skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you talk about inequality, you're talking about the Gini coefficient (you may prefer a different definition, but let's just use that because it's well known and simple). There is no reason to think that a Gini of, say, .7 leads to plutocrats or monopolies any more/less so than a Gini of .4.

Plutocrats derive power from their wealth. The Pluto Problem (haha, couldn't resist) is not due to society wide inequality levels, but rather to a political system which enables them to derive said power. Finally, if you look at the richest people in the US such as Gates, Buffet and the Waltons, I don't think that you'll find they have political power even remotely similar to plutocrats such as Berlusconi. Point being that, in my opinion, Plutocrats don't exist in the US. Are there rich, politically powerful people in the US? Yes. Are there people who derive immense political power solely through said wealth? I would say no. It's more likely to work the other way around (political power leads to wealth - as in the case of the Clintons and now Obama).

People may discuss examples such as Romeny et al, but he's only worth $250 million. If it only takes $250m to get political power (and does Romney even have any political power today?), then I'd see your concern!

Regarding your concern over monopolies generally, I am reminded of a wonderful Friedman response to the question 'When have you ever been wrong': "I used to believe that some anti trust activity had merit."
The graphs are just illustrations. The actual graphs would be high-dimensional (one dimension or axis for each word in the total word set), and each axis would have only two ticks on it: 0 and 1. A post is mapped to the binary vector in this space whose coordinates are determined by the presence or absence of words in the post.
Hostmonster.com, Hostgator.com and Bluehost.com Down (Again)
Ever since the hosts below merged to Endurance International Group's data infrastructure outages have become much more frequent.

https://twitter.com/bluehost
https://twitter.com/hostgator
https://twitter.com/hostmonster
A Musical Instrument using only WebAudio
I know that you are kidding because HN is against changes according to what I previously read
Having a small savings to get you through trouble doesn't make you well off. You make it sound like you have to run yourself irresponsibly in the red to be able to qualify as struggling to get by.
Raw data, and the source code which you used to arrive at your conclusion, or it didn't happen.

In today's world of github gists and python PyPI's and R's CRAN, there's no excuse to not document the entire process, in addition to raw data.
Charging a 1 time fee probably wasn't the best idea for life-time support.

Perhaps AOL hoped they would have their own itunes and it would self support the player development
The new revelations on this NSA stuff aren't surprising; the theme has been set and now we're just thinking, "yeah, no surprise there."
Yeah you can force it if you call shellcode as a function but other than that, libc functions, if the elf is dynamically linked, will be mapped in using the procedure linkage table before main runs

but...this is because printf != the write syscall
What's with all the outdated OS images on DigitalOcean?
> few pieces of software I still use every day that can provide an anchor all the way back to my mid-teens

Same here :(. I pirated it for so many years and it was the first license that I purchased after being able to afford it (after getting a job).

I would really like to know why :(. Winamp is one of the very few companies that I feel deserves many more pennies than they asked for.
Thanks! I was using firebug to kill the overlay.
They do, but again, if you haven't read the book you won't connect the dots.
That has absolutely nothing to do with anything I said.

We also still use cups to hold water and plates to eat food off of. What is your point? Some things don't progress? You're right. I don't see how that relates though.
Thanks to media consolidation, the uproar is swept under the rug in such a way that it does not spread. Occupy Wall Street was covered as front-page headline news for a very short time in relation to its actual duration. It went practically unacknowledged for the size of the event.

And people saw New Orleans after Katrina, and Boston after the marathon bombing. They didn't yell. They just went out and bought their first gun. Or they bought a camera or smartphone live-streaming app and started randomly recording police encounters.

So now "prepping" by such means as stockpiling food and ammunition is a normal part of society. This, despite blog and television portrayals of such people as wingnuts. People are quietly preparing for surviving a civil war, under the guise of disaster preparedness.

