297-fold return on investment"

This is illustrative of what bothers me about the paper: they're already trying to market the algorithm, and they're not being honest about its limitations. Now I'm uncertain of whether to trust them on the network analysis part at all.

Take the cited example: What is the return? It will vary wildly and take into account factors like how related the message is to the product/service, previous exposure, quality and likelihood to share, and website quality/conversion rate. Second, what is the investment? Marketing costs can range from 0 to many tens or even hundreds of thousands.

To those who say the "message is all that matters": relevant, quality content fails to go viral all the time. It's easy to think it doesn't happen if you don't work in marketing, since you'll never see it. Identifying key people effectively really can have value in a marketing campaign. That said, connected people (also most people) will likely ignore you if your message or content is shit (uninteresting, unsurprising, unclear, etc.)
Flagger: browser app that trolls the NSA with red flag keywords and free speech
That would probably be illegal as well in France.
Algorithm Visualizations In browser with Python, d3.js
Google App Engine, Python 2.7, Python NBD DataStore, Jinja2 Templates, HTML/JavaScript/CSS, CodeMirror, jQuery, D3.js
Screenshot Bug Tickets for FogBugz
No time is a good time to buy a house, never buy.
I hate when apps ask to post to Facebook or Twitter on my behalf. It's uncomfortable and puts the user in an awkward position. Great article, hope some of these companies take note!
Ask HN: what was your first startup event like?
How did you prepare your team for your first startup event ever (as a startup)? What should we expect?
> I expect a room, or an apartment, that I can stay in

It was basic stuff like this that I had problems with. For example, the host was not there when I arrived the first evening, and neither was the person that the host had said would be present - something I find unacceptable. And then the host got confused and thought I was leaving a day before I was, which I had to then sort out over the phone. These are the sorts of things that I shouldn't have to think about.
Gregory Szorc's Digital Home
BGR iOS 7 review: The perfect balance of 'new' and 'now'
Hey, that's something. I'd take it gladly over nothing. I was honestly curious if any of them came with a breakfast made by the host, which in some places might be worth staying for just to enjoy! If my grandmother was alive, staying with her would be worth it just for the morning meal :)
It's true that some people just have two second languages, and some barely a single.
Bees extinct in UK reintroduced
We http://liid.co/ created this file for internal use but I'm sure the HN crowd will get more value from it!

The information has all been sourced using our automated tools as a consequence no data has been cleansed or manually processed. So you will have to excuse any errors or mistakes that there may be.
Hadoop / MapReduce was invented for situations where the data is being generated on the machines (eg, via a distributed web crawl). If you're not generating the data in situ and have to ETL it anyway, it makes just as much sense to load the data onto one Monster Box with a terabyte of RAM and 48 CPU cores. You massively save on complexity.
Messing with binary formats
If you have the money yes :).
Leo is the last outliner you'll ever need. http://leoeditor.com/
You'll get fired for making a devastatingly bad call, and AWS could be one of those. It's difficult to work with, can be expensive if not used effectively, and exposes you to completely different kinds of risk than your team might be used to.
Can it be rational to have faith?
Apple offering 'last compatible version' of iOS apps for older hardware
If this were absolutely the only use of such data slurping, then yes. The problem is, with such secrecy and an unwillingness to allow independent oversight, its hard to believe that.

The problem is all the other uses of such information. And of course we have no idea what else the information is being used for. There is also the effects on people who don't know. For example, imagine the politician who wants to reign in a security service for over reach, but suspects that the security service in question might have some embarrassing data on him/her. Would such a politician take the risk? Or what if a candidate wanted to fight an election based on reigning in a security service, and the sitting politician was "helped by the security service at risk. And so on...

Such information has great power to destroy what democracy we have.
Are map, reduce, and filter turing complete?
Google Analytics stops official compatibility with IE8
I have to agree that faith can be rational. My biggest argument for this how the human psyche works. A person can say they have faith (in some cases even a gut feeling) but what they are experiencing in reality is a sum of what they subconsciously know. The example having faith that your wife is not cheating on you stands behind this point in that subconsciously you know that you know certain things about her day or you knew where she was at certain points. Even religion is in reality just a sum of what collective knowledge you have and whether or not I'm your mind it is collectively enough proof for you to believe.
When I fall ill and go to the doctor, as opposed to going to medical school, is it rational? Off course it's rational. But that act of leaving my health at the hands of this dude whom the world tells me will get me back to good is essentially faith.
I'm not a very philosophical/bright type, so I may come up shot if someone wanted to take this up philosophically, but at basic level I do think faith is rational. A lot of the inputs for what we consider rational may very well be acts of faith.
Considering the interest rate is lower than the inflation, what would be some other items to invest $100k to generate some guaranteed income?
(except stock, where you could also lose money)
great. Thanks!
When you find something difficult to phrase, it usually means that you're not sure yet of the scope and details of what you're trying to say, or there isn't broad consensus as to what should be said. All of which counsels against carving those prototype ideas into the Constitution, either through an amendment or a Supreme Court decision.

