skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Internet didn't kill the video store, Blockbuster killed itself at the dawn of DVD. When DVD was coming out as a new format, Blockbuster got greedy and when the movie industry wanted the same profit sharing deal, Blockbuster was the #1 revenue source for Hollywood, so Blockbuster wanted a better deal.

Major movie studios decided to then make better wholesale deals with Wal-Mart driving the price of movies down from $20+ to $5-15. At the same time renting a movie from Blockbuster was in the $3-5 range and Blockbuster famously made a ton of money with late fees. Within a few years Wal-Mart was Hollywood's #1 revenue source.

Basically, Blockbuster had a near monopoly and used it to piss off both their suppliers and customers. Over time, Netflix, Redbox, and others have taken business from Blockbuster, but most of that was Blockbuster pissing it away more than it is the internet "disrupting" Blockbuster.

Blockbuster is a case of self-sabotage.
More detailed story, with some photos and video: http://richmondsfblog.com/2013/11/06/part-of-internet-archiv...
seeing this from an onshore perspective of an IT company - it's really not about "solving every problem by hiring people being an Indian mentality" - it's actually a caveat of the way the IT Services industry works. IT companies are at the end of the day more or less commodity traders. what is the commodity? Skilled (arguably) labour. The more you sell - the more you make - I've seen companies sell x+50% heads for a project that required realistically maybe even less than x. But if you're making 20% margin on each head - and the company buying the effort is still saving a few million over doing the same work onshore - everyone is happy.
Yeah but "higher risk of terrorist attacks" is like, what, an increase from 0.000001% to 0.0000011%?
Wow, that's big. Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't know what could be the potential consequences of releasing this app. Apple really does not care if you are making things easier for people as well as them.
Good riddance. I'm normally fairly sentimental when it comes to technology (still have the turntable of my long-gone teenage years) but I've always hated everything about going to video stores.
I will never understand why Silk Road is easier than just hitting up your dealer
It actually is against the professional rules that govern attorney conduct. We (lawyers) are trained on this in school in a mandatory course and have to pass a standardized ethics exam to be licensed (separate from the bar exam).
Well, they would be if anyone were.

Now that I read the quotation more closely, though, I find cause in it to reconsider my original opinion:

> [...] in a manner reasonably calculated to convey the impression that such use is approved, endorsed, or authorized by the National Security Agency.

Frivolous as I find it, I rather strongly doubt that anyone is going to mistake McCall's parody for something 'approved, endorsed, or authorized' by NSA. As such, I doubt the case will get anywhere near the Supreme Court, unless whoever in NSA's legal office is behind the C&D really feels the need to pursue a hopeless cause that far; it seems almost certain that the first court to rule on the matter will do so in McCall's favor.
I truly believe that we did the best we could in this instance. Drive failures are always always unfortunate, even with backups, downtime exists.

That being said, we're always genuinely looking to improve, and I'd welcome your feedback on how you feel we did and how you feel we could do better. Please do reach out to me personally john@do! Thanks. :)
This article was interesting but didn't really tell me anything I don't already know. Does anyone know where I can find a good article that actually explains the mathematics of performing a Fourier transformation? I thought that is what this article was going to be about.
Awesome article! Here are two things that stuck out for me...

1.) In the first part of the article talking about decomposing a periodic signal into sinusoids of different frequencies - it would be more correct to refer to it as the Fourier _Series_, which is different from the transform.

2.) The image showing three sinusoids summing together into a non-period signal made me cringe (the sum is also periodic - that's the whole point of the Fourier Series).
You Are a Rogue Device
aatish, since you seem interested, I'll throw another fun-fact at you that I found very interesting even after years of working with Fourier transforms:

You can view the Fourier transform as a fitting problem. Yes, you fit the data to a function. Ie you take the data points and fit it to a sum of exponential functions. There is actually a much more general approach called "Prony method" that extends the concept and adds a dampening factor into the function to fit:

http://www.engr.uconn.edu/~sas03013/docs/PronyAnalysis.pdf

You can take it further and use matrix pencil methods and eventually you'll see connections to ESPRIT algorithm and even least squares algorithm. It's really interesting how they're all actually connected.