Once the watershed event occurs, whatever it may be, it will not be pretty. If even 0.1% of the population are just waiting for the camel's back to break before firing one shot, that's still a lot of bullets in the air.
I don't know about you, but my boss has no say in how many kids I have or specifically where I live, and any effort he makes to impact these things is not enforced by the state.
They are also incredibly risk-averse. Even though they they have a no-risk, probationary period during which they can release an employee who's not working out, they are deathly afraid of hiring someone who's not perfect. And a 90% fit simply won't do; they must be guaranteed of a 100% fit. In the meantime, their current employees are stretched beyond their limits, deadlines are missed OR made with a very high price (team morale, long-term productivity, other missed deadlines), the business becomes more tactical than strategic, etc. And if things eventually go to hell in a handbasket, it's blamed on the "lack of qualified applicants".
An 80% chance of becoming worth $1 billion (liquidly) seems like a dramatic exaggeration to me.
Upvoted this for an interesting read, but I agree with the sentiments in the comments that (1) ML is in general hard (2) some parts of ML are not that hard, but are likely the minority (3) we are standing on the shoulders of giants, who did the hard work.
I prefer Seafile, owncloud didn't work properly. As in, failed at syncing files.
Sure, author here.

The point of the graphs are as an example more than anything — in any real world solution it's not trivial to plot your documents (as representing documents with thousands of words in 1d, 2d or 3d is not trivial).

But if _you could_ represent your documents in 2d, you could plot them like I do here. And, the X-axis would represent 1 feature of your documents, and the Y-axis another.

Tl;dr don't focus on the axes — focus on the idea of being able to compare the relative distances between documents.
http://i.imgur.com/Y9Y4yZI.jpg
You will be missed!
Keep in mind the problem aren't the elites, their success in reproduction which causes the imbalance between their numbers and the number of (suitable) positions available to them.

After all, a core tenet of The American Dream™ states one must do better - in terms of social status - than one's forebears.

And when was the last time you heard a college professor brag about having a mechanic for a son? Not that there's anything wrong with either profession when they act honestly.

I kind of dig the analysis, as it resembles Asimov's psychohistory, but it's still a bit haphazard because the analyst assumes some kind of periodicity to the phenomenon.

This kind of work lends itself to other questions, such as whether one can increase its' predictive power by analyzing social artifacts such as music, books or visual arts.
Notable inventions by IBM include...[only one thing invented in the last forty years].

Your claim doesn't really argue against the description "old dying giants." The best response might be that IBM is still profitable, but you didn't include that.
This is why I lament the fading of the 'PC era'. For me the PC embodies standards, compatibility and interoperability. Buy your PC from one company, and if their memory upgrade price was too high, buy your memory from another. (And your graphics card from another, and your hard drive from another...).

It's my hope that eventually similar standards will evolve for tablets (and laptops, and perhaps phones) that allow a consumer to easily modify or custom build a compatible device.

Unfortunately, I don't have high expectations that this will actually happen. The market just doesn't seem to be applying the right pressure to have any companies interested in doing such a thing.

(Out of interest, can anyone with more knowledge comment on how this standardization came about for PC's. I presume there was a time when computers from different companies weren't compatible. What brought about the "IBM compatible" machine, and why did IBM not sue the pants off every company releasing such a product?)
Encrypt the Web Report: Who's Doing What
Which version? I installed v2.95, but the library doesn't seem to work.
> Instead of creating the atomic elements needed to support generic data structures then adding a suite of them to the standard library, the Go team went the other way. There was a concrete use case for good data structures, and so they were added. Attempting a deep reconciliation with the rest of the language was a secondary requirement that was so unimportant that it fell by the wayside for Go 1.x.

For the last year or so, Go has essentially been my primary language. Before that, my primary languages were Python and Lisp (various dialects).

I don't think that anybody who uses Go extensively will deny that they have some feature $X that they'd love to have added to Go[0]. (For me, I miss being able to use some common Lisp idioms).