> My reading of history is that the Constitution was not intended to create any human rights, but rather to prevent the government from limiting the rights that we all have naturally. Which would include privacy.

Where the "rights" that the Constitution protects come from and what they are is a complex question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantive_due_process. Most modern jurists have abandoned the idea of "natural rights" (which are ironically, essentially supernatural). Most liberals tend to think of the Constitution as protecting an evolving set of rights derived from broad social consensus. Most conservatives tend to think of the Constitution as protecting those rights the founders would have recognized at the time of the framing, based on long-standing English tradition dating back to the magna carta.

Scalia had this to say about the "right to privacy" yesterday: http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2013/09/scalia-chides-acti... ("As he often does when extolling the text of the Constitution, Scalia criticized his colleagues for their 'activism' in creating new human rights not articulated by the framers. He made much of the fact that the right to privacy can nowhere be found in the document, yet the Supreme Court has discovered and cultivated it over the decades."). As Scalia noted in Jones, historically the 4th amendment was rooted in a "property rights" view, not a "privacy" view. It's easy to see the 4th amendment's protection of "persons, houses, papers, and effects" as simply expressing that the government may not commit trespass against real property or chattels without a warrant. Of course, a lot of people also think Olmstead (which approved phone wiretaps before it was overturned by Katz) was rightly decided: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmstead_v._United_States.

I personally think the entirety of the Supreme Court's privacy jurisprudence is hand-waving, from Katz to Griswold to Roe to Lawrence. There's just no privacy in the Constitution, nor is there anything in the historical record to indicate that the framers had a well-developed concept of privacy as distinct from property rights.
Ask HN: Should I turn off cookies when booking on Expedia/Orbitz/Hipmunk etc? 
Does anybody in the industry have any insights if prices change when you show clear intent of buying a certain trip? Should I go incognito? Thanks
I bought a duplex 4 years ago. With rent from other side my total (taxes, insurance, mortgage) has been ~$500 (1/2 to 1/3 of what I could rent for. PLUS I've gotten tax benefits, and $250/mo equity.

When I buy a house shortly, the duplex will start making $500/mo + ever increasing equity amount. Until I decide to cash out.

Property/land is one of the most available avenues to wealth. But, it's no silver bullet. If you are an idiot and/or and/or make poor choices you will probably loose. No different than any other business, endeavor or purchase.

Property is so varied geographically, price bracket, types of property, condition of property, even seasonally, that blanket statements "Don't buy expensive house" lack any relevancy.
With all its deficiencies, USP is a top university and produces valuable researches. That's no joke at all. Just look at the Lattes curriculum of both its faculty and graduates. MIT, Harvard, Princeton —those are awesome universities but they are expensive too, not a thing most people can afford. Studying at USP costs nothing. That's quite an achievement.
I don't mean to be overlook the problems. I'm just pointing out an important difference.
One of my big questions is: Does the NSA engage in industrial espionage? And if so, does it transmit data from foreign companies to US companies?

It has been rumored that this is standard operating procedure in China, where each hotel employs some intelligence officers to invade business traveler's devices...
Yes, there are increased traffic deaths caused by heightened airport security.

Approximately 500 additional people die each year because of this.

The inconvenience of extra passenger screening and added
costs at airports after 9/11 cause many short-haul passengers
to drive to their destination instead, and, since airline
travel is far safer than car travel, this has led to an increase
of 500 U.S. traffic fatalities per year. Using DHS-mandated
value of statistical life at $6.5 million, this equates to a loss
of $3.2 billion per year, or $32 billion over the period 2002 to 2011

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/excess_automo...
I think the main issue is that the console and framebuffer use canvas elements which are continuously refreshed by a javascript timeout. This tends to use up all of a single core, no matter how little of the screen is actually changed. Perhaps using requestAnimationFrame could improve the CPU utilization.
When you watch people lose jobs for sick time you tend to have that reaction.
There is delete icon(image of trash bin) on toolbar. Tap that to delete selected shape. The icon will be visible only after you select the shape.
BizTalk Orchestrations would probably fit. I also remember an old robot programming game.
Historical artifact.
Redesigned Google Analytics Landing Page
I checked back:
In this case it was local venue restrictions.
I don't use standard tests when hiring (read: to weed out candidates)

I'm in the process of hiring again as the team is growing and this has struck a chord with me.

