skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I already know for sure that my work computer, email, chat, etc can be read at will by my IT department

Yes, but it's not about you. It's about your company, the legal obligations they have to protect your data, their customers data, and their internal IP from outside intervention.

Consider that you have a legal obligation to protect the privacy of your data. Now if you are served a warrant to give up the data or to secretly tap connections to your server, you are probably legally covered. But when they just go straight to Amazon to get your data you have no such cover. Users can rightly ask why you put their data in a place out of your own control, your own legal accountability.

Prior to this year, one would have said that such events were so extremely rare, and in such exceptional circumstances (on credible threat of an immediate major terrorist attack, etc) that it was an acceptable risk for a business to take. That's now flipped. The presumption is that if you store data in the cloud then it is being routinely intercepted and is freely available to a multitude of parties outside of your control. That's the crucial change that is going to put cloud storage and services off the table for anyone with sensitive data.
Likewise. I had a driver in LA disregard my directions and take a route that landed us in traffic. The bill was $114. I emailed Uber when I got my receipt and they got back to me before 10 the next morning. They refunded me down to an $88 charge, which was appropriate given the ride.
Macs used this for years as well. You could boot into the Forth interpreter and do interesting things.

Amusingly, many of the older models with Open Firmware had no display drivers in the interpreter, so while you could start it, you had to talk to it through a serial port rather than using your keyboard and screen.
31.0.1650.48 here as well.

It appears to be a bug with a combination of the ::selected pseudoelement in conjunction with the font Georgia. My guess is it's a Chrome-on-mac bug (Firefox is fine), not a site coding error.

Disabling either the font or the selection style fixes it. Most likely a text rendering issue. At work we've noticed Chrome getting buggier in relation to that, as well as retaining DOM node properties via redraws.
I'm glad it worked out for you! Your product looks solid, and I like the idea. I think one of the key takeaways from this (for me at least) is to have a solid support network.
Which jurisdiction are you talking about? swombat looks like they are sitting in the UK.
Odd. I can't replicate on any browser but I don't have OSX. Does it work fine on your other browsers?
They gave me a sneak peek at the code... it just implements rule 110! No wonder it's so powerful.
</sarcasm>
How about one line?
<title>Notepad</title><body contenteditable style="font-size:3rem;line-height:1.4;max-width:60rem;margin:0 auto;padding:4rem;">
New Tool to Ease Difficult Births - A Plastic Bag
After many of its iterations have been posted to HN with little improvement in quality, it's clear that the point of the benchmark is to tout certain languages like Java, so this is not surprising
Google Search for Android now does Siri-style conversational voice commands
As a CFL fan, I'm wondering how these approaches would work up in Canada. It does seem that most CFL teams go on 3rd and one (easier since the defence has to give up a yard from the ball unlike US football) now, even in their own end.
Event Hacking For Startups
The issue in day to day science is that people will work their numbers to get p=0.05. They'll have a hypothesis, that, say, lactating adenomas confer a protective effect against DCIS. And they'll pull, say, all lactating adenoma cases from 2001 to 2013. If that doesn't work, they might actually try dropping the 2001 data and just using the 2002 to 2013 data if it gets them to p=0.05. The result is more brittle (we often test findings by asking "How would the p value change if we added one negative case?") but the alternative (pun intended) wouldn't otherwise be published.