However, what I like the most about Go is that they don't "just add it" simply because some people suggest it, the way that other languages might. The feature set is incredibly minimal - while it's impossible to get rid of all redundancy, programming in Go is a very consistent experience, because everything that's been done feels like it's been done the right way[1].

Also, from the original post (the one that this blog post partially retracts):

> the exhilarating sense of weightlessness that you get when hacking in Python is largely due to the fact that the language works really, really hard to optimize this process. Go has given away this feeling of exhilaration, basically for nothing.

Hopefully the author now realizes that what Go gives up (only marginally) in "weightlessness" while developing is made up more than tenfold when maintaining code.

I honestly don't bat an eyelid anymore when I need to refactor Go code, even if I've forgotten to write tests[2]. It doesn't take anywhere near as long as refactoring Python takes me, and I don't worry as much about introducing logical errors (or worse, runtime exceptions).

[0] Incidentally, "generics" doesn't seem to be a common complaint among people who have actually programmed in Go for a moderate length of time, anecdotally.

[1] Yes, this is subjective.

[2] Yes, I know. Always write tests. But still.
At $0.07/hour for 1TB/month, with <1min startup time, DigitalOcean is actually a decent host to do this with.
Oh ya?
Don't feel too bad, I heard Verizon is just as bad. I am a customer of a Sprint MVNO and have a new moto-X sitting at home waiting to be unwrapped tonight, and I've already been informed Sprint also prevents NFC wallet.

As far as I can tell, the only Google Wallet hardware that actually works for NFC is tablets, like my nexus 7. Everything else disabled by all carriers. I can't find anywhere to actually use it where I'd be willing to haul the tablet.
Said a different way, consider the opportunity cost of continuing to work on this idea that will probably not be a big payout for you.

If your idea will improve the world in some useful way (and if the rest of the owners will let you continue on with the company), and if you think any replacement CEO won't be able to execute your idea to your satisfaction, it could be worth it for you to persist. Or it may be better to, as mindcrime said, cut your losses and work on your next idea that will improve the world.
foobar still can't do sound level balancing (ReplayGain) properly. Does winamp?
That seems like a strange universe. I don't see why designers would suddenly disregard heat output or noise just because batteries were able to provide more power. Apple doesn't disregard these factors in their AC powered computers, so why would they do so in mobile computers?
resilient maybe?
This is very much false:

While this will return immediately:

v, ok := <- c
You don't need to. It's a freemium model - paying a subscription gets you some extra features, like apps for mobile.
One would be to play music.
Sad news. Always loved using winamp. Really did "kick the llama's ass."
I had a similar problem once when working on a project that used Basecamp. It was hell. Less is more!
Technically, we give up some of our rights to the state; the right to enter into a state of war, for example. There are notable exceptions to this but it's really dependent on community norms in those cases.
Doesn't require customization to be usable.
No, I immediately thought of him too haha
They have MySpace but not Facebook...Odd
Oh I have, and I like it so much that I feel like mentioning all the time. So I was pleased with my self-restraint here ;)
Those were the days!

End of an era. Sad day.
Yeah, "ok" here really signals whether or not the channel is closed. It will still block unless c is buffered.

There are actually a number of other errors in this post, unfortunately, even though I agree with the general conclusion.
You're right in that the GUI is certainly a much more accessible tool than the CLI, but I and many others still stand by the CLI as a powerful tool and the preferred way to get things done (in many cases, though not all).

Likewise, a hardware keyboard for a phone is something I like, something I enjoy, and something I find useful for me. I totally understand that many users don't need it or don't want it. Mostly, I'm just unhappy that it's being abandoned so completely by manufacturers when there is a utility to it.
IOS / Android Mail client with IMAP push from mail.ru staff
Didn't we have the same conversation yesterday?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6762562
How to become your own superhero
Culturally, do you see the same demands placed on you as are placed on a male peer/brother of yours? I bet when you start seeing those you will start seeing similar behavior (because I have seen it).
Yes, Peter Pawlowski. According to Wikipedia, he is "a former freelance contractor for Nullsoft."

