skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple may make some minuscule amount. Facebook and Google cannot survive without selling your personal data. It is beyond ethics, it is their entire business plan. If it makes you feel better to believe Apple is just as bad with your data go ahead.
This is the best game I've ever found on the front page of HN! Absolute awesomeness.
There's a lot that can be done. The most obvious thing to do is remove rent control and zoning restrictions and push for the construction of higher buildings with more units. Stop living in the past and pretending it's a quaint coastal town.

San Francisco is statistically the second most dense city in the US, wedged into a geographically bounded ~50 sq miles. It's dumbfounding that there were probably more high rise apartment buildings (>20 stories) in my zip code back in NY than in all of SF.
I just bought a house in Berkeley. I wanted to buy a condo in SF, but for the same price of a 2 bedroom condo in SF with 1200 sqft I could buy a house in berkeley with 6700sq ft lot size with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and a huge backyard all to myself. Even if I had all the money in the world, I'll buy rather buy a house in berkeley over a condo in SF.
There are plenty of restaurants around berkeley, and many places to hang out. The only thing I'm missing out if I live in Berkeley is all the awesome tech events in SF.
You can wiki-edit any SO answer (with low karma it's queued for approval before being shown), unfortunately it looks like something in the culture or UI prevents this from being common.
The science interview: Jared Diamond
heh, no worries. thanks for the link.
I think these are good arguments, but that said, the market mechanisms at most companies today are relatively weak.

Just because the organization exists within a market, doesn't mean that the organization itself acts like a market. I think the reality of companies today is much more like benevolent dictatorships than anything else.
Wow, that's great...this is exactly how I feel. In the last year, I spent much less time thinking about the cool projects I wanted to build, and much more time learning all the things I've skipped: testing frameworks, devops, command-line toolsets...even just how to properly organize a codebase.

It's been far, far more rewarding...Projects that I wanted to do a year ago seem so trivial now...I can't overstate how much of an impact making the development process easier and less of a strain on your real life can really pay off...being able to accomplish bigger goals with better results ends up being a very nice side effect
Ask HN: science grad student here, how can I prepare for a career in industry?
Hi HN, I'm a regular here, posting on a throwaway for privacy.

I'm currently pursuing a doctorate in the life sciences. Originally I planned on pursuing the tenure-track path, but my experiences and the realities of the job market have caused me to reconsider. I do a lot of software development and statistics as part of my research, and I think a career combining data analysis and software development (a so-called "data science" job) would be very interesting and suited to my strengths.

I have an active GitHub account (and am a somewhat regular poster here) with projects in half a dozen languages and a decent math/stats background. I've contributed code to a couple major Python libraries. But, I have no real work experience outside of academia to speak of.

I'll be graduating in about 2-3 years. In the meantime, what should I be doing as a graduate student to improve my ability to land such a position upon graduating?
You have a very stilted view of neighborhoods here. There's nothing at all cartoonish about any part of the city. Well, Fisherman's Warf, I'll grant you that one. That's as typical a tourist trap as any.
Skipping the WebKit cache
A couple of minor nits:

- is_int? is rather misleading (I would not expect is_int?(1.2) to be true)

- Since Ruby ints are truthy, the idiomatic form would probably just return Integer(x) and false or nil otherwise:

def is_int?(x)
Integer(x) rescue false
end
Nope, numpy needs libblas and scipy needs libatlas, both of which have to installed from the system package manager. I slap my forehead every time I move to a new system and find that the pip install in the virtualenv failed.
Conversely, I enjoy learning to do things, and after that magic has worn off I get bored.

Written enough code to put a 3D texture mapped model on the screen? That's enough for me.

Finally made a perfect batch of eclairs? I won't make any more.
"The most hopeful thing I can say, in fact, is that we may naturally be running out of feasible drug candidates, so maybe it doesn’t matter much."