Cheers
In some cases, Java is more weakly typed than Python or Ruby.

Java:

System.out.println("abc" + 5); -> "abc5"

Python:

print "abc" + 5 -> TypeError: cannot concatenate 'str' and 'int' objects

Ruby:

puts "abc" + 5 -> TypeError: can't convert Fixnum into String
This is an interesting idea and congrats on shipping. It got some things wrong about me though: http://fingerprint.leadsift.com/?username=__rlp

Not interested in sports and I'm not employed as a writer. With a little more accuracy it would be pretty cool.
Darn, just as mine started getting garbled graphics every day. Time to RMA :)
I'm not convinced he was assassinated, but I won't shed any tears if he was. He was an evil terrorist with blood on his hands who also managed to rip off his own people to the tune of more than a billion dollars. Good riddance.
It is based on many different sources. One of those sources is semrush.com
The interesting thing to me is that, in theory, the same kinds of extreme privacy-protecting, anonymity-maximizing measures which can be used to host any kind of Silk Road, or to visit it and use it, can ALSO be used by... wait for it... wait for it... yes the law enforcement folks. In other words, how can you be sure that this new Silk Road 2.0 is not a sting honey pot setup by the FBI itself?

I don't buy stuff like that and never will. But if I did, I wouldn't go near anything using the Silk Road name after a seizure/arrest has been publicly documented.

Remember, on the Internet, nobody knows if you're a dog. Or a teenager living in your mom's basement in Russia. Or an FBI agent munching on donuts in Washington DC. Etc.
If a grocery store harms you in an illegal way you they can be punished by the force of the state in a variety of ways. The same is not true of a anonymous person on an inbound tor site.
Coinbase is one of the top 3 highest-volume exchange in the US! This is where many people buy and sell. If their customers exchange bitcoins there, it is fair to say that Bitcoin "reached" the specified value it was exchanged at. Ignoring it is ludicrous.
Thanks a lot for the answers, good luck on your further development. I'm a regular SQL Server user and MOLAP goodies can be very useful. From what I understand, it should be very easy to join a new data source to existing Presto warehouse. So I suppose you could "upload" additional mappings from Excel/CSV into the warehouse and do new queries live (instead of waiting for batch reprocess). This can be very beneficial to the user/analyst who often likes to define new data categorizations on-the-fly and use them to dig into data further.Great job! I'm putting this project on my must-try-shortlist right now!
Has the event taken even happened?
I spent 20 minutes at the door, trying every doorbell . . . and finally left without anyone having answered :S.
> (In a later post, we will share some tips and tricks for writing high-performance Java system code and the lessons learned while building Presto.)

I'm waiting in anticipation for that article!
Which is just fine because globalism would rape their country otherwise.
The phrase "conspiracy theory" has been used to great effect to silence criticism and shut down real investigative journalism. It's a simple guilt by association technique: if you think anything other than the official line, then you are engaging in "conspiracy theory" which means you are like those people who think the queen of England is a reptile.

We are actually in worse shape than Soviet Russia. In the USSR, educated people knew that quite a bit of what was in Pravda was a lie. In the West, an attitude of malfeasance-denialism has been encouraged in the educated and upper crust elements of society to the point that erudite people tend to almost deny the existence of elite deviance or official criminality. Given the higher-educated demographic of HN, you can see it around here. Just try arguing that, say, widespread financial shenanigans have anything other than prosaic and innocent explanations.
this is not new - china has maybe been more in the spotlight - IT has been outsourced to India atleast for 2 decades now - those jobs are already "stolen" if you will. The real story if you care to put aside your bias though - is that a bulk of what these guys are doing is IT grunt work - stuff thats in IT terms "menial" - solving simple tickets, implementing basic CRUD stuff etc. Stuff that a good programmer in the West - wouldn't want to do - and would honestly be too expensive to do. Until you figure out how to automate it - you do it where it's cheap and labour is ready. Econ 101.
Surprised no one else has submitted this yet. The interesting bits are that the size of a 'dangerous' meteorite is being made much smaller (this will affect programs designed to defend against them) and we have some real data on what the 'blow by' effects are of near misses.

