skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I had the same impression.

The thing is, after two years as a Westerner in an Asian country, I felt as though I was completely unqualified to judge the people and the country who had so impressed me with their courtesy, grace, and humility.

The longer you stay in a country, the more you realize that it's difficult to generalize. A one week or one month visit confers a certain shallow impression which is easy enough to express. A year or two can dramatically change one's outlook.
Instead of the tech community "giving back" to the poor and disadvantaged by trying to teach them all to use the shitty tools that we've cobbled together, maybe we should be asking if it is instead us who needs the education?

The sort of ignorant crap coming out of not only Morgawr's mouth but also a good number of people in our industry just shows how many of us have clearly never listened to a word that a disadvantaged or underprivileged person has ever said.
Yeah, figured this would at least use flexbox or something.
Future Gadgets: Hottest Concept Tech of 2013
I assure you that everyone's political arguments carry the same weight.

Voting is not a magical salve to make people give a shit about what you're talking about.

Nobody cares what anybody thinks about politics.
Yep the ideas from the 50's have definitely reappeared now we have the compute power and methods to implement them at a large scale. That article gives a nice perspective.

One of the best breakthroughs has been this notion of layer-wise pretraining, which allows the backpropagation algorithm to not get stuck in local minima so easily. It provides a good guess to the starting starting points for the weights. Otherwise, the biggest issue with backpropagation historically has been the diffusion of weights as the layers increase; it is hard to attribute the causality or what portion of the update weighting should be applied to each node since it grows exponentially. This pretraining idea helps against that.
We used to talk that way in Taiwan, as a joke. I would amuse my Chinese friends by taking famous pop songs (Beatles, etc.) and singing them in my clumsy Chinese. They would roar with laughter. I think and believe they were laughing with me.
Interestingly enough, you don't send Bitcoin to addresses. You send Bitcoin to a script of your design, and whoever can provide an input which causes that script to evaluate true is allowed to spend those coins.

This was originally meant to allow you to come up with all sorts of fantastic transaction types, such as coins which need M of N signatures in order to be released, or a Kickstarter clause that only releases the coins if a certain amount has been pledged.

But, after the scripts had caused enough security vulnerabilities they were severely restricted. Clients will now only accept transactions which include one of the standard scripts.
Linking to a product that's seemingly not out yet. That's impressive!
It is faster, say less than a half second and not the 10 seconds it was the first time, but still very noticeable. Normal latest chrome on a Windows 2008 box.
In that vein, may I also suggest Ordinary Differential Equations by V.I. Arnol'd.
- This is a great story, Im happy that you held it through.
A collaborative spreadsheet in less than 45 lines of JS, one library used
Interview with Author/Programmer Ralph Vince
How JP Morgan's Latest PR Stunt Blew Up in Its Face
Our Government Has Weaponized the Internet. Here’s How They Did It
Google, Twitter, Netflix, Yelp, Pandora and more are speaking on Deep Learning and RecSys this Friday at MLconf in San Francisco. We're trying to get a streaming solution going as well for those who can't make it. http://mlconf.com

DISCLAIMER: This is my event
Google Search for Android now supports conversations
I just bought these not too long ago: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002SOU2Y0

I've been happy with them so far. I also like the fact they use standard NiMH AAA batteries, so replacements are cheap and it's easy to keep a spare pair around.

I'm able to wander around my apartment with no signal issues.
I can only offer anecdotal evidence, but mono runs quite well on FreeBSD; it may not be 100% as fast as the CLR on Windows, but it's still plenty quick.

In fact, it ran so well, I later wrote up an installation guide on the F# Foundation website (http://fsharp.org/use/freebsd/) and I've heard other users have had similarly good experiences with this combination.
Sure. During the rap genius debacle there were a bunch of people taking time to figure out what was wrong with Heroku's routing. I was entertained because there were two parts to the problem A) queueing and B) optimizations.

So with a line of code you could represent heroku's queues and determine exactly how many dyne's you needed. Or, you could try different queueing methods and determine how much money you could have been saving.

In some sense Mathematica is further down the What vs How line of language power. Even in ruby, Clojure or Haskell you're still left specifying HOW to do optimization, integration, etc. Not what you'd like to optimize, integrate or manipulate.

[1] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/QueueingProce...
[2] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Optimization....
No, fingerprints are only suitable as a unique ID and not a password. You leave your fingerprint everywhere you touch and that cannot be changed.

http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2013/10/fingerprints-are-user...
That's fine for me, but I'm getting ligatures for every st. I thought it was deliberate (and a little pretentious really) but you're not getting them so hurray webfont or something I suppose.
I always thought of myself as good at math, but I had an unexpectedly hard time in required freshman calculus courses en route to a CS degree. I think the source of all of these paradoxes is that math is too broad a thing to be simply good or bad at. The objective in first year calculus seemed to be to practice basic techniques until they became rote. If you were an engineer, you'd have much more calculus to do and the early stuff was like learning to tie your shoes. I didn't encounter any really mind-bending concepts (I actually had to retake some calculus I originally took in high school and placed out of); the problem was that I couldn't do the problems fast enough on the tests, and I had to devote way more energy than expected to practicing doing them fast, which felt sort of like learning to play a musical instrument -- training muscle memory so the mind didn't have to be involved. I figured that calculus wasn't for me and I stopped after I met the degree requirements.