I'd hate to have the mental-state that regarded such a situation as 'the most hopeful thing I can say'. Is almost as though the author has been briefed that higher prices are the aim here.

Also, if you look at research money on the diseases that affect the most people, it is mostly not coming from big-pharma anyway, but rather from state backed research, much of it from the countries that the author reckons are raising US drug prices. Personally, I suspect that the main reason for high drug prices in the US is actually having such a massive army of middlemen who do not have interests aligned with the patient, but that is only a guess.
It's not - but the resource & labour cost of printing a $100 bill is many orders of magnitude different from the resources and labour you can buy with said $100 bill. (Never mind that a lot more money exists electronically, then physically.)

If that were the case with BTC, nobody would be mining it.

Is there value in maintaining safe money stores and transaction integrity? Yes. Is that value the same as the value of all outstanding currency in the world? For anything but BTC, the answer is 'Hell, no!'.
ggplot2 may be influenced by Tufte, but the main influence is Leland Wilkinson's grammar of graphics. In fact, that is what the 'gg' in the name stands for.

The grammar of graphics approach attempts to identify the components of a graphic so we can specify them in a high level, abstract manner. This is also why the syntax is so unusual compared to most plotting libraries. (Grammar of graphics also deeply influenced protovis and D3.js.)

I've found learning the basics of ggplot2 to be a great investment in my productivity at data analysis. Basically you get to say "make a plot; x-axis is page views and y-axis is time and make it a bar plot with bars grouped and colored by user age" and you get something that looks great.

(edited to fix minor autocomplete typo.)
My wife and I are blessed to be bottom-end 1%-ers, and even we could not afford to live in SF, so we moved down into the peninsula. Well, we might be able to afford it if we got a crippling mortgage, but then we couldn't afford day care for our kids, and the 1hr+ commutes would have wreaked havoc on our lives.

You can't raise a family in SF without making enough money to afford a $1.4M house, and spending $2000/month on private school per kid because the SF schools have become really horrible (due to SF political stupidity).
All of these arguments for success implicitly appeal to our fear that we are not going to be able to have a good human experience if we don't have enough power over other people.

You can succeed and you can fail, but you cannot be a success or a failure. The entire problem is identifying too strongly with the outcome of your actions.

Incidentally, if you really commit to this worldview, then traditional motivators like guilt and money stop working. The transition period can be difficult; it's usually the crux of a mid-life crisis.
What I like best about this is that it lends itself to 3rd-person vantage views, and static fields (overlooking a map, looking into a box, etc) which tend to be more comfortable AR & VR than trying to track/render a first person view (oculus rift) at 60 fps == less "VR sickness".
I liked the article.

But the irony is that if he had written the exact same thing prior to achieving success with Dilbert it would mean absolutely nothing to the masses and hardly be taken seriously at all. But yet I'm sure he would admit that Dilbert succeeding was total luck after so many "failures".

There are many people who are successful with many good things to say but nobody would ever take anything they say seriously before that lucky event (by that I mean on a wide scale basis I'm not saying that an individual might not listen to another offering some good advice.)
This is interesting, because it appears that they just took a 15 Tbps technology and used 7 of them at once to get 100 Tbps. As in, they could have used 70 of them at once and achieved 1 petabit per second.

I imagine that in either case, they're using multiple computers to do the transmitting and receiving.
I don't understand how people would stay at a low-paying or (what I see as) non-fulfulling job for very long. Don't these people want to grow? Aren't the curious as to what else is out there? Forget the chances for more pay, benefits, etc.
I just turned down an offer at Apple because, even with the (by any other standards) generous salary and options, the cost of housing just doesn't leave any room for saving for college, retirement, no less owning a home.
Well, that seemed to me that they're rather looking for senior engineer :) who is a senior engineer after all?
They want to have a new team player.
No. What you are missing is that there was a one-time window of opportunity for attackers due to the ASIC tech not having been deployed on the Bitcoin network 10 months ago. But now that the network is rapidly adopting ASICs, the network speed has been doubling every month for the last 10 months, so this window is quickly closing...

