skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is true. Also beyond these problems, I am going to say something else.

Marketing is not the result of a few actions. It is and should be something woven into all business activities. It should be part of your email signatures, participating on social networking sites, etc. All of the little things build up and the thins which really help with building a presence.

There are legitimate marketing hacks but they don't involve tricking users. They involve living and breathing marketing, and realizing that building your business means a billion little marketing hacks, not a few big ones.
Thanks Tom :)
how does bloatware exactly increase the profit margin?
PDEs are kind compared to graphic codes. Molecular dynamics problems that are characterized by PDEs are some of the largest scaling codes - ever.
Bill Nye on DWTS
Keep in mind that many of the startups in Silicon Valley are in the business of selling stock.

So trying to "hack" metrics that appeal to investors is an entirely rational endeavor.
Reduce search by stats flexibility of the AH. Allow only one item per account. Make custom games with custom names available and browsable. Make chat channels relevant by placing everyone in one and having it take a lot of the screen estate.

You can still have the AH for one-off items, but reduce the volume by a large margin.
I am also curious- the partitioning algorithms, the visualization. Does anyone know what tools he used are, or tools to achieve similar results?
That's because startups just need a fancy shmancy CRUD UI in order to raise millions of dollars and get acquired! Who cares what happens in the backend?! Le sigh.. I agree with you.
> It's not the role of the justice system to pander to emotions.

In Oz courts, there is often a "victim impact" statement read to the court, eg a rape victim will tell the court about the negative effects the assault has had on their life (eg can no longer have sex with partner, so is now divorced; can't leave house at night so has lost job). This impact statement will be taken into consideration when sentencing, and is often directly referenced in the judge's closing statement. Eg, "the victim has experienced years of mental anguish and you show no remorse; I am therefore pronouncing the maximum allowable sentence".

So yes, the court very much does "pander" to emotions. I'd love to hear an actual lawyer chime in, the ones I've talked to have a very strong code of professional ethics surrounding this (believe it or not.)
Your questions are interesting, because (outside of the startup world) they are based on sound logic. The basic rules of expected value don't apply to startups, because the present value is not a good predictor of future value. Some people are good at predicting the outcome (success vs failure), but nobody can get the number right ($10m vs $1b). Any investor who lets marginal changes in valuation influence his decision is essentially calculating a probability using a random number.
New potential for touch screens found at your fingertips
Speaking as a 39 year old developer curmudgeon who routinely downloads new apps: I am not going to click around and discover your interface if it isn't obvious in the first few minutes.

As an example, the new flat google maps app is a disaster. It took me weeks to figure out how to do fairly simple things, like how to cancel turn by turn directions. My wife is totally lost, as a long time iphone 4 user trying to use the flat iphone 5 version. When she tries to navigate while I am driving, she is constantly confused while I say, "no! just swipe down hard enough that the app thinks you are going back, then click on the box, then click the x, then swipe up, and stand on your left foot!"

But we have to have a map, so we use it.

As a startup, this is what you should think about: Is your app as useful as google maps? If not, then you can't afford to make it unusable with a trendy flat interface.
Imagine a violent crime: A person takes some medical drug which this time causes a psychotic break wherein he kills a store clerk. How long should he be locked up? Clearly he's pretty much "rehabilitated" as soon as he's of the drug.
It kind of reminds me of a bluffing strategy I've used in poker. If you can guess your opponent's hand, you can bet just enough to make the pot odds just under their odds of winning, so that the rational thing for them to do (assuming they don't know you're bluffing) is to fold, while exposing yourself to minimal risk. A converse strategy works for getting people to call when you know that you have them beat. (There's probably a name for these like "three eyed street corner" or "popping the collar" or something, but I kind of lost patience with reading up on poker strategy).
The issue then would be deterrence, it would you could try your luck, in which case you could win really big, but if it didn't work out it wouldn't really matter because you wouldn't have lost anything that you had in the first place.
In my opinion a more important effect of this is that the lower class children do not become role models for the other children.
I read nudeschool.io haha
The way themes have worked historically is that the application isn't consulted.
I also think that video games give you small victories and and sense of achievement, and failure can be undone. It's a good (albeit unrealistic) type of positive reinforcement that keeps me from getting too hard on myself.
I would say that the context of the sentence ("is a gift") makes it clear that he is talking about biological predisposition to intelligence - for example, working memory size, and not, say, whether you've spent lots of time doing interesting things and learning useful information.
>Reduce search by stats flexibility of the AH.