This search for p=0.05 also leads to a lot of hair-splitting studies: take two diagnoses, say, usual and atypical ductal hyperplasia. Now, if you can find some constellation of parameters that define a middle category, say, "borderline ductal hyperplasia", you have a wide-open field to all sorts of p=0.05's, even if there's no change in treatment or outcome. You can say "cases previously characterized as UDH with a <parameter x> greater than <x> are 67% more likely to have <parameter y> (p=0.002)" because you lumped together a bunch of stuff that people already mostly agreed on anyway.
While you are at it, might as well make voting rights proportional to taxes paid (perhaps plus a free allowance to allow poor people to have a say at all).
Microsoft and Xamarin tighten mobile app-development ties
The U.S. government made it illegal for individuals to hold or invest in gold for quite awhile. It didn't "kill" gold as a storage of value or as a de facto currency in many parts of the world. I think Bitcoin may be "killed" in a subset of national jurisdictions, but I do not think it is going anywhere.
The only place I have found it in Taiwan was at some Vietnamese restaurants run by American Born Chinese. I have seem some imitation ones in the supermarket.
No one will be old enough to remember this, but TradeWars was the best.
I suspect this is tougher than throwing up a website
"Every local police force could get a warrant to search your personal computer data without you ever knowing."

They can also get a warrant and come to your house and go through all of your stuff (including your personal computer) there. Of course you'd know, but not until it happened. There's no real "protection" from a legal search warrant.
True. I think an (even more) ambitious attempt could have attracted core developers to the project, which could have solved all the technical hurdles. That said, I was pretty excited by the idea, and I hope something new along those lines gains momentum one day.
Any boundary noted is is artificial and people doing software must know about the hardware - especially in the 1950s. Every subject in the book is written by somebody who has no clue what he is talking about directed at other people who are equally clueless and perhaps gullible. Most readers grab onto the vague feeling of understanding and ride it like a bearded man on a narwhal. This was the era when hipsters were coined.
This is a fantastic story. Thanks for sharing.
The AQMD actually inspected the plant several times...and found nothing wrong. The complaints about the smell originated from an Irwindale councilman's son.

See http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-1110-sriracha-20131110,0,..., also posted in another comment on this thread.
I second this. The protocol is incredibly fast, even over a cellular connection when zipping down the rail line on Amtrak. On a LAN I can use VMware PCoIP on an Apple Cinema Display and there is zero lag (hard to test the Cinema Display on Amtrak!). I don't know what black magic they use under the hood, but it's the only remote protocol I've ever used that didn't make me want to throw my computer out the window.
Awesome story, even if it's old!
FBI calls Ph.D. FOIA research a national security risk
Formula.js has most of the excel formulas in a library.
http://stoic.com/formula/index.html
Will you date a programmer after reading this comics?
Thanks! Yeah, part of the reason YC has founders from previous batches hanging out in the main room is to provide a little support to all the nervous interviewees. It definitely calmed me down.
Half a Life in Solitary: How Colorado Made a Young Man Insane
When to sell Bitcoin? In 10 years, at $50k.
The truth is I/O is much slower then networking. Many LCD displays do image processing which results in it being several frames behind the one the GPU is currently pushing out. So between your desktop and your monitor could be 70ms of latency. On top of that there's the delay in input devices.

If streamers could maintain 30ms of network latency then it's just a minor difference from the system baseline.

If the streamers are smart they could colocate with the game servers. Then that 30ms of network latency is there regardless, home system or streaming system. It effectively adds no lag for streaming.

John Carmack made a comment that he could send a packet to europe faster then he could send a pixel to a screen:
http://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-fas...
Be careful, the lesson for the rider may end up being a ban from the service.

All because he couldn't wait a business day for a response (the ride was Sunday around noon, Monday was a holiday, a Tweet reply came Tuesday).
+1 on nitrous.io

I have only played with it so far, but it is nicely done.

BTW, Google has a very nice web based IDE but it is for internal use only.
The Moto G is manufactured in Brazil and is priced as if it was imported. In fact, perhaps as a slap in the face of the consumer, it's priced exactly as if it was imported. There's a 60% importation tax, which means that importing a 179 dollar phone goes for exactly 650 reais, which is what they're pricing it.