My personal interest in this came from a talk at the SETI institute where they were discussing extinction events and I asked if an asteroid could cause an extinction without actually hitting the planet. It hypothetically possible but not well understood. We've got some more data now :-).
Apple changes its mind frequently. "Nobody wants video on an ipod" a year later, ipod with video. "Nobody reads Books anymore", cue the ibook store years later. You don't need two buttons on a mouse, powerPC processor are the best, firewire! Scsi!

Apple seems to reserve the right to change their minds and then not say anything about it. They ignore commenting on the past ofter (the Halo Demo at macworld for example..)

Apple always project they know what they're doing, but looking at it hindsight they change their mind frequently as business conditions change
Old-fashioned video stores cater to markets that streaming services don't.

There's the low-income who don't have a device that can stream. There are those who don't have internet access for whatever reason. People who don't have a credit card to sign up for Netflix. The same kind of people who stand in line to pay their cable and phone bills in person. Then you have people who just don't embrace technology.
Scarecrow Video in Seattle hasn't shown any sign of slowing down. Almost any movie ever made, rented to you by someone who's probably watched it.

It's the Powell's Books of movies. I'm impressed every time I walk in and every time I talk with someone who works there.

http://www.scarecrow.com
This. Phase is the most important subtle point about the FT that everybody misses the first time around.

The Fourier Toy mentioned in the article: http://toxicdump.org/stuff/FourierToy.swf

Notice how you can click and drag to change the size and initial phase of the circle widgets. Try changing the initial phase of any of the larger components without changing the size and see what happens. It goes haywire!

The first FT toy that I wrote years ago also ignored phase. It took me forever to figure out why my reconstructed images looked like crap.

Turns out you can't just throw away half of your transform data (you get frequency and phase for each component you care about) without being fabulously clever.
Nope - the amount of numbers is in fact identical. The discrete Fourier transform has redundant information in bins above NFFT/2 (where NFFT is the size of the transform/number of samples in the signal) for purely real valued input. This means the "number of numbers" is the same - NFFT/2 bins of necessary complex values after transformation, versus NFFT real values in the original series.
I didn't produce him, or it. Thus I feel no shame.
I'm surprised that the ringing isn't that bad even without a window function.
I agree that brits / americans / australians might have an easier time understanding each other. But that probably has to do more with exposure to each other than anything else. Simply put - you've only really dealt with Indians for maybe 2 decades as a nation? give it time - soon you'll understand them too.
Multitrack love .chez kek.
True, I suppose what's left is only about 30% of what they had when they went bankrupt.
If you don't mind me asking, what happened with Persuasion? I was working in the industry at the time (not coding though) and I can't remember hearing about it.
Wow that loading bar at the top of the page is horrendous.
> open about screwups/future plans when he thinks it will pay off.

I'd talk about "ongoing" plans here, considering history (iMovie and FCPX) it's likely the plan was "rebuild from a cleaner slate" all along, but it's good seeing it actually spelled out for once.

Might have been better if they'd spelled out a bit earlier, but at least users are not left completely in the dark and praying for salvation as they were with iMovie '08.
Theres a nice approach to this through linear algebra and the discrete cosine transform (DCT), as just another base.
TextBlob is nice, but for sentiment analysis it basically wraps Pattern (https://github.com/clips/pattern).

Pattern uses a whitelist heuristic approach that's got poor precision and is no longer state of the art.

