skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An insurer has to pay the manufacturer the full price of the vehicle. Tesla's margins are approaching 25%. Tesla is betting its cheaper for them to replace the car at cost than the PR hassle because people suck at math. In the event another few cars go up in fire, Tesla eats the vehicle manufacturing cost in return for goodwill and people continuing to purchase their vehicles.

You have to admit, Elon stands behind his vehicles, literally with his personal wealth. Compare that to other luxury brands. It's brilliant.
Part#1 is here http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/18/treadmill_desk_test/ which is where I used the title from. Part#2 (this submission) has a video with Simon Sharwood actually using the treadmill desk which is informative, however the title was probably not that HN friendly ("SuperStride Me: Reg man attempts to walk off GIANT CURRY") :)
Steam In-Home Streaming
I used to run Subsonic, now I'm loving http://plexapp.com and the (paid) iOS app.

I'm also an Rdio and Netflix subscriber, but running Plex on my server allows me to 'roll my own Netflix' and stream movies and music to my iPad or other computers, or even from my server to any computer in the web browser. I'm happy.
super mario bros. in 30 lines of js
Amazon.com: Remove the book "To Train Up a Child" by Michael and Debi Pearl
> 4K will probably be download-only (and probably fiber-only).

Legality aside, I'm a member of a private movie tracker. High quality 1080p rips come in at ~12GBs or more for ~1h45m of content. I have an 80Mb connection, and it still takes me about 30-35 minutes to complete the download.

1080p, let alone 4k, downloads are years away for the average consumer. What are they getting these days, 20Mb + download caps? So sure, fiber only, but my god it's a long way off.
I use ownCloud[1] . A bit of a hassle to install, and not as streamlined as e.g. Dropbox to use, but well worth it if you wish to have your own, free and open source cloud solution.

[1]: http://owncloud.org
An official Instagram app for iPads would be better news.
For the nay-sayers out there: You have clearly not been anywhere near the hiring funnel of a tech company. The sheer number of people with impressive academic credentials, even with industry experience, that can't code a for-loop and reason about it is staggering. Anything that facilitates actual, hands-on coding early in the process and on an actual computer (as opposed to whiteboards or paper) is a very welcome addition.
Thank you for sharing! I'm not really familiar with most of these speakers, though, so it would be nice if the videos were linked by topic.
As usually, it's only for 1 year then it's back to expensive.
Simplify, Organize & Pay with Loop
They're currently 0.01NMC to register/update actually. Which is quite cheap, but trying to mine 0.01NMC isn't as easy as it used to be. It is the second most difficult to mine coin that exists in the world.

It would take somebody ~3 days of mining with a basic multi-GPU mining rig just to acquire the 0.01 NMC to register a domain name.

And the difficulty is jumping through the roof: http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php
It's really simple.

Most people pay a lot more taxes because they don't have entire tax firms to leverage against their yearly tax return. Most people make a lot less money than politicians. Politicians often say that we need to pay for our public services in taxes. Politicians are often to take advantage of the social services of a society without contributing back with taxes, and people see that as taking advantage of the good will of people. Then when such people run for public office, people are disinterested to vote for someone who demonstrates no care for the social system that allowed them to employ workers and build a business.

This isn't a question of what people should do to garner public support. That's a red herring. Asking such a question is pointless. It's pretty much saying "well if I fed a poor person while I was ripping off hard working everyday people, would you vote for me then?"

Well.. no most people wouldn't, but it does tell us a lot about you when you ask that question.
This is similar to PayPal debit card right? PayPal also support Mastercard, which means you can use this prepaid card at any mastercard POS.

https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/paypal-prepaid-mastercard
You don't see them at conferences either. :/
How Cat Memes Became A Language Learning Game
IMHO, worth the money and then some. I occasionally sleep in mine, they are quite comfortable (I got the 'soft tip' additions because I do some singing too). They do require the custom ear molds, but I got those for $10 at a nearby audiologist.
Here's the link to donate to EFF: https://supporters.eff.org/donate
> This isn't borne out, though, by actual experience.