EDIT: He's also been working on an audio player called Boom: http://perkele.cc/software/boom
New Web Frontend for Apache ZooKeeper
Tonido sucks. Nothing but issues and problems with it and support is non-existent. Stay away!
Well thanks for fucking ruining Citizen Kane for me.

But seriously, Frodo getting to Mount Doom is not a spoiler because it's expected. Vader being Luke's father is unavoidable in popular culture because people quote it all the time.

Ender's Game on the other hand has a huge twist and is obscure enough that it can remain hidden. It went unspoilt for me for probably 25 years, and it's not like the book was unknown to me during that time (I probably heard of it in 1993, but only read it in 2008).
For the record, I was not meaning to criticize jmillikin's remark. Rather, the tone and phrasing of the remark made it quite clear (to me at least) that Google now has, at least in some quarters, gravitated towards the common and pedestrian situation where employees and management are intrinsically at odds with each other, operating from vastly different perspectives, and having to work hard to even maintain civility, having essentially lost respect for each other. Phrases such as "their stated reasoning goes like this" implies that their stated reasoning differs from their real reasons, and by further implication, their real reasons are either wholly misguided, delusional, capricious, evil, or some combination thereof.

It's just a far cry from "do no evil", and the tone is wholly different than what I heard from early G employees, back in what I respectfully have to consider their heyday.
you CAN technically do that in this way

if you buy .pizza you could technically host one website at

http://www.pizza
'Regarding your concern over monopolies generally, I am reminded of a wonderful Friedman response to the question 'When have you ever been wrong': "I used to believe that some anti trust activity had merit."'

I consider it a good and proper task for the government to ensure nothing, including itself, gets too large. That is not to say that our government today can do it. I'm not sure what to do once you pass a certain event horizon of concentrated power... well, actually, I'm pretty confident the only answer is to wait for the concentration to inevitably collapse and take some percent of society with it (historically, at times approaching 100%), but I don't know how to reliably make that safe, let alone painless. I'm not sure there is a way. I'm more interested in building robust societies that can survive disruptions than in trying to prevent them; there's pretty good mathematical reasons to believe that's simply impossible. To say this puts me out of the political mainstream would be putting it lightly.

Anyhow, it's not news to me that my preferred politics doesn't produce Utopia... I would be much happier if everybody else realized that neither do theirs.
My nephew is into Skylanders, and the other day at Toys'R'Us I noticed that they are now selling Skylander dog-tags.
Of the two methods described - search vs. clustering - the first one - simpler and not involving ML - is better for this use case. The only reason it seems to give worst results is because it's only used with the titles and not the full body (unlike the clustering approach). So I guess machine learning is easier to mis-use than it looks...
Theres a list of examples in the readme. I think the devops ideas are interesting.

Store sensible data: Your brand new shinny infrastructure surely relies on many certificates and private keys of different kinds: ssl, rsa, gpg, ... Trousseau provides a simple and fine-tuned way to store their content in a single file that you can safely version using your favorite cvs. No more plain certificates and keys in your repositories and configuration files.
These explanations make a lot of sense.

For #1, the stated reason VCs discourage substantial employee equity is that they don't want the "equity-oriented culture". The real reason is greed in what they perceive as a zero-sum game (but it's not; different policies would create different companies!)

#2 is probably quite accurate. It's sad, though, that paying well confuses Wall Street into thinking a business is ineptly run.
Regardless, the point is that credit cards make money off of each transaction, even if the consumer doesn't see a per-transaction fee.
Should I file a lawsuit against my former employer?
Let's say being a programmer requires X, Y, and Z. X is 65/35 male/female, Y is 60/40, Z is 55/45.

The odds of finding a woman with X, Y, and Z is 0.35 * .4 * 0.45, about 5%.