My point is that different scenarios involve different "math." For engineering, math is a hill to climb on the way to the interesting part. For CS, math is not about learning math per se, it's about learning to prove things and think rigorously. For math majors, it's about deep concepts in math itself. You could be good at proofs and bad at adding numbers in your head, and be good and bad at "math" at the same time.

Dividing people into good at math and bad at math is pretty meaningless. If you were truly bad at all math, you could probably not function in any job, because everyone needs to do something that could be called math. On the other hand, hardly anyone is just plain good at math, because you would have to be good at pretty much every hard subject that exists (statistics, economics, physics, and so on). If anyone is that smart, there can't be more than a couple of them.
Have you ever driven US101 between SFO and Mountain View?
> This is an important and subtle one. Investors assume that if they're hearing about you first from you, you can't be any good. If you were good, they'd already have heard about you, because you'd have found a way to get introduced to them by someone they trust.

Yes, the investors do "assume", but, for information technology investing, their ROI for the past 10
years sucks (details in a Fred Wilson blog).

VCs don't know the right people to know
a significant fraction of people who are
really "good". A really "good" startup
entrepreneur
likely won't know anyone a VC will "trust".

If a VC can't evaluate my work from what
I write, then they won't be able to be
effective on my Board; I won't be able to
hope to be successful with them on my Board;
and I won't be able to have them on my
Board or have them invest.

I want to be successful in business, but
on average VCs are not very successful.
Khosla had some recent, sharp remarks
on VCs.
Single Page Application. There are a bunch of javascript SPA frameworks getting attention lately. Angular, Backbone, Ember...
I'll definitely check this out if you get a stream going.
Lattice Boltzmann have these same weaknesses (whether one cares as you say depends on the Reynolds regime). Point is, starting from the "simplest possible gas program" has yielded a useful branch of CFD, and one would have thought it extremely unlikely to work if you used intuition from traditional mathematics... It's as discrete and analytically intractable as you get.

Anyway, to me, the continued application of these methods is one data point that NKS-like methods are proving useful across a variety of domains.
Regarding ACPI specifically, not everyone uses the Intel developed one - Microsoft supposedly implemented their own, as well as OpenBSD (See section 3.2 and on of this: http://www.openbsd.org/papers/zzz.pdf)

ACPI is notoriously broken in many places - the OpenBSD dev's frequently had to do a lot of "bug for bug" hacks to talk to the hardware just how Windows did, in order for things to work.
Lost iPhone used to purchase something = stolen iPhone. Police report along with details where this individual was picked up and going might have gone a long way.. unless you lost your iPhone in an Uber vehicle.
There comes a point where the tax advantages of forming a company outweigh doing a sole proprietorship. Based on my circumstances, my accountant informed me that that number was less than 100k of taxable income. Certainly this is in the range of a reasonable freelance salary in my area (because it's in the range of a reasonable developer salary).

Dissolving your LLC and going to a sole proprietorship could end up costing you a lot of money and doing so without consulting an accountant would be foolish.

...and that's not even talking about liability issues (which your LLC may or may not protect you against), so it's best to talk to a lawyer too. Both will pay for themselves.
Personally, I've found that I don't retain much of this sort of material without working through exercises. If you learn the same way, you might want to check out the series of progressive exercises from Andrew Ng here: http://ufldl.stanford.edu/wiki/index.php/UFLDL_Tutorial

For reference, I have a copy of my solutions here: https://github.com/danluu/UFLDL-tutorial. Debugging broken learning algorithms can be tedious in a way that's not particularly educational, so I tried to find a reference I could compare against when I was doing the exercises, and every copy I found had bugs. Hope having this reference helps someone.
How depressingly obvious.
I was in a similar position - couldn't even watch football games on TV (there were none where I lived). However I learned the rules by playing a video game (Madden, if I remember correctly). Became a big Green Bay Packers fan, too, just by playing the game :)
Thyroid cancers up in Fukushima
VAT in Brazil is lower than in the UK. It's not really substantial, not as to explain a 100 dollar increase in a product. There are other taxes that are levied on production and sale (the VAT equivalent is just one), but the complexity of the tributary system is used as an excuse by electronics producers for the increased prices.