So, no, it's not because of taxes. Unless the cost of production in Brazil is precisely 60% the price of production in the US, this is just plain markup on a market used to it, so they abuse it while still being below the other high-markup devices.
Not trying to deflect any blame away from the NSA, but I think its likely there are other nations' spy agencies (and cyber-criminals) doing similar things that have not come out into the open yet. What I mean is that if it wasn't the NSA revelations, then it would have been other ones coming out at some point, with the same effect upon cloud services.
TPP would codify §1201 Anti-Circumvention Provision of DMCA
It's also another example of economies of scale working even if only on a smaller scale than a cloud. The guy has 18 bike shops. That's quite a few. If you have 18 bike shops I really would hope that you'd have somebody running IT for you. Still, it takes 18 bike stores and revenue north of 3 million dollars to power two IT guys. The cloud makes sense for folks that operate on a smaller scale than that, or just don't have access to those resources wherever they're doing their jobs.
All cash 3 billion offer for snapchat
What does it take to be good at machine learning such as this? In terms of mathematics, and computer science knowledge?

I know how to code through self learning, and I've pretty much solely done web development. So I barely know much CS. Also not very good at math.

So what are the essential prerequisites you would say are necessary for doing neat, useful stuff with machine learning?
Are you still at Sift Science?
This is what Rust was doing, more or less, before they removed segmented stacks.
you can use httpOnly cookies and they will not be accessible via javascript.
I think that's part of what the author is trying to approach in the article. I could be wrong, but the engineering students were probably immersed in math way more than you were, so concepts that seemed natural to them were only because they'd banged their head against it more often.

I run into this a lot when people talk to me about programming and I get something faster than they do. I've spent a lot of time reading book after book, listening to podcasts, learning new languages, and studying new concepts, so it can be really easy for me to fit new information or ideas into some context and get them. I don't think that I'm necessarily smarter for it. I think I've just had a passion for it, so I never get tired of reading the articles and absorbing the material.

Now I'm personally running into the place where there are a lot of things I've wanted to learn for awhile, but my weak background in math hinders me (machine learning, more advanced algorithm analysis, signal processing, machine vision, etc).

I'm working my way through a calc book. I don't think I could have done it in your position, either though. I'd have psyched myself out. I've got to learn it on my on, with my own rhythm.

Kind of rambly, but you should find something related to what you like and maybe jump back in. Just find a learning mechanism that's suited to your background :)
This is not new and in fact the Taiwanese has been using this for many years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System

This is the most popular forum in Taiwan, out of terminal. This is the oldest reddit you can find in Taiwan.
This is a cool tutorial!

It's ironic that deep neural networks have become the biggest machine learning breakthrough of 2013: they were also the biggest machine learning breakthrough of 1957. The idea dates back to the Perceptron, one of the oldest ideas in AI.

One thing to note: although there was a lot of initial excitement about Restricted Boltzman Machines, Auto-encoders, and other unsupervised approaches, the best results in the last year or so have all used conventional the back-propagation algorithm from 1974, with a few tweaks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation

Ben Lorica wrote a good article on the latest deep learning research from Google, and what's changed since neural networks were last popular in the 1980's:
http://strata.oreilly.com/2013/10/deep-learning-oral-traditi...

What's old is new again.
Looks like you can sign up just fine with only an email address.
I thought the spreadsheet was mad impressive and decided to take a shot at making it massively multiplayer. Here's the fiddle:

http://jsfiddle.net/sy85U/
Regardless of any other arguments against this idea, I think that the key implied proposition is false; that there are other brains 'similar enough' to your own to share the same physical processes is extremely unlikely.

There are more possible configurations of the neurons in your brain than there are atoms in the universe. Even worse, the future excited state of your brain depends on the current excited state of your brain.

In order for the decision you make to be correlated to the decision of someone else's brain you almost certainly need to work at quite a few abstractions above the physical one.

This comment is getting longer than I meant, but an interesting counter point to my previous statement would be that many brains will react in similar ways to the same stimulus, and this may be put down to a 'physical process'. An example might be reactions to attractive people.
#GetItDone
Iphone 5 - Starts at 2.299 BRL (~980 USD) for the 16GB and goes to 2.899 BRL (~1242 USD). I kid you not [0].

