skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But in fact the libertarian in me loves it - if implemented, it removes the need for vast swaths of government.

True as far as it goes. Collecting taxes and then turning around and giving the money back might be a good first step, but it should be obvious that it would be more efficient not to collect the taxes in the first place.

Some may object and say that giving money to the poor changes the social makeup of society by redistributing wealth from haves to have-nots. But that doesn't change anything, because the money given to the poor quickly finds its way to the same places it does now.
I like it, proper old-skool James Bond-esque spy antics, none of this modern NSA nonsense.
Okay, thinking further: The (open) (pad)locks you distribute also carry a seal impression. Then:

- to encrypt, the user takes a padlock of the recipient and adds it to the message.

- to decrypt, the recipient uses his key to open the lock.

- to sign something, you use your key as a seal, creating a unique impression on the message

- to check a signature, the recipient compares the impression on the message with the impression on the lock.

Does that make at least some sense?
... mathematically-testable false statements. Most hypotheses in life aren't, such as "If I become a poet, then I'll be happy."

That seems like kind of an absurd example, but thinking along those lines reveals how startlingly few hypotheses fall within the domain of science.
Arch is one. Continuous updating (never having to reinstall, nor running an LTS with 4 year old software), pretty much any software you might ever need in the official repositories or in the AUR (Arch User Repository), lots of freedom to tinker.

Updating it needs some care, since once every few months a breaking change is announced requiring some manual intervention. But that's not a problem if you subscribe to the mailing list.
3 steps:

1) Search on Google Scholar(using boolean operators)

2) Find interesting articles and read them

3) Check the references that are used in these articles. These articles might be interesting as well.

ps: We are building a tool to write academic papers: beta.bohrresearch.com
If you're in the target audience for this blog, I'll add that football itself is very enjoyable. The strategic elements of it really are game playing at its finest. The basic goal is for the offense to advance 10 yards down the field within 4 plays (inclusive). Here are videos covering formations, which are core to understanding the game:

(defense) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hgu7hExdjQ

(offense) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY7b24cv600

Also, if you have a chance, I recommend watching any football games which don't have commercials (including not going to live games which are televised) because the commercial breaks slow down the game unnaturally by about an hour. Arena football is especially fun to watch (basically a minor league and semi-pro type team with ex college-level stars playing under modified arena rules... google to find a local team) and high school football is also quite fun to watch.
One of the nicest all around behaviors I've seen is the tenacity to never give up. But, the BEST behavior I've ever seen is the same tenacity tempered with wisdom. Knowing WHEN to give up. When to ditch your approach, reverse all your changes, and go in the most efficient direction regardless of the pain involved.
>But changing to two time zones? How is that better than 4?

Jet lag for one thing. Flying from LA to NYC currently sets you back three hours. It will wreck your sleep schedule and leave you tired for three days. Change to two time zones, and it will set you back one hour instead, which is essentially the same effect DST has. You might be slightly tired, but you'll recover within a day.

Another benefit is communication. Communicating with people in different time zones is a pain, and the more time zones between you, the worse it is. With only one hour between them, you greatly increase the overlap of when people on different sides of the country are able to communicate.
No "in the future" about it... we're already seeing automated ore haulers in Australia's pit mines, for example. It's a perfect storm of a controlled, sparsely populated and dangerous environment, relatively low cost (thanks to fewer, larger vehicles, and automation costs rising slower than size), etc.
I already talked about combining an undergrad engineering degree with an MBA. I'll hire as many of those people as I possibly can.

Marc Andreessen

http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part2.html
So, is the Linux distribution market now ripe for disruption?

I wonder who out of today's major players could be the next big thing. OpenSUSE seems the closest to Ubuntu in terms of user friendliness (Linus' comments notwithstanding) due to tools like YaST [1] and a PPA-like mechanism called the openSUSE Build Server for extra prebuilt software [2]. People certainly have speculated about it online for a while but we're yet to see an exodus of Ubuntu users to openSUSE.