Yes, actually, the fact that, in the absence of a state (and, in fact, even in the presence of a de jure state but the absence of an effective state), people are free to claim whatever, but their ability to enforce a claim is dependent on their ability to muster force to press it is well established by experience.

> Plenty of economic goods are not secured by codified property rights, defined and enforced from above.

I don't disagree with that, but its not relevant to anything I said.

> Communities are able to self-organize to define a reasonable set of behavioral norms.

Again, I don't disagree (in fact, that's what a democratic state is.)

> Local knowledge can be leveraged to generate better outcomes, and locality allows different communities to experiment with what actually works best, making the system as a whole more fault tolerant.

And, yet again, I don't necessarily disagree with that in general (though I do think it is an overgeneralization), and, again, it doesn't contradict anything I said.

>
MPD is pretty popular too http://www.musicpd.org/
It has a client/server model and you can create your own music streaming service by controlling it remotely and streaming back over http.
ncmpc/ncmpcpp is a client for mpd that resembles cmus quite a lot.
Blocking ad sites for privacy and bandwidth
Is your argument about what fair comp for a developer is, or are you instead trying to poke holes in the mythologizing of company founders?

If it's the latter, I disagree but don't care enough to argue.

If it's the former, nothing you're saying makes any sense. What the owner of the company makes has nothing to do with what you should make. What you should make is a function of the market and nothing else.

To see why, simply think of any well-run firm whose owner inherited the company. By your logic, every employee there should be better compensated than the owner.

If you're here to relitigate all of capitalism, that's fine too; we won't agree, but I also won't waste my time debating.
This reminds me of an example in a book I read about advertising. Toy companies increase advertisement before Christmas but lower production rates so the big toys of the season sell out. The reasoning is that kids bother their parents to buy the toy and the parents promise they will but can't since its all sold out so they buy something else. The toy companies cut the ads a little before Xmas only to ramp it up again a month or so later at which point the kids complain that you promised and parents psycologically feel obligated to buy. The toy companies then get 2 purchases from you. They use your kids against you
tldr: the ML algorithms look hard reading the papers, while the code looks simpler and shorter, also you can get pretty decent results in a few lines of R/Python/Ruby so ML is not that complex.

I disagree in so many ways:
1. complex algorithms are usually very short in practice (e.g. dijkstra's shortest path or edit distance are the firsts that come to mind)
2. ML is not just applying ML algorithms: you have to evaluate your results, experiment with features, visualize data, think about what you can exploit and discover patterns that can improve your models.
3. If you know the properties of the algorithms you are using then you can have some insights that might help you on improving your results drastically. It's very easy to apply the right algorithms with the wrong normalizations and still get decent results in some tests.
MA police department pays bitcoin "ransom" to decrypt files.
"A computer virus that encrypts files and then demands that victims pay a “ransom” to decrypt those items recently hit the Swansea Police Department.
The department paid $750 for two Bitcoins — an online currency — to decrypt several images and word documents in its computer system, Swansea Police Lt. Gregory Ryan said."
I do the reverse setup: I use these earplugs [0] (or similar) and then put sennheiser hd280 (or whatever over-the-ear headphones $EMPLOYER gave me) over them. The former claim 20dB reduction, and I guess that the latter give another ~3dB.

I can take the earplugs onto airplanes a bit easier than earmuffs, but if I were to sit nearer to the coworker with the model M, I might switch to earbuds-under-earmuffs.

[0] http://amzn.com/B0015WNZ9K
Most machine learning concepts are very simple. I agree with the author that mathematical formulae can be unnecessarily confusing in many cases. A lot of the concepts can be expressed very clearly in code or plain english.