[0]: http://i.imgur.com/EEeTi6G.png
That's a very unusual way to phrase the question, there are many steps between code and voltage in a CPU.

In brief, Code is stored in memory as a series of 1's and 0's.

Now the memory is stored as different voltage levels in transistors - 5 volts for a 1 and 0 Volts for a 0 for argument sake (but the voltage to logic value is arbitary).

Now the CPU executes the code by walking along different pieces of memory and executing different instructions depending on the value of those pieces of memory.

There's a lot more. For a start Google 'Introductory Digital Electronics' or 'Introductory Computer Architecture' and this might get you started.
What about shared memory?
Amazon WorkSpaces: Your PC Now Lives in the Cloud
Submitted for discussion of the interesting marketing approach: Work in the bathroom, work until you pass out in bed.
The problem isn't with using notation. Lots of people on HN are programmers, we understand the value and necessity of unambiguous artificial languages.

The first problem is that the notation is usually "the first symbol that popped into some random genius's head 200 years ago". And once the notation is set, it's set, no matter how poor it is, or how many other places it's already in use etc etc. Then, as you note, sometimes there are multiple notations. Ugh.

The second problem is closely related to the first. Mathematical notation is write-optimised. This makes sense because of the long history. But that doesn't change that write-optimised languages are harder to read and understand, even for experts, than read-optimised languages.

In a programming context if you today reduce all your variable names to single latin letters and all your function names to single greek letters, you will be widely mocked and reviled. In maths it's Just How Things Are Done.

I guess what I'm saying is: the curse of mathematical notation is pen and paper. The boundaries of QWERTY liberated (almost all) programming languages from the curse.
This is related to Meredith Patterson's talk at the 28th CCC, "The Science of Insecurity":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEfedtQVOY

> Why is the overwhelming majority of common networked software still not secure, despite all effort to the contrary? Why is it almost certain to get exploited so long as attackers can craft its inputs? Why is it the case that no amount of effort seems to be enough to fix software that must speak certain protocols?

> The answer to these questions is that for many protocols and services currently in use on the Internet, the problem of recognizing and validating their "good", expected inputs from bad ones is either not well-posed or is undecidable (i. e., no algorithm can exist to solve it in the general case), which means that their implementations cannot even be comprehensively tested, let alone automatically checked for weaknesses or correctness. The designers' desire for more functionality has made these protocols effectively unsecurable.
As someone who grew up on a farm which at one point had around 800 hogs and 5000 chickens,

chickens.
I'm not sure on how mining economics will work out after the bitcoin limit is hit and miners will no longer get new bitcoins - has someone worked out the math on how much transaction fees will increase to cover mining expenses after that?

The implication is that bitcoin won't function without (lots of) miners, and if miners would be getting more money in an alternative currency where they can use their hardware, they'd leave bitcoin.
> taxi pricing is transparent

Hilarious.
Definitely a solid foundation in linear algebra and statistics (mostly Bayesian) are necessary for understanding how the algorithms work. Check out the wiki portals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning) and (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence) for overviews of the most common approaches.

Also, Andrew Ng's coursera course on machine learning is amazing (https://www.coursera.org/course/ml) as well as Norvig and Thrun's Udacity course on AI (https://www.udacity.com/course/cs271)
haha yeah me too, I bought in at $40 and progressively sold out up to about $240... I too felt smug. :)
Do you know anywhere that still runs that? I remember playing it back in high school,but not much left about it it seems.
How would the c equivalent of fmt layout duff's device, and would it be clearer or less clear than Tom Duff's original formatting (http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/duffs-device.html)?
On Learning Difficult Things
I'm not (that's a whole separate topic), but the company is still going strong -- if you happen to run a site that accepts payments, and you're dealing with fraud, you can try it here:
https://siftscience.com/
Regarding repl.it, I'm not sure how active it is. Their python C port for example is 2 years since the last update. I'll ping them to see.

