skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't steal it right now. LibGen is considered "questionable content" which is against JP Morgan policy.
Not true at all! At least in Toronto most of the companies here are hiring Java programmers like crazy. Depends where you want to work, I assume in the Valley it's all Node, Ruby, iOS. I guess Android is all java as well.
Just 1 EUR/book? You should probably go self-published. I don't see how this is a good deal. For how many EUR are your books sold at Amazon.de?
> Low probability events happen all the time

Hah! I love how extremely counter-intuitive and completely true this sentence is at the same time.
A lawyer sending threats is by most people's definition a act of aggression.

Especially when it's very doubtful there was infringement.
Update: I've emailed the developer of Sprite Lamp. Depending on his response I will release my implementation of the normal map generator to the public either as soon as it's ready (which might take a few days) or after the end of his Kickstarter campaign.

At least one HN user has shown interest in this tool, so as a compromise in case Snake Hill Games does ask me to wait until the end of the Kickstarter campaign I've set up a Google Group [1] for those who might want to test it before the public release. Depending on the circumstances I'll post a private download link or a GitHub link in the group once it's ready.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/unflatterer
If you are EU citizen, don't forget to sign the petition: http://sign.basicincome2013.eu
Also check out http://gun.io which has some short-term gigs.
I've a friend who principally for a living shoots things - pigeons, rabbits, and other such pains-in-asses for farmers.

In the UK, there's a fairly complex framework as to where you can shoot, how much you can shoot, and when you can do it. To this end, he's developed, single-handedly, iOS and Android apps for hunters to manage such and record their kills, principally for compliance purposes but also for their own edification.

Either way, it's been fascinating watching him learn - his approach has been to learn on the go, and iterate. He's gone from hacked-together PHP obscenity to android/iOS APIs and frameworks in about two years.
Ask HN: Do you use Twitter?
CBS just reported only 16% of American adults use Twitter. Personally, I know very few people who use it. I've never been able to get enough out of it for it to become part of my daily routine.

Do you use it? How do you use it? How often? What value does it add to your life?
Haikyo Photos Depict Japan's Abandoned Places
Announcing Proceedings: Distributed Reading Groups
How To Learn Anything in 30 Days
Pyret is so hot these days.
I mentioned this in another thread, but I will regurgitate it here.

I don't consider myself well informed. But I live in the Philippines and I have been in a high wind, light flooding typhoon and a low wind high flooding typhoon. Of the two, the high flooding typhoon caused a lot more damage and loss of life.

You can't make apples to apples comparisons on typhoons. Wind speed isn't necessarily the most destructive factor. Wind creates a lot of damage, but its flooding which creates high casualty counts. The devastating tsunamis we have recently seen is a great example of this.

From this article.

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/11/10/21389125-typho...

> Most of the deaths appear to have been caused by surging seas that resembled a tsunami, flattening buildings and drowning hundreds, according to Reuters.

It's certainly possible that the region you mentioned in India was better prepared, but I'm guessing that the flooding was worse in the 1999 storm.

The Philippines typhoon was among the strongest to ever hit hand. It neared the theoretical maximum strength of a typhoon. One of the methods used to measure the strength of a typhoon is the Dvorak scale which goes up to 8. At the peak of the storm, it hit 8 and they could no longer measure it. They could only estimate that it went up to as much as 8.2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_technique
Dear Facebook: You Suck
Forbes' 2013 list of the best financial services companies to work for: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/07/31/the-be...
Some context would help, since it depends on what you already know, what your longer term goals are, and how you think learning Java will help you achieve that.

Some reasons in favor of learning Java: it's an incredibly entrenched technology in a wide variety of industries, and it will be running incredibly valuable line of business code for long after both of us are dead. The language itself is competent and C-style, and it handles memory management. The JVM is a wonderful platform. The Java ecosystem interoperates with everything, has copious developers available no matter your region/price point/industry/desired level of experience, and has a vibrant community which has libraries available for whatever you'd want to do.

Reasons against: I'll spare everyone the "Good God man, it's Java." (Though, having cut my teeth on it and used it professionally for most of my career, they're not totally wrong.) Mostly, my concerns would be directed at "Is learning a new programming language really the highest priority for you given your particular goals?" Learning the syntax will only take you a few weeks (assuming you've programmed before), but getting conversant with e.g. the J2EE stack is a multi-year project, and there are many things you could accomplish in the same time which would be more intellectually rewarding/credibly promise more career growth/etc.
I've heard stories about some families who live in concrete houses decided not to evacuate, confident in being safe from the wind, only to drown in their own homes. :(
+1 -- Chicago is top 5 in startup/vc activity, has a number of big/successful tech companies -- groupon, orbitz, 37s, Braintree, etc. Google has nearly 3000 people there (including the 2500 or so from Motorola mobility). There is an active tech community lots of events meet ups, two top 10 national universities and 4 other large universities.