Why would you intentionally cripple your UI unless you just wanted to frustrate your users?
From Wikipedia:

Modularity is one measure of the structure of networks or graphs. It was designed to measure the strength of division of a network into modules (also called groups, clusters or communities). Networks with high modularity have dense connections between the nodes within modules but sparse connections between nodes in different modules. Modularity is often used in optimization methods for detecting community structure in networks. However, it has been shown that modularity suffers a resolution limit and, therefore, it is unable to detect small communities. Biological networks, including animal brains, exhibit a high degree of modularity. A 2013 paper shows that modularity in biological networks may have evolved due to selection pressures to reduce connection costs.

Paper on Modularity Maximization algo to identify communities in graph is at http://www-scf.usc.edu/~gaurava/modularity.pdf

There are many other ways to cluster the graph.
I plan to :) I got a little bit caught up in the older-school graphic style, big chunky HUDs and whatnot, but I think I'm really only a few hours from the end. I plan to finish it real soon.

I also watch tv with my wife regularly. I'm a fan of many, many good shows.
If you ask me, they should raise prices on the MRT during rush hour, instead of just lowering prices in early the morning.

But that's just me. The normal price to get to work on the MRT is less than 1 USD. So the difference between that and free isn't worth it for me to alter my schedule. Less well off people might be more influenced, and raising prices might be politically infeasible. (And I usually ride my bicycle to work anyway.)
Oh God, flashes of Contact. Wow, can't find a single relevant screenshot on Google. I'll have to make some tonight.
The political flip-flopper is I think more scorned for flipping or trying to play both sides of issues that are more matters of principle than simply changing a position based on new evidence. I have much more respect for a politician who sticks to principles, even if I don't agree with them, than I do one who tries to have it both ways depending on who he's talking to.

("He" can be used with gender-neutral intent. I dislike using the plural "they" for this purpose.)
Portal and Portal 2 are both great games! Loved em both in every way.
Honestly, not a huge fan of newmaps, and I'm a googler. But most people I know have figured out how to use it. I did too after playing with it for a bit. People will figure things out, especially if there are no non-flat alternatives.
Dividends are far from the only way you can realize value as a buy-and-hold investor with infinite patience. For example, the company might be acquired in a cash-for-stock deal. (I don't hold my Microsoft shares in the hopes that someday Google or Apple will just swallow them for old time's sake, but hey, stranger things will happen as time goes to infinity.)

This means that even if your stock of choice never distributes dividends, it is essentially a non-expiring call option on participation in an eventual sale.
This looks like a great resource. Are there any other links people can suggest along the same lines? I know of Codeschool and Codeacademy so far.
The number take-away from this for me is wow, Apple wields an awesome power. They move to change design conventions, and boom! - a worldwide ecosystem of designers and developers scramble to retrofit every aspect of their complex applications to match the changes. Microsoft could only dream of having that power. I've been on Windows Phone for over a year now and at this point in time they seem years away from even having anything resembling this sort of following. The difference of course is that one phone feels exciting and dynamic to own, and the other feels completely and utterly barren.
Thanks, I do remember that. There is the problem though of those apps which use a dark theme, that therefore become light upon negative view. Hence, why I'd prefer a single theme enforced.
Peter Thiel (via Blake Masters) has a good discussion about this: http://blakemasters.com/post/21869934240/peter-thiels-cs183-...