For example, if an attacker wanted to attack Bitcoin, they would have to get funding today, develop or acquire an ASIC design, build and develop a ~150 meggawatt datacenter, all within the next 6 months, to have a chance to attack the network.

Details: at 2.2 Phash/s today, 6 months from now we should be around 2.2 * 2^6 = ~150 Phash/s. The best ASICs, 28nm KncMiner, are approximately 100 ~Ghash/s and 100 Watt each. So the attacker would have to build 150 Phash/s of these to clearly outperform the network: that is 1.5 million chips at 150 meggawatt total. And to plan for a potential delay of 30 days, the attacker would have to build not 150 Phash/s but 300 Phash/s of ASICs to attack the network. 3 million chips. 300 meggawatt datacenter. For comparison, Facebook spent $210 million on their 28 meggawatt Prinevill datacenter. So a 300 meggawatt datacenter would probably cost $2 billion. Therefore I doubt such an attack against Bitcoin would be even within NSA's capabilities. They can't even get their Utah datacenter to run correctly and it has been delayed by more than 1 year: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2052960/nsa-data-center-suffe...
Uh, yeah.

SF may have crime but its nowhere near the danger level of oakland. IIRC, SF isnt even on the "top 100 most dangerous cities" list, but oakland usually is in the top 5.

So, yes- Big difference. 10x higher chance to get murdered in oakland than SF.
Fail fast to learn fast
Because then he might accidentally say something he would have to defend.
This is very close to the "percolation problem." [0]

According to Robert Sedgewick, this particular problem has no known mathematical solution, and the threshold (for a given N) is only obtained through, e.g. a Monte Carlo simulations where you randomly open sites until the grid percolates (akin to the adding of threads). The whole thing is a good application of the union find algorithm.

The threshhold for N > 2 is about 60%. Not sure how that applies to software complexity, but it's interesting to think about.

Thanks, Coursera!

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation_threshold
Cheap everything, including drugs, is the value that free markets are supposed to create, to lead to the cheapest - and patents aren't supportive of this. Regarding people who say this research and discoveries wouldn't have happened without ability to patent - there are plenty of researchers, many, if not the majority, who do their work because they want to help people and the field interests them - so if they have their living costs taken care of, and access to the tools they need, they'll be happy and the research would be discovered. The U.S. pushed on the capitalist system to the extremes, and it leads to the acceleration of innovation - though we have enough basic science and technology figured out now, where we should be focusing on taking care of people properly, which we're currently doing a poor job of - doing a good job is where free market value is supposed to lead. Free market capitalism, without protectionism (no longer free market - a popular term hijacked by those in control), leads to the cost of production getting as close to the next unit of production being $0. If something is $0 then everyone can benefit from it. This is why the internet is so valuable, invaluable, and hugely important in the world's progression. If you have an internet connection, then the cost of acquiring the benefit from software created or receiving information is basically $0. Right now though the positive benefits of unchecked capitalism don't outweigh the negative effects that it also generates, fosters. Without patents and the such then the world would benefit in the same way - everyone can very cheaply benefit from software. The problem is many countries have aligned themselves with being in a controlling state, to use leverage for short-term gain - though it is only temporary, and only lasts so long as you maintain control - and control is costly. If the whole world was fitting the bill for new research, the cost to each of us would be practically $0; I won't go deep into the idea that money isn't real either, and that if we were all in service to everyone else, then everyone would be very well taken care of - we're not born into this construct so it's very hard for most people to visualize this experience of living this way, or to feel safe and secure.
Pumped-storage Hydro is a solution for storing power that is generation-method agnostic; it works with electricity from nuclear just as well as it works with electricity from wind. Basically the PSH station buys cheap electricity, and uses it to pump water up a hill into a reservoir. When electricity becomes expensive, it reverses the flow, generates electricity with the falling water, and sells it to the grid for a profit. These setups can switch to power generation rather quickly.