On a related note, a major thing Ubuntu and its derivatives have going for them is the great font rendering out of the box. I wonder why other distributions haven't yet adopted it, or the Infinality patches [3], as defaults.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaST

[2] That said, although I've been following their releases lately I haven't used a SUSE distribution as a daily driver since SUSE 9.3, so I don't know how the quality compares; any openSUSE users here that can chime in with a comment?

[3] See http://www.infinality.net/blog/.
Any elementaryOS love around here?
Wouldn't want to work with this person
I was in the bay area recently and got stuck on 101 driving from Google to GoodData in downtown SF....

It made me think that the place to start is the car pool lanes on 101.

Just close them off to humans. Instead, make them available to driverless cars with one addition -- a driverless on-top tow truck.

You drive your existing car on it. Type a destination in on your phone and press GO. It dumps you an one of several exit points.

Ideally, you'd do this with rail instead of roads but that changes it from a tech problem (mostly) for an infrastructure problem (mostly).
US is placed 51st in Life Expectancy at Birth
a) I was not exaggerating

b) All the upstream Fusion Forge generated pages, for all 1,000 projects, were being served without any HTML robots meta tags -- which, of course, is asking for

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />

and duplicate pages were being served from 4 subdomains, and the 1,000 projects also had their own web pages without any HTML robots meta tags...

In other words, googlebot was visiting alioth because alioth was repeatedly asking googlebot to visit.

Luckily I found a way for the alioth admins to take some control of the Fusion Forge generated pages, that did not require changes to Fusion Forge.

Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index...

The alioth admins were willing to ease throttling and see if asking robots not to index and not to crawl Fusion Forge pages reduced the server load.

Currently server errors for benchmarksgame subdomain are below 70% and robots.txt below 5% and the benchmarks game pages are indexed.
I have to agree. Sounds actually quite a lot of fun to sit around and think about outsmarting human behavior. Almost like a professional troll-baiting service.
Can programmers have a life? All I see about programmers these days is that good ones program 24/7? Don't they have social lives or family?

That's not a life worth living.
Having grown up in poverty I was impressed that he was able to relate fairly well given the short experiment.
I just hope they keep an eye on the games workshop stores in cheltnam and the ones near the NSA in maryland just in case Natasha with the large "sisters of battle army" is not who she seems :-)
I wrote few days ago about .net and web development. Here is my opinion: http://ema.codiceplastico.com/blog/2013/10/24/web-developers...
"I am disputing the canard that 'Android is open' "

This is because of what you define Android as.

Of course, the humorous part is that when all of this first started, Google tried very hard to make sure Android was defined in terms of what the Android Open Source Project was and had, but failed miserably here, so they gave up.
I think the objection is not "old installers shouldn't be elevated" but that making the OS decide this based on the filename of the EXE is a disappointingly kludgey (but sadly unsurprising) way to do the job.

One alternative might be to have a security framework that offered the UAC prompt when a program actually attempted to do something that required elevation. I had thought that was the way UAC actually worked.

I wouldn't be surprised, given all the details, to learn that this "check the filename" approach really was the most sensible and appropriate thing to do at the time. We could call it a matter of "path dependency" if we're feeling charitable or a matter of "painting oneself into a corner" if we're not.

What I find so fascinating and irritating at the same time, every time I hear about some bit of Windows internals like this, is that MS seems to need an exit from a corner they've painted themselves into all the time.
Only about 200 DAU (3K MAU), some are paying and the rest are on a 30-day free trial. But we do a lot of processing for each user. For example, we have a unified inbox for all your mentions and messages from all your social networks, so we pull a lot of posts on a regular basis. Our database has 3.7M records, and a total size of 15GB (8GB for data + 7GB indexes).