There are some expensive neighborhoods but also many cheap ones that are super fun if you are young and don't have kids or care about school quality.

Public transport here is ok - very extensive systems but some lines are pretty slow. Culturally we have everything you would expect of a very large city - great restaurants, museums, music, etc.
But you need mutation just to create examples of your data.

OK, I'll buy this.
bahahaha street teamer
Software development, metalwork, carpentry, all have the same base skills, of planning, patience, and perseverance.

I do all, and many more such engineering/mechanical/creative type things, and I know many developers who are as adept at hacking in the real as in the aether.

Anyway, my point I guess is that it's all the same domain, and the skills are eminently transferable, and the internet fills in the knowledge blanks to a large extent.
Holy hell, that thing cuts through the car's pillar as if it were made of paper!
Italy Proposes An Entirely Illegal Google Tax
Artificial-intelligence research revives its old ambitions
In my opinion, hard AI could be just around the corner. Wonder what kinds of startups would rise up to leverage such a technology that is so natively different.
Will prescription lenses change how society reacts to Google Glass?
Since they know who you are, and since the central banking database knows how much money you have in what bank accounts, and since they know who your friends are, it is no problem to demographically calculate that you could reasonably get a heart attack now. Of course, you made quite a few strange large purchases just before you died, but only your friends would know that these were strange. Your balance is pretty much gone. You seem to be no longer keeping them up to date on what you are doing? Facebook is simply a gold mine, because any money that you are holding in bank accounts forms collectively a bounty on your head.
If that were true, they would liquidate much more aggressively. I don't know how much total value in shares they have left, but if you're a venture investor, your goal isn't to tie up all your money in ventures that have already broken through; your goal is to find the next one. If all they wanted to do is go long on stocks, they could do that without all the venture investing.
The Importance of Feedback
It's not really a blatant misuse of funds, though. My roommate is an intensely bright dude finishing up his math PhD working with studying interactions between complex systems. He writes all his code in C, and he recompiles it every time he wants to change a variable (e.g. the input file, or the number of iterations).

He's been doing it this way for years because that's what he was taught. That's the level of software engineering acumen you'll get in academia. But it "works". I've offered to help him modify the code so it will accept command line arguments, and we're going to sit down and do that so he can run several instances in parallel and utilize all of those fancypants cores on the computer I loaned him, but... he didn't know you could do that. No one told him! How would he know where to start looking that up? How reasonable is it to expect him to grok all that, when he's deep in math-land?

So it was blatant to me, software developer of four years, that something was pretty wrong, but for him: he's about to finish his PhD. He's been published a couple of times. They're not running horribly inept software development, they're running mathematics the best way they know how.
How is the internet connection there ? Reliable ?
While this is true, one only needs to be a vendor who ships products to begin to associate metadata with purchaser's wallet address and start breaking down that privacy. Multiple addresses works in theory, but we don't know how often it's practiced. I'm not sure it's really as far away from that kind of direct correlation as you think.
Just a few observations (without ever having experienced this - didn't go to business school and was never interested in investment banking, so don't know the industry):

just because I'm not emailing/cold-calling 3 investment bankers a day

Then email 3 investment bankers a day. You should be able to do this without spending more than a few minutes on each one.

Create a template once and then personalise it as needed. In my current startup, we've emailed many hundreds of people over the past four weeks. It doesn't have to take a lot of time. It absolutely can be done without being such a chore to eat too much into your other time. Also, if you cannot do three a day then do two or even one. Or even one every two days. Anything is better than none a day.

I feel like I'm better suited for <..snip..> a startup, but I'm afraid of risking a safe / prestigious job ...

Unfortunately, in my opinion, startup and risk aversion do not mix well. Startups are risky - that's simply the reality of it. If you are risk averse, then startups absolutely are not for you.

Founding a startup is a hell of a lot of risk (its still worth it IMHO though) and being one of the first few employees, while not quite as risky, is still a lot of risk because you don't know if your job will still be there in a few months or a year.

Personally, I think the startup experience is worth it. I can't see myself working anywhere else now. But its definitely not for everyone, so consider it carefully.

---

Having said that, you can absolutely get into software development, but if you want to have lots of options you will want to build a network here too. Life is all about networking. I don't think its quite as drastic as having to email three people a day though - I'd start by attending lots of programming user group meetups and conferences - that's where a large portion of my network came from.