Excerpt: "To a first approximation, a VC portfolio will only make money if your best company investment ends up being worth more than your whole fund." This is the big hit, and VC's are trying to optimize their chances of getting one of these. That's different from trying to precisely calculate expected return. As long as you've found it, it won't matter if you paid a bit too much.
The more you know the more you know how much you don't know.
I know what you mean. I did more or less retire from video games for a while until a few solid ones brought me back. Honestly, everything Naughty Dog released is incredible. The Unchartered series and The Last of Us are absolute masterpieces in storytelling and immersion. I love my PS3 :)
$250 for a PS3, 4 controllers, and 25 games wasn't a bundle I found on Amazon :)
Ask a grown-up: does my cat Oscar know he's a cat?
Well hey there Kenny! I'm definitely gonna check out your podcast. I see Joel and Ellie there on the homepage so I definitely need to see what that's all about.
Why not just give the blind (or anybody deserving) money, and leave them free to decide how they want to spend it?
I was skeptical to click this but it's piqued my interest. If it continues as cogently as it began, then the author has my congratulations: it's said that if you truly understand something, you can explain it eloquently to others.
Honest question:

How do you write so much JS code? (i.e. editor, testing, debugging, running, dev environment, etc.)

Thank you.
Absolutely true. Video games do it for me (I also hit the gym a few times a week, watch tv, play board games, etc), but they're certainly not a silver bullet. They just happen to intersect many points of entertainment and self-involvement, which makes them pretty ideal for clearing your head and winding down.
I'm working on a side project (kind of on the backburner) JS library to drive progress bars based on perceptual tricks like these, and using estimates instead of actual progress monitoring (linear regression will be used to adjust the estimates over time), and this is certainly good data to have for that.
I do love hitting the gym as well. I usually go right before lunch :)
That was pretty cool. Also, Tapestry is insanely cool!
It's pure political framing.

If the DMCA can be construed as preventing unlocking, then you can build a political coalition to repeal that part of the DMCA.

If cell phones are not locked then there is no political motive and when you go on TV as someone who is against that portion of the DMCA you're framed as a Blu-ray thief. If you can reframe it around cellphone unlocking then you're a hero.

Cellphones are viewed as a very personal device and long term contracts / locked phones are viewed as a restriction on freedom. If you can make it about freedom then you can get Americans on board.
Holy crap! The author and I are on the exact same page. I reached crazy levels of burnout over a year ago, and I found out that the only thing that could take my mind off of my work was fast paced shooters, namely UT99. Little did I know, becoming an integral part of the old UT99 community (see globalunreal.com) has actually improved my ability to code tenfold while giving me some pretty invaluable team-building/management experience.
I think the real issue here is PayPal. I just opened an OVH account not that long ago and was surprised they only accept PayPal in Canada and USA.

So I opened a business PayPal account even though I have no intention of becoming a "paypal merchant". To my surprise, PayPal holds the money 8-10 days. Excellent.

It took about 20 days to get the payment through, so at least they started the billing cycle from that point.

Having heard so many PayPal horror stories I would not be surprised if they got screwed over somehow.
I agree with you actually, but this quote was just too apt to miss.
The Death of the Windows Desktop
>An executive bound to enforce the law would result in more citizen/legislative/lobbying effort directed toward implementing better laws and fixing those that were broken or out of date.

Or, the executive could choose not to enforce those laws (and screw people's lives over in the process) and take the initiative to scrub them from the books by introducing bills, etc. But you're right. Politicians are not usually decent people, and it's unreasonable to expect them to not play politics with people's lives.
There is nothing in politics that isn't a PR move.
10 free HTML5 Game Engines/Frameworks
Same here.