Regarding lua, I updated the lua vm project, and tried your fibonacci function from before in the repl

http://kripken.github.io/lua.vm.js/repl.html

Looks like in both firefox and chrome it runs in about a second in JS, which feels about the same as the time it takes in PNaCl in chrome on

http://gonativeclient.appspot.com/demo/lua
Think of it as "machine learning for humans."
People loosing confidence in it. With no one & nothing backing it there is nothing to prevent the value from going to 0. The only thing keeping the value of bitcoin from being 0 is the willingness of people to trade them for other things of value.
What about the costs of running the hardware - power, cooling, network switches, storage arrays, datacentre rental (or opportunity costs of using a server room versus more desk space for example)?

Not saying it still wouldn't work out cheaper for you, but worth bearing in mind.
Quite right, people do the best they can with what they have available. The promise of the cloud raising the bar on what smaller operations can deploy both in terms of sophistication and scalability vs price to play is certainly a strong factor in it's appeal.
I agree.

Plus, school schedules are also inherently incompatible with true night owl behavior. So, for what it's worth, there's no additional data point to compare against, say, a school that starts later in the day.

I think a more useful metric would be university courses where students have some degree over selection. Otherwise, this "study" isn't so much about how terrible someone's academic performance is because they go to bed late as much as it is a study that simply confirms sleep deprivation affects academic performance (fancy that).
Investors can want whatever the heck
they want, but wanting is not getting.

I know plenty of people high up in
US business and academic research,
but those people and the VCs don't
know each other.

VCs and I don't know the same people.

Bluntly, the VCs are a bit below my
'circle' of business acquaintances.

In particular, the fraction of VCs
I would hire into my company is tiny,
so small to be nearly invisible. Why?
Because their technical qualifications
in information technology, etc. in a
word suck.

I mean, would you hire a VC? For what,
BizDev? What if a VC gave you
advice on how to invest your IRA?

How
many VCs can code, productively with today's
technology? How about be a system administrator
for a high end server farm or network?

"The single most important decision you will
ever make is with whom to do business."

Extra credit for the source.
Agreed - there is a paper mill about 45 minutes drive from where I live and the smell really depends on the day. Some days you can drive by and not even notice an odor. Other days your eyes are watering. Driving the other direction about an hour there are mint growers and processors (they ferment it in mobile fermenters). I don't even like mint, but it makes for a nice aroma when the entire valley is minty fresh.
Strange country. Is never even thought of anybody doing that, and I've no reason to think that I would ever draw someone's ire who would do so.
Hi Peter,
Can you comment on http://www.earthindicators.com ?
I've just sent you an email with some highlights.
Thanks
Keep Freelancing
From http://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/details/

"All WorkSpaces Bundles provide the Windows 7 Experience to users (provided by Windows Server 2008 R2) ..."
Hmmm I was rejected this past April and then sent a reply back saying something like your loss.

Miraculously a week later I was invited out to Silicon Valley to demo our novel tech, though not to Y Combinator but one the biggest tech firms out there. Not sure how that happened ... people talk, I guess.

So if you don't get in to Y or others I say send a reply making them doubt their decision. This worked for me this past April and more so in 2008 when I was accepted into another popular incubator program.
Absolutely have to recommend Paul Lockhart's Measurement [1]! Journey Through Genius is a great book as well.

[1] http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674057555
Thank your for your informative and thought-out rebuttal.

Every taxi I've ever ridden in clearly lays out the initial charge, how much distance is included, how much additional distance is charged, how much idle time is charged, and any additional fees.
RBMs and auto-encoders use backprop too. They just use it for "fine tuning" (due to running pre-training first) instead of propagating error derivatives from randomly initialized weights.

(Thus concludes the smartest thing I've said all day.)