skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The other sad thing about macro is a lack of consideration about the cash constraints facing poor consumers.

For example, suppose there's some 20% off offer available on a regular household expense. The rational thing to do is buy in bulk so you can take advantage of the offer, but if you're poor that option isn't necessarily available, because buying in the requisite quantity to receive the discount means going without some other necessity - eg there's no point in buying lots of diapers when they're on sale if it means there's no money left over for baby food.* Of course couponing allows for fairly flexible strategies and with time the savings can add up, allowing for some greater flexibility; but the underlying fact is that the more money you have, the easier it is to take advantage of discounts that save you money. Inability to access economies of scale is a brutal fact of life at the bottom of the economic pyramid that manifest almost every time one needs to buy food.

* It's just an example, don't get hung up on what exact level of public assistance is available to people with babies in an attempt to negate the point.
Economics is not a science. Its a series of attempts to rationalize inequality. The IMF is a criminal organization. Austerity is both international and class warfare.
Home Wireless Network Keeps the Snoops Away
Before and after: Devastation from Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines
And they're compatible with every version of IE on Windows XP, unlike those free certs from StartSSL.

This matter has nothing to do with the version of IE and everything to do with whether Windows root cert update is turned on.
As a former gymnast and YC founder, I have some experience with nerves. The best advice is to prepare as hard as you can, and then relax, knowing that you've already done everything you can to succeed.

Obviously, practicing being put on the spot is also valuable - find ways to do things where you have to deliver even while nervous.
Found it! Note that it's part of a greater thread: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?666317-Bizarre-Fan-theor...
Wow. These two announcements from Amazon today have been really interesting. I work at a community college and we're constantly investigating VDI and vApp solutions. With the heavy push towards a more cloud-ready infrastructure, it'll be interesting to see how our upper management approaches this platform. A lot of ya'll seem to be arguing about gaming -- but I see other highly demanding software being used -- CAD, Maya, Blender, AfterEffects, etc. All of which will be on-demand. We won't have to invest so heavily in up front hardware costs just to handle our typical overwhelming periods.

[anecdote] We've licensed our CAD software to have 100 "seats" available at any time. We also (try to) reserve that much hardware to be available. We only ever see maybe a 5-10% utilization throughout the semester with ~200% utilization in the last 3 weeks of the semester (When util >100%, users are queued). That's a lot of waste and still isn't acceptable to the majority of our professors and student body. While it'd be great if we could retask that hardware to justify its cost when not in use, we simply can't. We need that hardware to be available for these applications at a minute's notice.

I can see this being a huge win for education or independent studios who are just starting out.
Math. math. math.

Linear algebra. Bayesian statistics. MUST know these inside out, upside down.

Vector calculus. Convex optimization.

A boatload of machine learning literature. The ideas coalescing into deep learning are based more than a decade of research.

If you know nothing about math... I can't imagine getting to the point of understanding deep learning (which is a fairly rapidly evolving area) without at least 2-3 years of very hard work.

This class is a reasonable attempt to give a quick intro to one major source for DBNs https://www.coursera.org/course/neuralnets understanding this course is a good benchmark.
I wonder how it would work out if teams actually structured their offenses around gaining only 2.5 yards per down; not averaging 2.5, but actually gaining 2.5?

Of course, they'd have to go deeper now and again just to keep the offense on its toes, but apart from that 2.5 is the goal. Everything else is a bonus.

If successful, they would also control the clock and keep the other team's defense on the field.
Here's an article on how to do conversion optimization with little to no traffic http://conversionxl.com/how-to-do-conversion-optimization-wi...
how do I get to the door games
The history of AI is really interesting. Perceptrons were extremely oversold by their inventor, Frank Rosenblatt after he introduced then in 1958. This led to a lot of funding and interest in AI and perceptrons. Then, in 1969, Marvin Minsky coauthored a book Perceptrons which harshly criticized how underpowered perceptrons were. Most famously, the book proved that a perceptron could not model a simple XOR function. In other words, a technique that many had been led to believe would one day emulate human-like intelligence couldn't even emulate a dead-simple logic gate! The book was devastating and effectively led to a dark age of AI where funding and interest dried up (later, the term "AI winter" was coined).

The next big boom in AI (ignoring some logic/rules-based research in the 70s that I don't think is very interesting from an AI perspective) occurred in the 80s, when computational power increased and researchers discovered/rediscovered neural approaches, including the obscure 1974 research on backpropagation. This led to tons of press and funding from governments who dreamed of killer AI robots and what-not. But, once again, imagination raced ahead of reality and funding dried up when said robots didn't materialize. The field didn't really die off, but funding in AI went way down, leading to another major "AI winter".