Not that there's anything wrong with this code, but anyone who is looking to use sentiment analysis in their work should consider researching more up-to-date alternatives which don't necessary have Pythonic alternatives just yet.
So you basically sacrifice speed of replication in order to ensure long running queries don't get cancelled?
Woah, I followed pretty much the same roadmap as you, except I took the (Python-based) CS600 class at OpenMIT instead of Udacity's CS101. And my year was 2013. I really enjoyed Udacity's CS253 on web development, even if the particular technologies introduced in the course aren't very popular.

Since then, I've been switching gears from Python to JavaScript by learning Node and Angular. I don't view Python as a waste of time, because I think it is a great first language to learn particularly for CS fundamentals. Starting out, I may have been discouraged learning JavaScript as a first language. OOP isn't so straight-forward in JS, and there aren't as many learning resources for algorithms/CS-theory stuff in JS as there are in other languages. Also, learning server-side web development fundamentals with Node.js may have been a struggle, perhaps because there aren't as many resources devoted to beginners and docs as there are with Python/Django. Plus the asynchronous stuff. I'm struggling to learn AngularJS, although it's just straight up difficult I think.

I still need to figure out how to interview well. I have a decent GitHub/portfolio, so I'm generating a good number of interviews despite having 0 professional experience in the field and no CS degree (I have a math degree though). I've had about 20 technical phone screens/interviews not including take-home assignments, and I'm getting better at them. But I'm clearly not there yet, since nobody has offered me a job.
For a periodic input, it's countably infinite (Fourier series [1]). For aperiodic, its uncountably infinite ((continuous) Fourier transform).

I don't think this implies that there are a countably infinite number of smooth, periodic curves though, because the each one of the parameters is a real.

I'm not a mathematician though, so I could be abusing these concepts...

There are two more major Fourier transforms: the discrete Fourier transform, which maps a discrete aperiodic function to a continuous periodic (i.e. band-limited) frequency domain representation [3], and the discrete-time Fourier transform [4], which maps a discrete period (i.e. time-limited) function to a discrete period (i.e. band-limited) frequency representation.

Notably, in the applications mentioned in the article, what's really being described is the short-time discrete-time Fourier transform (STFT [5]). In this most useful variation, you chop the input signal of arbitrary duration into fixed-sized (and possibly overlapping) chunks, (usually) apply a windowing function to temper down the edges of the chunks, and then apply DTFT to each chunk. The result is a sort of spectrogram -- a time-frequency representation of the input. In image processing this is done in two dimensions.

The famous FFT [6] is a O(n * log(n)) algorithm for calculating DTFTs.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_series

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_Fourier_transform

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete-time_Fourier_transform

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STFT

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFT
Flat UI make me anxious
Just a thought.

It seems they want to remove the distance between me and the informatic application.

It makes me anxious.
Why would a solipsist have no objection to jumping off a cliff?

Just because you believe reality doesn't exist outside your own mind doesn't mean you can't die.
You can use console.dir to get an inline browse-able object, does that help?

See this screenshot:

http://note.io/HxSxmK
Do you know that you can place emphasis on a word on HN by surrounding it in *?
Donations to Museums Are Morally Reprehensible, Says Bill Gates
But consumer anti-static brushes (http://www.amazon.com/Static-Master-Brush-1-Inch/dp/B0000AE6...), industrial anti-static coatings, industrial coating thickness measurement, and oil well inspection are a few of its uses.
I'm looking for an Etsy for drugs. I want my synthetic opiates cradled in a lace & cordoroy kerchief that states "rustic charm".
Long Term Web Semantics
Full Disclosure: This is great news for my company (www.rooof.com/syndication) because our patent-pending methods of syndication can still post to CL using the their native image uploader.
In terms of threading, Ruby and Python are in the same, sad, GIL boat. The speed issue is the same, but the C libraries alleviate this somewhat (Numpy, scikit-learn and lxml come to mind).
Tail recursion is really needed when you have a functional language, and since Guido van Rossum, and therefore Python, has a bias against FP, the lack of TCO is not that glaring when you write pythonic code (which is kind of a circular argument, I know).
When it comes to libraries, the old "batteries included" argument gets old, and the standard library shows its age, but it's usually addressed in external libraries...
...which brings me to my real gripe about Python, the ever changing way you're supposed to manage packages (use easy_install, wait, no use pip and virtualenv, wait you should take a look at wheels too, and so on).
Hur, I can suffer harder than you! I almost can't believe you want to one-up me on a race to hell.
Does this interfere with the replication process at all if I run pg_start and pg_stop_backup, and rsync the files to another server?
My guess is that those things take time to learn/hone? I was impressed what it could do as a first attempt...
Build here, Launch there: The geographically lean startup.
Three months ago I left my job to start building a new mobile service with my former colleague and roommate Solène, full-time. For a while, the two of us had been discussing where and when we should move next from Paris. At the time, it seemed the city would not offer us enough opportunities or let’s say the right “ecosystem” to start off.