I know people who have never studied at all who are doing great - the key to their success is that they have good strong github profiles: you will have a degree from a good school, if you can also create a portfolio of projects (personal or open source) then you will be in a really good place. Its not necessary, but its very helpful. If you can get a summer internship, that also helps a lot. Basically, anything that demonstrates experience writing code (outside of uni projects...) is a very good thing.
In Puppet-land, MCollective ("more than a fancy ssh-for-loop") allows you to query servers by Facter facts.

Screencasts: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/mcollective/screencasts.html
I don't know that meteorologists have been able to collect all the data yet. A lot of what you are seeing in the news reports is probably info regurgitated from who knows what sources. Just as with the death toll, it will take time to come up with official numbers. As you mentioned, that could be difficult if the testing equipment couldn't handle the forces.

http://qz.com/144734/super-typhoon-haiyan-one-of-the-stronge...

> Super Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines at 4am local time today with winds near 195 mph, making it the strongest tropical cyclone to make landfall in recorded world history, according to satellite estimates. That astounding claim will need to be verified by actual measurements at ground level, which should be collected over the coming days.

> The storm (known as Yolanda in the Philippines) has officially maxed out the Dvorak scale, which is used to measure strong strength using satellites. That means Haiyan has approached the theoretical maximum intensity for any storm, anywhere. From the latest NOAA bulletin:

Here is a wikipedia link to the Dvorak scale.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_technique
Define van. Some folks take that to mean the Mystery Machine from Scooby Doo, but locally soda/beer/etc is sold out of giant trucks, semis with trailers.

I think you'd have better odds with a tradesman's van/truck for some obscure service. Not a craft meth heads would be magnetically attracted to steal and fence tools like a plumber. Something unappealing like grease trap cleaning service. Or contents you don't want to screw around with, like an exterminator service.

You'll run into some interesting state laws about commercial drivers licenses, and registration of commercial vehicles. Just because you're sleeping in it, doesn't mean according to the cops that its not a commercial delivery vehicle that you've borrowed or whatever (who cares why) and as such both you and the truck should be licensed to actually deliver sodas for hire. Some states have weird laws. You may even be required to have a business license and business insurance to get the commercial vehicle registration.

A magnetic decal sign applied to a plain old van when stopped might be wisest. Can't be pulled over for something you're not displaying and when you're parked, unless you're about to get a parking ticket, no one cares if you're a properly registered commercial vehicle anyway.
Theft \Theft\ (th[e^]ft), n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e.

See {Thief}.]

1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and
removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful
owner of the same; larceny. [1913 Webster]

Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the
owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious;
every part of the property stolen must be removed,
however slightly, from its former position; and it must
be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of
the thief. See {Larceny}, and the Note under {Robbery}.
[1913 Webster]
No job or career is safe. Stop clinging to this antiquated notion that you can get somewhere and chill for the rest of your life. It sounds like you want money. Whatever you do, you're going to have to hustle for it. So stop following the crowds (meaning, whatever you're not personally driven by - be it IB, Consulting, or even startups) and jump in and make your own direction.

If you fall and screw up, its ok.. get up and do it again. Time to grow up
Patterns related to Primes are difficult - outside present technology.

On MathOverflow, Joseph O'Rourke and Terence Tao offer more pretty pictures and discussions on patterns related to the spiral http://mathoverflow.net/questions/102075/prime-spiral-distri...
http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/59369/prime-spirals-...
Ayn Rand on "Money is the root of all evil"
Until I can write Android apps in something else, yes. :)
Just 16% of U.S. adults use Twitter and only 8% get their news from Twitter
Abandonware is never fun to work with, but I've seen internal build and deployment tools that are (a) actively maintained and (b) so good that former employees pine for them when they leave the company.
+1 ~ I used to have two ladies in the Philippines do a little part-time research work for me via oDesk for my previous job. The were absolutely fantastic. Every time a disaster strikes there (which is frequent) I touch base to make sure they're ok. I can't recommend hiring some Filipinos to help augment a local team enough. It's a way to increase your own efficiency and help raise their standard of living at the same time.
And does that matter? Most things are like that.

The miniscule subset of all things in the universe that we do know scientifically doesn't mean that the things outside that subset don't provide any value.

If an economic theory is useful even if it doesn't have a proof like in hard sciences it provides value nevertheless.

There are scientifically proven things that are undisputable but which, on the other hand, aren't much of a value either now but maybe of great value later, at some point in the future. But merely having scientific evidence is not an implication of value.

If something seems to work, it seems to work. If that something also gets scientifically verified at some point it might turn out to have additional value, too. But it still works if it happened to worked before that.

Of all the information verified in hard sciences only a part is practically valuable in running societies, governments, states, and efforts involving humans. The minimum wage of fast food workers is a problem that has no scientific answer and which is also probably quite hard to approach scientifically in the first place. I suppose that the majority of question in a human society are like that.