For example, a matrix factorization could be explained with two arrays, a and b, that represent objects in the prediction:

for each example
for each weight w
prediction += a[w] x b[w]
err = (prediction - actual_value)
for each weight w
a[w] += err x small_nuumber
b[w] += err x small_number

It's that simple. Multiply the weights of a by the weights of b, calculate error and adjust weights, repeat.

K-Nearest Neighbor/KMeans are based on an even simpler operation:

dist = 0
for each weight w: dist += (a[w] - b[w])**2

Then make predictions/build clusters based on the smallest aggregate distance.

There are more advanced concepts. There are some serious mathematics involved in some predictors. But the most basic elements of statistical prediction are dead simple for a trained programmer to understand. Given enough data, 80% solutions can easily be achieved with simple tools.

We should be spreading the word about the simplicity of fundamental prediction algorithms, not telling people that it's hard and a lot of math background is required. Machine learning is very powerful and can improve all of our lives, but only if there is enough data available. Since information tends to be unevenly distributed we need to get the tools into the hands of as many people as possible. It would be much better to focus on the concepts that everyone can understand instead of keeping statistics secrets behind the ivy clad walls of academia.
For the most part, successful entrepreneurs are those who had the luxury of experiencing the failure of a business and then still had enough left over to try again. If the worst that can happen is that you hit the socialist rock bottom of only being able to house and feed your family and provide them with last year's models of smartphone, you are more apt to take risks, like starting businesses, or even quitting exploitative labor arrangements.
> The idea was to treat the mag stripe reader as a receiver to accept transmissions from a phone or accessory using a magnetic induction loop.

Neat solution compared to the Wallaby card and Coin.

> With these two models we were able to prove that the Loop works at over 90% of existing credit card readers.

Hmm, if it's not 100% then I need to carry around my cards anyway, so why get this?
You should speak to an attorney.
On the other hand, Apple is surprisingly anti-stylus. Perhaps they feel it represents a barrier between the user and machine, or maybe they feel it differentiates the iPad from the stylus-based tablets that came before.

Regardless, styluses seem to be one of the few tablet accessories that you can buy in almost any electronics store except an Apple store.
You don't need to. Since subsonic is Open Source, there's naturally multiple forks with the licensing code removed. The best fork, which also adds features, is madsonic[0]. I recommend it. In addition, if you already have subsonic, the license code is simply a check if your password = the md5 of your email. So using "example@example.com" and "23463b99b62a72f26ed677cc556c44e8" will make it think you're a valid subscriber and give you all features.

[0]: http://www.madsonic.org/
This one is a little esoteric, but Billy is a cool, incredibly minimalist audio player:

http://sheepfriends.com/index-page=billy.html

Unfortunately, it looks like the site's downloads are unavailable right now (suffering from nostalgia overload?), but it's definitely worth checking out:

* tiny -- like, 500K
* gapless playback
* 100% controllable by keyboard
Turning Bitcoin's rigorous verification system into a secure ledger for trading
I like the simple explanation of K-Means, and I like the contrast with the dense set-theoretic language -- a prime example of "mathematosis" as W.V.O. Quine put it.
I don't think the editor who picked the title actually read the article.

"Indeed, he noted, his maxim applies as well to mankind’s Biblical first act of insubordination in the Garden of Eden as it does to the 1960s counterculture that was the progenitor of the personal computer."

A better title would take into effect something like one dude says all innovation requires disrespect (LOL) and if thats the case are social media startups sufficiently insubordinate to be disrespectful enough to be our only source of modern innovation. Or something like that. Its a long complicated argument (and mostly wrong) so its going to be difficult to create a short linkbait headline.

For something that covers so many distinct topics, its pretty well written.
> you left the type of right undefined

No, the post I responded to was about the abolition of rights, which restricts it to the class of rights (legal, not moral) for which that phrase is meaningful.

Context matters.

> whereas you interpret "right" to mean "legal right" unless explicitly stated otherwise.