It's a huge effort in dark math to explain the prices these companies put up. There's a lot of "blame the government" and people love to do that, not enough "we're being ripped off by these companies".

Even products with massive tax brakes are among the most expensive in the world. It's not solely a tributary or legislative issue.
All of these are great. I'd like to add, maybe not for everyone, Calculus by Spivak. For me, it was the calculus book for which I had been looking for a long time.
It's surprising to see a person who has rubbed shoulders with the best (At Google and UWash) still feeling nervous before a demo. Could you elaborate on that ?
I keep getting notes from SoCal Edison with each bill wanting to tack on fees for every little thing. New distribution lines, cleaning up their nuclear mess at San Onofre. In other businesses those are costs of doing business and are factored into their balance sheet rather than getting directly passed on to the customer.
I usually write whatever I would say, then go over it after and take out any words or phrases that might be superfluous, or that can possibly be removed. Wholesale removal of extraneous stuff goes a long way towards making yourself clearer. I'll occasionally leave things in that I feel add to my "voice", but more often than not, if a word can be removed, it is removed.

--- becomes ---

I write whatever I would say, then go over it and take out anything superfluous. It makes things clearer.
pretty cool, but I would imagine Google to use some better ANSI.
Obligatory:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
Theoretically, that wouldn't be hard:

* Push the airplane mode button.

* Have the FAA place the phone in a faraday cage for testing the phone.

* Don't remotely activate the phone at this point (which you wouldn't be able to anyway, the phone is in a faraday cage )

* "Forget" to tell the FAA about the cellular equivalent of "wake on lan" we built into this phone.
It's also worth pointing out that Monday was a federal holiday. So, he didn't even wait 1 business day.
Sweet. How do you do I make it so not every Joe can hack the sheet?
Just curious, what are you up to these days? Got another startup cooking, or are you looking for the next place to hang your hat for awhile before you go out and kick ass again?
They have the olfactometers to enforce odor ordinances. Because, you need to be able to measure the odor to enforce the ordinances.

The author is just "concerned" that the police will abuse the new ordinances to prosecute pot smokers, even though the act of smoking is now legal.
Only if you ignore today's bogeymen:

* Methamphetamine

* "Bath salts" (i.e. MDPV)

* Synthetic cannibinoids
Also, in my world (Java) the stack trace is valuable as a software engineering tool. I don't know how folks develop in C, C++, ${other_non_scripting} day in and day out without access to that kind of information. Good debuggers and a ton of printf statements, I guess.
ok, print out your stack and we'll see which is taller...
As it was explained to me, amount of prep work you must do varies by your credibility:

- First-time founder has to show traction.

- With a handful of successful startups under the belt, one can make do with a good powerpoint, a prototype and some customer interviews.

- With a long streak of victories, a napkin is just fine.

Ergo if you're not Steve Jobs, you can't get away with a napkin.
That's what I thought too! But according to my friends on the Google Brain team, unsupervised pretraining is now thought to be an irrelevant detour.

In 2006, Hinton introduced greedy layer-wise pretraining, which was intended to solve the problem of backpropagation getting stuck in poor local optima. The theory was that you'd pretrain to find a good initial set of connection weights, then apply backprop to "fine-tune" discriminatively. And the theory seemed correct since the experimental results were good:
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/fastnc.pdf
http://machinelearning.wustl.edu/mlpapers/paper_files/NIPS20...

Does pretraining truly help solve the problem of poor local optima? In 2010, some empirical studies suggested the answer was yes:
http://machinelearning.wustl.edu/mlpapers/paper_files/AISTAT...

But that same year, a student in Geoff Hinton's lab discovered that if you added information about the 2nd-derivatives of the loss function to backpropagation ("Hessian-free optimization"), you could skip pretraining and get the same or better results:
http://machinelearning.wustl.edu/mlpapers/paper_files/icml20...

And around ~2012, a bunch of researchers have reported you don't even need 2nd-derivative information. You just have to initialize the neural net properly. Apparently, all the most recent results in speech recognition just use standard backpropagation with no unsupervised pretraining. (Although people are still trying more complex variants of unsupervised pretraining algorithms, often involving multiple types of layers in the neural network.)

So now, after seven years of work, we're back where we started: the plain ol' backpropgation algorithm from 1974 worked all along.

This whole topic is really interesting to me from a history of science perspective. What other old, discarded ideas from the past might be ripe, now that we have millions of times more data and computation?
I am permanently banned from Uber.

About 6 months ago, I noticed I was unable to log in to my account. Resetting the password did nothing, so I sent an email to the local support address. Almost two weeks later, I finally get the following reply:

I looked into this situation and it appears that this
device has been used on 25 different Uber accounts, which
is a major red flag for us. We will not be reactivating
your account.
Uber Love,
Sam

I have one of those "firewall" apps on my rooted Android phone that lets you restrict individual permissions for a given application. By default, I prevent applications from transmitting the IMEI. I assume at least 24 other people have done the same thing.