The odds of finding a man with X, Y, and Z is 0.65 * .6 * 0.55, about 20%.

All else equal, you'd find that about 80% of programmers are male.

Obviously my example is contrived, but if you think I'm wildly wrong, please respond with something math-based, even if it's equally contrived. Then we'll at least know what the other is really getting at.
Unfortunately, it's all the movie is memorable for.
SuperStride Me: Reg hack spends week working at 'treadmill desk'
And without the state I couldn't just have a few of my employees or friends burn your house down?

This whole argument of whether property rights or lack of property rights is due to a State is fundamentally misguided. The State is just force, and whether that force creates property rights or destroys common understanding of property rights depends upon how that force is applied.
I was going to say something around those lines but you save me the effort.

Although in my opinion using ML and have some decent results is not that hard. Use it and being close to the state in the art (i.e improving your recognition rate from 65% to 80%) is a completely different matter and it is hard and it requires a fully understanding of the details of the algorithm in use.

Still it doesn't meant that you can't do interesting things with an overall understanding of machine learning, but making a good cat detector is hard [0] [1]

[0] http://research.google.com/archive/unsupervised_icml2012.htm...

[1] http://techtalks.tv/talks/machine-learning-and-ai-via-brain-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6771148
Inflatable Solar Chimney vs. Traditional Solar Panels
I disagree with this article, although I did find it interesting. Replace k-means with a supervised learning algorithm like an SVM, and use some more complicated features other than binary and this article would be a lot different.

Also - maybe "article recommendation" is "easy" in this context, but other areas such as computer vision, sentiment analysis are not. Some other questions I might ask

How do you know how well this algorithm is performing?

How are you going to compare this model to other models? Which metrics will you use? What statistical tests would you use and why?

What assumptions are you making here ? How do you know you can make them and why?

There are a lot of things that this article fails to address.

Disclaimer: I realize more complex models + features don't always lead to better performance, but you need to know how to verify that to be sure.
Shocker, this just in, successful companies use:

- value-based pricing instead of cost-based pricing for products and upgrades

- set lower gross margin prices on a base model product in order to attract customers and upsell and cross sell to high margin add-ons and premium versions

btw. Apple has sometimes been described as a flash memory distribution company. All the other stuff, the devices, itunes, the media business, the app store, serve primarily to help sell more flash memory. The lion share of apple revenue is attributed to hardware sales. Mostly iphone and ipad. Within hardware sales the BOM and markup for flash memory chips is the largest driver of gross margin.
If you read the post, he's responding to that article: "So I was excited to see that First Round Capital featured a blog post by Andy Rachleff on this topic yesterday.."
Yup. Getting there will take a while. In the meantime I plan on releasing a whole bunch of middleware in the martini-contrib repo and creating more video tutorials on web development in Go.
To the OP: thanks for posting this. You may have just changed a life very much for the better (not mine, but someone I know quite well).
Thanks for replying.

Could you elaborate on your stance? Obviously, being agile doesn't do away with processes and tools. But giving a lecture on TDD to unwilling programmers seems to guarantee the "people and interactions" part of the equation will be unsatisfactory. There's also the question (at least in my mind) of how this should be viewed in terms of customer collaboration - without attending that lecture, it seems to me that there's no collaboration here, robin2's employer pre-ordered something useless, and that's what they got. Where am I wrong?

Obviously, teaching TDD in a collaborative and positive environment, and making sure the students are capable and willing to practice TDD would be very much "agile".

Just in case that's not clear: I'm sincerely asking that with humility, there's not a doubt in my mind you have a much better grasp of what agile means - you defined it...
That's the option. But i just turned it on and the comment still shows up as [deleted].
Sun expected to 'flip upside down' as magnetic field reverses its polarity
I like 'show password' buttons.
Show HN: Furatto Thumbnail Preview Add On a la' Google
I could see open software being more important on the 100+ year scale (I could also see it not). The work or Bill Gates is very high impact, though.