An inflated appreciation towards scientifically verified information tends to overlook everything else that isn't scientifically verified. Yet all those things lacking scientific verification are things among which new theories are discovered and some of those do eventually become proven and verified.

Yet ultimately, there are no truths, just opinions. Some opinions are individual opinions and may not be shared by many. Some opinions are reasonably based on evidence from various scientific experiments and some of that evidence is so solid that it would be hard to convince most of individuals in our culture otherwise. The physical theories involving air travel are accepted and tested by millions of people every day: they're effectively betting their lives against the theories explaining flight being correct. So the opinions are shared by many if not most people and they practically become something we consider a truth. Yet what happens is not that it becomes more true or a more absolute truth: what happens is that you convince more people —— and often for a good reason, but objectively that's what can be seen happening. In the end, all we have is our mind and the way we make it up.
The old objections against altcoins are rolled out and paraded again like a good circus.

Let me paraphrase what author is saying: "There will be no other cryptocurrency, for whatever purpose, ever, than bitcoin."

That's of course complete bunk. Yes, most of the existing altcoins are doomed, because they don't add anything of value. The few that do add something unique, are as likely as not to see these features adopted into bitcoin itself.

However there are areas where an altcoin can succeed, under the following conditions:

- If it adds something unique

- If what it adds is useful and liked by people

- If what it adds cannot be incorporated into bitcoin

Wait, how can it be that something can't be incorporated into bitcoin? Well, bitcoin has a certain architecture, which makes some ideas more easy to incorporate, and others hard, or impossible. A few examples of things that would have a difficult time landing in bitcoin:

- Colored coins

- Blockchain based trade order execution (would also be predicated on colored coins).

- Domain name resolution

- Trust metrics

- Arbitration and reversable transactions

There's many more. But you get the idea, most of these things are not inherently compatible with how bitcoin works, and is liked by people for working in this fashion. That doesn't make this bad ideas, it just makes them ideas where supplemental systems can excel.
How to Track Phone Calls in Analytics (twilio #)
1st 202 pages:
http://web.njit.edu/~wguo/Math447/Time%20Series%20Analysis%2...
Accessing WordPress from Ruby #3: GravityForms
Anybody supplying contractors to the NSA. From the central banking database you know how much money they have in what bank account. From Facebook you know if they could be dead by now. The sum of all monetary holdings of any of these targets forms collectively a bounty on their heads. Do you really need to see Edward Snowden's stash of documents to understand this? I don't.
Does not seem to have a good scientific background.
If I work at intelligence agency and my work is paid by taxpayers, should the results of it also be available to the public?
of course not! learn haskell! it will employ you easily.
Interesting, indeed it does:

# define a function that echoes it's first argument:
$ arg1() { echo $1 ; }

$ arg1 test
test

$ arg1 <(echo hello)
/dev/fd/63
Ask HN: To everybody who uses MapReduce: what problems do you solve?
This is wrong. Nearly every corporation including the likes of Google and Amazon use java extensively and ongoing. Despite what many articles predict or claim, Java is neither a declining technology nor a dying technology, on the contrary, Java is used more and more every single day.

Is it a sexy language, no, is it a hip language, no, is it a mature language with some of, if not, the largest support libraries out there, yes, and this is why it is so popular.
Some quick stats, according to IT Jobs Watch (a UK jobs website):

Python-related jobs make up 3.36% of permanent IT jobs in the UK. (http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/python.do)

Ruby-related jobs make up 3.54% of permanent IT jobs in the UK. (http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/ruby.do)

---

Java-related jobs make up 14.38% of permanent IT jobs in the UK. (http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/java.do)

C#-related jobs make up 16.97% of permanent IT jobs in the UK. (http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/csharp.do)

You can't judge the popularity of a language from the stories you're used to seeing on social news websites -- enterprise software, although it may be mundane, employs a huge portion of the developers out there today, and many of them are C# or Java developers.
> The JVM is a wonderful platform. The Java ecosystem interoperates with everything

I hear this over and over but it never strikes me as true. The best and most widely used libraries and interfaces for a given problem always seem to be C++ or C. There's typically some slower and less comprehensive library for Java or .Net.
Those businesses are still around, it is pretty easy given what Walmart actually sells. Amazon is more a pain for a lot of those businesses.
sounds like ML+contracts, but wait is it statically typed? Maybe not Racket folks hate types (with great dredd)
Given the new healthcare law, no main street business is going to have full-time workers other than relatives. 29 is going to be it.
This number is basically my whole town killed, twice.
I've seen many companies that still use Java. It's still a pretty popular technology, even though a lot of start ups don't typically use it anymore. However, I have noticed a bunch of start ups using Scala, which runs on the JVM. So learning Java and how the JVM works may be useful in the long run.