I sent an email explaining the issue, and they eventually emailed me back saying they would "check in with their engineering team and circle back soon." In May. My subsequent emails have been ignored. There is, as far as I can tell, no way to escalate the issue.

I used to really like Uber, but they sure did their best to keep me from using it.
What makes you think he'd ever even want to trust them again when they happily take 80$ of him, make no movements to return them and leave him with exactly zero communication as to why that is?
Thoughts on Fiverr
OK... how do the 1's and 0's in code become different voltage levels? That's all I'm interested in. That's the software|hardware boundary I'm referring to (and artificial one perhaps, but the boundary of interest to me).
Accurately identifying colours on real-world surfaces
This is one of the most inspirational posts I've read by any Entrepreneur and it's the character that you show by being able to follow through with the interview and then to write this post that tells me they made the right decision in picking you.

I happen to know of Sift Science and I feel its one of the stronger products in the valley today, but that said, even if I did not know your company at all I'd be rooting for you even more after reading this.

The good ones know exactly what to say ... The great ones say exactly what should be said, mostly without even knowing it.

Thanks for this post Brandon
I like the way ES6 is going, but Coffeescript has the advantage of maintaining compatibility with old (like, old-old) browsers. I hate having to do it, but you can't just ignore them.

Server-side, sure, use the latest build you can get.
Do a search for "telnet bbs tradewars" on Google. Still plenty running.

My favorites were Legend of the Red Dragon and Usurper.
> It doesn't surprise me that non-English language stuff is slower.

You don't have to read the stories I linked. You might want to at least glance at the URL though. E.g. [2] was posted in 2010. Still waiting...
I used to eat Sriracha now I don't because of their ingredients:

potassium sorbate, sodium bisulfite and xanthan gum.

Why don't they sell a version without these?
Thanks! If you're looking for ways to ease the burden of compiling it yourself, my favorite tools are django-pipeline (for django) and middleman (for static sites). Both of these let you treat coffeescript files as first-class while you develop.
If you read any classic text on statistics like Feller you can't get past the first chapter without hitting calculus. Any statistician will be very, very familiar with the Central Limit Theorem, for example.
I had a similar experience (about half as much.) Then there was a few times I dialed long distance BBSs..

My parents were so cheap they refused to buy a second phone line for years. In retrospect they probably enjoyed not being called by their friends or telemarketers.
> "with" gets a bad rap, and its blanket discouragement/deprecation may be as big a mistake as its original design

Unfortunately not. The design of with not only makes the code difficult to reason about for humans, it also makes the code difficult to reason about for js engines, and so it typically prevents any interesting optimisations. So code written using "with" will be both confusing and slow.
What makes her a great programmer? Some natural ability? Surely during the time she has developed all of these skills she has developed something that is worth showing off? If she is such a great programmer, how is she maintaining her skills if all she is doing is working on what her employer puts in front of her?

If that single mother literally has no time outside of her 40 hour work week to be learning new things and staying current with technology, she will have a hard time finding new jobs regardless of the screening methods used.

This is also one contrived example. Not an entire "social class" of the programming population.
Bitcoin's value comes entirely from its utility as a currency, but its deflationary nature would mean people won't be willing to use Bitcoin to buy actual stuff. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.

I suspect Bitcoin will occupy the same space that gold does now, as just another place to store your money during economic downtimes.
Sure, what's wrong with keeping the conversation here?

I have no special insight gained from first hand experience, however, if I meet someone that has a criminal record I make friends rather than run away from them. There can be many benefits in doing this, e.g. you have someone that appreciates and respects your advice, they can possibly do a better job than the police in retrieving your belongings if they get stolen, you can obtain unobtainable 'black market' items, get to the best parties, find out information not in the public domain and so on. You also get the best stories. I merely presented a composite, abbreviated version of things I have learned along the way. I am sure the same stuff could be found in films and books. I am also sure that the spies know what cycle to expect from those they take care of.
PCL and .NET NuGet Libraries are now enabled for Xamarin
Ran into the same thing with AirBnb actually - really poor support and messed up rule based billing. A host agreed to pick me up then couldn't make it for hours after. She had a strict cancelation policy, but agreed to refund anyway since it was her fault. She and I both contacted AirBnb to issue the refund, but they never did anything, and later even sent an automated survey asking how their support was. So they ignored what both I and the host wanted and wasted 1k of my money.

They've probably still saved me money over the long run vs. hotels, but honestly, I prefer to just call up previous hosts and offer them money outside AirBnb now and other similar options since I know AirBnb won't back me up when they screw up. The same option is available with cars as well. You can take Uber or Super Shuttle or whatever the first few times, but the drivers will usually give you a card so you can just call them direct and get a better rate.