No, I interpret it to mean "legal right" when it is used in a context in which what is being discussed is only meaningful for legal rights.
Let's see: what do we have in the world, in actual reality, when considering your comments? What do we know (from actual examples of things that really happen) when it comes to the potential for a government to be accountable to its citizens?

In the actual world that we live in, do we have democracies that function pretty darn well? Yes (all of Scandinavia, Iceland, Switzerland).

In other parts of the world, do we have corporate monopolies (or near-monopolies) with noxious outsized influence? Most definitely yes (e.g., retroactive copyright extensions in the U.S.).

If you were to pick a country to be born into, where your household was picked completely at random, would you rather be born in the U.S. or in a country in Scandinavia? In which country do you believe you would find yourself most empowered viz. society and its governance?
The Secret to Apple's iWatch Success: Self-Sufficiency
UITableViewTricks- A Circular Tableview for iOS
On http://www.rdocumentation.org these r-fiddles are used to embed the code parts for all the R help files. That way you can test and run these code snippets within your browser as well interactively.
On Kaggle
"The top 21 performers all have an M.S. or higher: 9 have Ph.D.s and several have multiple degrees (including one member who has two Ph.D.s)."

http://plotting-success.softwareadvice.com/who-are-the-kaggl...
+1 on MusicBee, can't praise it enough
If they knew exactly what they were doing then it seems very unlikely that they would decide against doing it, because Peter Thoman's method only took about 2 weeks of his own time. The method the developers were considering may have been an internal one that required some kind of refactoring, and they were either unaware of any other way to do it, or they were aware but didn't know how long it would take because they've never done it before.

Not every game developer has an extensive understanding of how to manipulate DirectX, considering that you can put together a pretty decent game by just using a game engine and ignoring the underlying graphics altogether. I can see them failing to hire someone who has experience with the lower-level stuff on PC, when the game wasn't for PC to begin with...
display:none;
works like a charm
Jay-Z and Ashton Kutcher-Backed "Uber For Planes" Grinds to a Halt
It depends on the parts of language you're referring to. Pre-1600 in the days before widespread mechanized transport, mass media and printing Britain ended up with a lot of regional dialects and ways of spelling the same words [1] as mutations had to conquer a much smaller population to get a secure foothold.

We see minor evolutions in language these days - an extra word or changed usage to keep the dictionary-writers employed - but is there anything comparable to the differences you'd see across Britain in the 1600s?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_the_Englis...
If Python is a critical part of your work, don't upgrade to OSX Mavericks
Seriously, it's a huge accomplishment, and they deserve to be proud of it. When the president uses your product (even if it's not good) you know you've made it.
With some caveats. For example, I'm sure all the patients whose data I work with would rather not have it spilled out over GitHub.
> Music is a great use-case for keeping data in the cloud

Since when? For start it drains battery much faster. Oh and you know, it does not work offline!
It's nice. There's a number of rough edges but not hugely more than in the developed world. Learning Spanish was the biggest problem for me, because I've never committed the time to it. I met a great girl (model) here that I intend to marry (I think I would have had great difficulty meeting a loyal old-fashioned girl in my home country, nevermind that girls as pretty as her never used to give me the time of day.) I can't complain.
"<-c", regardless of what's on the left side of it will block in every case until there's a messages available in the channel (note that close is a message).

I just notice this section has been removed. I'll be less angry now. :)
Bitcoin Is Still Doomed
The reason the "IBM compatible" machine took of is because for the most part, the IBM PC was made using off-the shelf, generic components; the only proprietary part was the BIOS. Compaq invested a TON of R&D into reverse engineering the BIOS, writing a spec for it, then having another team, who had no idea how it worked, re-implement it. Because it was a totally independent implementation based on described behavior, there was nothing IBM could do; there was no copyright infringement.

As for why everyone stayed compatible with each other... I have no idea.
> In reality, basic options theory states that an option is always worth more than the underlying asset...