I tend to see a resume, if it looks at all decent I will do a interview. Some would say do a call or give them a test to weed out etc. I've done enough interviewing to know that

1) people almost always are different than what their resume portrays for better or worse.
2) body language is 90% of our communication so why waste time on the phone.
3) If its so important to get someone I deem as a good fit I want to meet them.
4) I "waste" a lot of time interviewing, but I get better at it each time and I've found people who would otherwise never have gotten into see me that were spectacular hires. Also I have lots of friends who hire and sometimes someone is great but not for me, the favor has paid off when its returned.

The bottom line is people are unique in many ways. Why try to push them into a standard mold or discard them if they don't fit.

P.S

With regard to testing I usually tailor a test of 5-6 questions AFTER the interview so I can evaluate anything I am not sure of after speaking to the potential hire. I also let them do it at home with their tools. I don't care to see if someone can work with me hovering over them, because I have not intention of doing so on a day-to-day basis.
My understanding has always been it's one who "hacks" the "growth" of the company. Which coincidentally is why I've always had a somewhat negative impression of the term.
I think this ideas comes from the lack of careers that are so openly talked about that also have so much latitude for improvement and improvisation. Many professions have been turned into assembly lines, button pushing, and quality monitoring. The craftsmanship of many jobs has disappeared.

Programming is only widely open and publicized via the internet, it's natural for people with computers to have a greater presence on the internet.

However if you talk to someone that practices a craft,like carpentry or brewing, you will find a similar drive and passion to learn the techniques, soft skills, and hard skills that are required to be great. It's really about craftsmanship, not about software.
CA lawmakers punt decision on retroactive startup tax to Governor Brown
Just used it, 20 bucks a night to stay in Boston for the weekend, great experience. Never say never.
How about these:

Why hotels are still nicer than AirBnb.

Why you should probably not use AirBnb and why hotels still rule.

If you are looking for victims advertise on AirBnb.
Stanford Business School Launches Computer Science Program
OT My recollection of the G+ scenario is that they stunted it themselves - for whatever reason. By the time the people I knew actually had access I'd lost interest in waiting for my friends to show up. They arrived to find that after a month nothing was going on and they lost interest. I'm not sure how it's doing these days but it felt like a massive missed opportunity.
Time to ditch awful HD 1080p widescreen displays
My normal window on the market is past. I missed my chance. It no longer works because machines don't do ATA PIO.

delusion's great.

If it weren't delusion... it'd be God and God telling the CIA to commit suicide and telling Gates to commit suicide and telling the hardware makers to support AIA PIO.

It's delusion.

God talks.

Is this going to be real?
All the financial advice you need?
You don't have a chicken/egg problem with either biological evolution or computers. With biological evolution abiogenesis is at the bottom of the turtle stack, with computers it is likely some guy poking holes in some cards or rewiring a computer by hand.

Ultimately you don't need life to create life, and ultimately you don't need a computer program to build a computer program. There are other methods, even though we don't see those methods executed today.
Actually, it is. Thanks for the blanket statement, though.
The fundamental question is whether you wish to risk lower service (in some capacity, like the deal with the beds) for lower prices.

That's a trade-off, and if you're unwilling to risk lower service for lower prices you should not in fact use AirBnb. If you are willing to risk that trade-off, you should.
It's a shame you have arrived at this opinion. I couldn't work out if you'd actually tried AirBnB from the tone of your post, or just don't like the sound of the idea.

I'll say, from my experience, you're missing out on some exciting, beautiful and really great places to stay. Its not for everyone though, some people do enjoy the predictable, bland, plastic appeal of a hotel room.

Personally, I find hotels great for last minute plans, AirBnB doesn't do last minute unfortunately.
So you want them only to read what has been "approved"? At that rate they should stop reading Noam Chomsky because he may have writings not favorable to the US Military.
The idea of education (even at a US Military Academy) is let students read a diverse group of authors in order to make well informed moral decisions once they get into the field. Saying a book has "dangerous" ideas is akin to a people wanting to burn books because they object to what is being written.
Make number 1 into an API and that's your business. In other words: all these services can easily provide a button: see this data in excel, and your service sends the data to Google docs (or your own excel version if you must).
Occipital Announces Canopus Project
Exactly - encoding is the key.