I expect the cost per user to go down as the percent of paying to trial users goes up. Trial users stay for 30 days, and then most of them stop. But paying users continue using it much longer. Also, there is a lot of room for optimization, which I'll get around to doing later, once the key features are in place.
Completely agree with this approach. Conferences, at least for me, are not that helpful. Grad level advanced courses are usually the best resource because other people have "filtered" interesting content and organized it into some common theme e.g, I recently took Kai Li's course on "Big Data":

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring13/cos598C...

And discovered interesting papers from conferences that I'd never otherwise look at.
Demo didn't show diff for me. (OSX Chrome)
But the actual font-combiner tool seems to be great, I can create my own font combining few fonts. Which is nice.
I have claimed to know certain things, not to have authority to speak for Google :)

These are very different things, and you should not confuse them.

As i've said before, everything i've stated about these strategies is public knowledge, and often stated by Andy Rubin himself, just not always believed :)

All i've done is basically say "believe it".
Great! typespeed on steroids! perfect music! :)
The Importance of Commutables for Concurrency
> > Why can't you just run the 16-bit emulator from 32-bit Windows in the 32-bit emulator on 64-bit Windows?

> [Because that emulator uses v86-mode, which is not supported by 64-bit processors. -Raymond]

-- http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2013/10/31/10461...
just because they go to prison doesn't mean they have to stop contributing to society. There are probably a good number of such individuals that need the chance and encouragement. Idle minds serve no one
you've never met a federal grants administrator, have you? I've met only two non-stupid ones, ever. The first was my neighbor as a child (who was a physics administrator for the NSF who had the foresight to argue to pull the SSC - because of serious problems with the site - to say the least), the second was my former boss, who quit her highly successful position in academia (long story, won't get into her reasons for doing so).

To be less flippant: There's MORE accountability. If you crowd-fund, people will criticize you publically. when was the last time you saw public comment on an NIH grants review? On a DARPA Call for Proposal? If you don't take public money, to a first approximation you get ONE chance to screw things up by dazzling people. The next time, people are more likely to be wise onto your shenanigans.

Think of it this way: Yes, there are spectacular failures on kickstarter. But yet, there are still good projects that get funded. The economic model, despite all of its naysayers, STILL works to produce good content. Think of all the video games that have successfully migrated to the platform with private micropatronage, and contrast with this: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/06/_38_...

Now, consider that this may be happening in publically funded academic science (Arsenic Life, for example).
+1 Mint. I used Ubuntu, not Debian, because things "just worked." Ubuntu over time seemed to get slower and more intrusive, so I tried out Mint. It is fast, not over complex, and things like media and devices Just Work. I'm a fan of the Cinnamon interface, although in practice I use a minimal tiling window manager like i3 or wmii.

I'm a big fan of the Debian way of doing things. Next time I have an excuse I'll try LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition.)

http://www.linuxmint.com/
http://www.postjobfree.com ~$19K/month revenue -- mostly premium subscriptions from recruiters for job advertising and resume contacts, but also job alerts, revenue from sending job applications to job network and AdSense (in declining revenue order).

If it looks inspiring, keep in mind that:

1) It's revenue, not profit.

2) PostJobFree took about 4 years part-time + 2 years full-time.

3) I'm not doing it alone.

4) I still would be better off financially if I just worked as a programmer for hire.

Startups are tough.
Well I am glad that I have managed to get someone to sign up and contribute!

I do enjoy writing with my tongue firmly in my cheek when a story is either a 'first world problem' or if it has been discussed to death many times already. Hopefully I brighten someone's day, even if scores of others mod me down!

Anyway, welcome from lurkerdom to contributordom!
For me there is a more mundane reason why I think about switching my servers over from Ubuntu to Debian.