Often it's this: http://xkcd.com/386/
Will Microsoft turn off the Windows XP activation servers after support ends?
So true, eventually I could see a suit being filed that removing some crappy software is creating a derivative work.
Oh yeah, I was aware of those but hadn't kept up with them and forgot to check on that when posting my comment. Nice that they've kept up with OS releases, although they seem to still be a bit hit-and-miss as to whether they support a given OS release and iPhone model.
>It is not a tool designed or intended to be used to break the law

Isn't it though? If you use Tor to bypass an internet filter somewhere like China, are you not breaking the law there?
Oh, sorry, I thought this was the Unlocking Technology Act. All clear now, and agreed, it would make more sense to let that go than merely the proposed unlocking exception.
> Reducing contrast is really a problem in my opinion for users.

The most terrifying example, in my opinion, is the team selector on the InfiniteHoops app. It keeps the skeumorphic 3-dimensionality of the old selector, but strips out all of the color and context and makes the text hard to read, turning the whole thing into a real mess.
Syrian rebels are using iPads to guide mortar shells
A self-driving car would be able to provide a lot more information about how the accident happened.
This would probably except a lot of accident since they could prove that what they did was (mostly) correct, and it was either the other drivers' fault or something outside of their control.
Any accident this wouldn't cover, would undergo a lot of scrutiny, more like how airplane crashes are, than car crashes are today. And they would be able to fix it. Which would be a pretty good argument for self-driving cars.
I agree with the GAAP rules, but the GAAP rules require < 90 day instruments. The complexity of rolling $140B every 90 days is insane. You are going to have days where there just isn't enough liquidity.

They are basically managing $100B in house rather than getting screwed by banks every 90 days. GAAP is right, Apple is also right, but saying they only have $40B in cash, is very misleading. They could return $100B to shareholders in 6 months with ease.
I don't know much about RAID and other systems, but does anything other than ZFS read data from disk, determine that it was corrupt, go to another disk and get the same data and verify that the hash is good and then automatically fix the corrupt data? That seems like a killer feature to me.
You'd have to make a network call for each x,y coordinate you test in that case.
The japanese Twitter community as a whole is actually really big. I believe Twitter has most of its users in Japan.
You don't have kids, do you?

I have not played anything but short streaks of casual games since the infancy of my first, maybe with the exception of 2011/12 winter break, when I snatched a $0 deal on Broken Sword reissued for iPad and played for several days in a row, which was very recreational indeed.
This article could just well be titled "Why I have a hobby/life".

Gaming, for better or for worse, represents a very low-barrier-to-entry sort of activity, where in fact good design intentionally structures games in a way to provide a gratifying learning curve and risk/reward. Yet I feel at some point in time we need to consider opportunity cost and externalities:

-Assuming that I have finite time and I derive similar amounts of joy playing video games and tabletop games, do I spend time grouping with old college roomies on Halo and shoot aliens, or do I try to coordinate a time with 4 other busy professionals, drive across town, grab some snacks, and roleplay some Call of Cthulhu on a weekly basis? Or maybe I hang out with some buddies at TechShop and we build a robot that uses facial recognition to launch whiskey shots at people?

-If I wanted to enjoy a narrative, do I allocate three hours, send an FB blast for movie buddies, and spend $15 sitting in a dark room with others watching a common story, or do I allocate 20-30 hours over a few days to experience the story of GTA V? Or do I pick up a book and spend a day to let my imagination take me to Westeros or Battle School?

-If I wanted to enjoy some music, do I play some Guitar Hero and press some controller buttons? Or join a structured choir? Or pick up some social dancing (a co-op music game with a social externality, essentially)?

I think gaming is FANTASTIC as an efficient way to get quick jollies, with a low barrier to entry as well as high skill requirement for advanced levels; MOBAs such as League of Legends or shooters such as Call of Duty come to mind for "gaming as a skill". However, I do think other activities such as swimming, cooking, biking, amongst others, provide different externalities. And for some people these things are just better in the long run.

PS -- I've had a long history of gaming since the NES came out and love it. It's just that personally I find it harder to manage and regulate my gaming consumption (attention span and time are the main caps) vs other activities, and I also feel that I've had less to show for as a gamer of twenty years (did the semipro Starcraft thing for a bit but not much more) than as a concert violinist of ten, or salsa dancer for five; so on and so forth.