I just gave a presentation last week at the SF Python Meetup about how AdRoll uses a single server to query terabytes of compressed data with sub-minute latencies, using a system that is implemented in Python:

http://tuulos.github.io/sf-python-meetup-sep-2013

This is probably a thousand times less resource intensive than using Hadoop for the same queries.
We're a small company (30+ people) and been happily using AWS for several years now. We've found them price competitive for the same features - and they are really easy to use if you're looking for scale.

A few reasons for why I think they're now the 600-pound gorilla in that space. ;)
5 things neither side of the broadband debate wants to admit
Yes, with firefox 23 I pass from 6 MIPS to 90 (which I suppose means that there is some bug without asm.js, since it shouldn't improve that much).

This work is giving a new mean to "impressive"
ITA (a university that belongs to Air Force) famously let students to opt out of military, and many went around doing cool stuff.

I once saw a presentation of their students once, there are even people that went on to make games and stuff like that.

Also the military here likes to help Linux in general, even submitting patches, the air force in particular loves Debian and Ubuntu (last I checked, they moved 100% of their servers to Debian and 100% of workstations to Ubuntu)

Then we have some air traffic control software being developed, firewalls, anti-virus, whatnot... This is what I learned on tech conferences (thus obviously it is related to tech)

Also I've heard of the military helping people make vehicle engines.

And then we have Taurus (a weapon manufacturer) that had some business with my family, and seemly the military asked them to do some civilian stuff too (like use their armour technology to make clothes for perilous jobs, for example Motorcycle helmets, also they use their gun steel technology for other things, like construction, building factory machines, car parts...)

I think this has to do with that fact that the military here has some... funding issues. And thus need to cooperate a lot with civilian sector to get anything done.

Oh, and famously, the army built some stuff for the federal government that ended being on schedule, and used less money than budgeted (that they returned), although this was supposed to be normal, it was so exceptional that people think it is totally amazing and awesome (here federal government projects IF they don't fail outright, tend to blow both the budget and deadlines, and have shitty quality, result of hiring contractors and not checking ever if they are doing a good job or not, plus corruption).
Shouldn't the post be renamed "10 Reasons it is a Terrible Time to Buy an Expensive House, in the US"? It sounds like a general article but it's really only about the US.
Version 29.0.1547.66 m
In response to The Future of Journalism: http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html

You can read a bit more about our thinking on our blog here http://blog.beaconreader.com/post/61376491652/the-reader-wri...

Would love to hear your feedback and thoughts!
Most importantly learn your pitch by heart and if possible have a working demo of your service or application.
Our experiences: http://blog.getinch.com/how-to-get-out-most-of-startup-event...
Here's a direct link to the PDF, which is far more valuable than the article itself:

"A Scalable Heuristic for Viral Marketing Under the
Tipping Model"

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1309.2963v1.pdf
I know one issue they're worried about is display latency. DRM complicates this issue and potentially adds yet another layer of indirection to worry about. Though to be fair, I wonder how big of a driver this is for them.

See Michael Abrash's discussion on VR latency: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/latency-the-sine-qua-n...

And also this tweet:

I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a
pixel to the screen. How f’d up is that?

- John Carmack, Id Software
OVH Canada recently had a major price increase, no more cheap servers as of a month or so ago.

Well I take that back, they still have entry level but they are very weak.

They used to have a $60 server that was usable but now it is $80, so $240 more a year, not trivial.

OVH Europe has better pricing/configurations than Canada.
World of Equal Districts
This does make me wonder about something though: is there a crashplan for a compiler? Can a very minimal gcc be written which would be capable of bootstrapping the entire gcc compiler?

It seems like it would be relevant if a new architecture was developed at least.
A belief that can be demonstrated and tested, because it is inherently an objective phenomenon is better known as a hypothesis.

A belief which has your confidence because of subjective experience that cannot be shared (i.e. if you tried to, everyone would think you were crazy) can be rationally held, though it would be irrational to think you could successfully spread this belief.

A belief which you are terrified of testing against the crucible of reality by making excuses for why there is no evidence (e.g. epiphenomenal dualism, wherein the material plane is observed by the metaphysical plane, but the metaphysical plane never acts at all with the physical plane, and the metaphysical plane not existing would look exactly the same as the metaphysical plane existing) is by definition, fucking nuts. When you are making excuses for a belief about why it should be immune to testing, you are in a very, very deep error state.
I think it's for "historical reasons" - I remember a PG article mentioning that they used to think the "breakfast" part was vital, but based on the feedback they got from users they realised that most of them didn't care about that.
If this is stylish, I don't want to have style.
They could make everything more expensive, and offer significant discount for "reserved" instance for 1 to 3 years, like Amazon does.
If it ain't broke don't f.ool yourself