An option is always worth less than the underlying asset.
I believe it's related to this, basically dropping/obscuring core functionality:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/20/in-dumbest-possible-launch-...
even ignoring the issues i raised in my original post, another huge problem is the success of propaganda and the polarization of the political landscape. even if the system worked perfectly, a large portion of the population would continue to vote against their self-interest due to propaganda and social conditioning. and the polarization makes it so you can't get people to entertain different views, as they feel that they're getting attacked and "losing the fight" if they change their stance.
That's because a lot of industrial "control" is still done via classic OPC [1] for communication. That's Microsoft DCOM. I kid you not!!

And afaik they didn't have internet access directly for the control boxes at Natanz. Stuxnet got into the plant via USB sticks.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLE_for_process_control
SolveBio is exactly what I've been looking for for some other work I've been doing. We're using Harvest to build a variant filtering and reporting tool for clinical applications. We want to integrate external resources but we don't want to have to waste time writing parsers and keeping up with that public data stuff. Drop me a note (email is in my profile) if you want to talk more.
A lot of concepts are easier when you know how they work.

CPUs were magical for me before I took a computer architecture course. So was AI and machine learning. Once you see the "trick" so to speak you lose some of the initial awe.
Go-Fiddle
someone should have told the iranians that linux computers have no security vulnerabilities
I don't think preposition is correct. It's still being used as a subordinating conjunction with the second clause being an implied complete sentence.

Take the current top comment example. "because politics" actually implies a sentence something like "The talks failed because of politics, which is the kind of thing that always happens when politics are involved."

It's a common rule-check for grammar to substitute these complete sentences in order to understand the short-hand rule applications.
llama's aass! :) had to be said the right way!
It's top-down, because to engage in any endeavor of size requires some sort of organization 1) to actually direct the organization and 2) to amass the necessary physical capital necessary for the enterprise.

Capitalism solves those two problems through the modern corporation which by selling tradeable claims on the profits (through shares) and the owners (shareholders) through an elected board hiring of directors hiring managers.

Other systems which we have seen through history solve those problems through taxation and either appointment from the political class or professional bureaucracy. That is why it's top down.

(While the latter system may seem appealing, it's feedback and informational characteristics are even worse than that for capitalist managers.)
Winamp was being shopped around recently.

Either they didn't end up finding a buyer or they did and the buyer is taking the tech private (cheaper than staffing a product and paying for bandwidth costs). I'm guessing it is the latter.
> If the State ceased to exist tomorrow, do you think you and everyone you know would go on a killing spree, because no one would have "the right to live" anymore?

You not having a right to something doesn't mean I don't have better uses for my time and effort than taking it from you.
Indeed. Properly faked data, rather than just misleadingly spun analysis, can be analyzed using the most rigorous, statistically sound methods available.

Indeed, often very legitimate science does exactly this.

Deceptive analysis is pretty easy to spot. A genuine work of data fabrication artistry is much, much harder.
Once again, you beg the question. You pretend to draw a conclusion about how VC works, but that conclusion is based on the unsupported premise that VC works the way you say it does.

To the extent company boards are parsimonious about equity, it's probably in order to preserve optionality: a new chief operating officer, or a new high-profile engineer to lead a new product team, or a new CEO, all draw significantly from the pool of equity available to employees. Humans are loss averse, so a smaller up-front allocation is preferable to a larger allocation that subsequently has to be diluted down.
We just started using PagerDuty to deliver our Nagios alerts to landlines and mobile phones after losing confidence in Vodafone's pager network.

The other thing we like is the integration with HipChat to deliver alerts into our NOC chat room.

Overall we've been quite impressed....will be more impressed if you folks run into actual trouble but we still get our alerts :)
How to add a bookmark separator in Chrome
Very cool. Tough, as often times it's a question of cost-benefit analysis and it's definitely possible the developer didn't feel it was a high priority enough issue (against other bugs, against shipping by a certain date, against other projects), so it's awesome that someone from the community could choose to fix the issue in their stead. Obviously not ideal, but very cool nevertheless.