"Graphics"

That's right. It seems that Ubutu even on servers starts some high-res console or does other stuff that causes a black screen during boot. It requires fiddling with alt-fx keys to get a console. I never had such issues with Debian.
I switched away from Debian because so many software was out-dated and an installation has max 3 years of support (Love the Ubuntu LTS versions), which I care about because I don't have a fully-automated server/service deployment environment using Ansible or something and manual reinstalling a server is a chore, especially if it's not really necessary.
Yahoo's Mayer on the Talent Hunt for Tech Journalists (Even From ATD)
You probably will get a lot of google help for embedded stuff. Treat it like psuedocode even if its C++. Not as easy as adding a open source library and using it, but much easier than replicating the theory from nothing, or even worse not knowing a problem can exist.

Did you know, that if you make a control loop running basically newton's method of approximation (more or less), it can be statically stable in continuous analysis but when you run it on real world discrete math with short-ish rounded floating point it can get squirrely and oscillatey (are those even words?) so that's why you ram the output thru a low pass filter to damp out the oscillations. Or at least that's one way to fix it.

Oh another funny one is picking a local maxima / minima that randomly happens to have a near zero derivative. From memory Newton doesn't like that very much. Another funny one is any time you have tiny rounded floats divided by other tiny rounded floats, who knows what you'll get as an answer. You can fix that by fuzzing the input first guess with some random noise. Makes your execution speed non-deterministic, but stuff is fast now a days isn't it, and its faster than doing double/quad floating point anyway, which may or may not help much.

Sure the google found some python or fortran or mathematica which on the surface is useless, but psuedocode is psuedocode and compilable fortran is a tighter syntax than any random human generated psuedocode so in some ways its better.

This is before you hit the "well, that library speaks to 16x2 LCD displays, I guess I'll have to start over from scratch because I'm using a 20x2 LCD..." Well, typically, no.

For HFT I agree, you're stuck behind layers and layers of patents and trade secrets. But embedded is not a problem to get google-type help.
The fundamental flaw in your argument, and in most of the talk of a "tech bubble", is that the environment today is being compared to prior environment.

The phrase "tech bubble", used today, is really a misnomer. Extraordinary action taken by central banks around the world in recent years has created multiple asset bubbles. Most of them are, directly and indirectly, interconnected and many are feeding off of each other. You seem to have some recognition of this when you write, "Stocks are doing well now, but so is everything else...", but it doesn't appear that you care to ask the question, "Why is everything doing so well?"

If you work or invest in technology, it's understandable that you would have a primary focus on the sector. But when evaluating the notion of a "bubble", not looking at what is taking place from 30,000 feet is like looking at a fly on an elephant's behind.
Or maybe get hired as CEO at another.
There's always Fedora, CentOS and OpenSuSE...
Great project! Web designers need absolute control over charset and font size (load), kerning, word and letter spacing, etc. Support for OpenType features [1] would be a dearly needed addition. Editing/tweaking of glyph shapes [2] would make this tool really into an in-browser font editor.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typographic_features
[2] Check nodebox.github.io/opentype.js/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6459778)
Yes the galaxy nexus a three year old phone that's, IMO, not a very good phone. My point was that just getting a nexus device isn't a very good option for a large portion of people.
If you have a passion for something, you'll want to spend every waking hour on it.

I miss the days of childhood though where I could build what I want on a whim, at large companies you don't always get to build what you want to during the times of the day they pay you.
I also moved away from Unity after about a year or so of using it (some good ideas, but too unstable for my taste), and instead of going Debian, which was my initial impulse, I decided to give Ubuntu Gnome a try. This is a Ubuntu variant that isn't talked about much, and it's still early days for them, but it shows some promise.

You basically get the same Ubuntu base you're used to with all the repositories and PPAs intact, which if we're being honest are probably second to none in the whole Linux landscape, with a pretty vanilla GNOME 3 stack.

The devs just put out a call for more contributors today (http://ubuntugnome.org/urgent-need-for-more-contributors), and I'd love to see this distro take off. I'm also interested in seeing how they'll handle the whole Mir situation.
People with these needs having a steady source of income, low as it is, is likely to drive competition to serving their needs. We might well find more innovation there.
It all sounds good, until you get to the barcodes:

> "Prisoners each have a bar code they can scan, ..."