That being said, the analytical mindset of optimizing resources given victory conditions in games probably was the main reason how I ended up being a data scientist. I feel strongly that a positive way to direct our "fun" towards something productive is powerful for individuals and beautiful for a society... but that's a later step in our happiness, and for a different conversation.
It's also easy for him to say since he was successful. I know a fair number of people who tried "this thing called the internet" at about the same time and had their asses handed to them a few years later. Most don't actually say they regret it, but more than a few were burned badly enough to not try it again.
The NSA’s global spying operation in one map
> "He" can be used with gender-neutral intent.

Um, no it can't.
Yes, all 7MB... The image is a compiled to target the OR cpu.

But the impressive partbis the emulator itself... The emulator is a full SoC in javascript, based on the OpenRISC instruction set.
Should I buy LED or CFL light bulbs?
Great idea. As a native Memphian, I am a little disappointed they offer Rendezvous, one of the worst BBQ joints in Memphis. Though it is the most popular tourist trap so there is a reason why it is offered.
I did something funny like that a few years back trying to apply textures to roads for a game on top of the map. I normalized all the road colors to make it easy to pick out, then drew the texture on them with canvas (my memory is a little hazy here). It worked well, surprisingly.
Personally, a bigger deal for me would be if they required the carriers to go to move to a "pay to send" for text messages. I hate it that someone else can force me to incur a charge for unwanted text messages.
I wrote a little backend section in C once to do a FFT on some data and it ended up being 7 times faster or so than the perl the rest of the backed was written in. It made sense there.

Developing a whole CRUD app in C however? Seems like it would feel like digging a swimming pool with a spoon.
You can call your site The Archive Republic.
Importance of code indentation
King County Metro definitely has peak and non-peak fares. I don't think that's all that unusual.

Also, it's not a mass transit system, but the 520 Toll Bridge in Seattle uses this to price tolls. It was the first time I'd seen this, but perhaps there are other places where tolls operate similarly?
Hmmm. I run NTFS and truecrypt on top of raidz zpool allocations (zvols, virtual block devices) all the time, block storage doled out over iSCSI from my ageing Nexenta box.

I do think you're too quickly dismissing the advantages of the fs being aware of the underlying block storage provider, to the point of being able to grow elastically from common storage rather than preallocate at partition time.

I'd much rather the whole md layer be replaced by zpool even if zfs itself is not used.
Is it the investors, or entrepreneurs that are afraid of failure? Folks like to have "Sold to X" on their LinkedIn profile.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/investment-thesis.asp

Note that this seems not incompatible with 001sky's notion of vagueness above.
And a lot of software companies with a "software" background have trouble writing software to control safety-critical hardware.
3 Biggest Surprises in Transition from the Corporate to the Startup World
An on-topic question: what software was used to create the network visualisations in this presentation?
I'll buy that.
Is that like buying a newspaper at one coffee shop and reading it at another?

Sounds dangerous.
Might anyone looking for a speedup akin to C do better to look at Go instead?
Do note that Microsoft has an ongoing $40 billion share repurchase program that's ending in two weeks.

So they're just renewing the buybacks with another $40 billion. It would actually have been a bigger deal if Microsoft had allowed the program to expire without a replacement.

From Microsoft's annual report for fiscal year 2013:

> "On September 22, 2008, we announced that our Board of Directors approved a new share repurchase program authorizing up to $40.0 billion in share repurchases with an expiration date of September 30, 2013. As of June 30, 2013, approximately $3.6 billion remained of the $40.0 billion approved repurchase amount."

And the 2008 buyback program was, in turn, a continuation of the 2004 buyback program.
Also, bears can swim.
A lot of embedded systems have web configuration interfaces written in C. For example, your wireless router's configuration page is probably written in C.