I'd say the next big era of AI is the one we're in, driven largely by applied statistics that became known as "machine learning". This has been by far the most successful era, and has probably added 100s of billions of dollars to the economy (I'd argue Google is a machine learning company, for example). I think it's also the most pragmatic era, as people in the field have really learned from the past mistakes of overpromising. In fact, when I was studying "AI" in grad school, my professors warned me to always refer to what I did as machine learning because the concept of "intelligence" was such a joke to so many in the field.
I'm not sure if my post wasn't clear enough. Let me try and rephrase:

It's fine to deny phone support by default and demand usage of online tools. However if you don't provide a phone number for emergencies and cases where you fucked up, you don't take business seriously.

Doesn't mean i think you shouldn't do business. Simply means i won't trust you with anything remotely important.
Careful, this code runs eval() on all spreadsheet fields. Someone can "collaboratively" steal your jsfiddle.net cookies.
Tl;Dr
"Perception is 9/10 of reality"

This was a good example of how it can yield results when selling your services. It's also very valuable if applied correctly to many areas of life. As an employee, customer, a defendant in a legal case, when you are trying to attract a mate, etc...

The important thing to remember is "how do others perceive me?". Based on that "what can I do to change their perception?" Of course you need to figure out what image you want to project; that image is also situation dependent.
Artificial scarcity creates profit.
Facebook Tried To Buy Snapchat For $3B In Cash
Two possible reasons:

1) they know, but it isn't easy to demonstrate, so it doesn't get published and therefore it doesn't exist because nobody can provide a citation. Alternatively,

2) most people who have economics degrees are fortunate enough never to have struggled with serious poverty
Don't forget the World Bank.
I would take this further and say, how do we know this was a real offer an not PR? Or there were onerous conditions that 'could' value this at 3bn but was more likely significantly less.
$10–$20 million is nothing to sneeze at, and certainly enough to fund a more-than-comfortable lifestyle if that's what you want to do. But if you have money in the billions, that will literally open the door to anybody in the world that you want to talk to, and you will be taken seriously.
Sorry for breaking it, I couldn't help it =/
This is ludicrous. Snapchat has no fucking revenue. What a chronic joke.
This is a really good write up. For people looking for practical experience with these types of methods, I'd also recommend checking out theano and/or pylearn2 (which is built w/ theano).

theano: http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/

pylearn2: http://deeplearning.net/software/pylearn2/

NIPS, a big ML conference, is in December, so expect to see a large amount of new ideas and applications re: deep learning to come out of that.
Despite the fact that whenever I read things like this it depresses and befuddles me, the truth is a company (or really anything) is only worth what the buyer is willing to pay for it.

Is Snapchat really worth $3b? Apparently they are, because someone was willing to buy them for that much. It doesn't matter if they make 0 revenue, or if they 0 users, or the worst possible financial metrics. At the end of the day, if someone is willing to buy them, then the founders and investors will get their return on investment. The VCs won't care if they are hemorrhaging money as long as at the end of the day, there is some sort of exit that is a multiple of their initial investment.

I think the revelation I've discovered since diving into entrepreneurship is that worth is not simply as black and white as how much money you're bringing in versus how much you are spending. Part of a business model appears to now be acquisition - it's like the analogy of do you want to offer a product for $100,000 to 10 users and earn $1mm, or do you want to sell a product for $10 to 100,000 users? In this case, it's selling 1 product (your business and it's userbase) to a customer (the parent company) for a large sum.

When you look at it that way, businesses are simply commodities just like the products that are offered within them. The business itself is the product. In that sense, the customer-facing product is simply just a mechanism to the greater product, which is the sale of the business.

I hope I've articulated myself clearly enough, but that seems to be the rationale that makes the most sense to me when I see seemingly "fruitless" businesses valued at exorbitant amounts.
Very metro
I have a very bad feeling about Snapchat.

My background is in Finance, I have traded and followed the markets closely for nearly a decade and I've studied or read about basically all major bubbles that happened around the world for the past millennium.

Price cycles are an inherent part of capitalistic markets, periods of both over and undervaluation will always happen, that's basically a part of the games rule.

In the late 90s happened the web bubble. When is the mobile one going to take place?

Now back to Snapchat. They are looking more and more like what I imagine the poster boy of the mobile bubble would look like. Also, the macro conditions (tech stocks making new highs after new highs, investors throwing easy money at basically anything related tech etc.) are currently very bullish, which means perfect conditions to the birth of a new a price bubble.

That being said, I wish the Snapchat crew the best wisdom and luck of the world in navigating both the good and the bad times, whatever comes next.
Economics most certainly is a science. You're addressing a failure of macroeconomics, which I agree is quite deficient in many ways. Microeconomics works fantastically well in most cases.

The IMF is a criminal organization.

Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
You'd have to parse the cells as some sort of DSL that only allows mathematical tokens, as opposed to eval which allows access to the full arsenal of the JS language. But I think excel is Turing complete
Real men don't wear padding.
One aspect may be that they link plays together in rugby so one rugby play may contain the equivalent of many football plays. This makes the game more fluid and there aren't as many breaks.
Your profile has no email ID either - was going to write!

Anyway, couple of other things for you, since you are interested in the topic...

In the movies the guy on the run is able to get some help and support, in real life moral courage coupled with cognitive dissonance, hostile propaganda and ineptness gets in the way of that. Hence Mr Snowden, for all his many supporters is probably alone in very subtle ways, even when amongst trusted friends. None of those around him have pushed back the fear boundaries or played a tight game in a sigint-hostile 'battlespace', therefore, even if their intentions are good, or they think they have good intentions, things like basic stupidity get in the way. (Note that stupidity is the most harmful thing in the known universe.) Furthermore, anything involving actual risk is not something an honourable sort like Mr Snowden can palm off on others, so he is very much stuck doing everything himself, with no meaningful organisation to help him.

This situation was also a serious problem for Martin Luther King. He was able to get millions to turn up in support of what he had to do, yet he was also deeply alone. Part of his popularity stems from this, people who were alone could relate to what he said.

Orwell's classic 1984 is also quite interesting. We all read it at school, however, I believe the book takes on a whole new level of insight to those that are blowing the whistle in a surveillance society. Details like Winston's health problems take on a peculiar relevance. However, Orwell did not go far enough on the subtleties of betrayal and stupidity.
This assumes that only one of X parts is essential and the others can just fail and you only get some degraded service -- which is not always (or even often) the case.

E.g if the DB fails, you're down. If the web server fails, you're down. If you're a photo service and the file storage service fails, you're down.
Is it even useful anymore to talk as if there's any separation between governments and private companies at this point?
Winners Announced of CreateHS October Challenge
My feeling is that the automatic punt while you're up has also become a sportsmanship/etiquette thing now when your team is ahead.

If you're up by 2 touchdowns and you go for it on 4th, I can't think of a single announcer in the NFL who wouldn't make it seem like you were rubbing dirt in your opponent's face by doing so.
You're on your way to a once in a lifetime meeting. Spending 100 dollars to have an expert drive you there seems like money well spent. Assuming that "google maps is pretty incredible for figuring this stuff out in a hurry" seems like a really bad idea. If you're not from SF, how would you know how good google maps is at determining the right caltrain route?
Really inspiring story. It reminded me - it's time to make backup!
Have you ever been to Tokyo? Craziness everywhere!
Rejecting Billions, Snapchat Expects a Better Offer
Hardware has functionality in and of itself, for example a flop-flop is a circuit that can store a voltage (ie. a one for an arbitrary voltage or a zero for a different arbitrary voltage), an adder is a circuit which adds to sets of values etc.

In a computer there are a bunch of these different low level circuitry components which when combined in different ways can be used to produce any functionality. There is a certain amount of the circuitry which is unusable by the programmer which is reserved to know where all of these components are and how to connect one component to another. You can think of this as a program that is built into the hardware which knows how to install and run other programs.

Basically when you write code, there is a program or multiple programs which transforms the words you write into a string of binary numbers which tells the control circuitry how to arrange the free components to get the desired behavior.
One more cool trick from the same article (slightly modified). It's a factorial function computed on an "infinite spreadsheet". But how?

fact = loeb fact' where
fact' 0 _ = 1
fact' n f = n*f (n-1)

If we ask GHC for the type of `fact'` then we see that it is

Int -> ((Int -> Int) -> Int)

which we can interpret via the `Reader Int` monad as being

m (m Int -> Int)
-- for
m a = (Int -> a)

Now, `f :: (Int -> a)` as a functor is isomorphic to an infinite stream

map f [0, 1, ...]

if we ignore the negative numbers. So we can think of `fact'` as having the type

Stream (Stream Int -> Int)

where each function in the stream takes its own index and multiplies it by the value at the previous index.

Then `loeb` completes the computation using spreadsheet recursion.
Articles like this just go to show how little acceptance there still is for behavioral economics data in mainstream policy making.

Just a few years ago data from lab experiments was not widely accepted because people were unsure if it was relevant to how people act in the real world. Countless times the effectiveness of lab experiments has been proven.

I am looking forward to the day when people finally accept that traditional economic models are not perfect (duh!) and that people are not perfect, rational, decision making robots.
Prosthetic Hands Trigger Uncanny Valley Sense of Creepiness
I'm genuinely curious how this app that works with IE9 can't work in IE10. From my experience, Microsoft has put a lot of effort into making IE backwards compatible. You might have to force IE into a specific mode, but I can't imagine an app for IE9 not working at all in IE10.
Wow. These two announcements from Amazon today have been really interesting. I work at a community college and we're constantly investigating VDI and vApp solutions. With the heavy push towards a more cloud-ready infrastructure, it'll be interesting to see how our upper management approaches this platform.