Well, we were wrong.
If you guys get a chance, this is the greatest thing of all time. Get Motocross Madness 2, start a race, and forget about it. Drive straight until you reach the huge wall that marks the edge of the area. Some places it's lower than others, and with a good run-up, you can actually scale the wall. Up top it's clearly not a place for players, but if you drive towards the non-existent horizon you will be fired as if from a cannon (there is literally a cannon noise) into the course again and your guy will curl up and die horribly in the crash before getting back on his bike. My friend and I used to do this for hours, it was the best "open world" we could find!
Violence amongst end user drug dealers is very rare and confined to specific, very poor, areas. Wholesale is the only place where you start to see significant amounts of cash, and hence most of the problems, and that has zero differences between offline and on. There is no 'political narcoterrorism' between the guys selling 8ths of coke in the neighborhood. You're also mischaracterizing the drug trade with regards to consumer habits. Drug users communicate about dealers and products the same way people communicate about every other local business. The internet has greatly expanded and enhanced this ability, but prior to the Internet, local businesses, just like local drug dealers, operated by word of mouth and competed in many facets of service. We know this as drug quality has gone up and up over the years.

Remember, the vast majority of offline drug deals do not consist of driving to the hood to pick up something from a gangster. I think this mis-perception clouds a lot of the analysis of operations like the Silk Road.
I agree that that is the standard and typical advice that people follow.

But people tend to, in addition to doing the subjective "good work" [1], they refer people that they like personally or who encourage the type of relationship building that leads to more work. [2]

Also, in theory at least, if an attorney ends up being referred a great deal and has a nice book of business they would raise their rates and/or push work off on subordinates, right?

[1] And how, with legal work, do you know if it's "good" until the shit hits the fan or there is a problem?

[2] Even physicians are susceptible to this (but less so). I don't want to know who you like personally or who you know but who you think does a really good job as a clinician. And maybe you hate that person or their personality. That's fine. I just want someone who is good I don't care if you like having him over for dinner. (Had a girlfriend once whose father was a surgeon and they were always entertaining the family practice doctors so they could get referrals. He was a jerk to his family but he was sweet as sugar to the other physicians who he needed.
Another cool thing is that orthonormal bases are not unique - there are many other basis functions that you can choose beyond just sine and cosine to decompose a function (or digital signal). Though they are a natural choice if you are specifically looking to analyze periodicities.

One direction to go in for further study:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelet
It said I was employed and owned a dog and car. I'm a freelancer, and don't own a dog or a car.

Further, I don't remember tweeting about any of those things in the past year, if at all.
Although it's not much of a use for me since I'm not in the U.S., looks nice, polished, dead-simple. Ability to open store locations in Google Maps (in addition to stock Maps.app) and remembering last chosen items are nice features too. Too bad Apple is not very open to this kind of things.

By the way, does Apple's official Apple Store application has this feature?
1) ...which when applied to a sampled signal, is the discrete-time Fourier transform (DTFT)

2.) It will only be periodic if there exist some frequency for which the frequencies of the sinusoids are integer multiple.
The amazing morphing table that can copy you in real time