The only problem is that you need suitable geography. It's a bit more forgiving than finding proper geography for regular hydroelectric, but it is still a restriction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
Transitive closure and connected components are not expressible in first-order logic, but maybe you are thinking of Fagin's 0-1 law for finite relational models[1]:

For a given first-order sentence s, as n -> infinity, the fraction of models of cardinality n that satisfy s approaches either 0 or 1.

[1] http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-fagin/t...
Something I was looking for for a time! For now I used html-mode with mmm-mode (to encode largish javascript chunks in javascript mode.) Looks like I won't be needing it anymore
For those that love this topic, xxhash[1] has a SMHasher score of 10[2] and is ~2x as fast as MurMur3 -- really interesting, incredibly fast, high quality hash function.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/xxhash
[2] https://code.google.com/p/xxhash/wiki/xxh32
Deploy a package, not just a tag, branch or binary
Completely agreed. This is one of the main points I made in the original reply (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6547517).
Yeah, the problem is, no matter how good you are at doing something, there is somebody somewhere who is just as good or maybe better at the same thing, and he or she likes it. That person will kick your ass if you follow Scott Adams's advice.

(Advice that he apparently learned from an anonymous lending officer at a bank that isn't around anymore: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocker_National_Bank)
This is exactly the problem. If people stop thinking of SF as its own city and rather just an expensive neighborhood in the larger "city" of the Bay Area, they wouldn't clamor so much about high costs. It's the lack of good transit connecting all these scattered neighborhoods that is the main problem.
> On the other hand, Dilbert started out as just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try. When it started to look as if it might be a success, my passion for cartooning increased because I realized it could be my golden ticket. In hindsight, it looks as if the projects that I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success.
>
> So forget about passion. And while you're at it, forget about goals, too.

This is the generalized version of: "It's not the ideas, it's the execution". And I have to say, I agree. It's not that ideas don't matter...but unless you already have some amazing foundation of wealth or opportunity, you need a good process to get to the point where reaching your idea is feasible.
Matplotlib depends on freetype, libpng, and libjpeg as well. Numpy can be built without any external dependencies, but it will be a very slow installation. You're better off with an accelerated BLAS library (e.g. ATLAS/MKL/etc) and some sort of LAPACK library. Some of numpy's functionality also needs a fortran compiler to build. At any rate, there are other system dependencies beyond a basic compiler and the header files for python.
Having gone to business school, and having worked for well-known tech companies, I can assure you that there is approximately zero overlap between what you learn in Organizational Behavior class and what is practiced in real companies by imperfectly human managers.

It's not really productive to say "everyone is incompetent." It's more productive to figure out how to manage your own career in an imperfect world.
I cannot play Source Engine games even on my regular display because i get motion sickness, but other games are fine. None of the settings I tried helps (FOV, resolution, refresh rate, VSync). I wonder if trying Oculus would make it worse or better.
Mit dem SEOkanzler zur Brotzeit
SF and the bay area have an anti-development attitude in general, leading to a predictable supply shortage and thus the crazy rents you have now.

This is how you solve it:

1. Allow development, stop getting in the way.

2. Create punitive pigovian long term unused property taxes to encourage property use. Stop land owners from letting property just sit there unused and discourage using property just as a fancy bank account for the wealthy.
There's interesting technical content here, but it suffers from its alarmist tone.

The MD5 hash function is broken, that is true. However, TLS doesn't use MD5 in its raw form; it uses variants of HMAC-MD5, which applies the hash function twice, with two different padding constants with high Hamming distances (put differently, it tries to synthesize two distinct hash functions, MD5-IPAD and MD5-OPAD, and apply them both). Nobody would recommend HMAC-MD5 for use in a new system, but it has not been broken.