A lot of our initial hardware costs have to deal with planning for spikes in usage. At any given time we may only see 10% use -- but come the end of the semester -- that could very well jump to 10x our average load. And we have to have the hardware allocated for that. It's a balancing act between how much we can expect and how much we can feasibly budget.

I can see this being a huge win for education. We have a department that oversees all IT related tasks. They also chip in occasionally to help establish foundations for best practices and unite all the community colleges on single platforms (email, learning management software, internet services, etc.). This might be right up their alley.
> It seems rather drastic to totally drop the service and do a chargeback after 3 days, though. Obviously something has slipped through the cracks.

That's the power of the chargeback, though. They might not have a customer service number but they've got a number the credit card company knows how to call. To avoid this situation in the future, an obvious solution presents itself...
Six days before the interview, my laptop crashed and we lost our entire demo.

I am constantly shocked how intelligent technology people frequently fail to make backups.

Backups are so easy today - USB sticks, cloud backup, server backup, etc. Why do so many people ignore this basic step?
"A lot of people fail to understand the overheads and limitations of this kind of architecture. Or how hard it is to program, especially considering salaries for this skyrocketed. More often than not a couple of large 1TB SSD PCIe and a lot of RAM can handle your "big" data problem."

It's not that hard to program... it does take a shift in how you attack problems.

If your data set fits on a few SSDs. then you probably don't have a real big data problem.

"Moving Big Data around is hard. Managing is harder."

Moving big data around is hard--that's why you have hadoop--you send the compute to where he data is, thus requiring a new way of thinking about how you do computations.

"Before doing any Map/Reduce (or equivalent), please I beg you to check out Introduction to Data Science at Coursera https://www.coursera.org/course/datasci"

Data science does not solve the big data problem. Here's my favorite definition of a big data problem: "a big data problem is when the size of the data becomes part of the problem." You can't use traditional linear programming models to handle a true big data problem; you have to have some strategy to parallelize the compute. Hadoop is great for that.

"A large telco has a 600 node cluster of powerful hardware. They barely use it."

Sounds more like organizational issues, poo planning and execution than a criticism of Hadoop!
Terribly efficient.
very cool, probably need a few 100 more lines of code to stop XSS but awesome none the less.
I actually wonder how many of them might have taken this offer (or its equivalent), if it was on the table.
This is just mind boggling. This article is another piece that shows that economists are behaving like evil... pure evil!

Leave aside experiments on humans and animals, these guys are basically experimenting with families and entire nations just for fun of gathering more "data" for theories they can confirm or deny by just asking people in the streets.

Kind of makes me help understand why Indian politicians were such staunchly opposed to recommendations of IMF and their group of economists all along. Those rich idiots don't know how 99% of the world functions.
I wish there was something like C but with a better type system, I don't think rust will fill that gap. There are still too many inconsistencies between abstractions with overhead and without making it a C++ replacement if anything.
> claim that the credit card reader is "broken."

Fortunately, the law protects you again in this case. In NYC (and SF too, I believe), if the credit card machine doesn't work, and the cab driver doesn't tell you before you start the ride, you don't have to pay a dime.
There are some millionaires who choose to live modest and discreet lives. (or some I'm told). Publishing everybody's tax return does deny them the discreet part of their choice. That may be acceptable, but it is a real consequence.
"Does anyone have a use case where data is on a single machine and map reduce is still relevant?"

No! MapReduce is a programming pattern for massively parallelizing computational tasks. If you are doing it on one machine, you are not massively parallelizing your compute and you don't need MapReduce.
FWD.us Hires CTO To Fight For Immigration Reform With Tech, Not Just Money
The IBP (tiered rating) isn't a birthright of utilities, geez. It's a conservation measure!

Whether I shave off my higher-tiered consumption by changing my thermostat, changing my lighting or by putting in solar, that lost high-profit consumption isn't the company's property, it's mine to do something else with.
Not only transparent, but predictable: you don't have to read the fine print on each individual taxi to figure out if this particular fellow is charging you something absurd. That's something Sweden has run into with its deregulation of taxis: http://www.thelocal.se/20120425/40476

The gist of it is that some independent taxi drivers will legally post prices about 20x the going rate. Of course nobody who both knows what they're doing and reads the price will take such a taxi. But the business model / scam is to snag just a handful of clueless rides each day, especially targeting tourists arriving at Stockholm Airport. Then rack up huge profits on a small number of rides. It helps that tourists arriving at the Stockholm airport typically: 1) don't know what the going rate for taxi service is; 2) don't have an intuitive conception of what prices in Swedish Kronor mean; and 3) don't know how to quickly locate and read the posted prices.