> "When an inmate’s bar code is scanned, prison officials would be alerted that they should receive a diabetic meal, or a Halal or Kosher meal."
Thoughts that occurred to me as I read this:

1. Why were privately owned mass transit systems the norm in the first half of the 20th century, and why is that now considered "impossible" today?

2. Why is it OK for government to "monopolize mass transit", which they have done almost everywhere, but a criminal "conspiracy" when four private entities try to do it?
As much as I'd like to read more of this article, the choice of font makes it pretty unreadable.
Again, it's a distro with Ubuntu 12.04 as it's base. (I'm running it though).

I might try LMDE too.
Python: Recommended way to walk complex dictionary?
This is a bit of comparing apples and oranges since different countries judge what count's as an infant death differently (some countries don't count all infant deaths). The US counts differently than the UK or France. If you force a starting definition the rankings change.
Can we change the link to that? This is really handy.
I also had an experience of installing debian recently, and finding it 'just work' extremely well.

Especially if you have a set up (window-manager, etc) that you like and aren't searching for a new cool updated-by-other-people UI (like windows, OSX, KDE, Gnome and Unity), then debian is really quite easy to set up.
After doing a lot of listening in forums, on my email list, etc... I launched http://jfdi.bz as a response to a common pain I kept seeing: there's so many people building products by themselves (alone in their basements). They want a social connection with other folks who are doing the same thing (more here: http://jfdi.bz/guide.pdf)

Did a small launch in August. It's now just over $1,000/month in revenue. I use WPEngine to host the site. It's built mostly on the open source BuddyPress platform.
>> 7 times more than Apple (which is currently the most valuable company on the planet).

Something is missing in that sentence. The most "valuable publicly traded tech company"? Or is it another definition of valuable? or of company? At around 400bn it's less valuable than Saudi Aramco (with a value around $2 - $5 trillion USD, PetroChina (1Tn) or Pemex (also about 400bn!).

http://blogs.mccombs.utexas.edu/titman/2010/03/01/more-thoug...
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aA1jw...
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5de6ef96-8b95-11db-a61f-0000779e23...
Right but the Nexus 5 does not support Verizon's 4g network. Verizon coverage is much better in the Northeast USA (where I live), so much that even if I wanted to switch to T-Mobile (or god forbid AT&T) I doubt I could.
He dismissed just plain experience to easily. Having intuition where a customer is likely to change its mind later down the track and throwing in a factory or an interface declaration so that just a small tweak doesn't cascade into into a weeks worth of refactoring.
The history isn't that bizarre. Robert Moses simply despised anyone that wasn't rich, and spent his entire career trying to make the city even more miserable than it already was for the poor. If you're rich, you don't bike to Staten Island, plain and simple -- you drive a glorious automocar.

It's ironic because now all the rich people want to bury his highways underground.
For applications that don't need guaranteed uptime or SSDs, you can save a lot of money with EC2 spot instances. I can get an m1.large instance and 80GB of EBS storage for about $27/month; comparable specs would cost $80 from DigitalOcean.
It keeps the hipsters out of Queens and then rent stays low. Do you really need another coffee shop for people to hog up tables using wifi all day?
Monkeys open bananas from the end opposite the stem.
I'm not too surprised, the mental composure of poor people does seem different than that of non-poor human beings. They probably operate on a more basic level.

Please don't take this as offense, but it does seem logical that if you operate on limited supplies you'd go for a very primal - just survive today mode. I'm pretty sure ANY person that has no fallback to rely upon would go into same mode.

I heard that steady supply of cash does help them a lot. Like a monthly wage. That way you can say, ok if I skip this trash meal and go learn something, maybe I can live more decently.
Interesting! Plenty of room to grow considering it's iTunes-only and (anectodally) most people I know don't use iTunes... What music stores do you support? I've seen lastfm has 7digital, amazon, itunes and juno but I've never used any of them.