RC4 is horribly broken, and is horribly broken in ways that are meaningful to TLS. But the magnitude of RC4's brokenness wasn't appreciated until last year, and up until then, RC4 was a common recommendation for resolving both the SSL3/TLS1.0 BEAST attack and the TLS "Lucky 13" M-t-E attack. That's because RC4 is the only widely-supported stream cipher in TLS. Moreover, RC4 was considered the most computationally efficient way to get TLS deployed, which 5-6 years ago might have been make-or-break for some TLS deployments.

You should worry about RC4 in TLS --- but not that much: the attack is noisy and extremely time consuming. You should not be alarmed by MD5 in TLS, although getting rid of it is one of many good reasons to drive adoption of TLS 1.2.
You'd have to expand on whats absurd about it. If food is a hot button for you, lets take it to a new area. How bout cars?

I recently bought a cheap little commuter car for about $15K. I could have bought a much fancier car for $30K but why waste the money to show off my wealth to people on the interstate whom I don't care about? Besides I'm pretty well off but I can find plenty of fun things to spend $15K on and a fancier car doesn't quite make the top 100 or so.

Can you make a reasonable argument, that given the same manufacturer and roughly the same workers that the $30K car wouldn't by definition cause about twice the environmental damage as its constructed as the $15K car? I think thats an epic engineering fail.

Now lets say I bought a 4WD all terrain $40K pork-mobile commuter instead of a green (paint) $100K quinoa-SUV... I'm sure the planet would be trashed about 2.5 times worse by the SUV than my glorified golf cart. Now then lets step back into the world of farmers and their products...
Capability Myths Demolished [2003]
the google translation of that quote is pretty funny:

"Democracy does not end for us to plant fences"

I think it's important to consider the rights of the owner as well. If I am a captain on a fishing boat, and I built/paid for the boat, I can then hire fisherman to work on my boat. There are more fishermen than captains, if there is a disagreement between the fishermen and the captain regarding where they should be fishing and it was up to a vote, the fishermen would win.

What incentive does the captain have to invest in his own boat if he has no control over where it goes or how it is run?

Why don't the fisherman go build their own boat if they don't like where the captain is fishing?

The majority in this example microdemocracy is effectively stealing the boat from the owner by using the force of the 'state' to reallocate his resources to themselves.
" I've worked on projects that I've not been passionate about ..... and I always end up throwing in the towel and moving on"

I've been there. And I have to say you'd be surprised how passionate you get when you get reinforced with money and something works. My guess is that had some of the projects you worked on hit in a satisfying way you would have found great joy and that would have made you more passionate.
I promise you the level of state-backed research for pharmaceuticals is much higher in the US than it is from "the countries that the author reckons are raising US drug prices." I would, however, be the first to tell you that throwing money at drug development is not a solution to good drug development, and may be counterproductive beyond a certain point.
Ask HN: What Are Some Things I Can Do To Help My Startup Be Successful? 
I'm a first time startup founder. I've been doing the "work for myself" thing for the last decade... finally stopped doing "me-too" sites and rolled up the sleeves to build something that doesn't exist.

I'm a horrible marketer and I don't have deep pockets. For the record, my startup is a hobby marketplace. Overcoming the chicken and egg scenario with bounties and incentives placed on listing "wanted" items, leverage special relationships not available to the general public of collectors... essentially focusing on bringing liquidity to markets where it traditionally has not existed.

My space is one where the light from the Techcrunch's of the world doesn't shine. I really don't have the opportunity that many of the tech startups do.
This. Transportation in the bay area is awful. I lived in San Jose and it would take me 2+ hours to get to SF by public transit, even at peak times. If I was in SF after midnight, I was literally stuck for the night. One time I had to take an airport SuperShuttle back to SJC just to get anywhere near my apt. because I tried to leave SF at 11pm on a Sunday. I can't even imagine what would happen if it was that hard to get between Newark and NYC.