skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The dilemma: the GDP growth of China and India are almost wholly accounted for by increasing energy consumption, as I've detailed on G+:

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/LyQx8fcv...

You can see the relationship between GDP and energy via Wolfram+Alpha:

China: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=china+total+primary+ene...

India: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=india+total+primary+ene...

That said: the entire planet's got a bit of a problem, and the truth is that growing the economies of China and India through yet more increased fossil fuel consumption (much of both nation's energy comes from the worst possible source: coal), will have tremendously bad consequences.

Another factor is that the promise of economic growth has long stood in for efforts to produce greater equity -- with a growing pie, a promise of a better future can be made to all. When the pie stops growing (or even slows markedly) that relief valve is no longer available. Worse, the dynamics of various systems and institutions, including liberal democratic ones (but also "free market" systems) appear to behave pathologically under resource constraint circumstances (not that non-democratic ones behave better in all cases). It's a rather sticky problem (and for the record: I happen to like many of the features of democratic and liberal institutions).
> When Kim decided to leave NASA [...] he wanted to get a job in Korea but to even do that he was told that he needed elementary, middle, and high school diplomas. “Since I had no official diploma ― I had to start all over from scratch,” Kim explained.

Highest IQ in the world, 10 years of experience at NASA, and he wasn't drowning in job offers? South Korean companies need to think seriously about what they're looking for in an employee.
There are, broadly speaking, three kinds of quant funds that trade equities -

1. High frequency trading firms with sub-millisecond latency, who make their money from the bid-offer spread. You can't compete here.

2. Medium term traders who will hold a position for somewhere between hours and weeks. They tend to be looking for statistical regularities to exploit. If they find one, they don't expect it to persist for long - the typical 'half life' of a strategy is around six months. It's not impossible for an amateur to compete here, but be aware that there are thousands (tens of thousands?) of people for whom this is a full time job. Many (most?) of them have backgrounds in quantitative finance, have worked at funds and large investment banks, have PhDs in physics, mathematics, computer science etc. So you should ask yourself why you think you will be able to compete.

3. Long-term traders who are either stock picking, or actively managing a portfolio that might include stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies etc. Some of them are just trying to beat the market, and some are looking for absolute return. All the points in the OP article apply to this case.
Nice.

We all have windows - and many of those windows open. A basket that hangs outside the window with a battery powered beacon is another option for delivery. The baskets could even be secure and waterproof.
The control of the train itself is easy. Simulations abound for this purpose. The GE's and Siemons of this world wouldn't hesitate to implement them if there weren't other significant rail context specific issues, such as the human environment comment above. The difference is that it's not a human vs human driver problem but a schedule design and human making bad scheduling decisions now that the trains are running late, implementation problem.

Furthermore, train drivers are cheap (compared with other infrastructure investments) and relatively efficient as they can be skilfully taught to drive according to a plan (compared with your fellow road commuters). Without other investments to tell the driver or the computer that they can drive faster/closer to the train in front at most railways are only likely to see efficiency gains (lower power/diesel usage) but struggle to drive those trains to denser schedules. It will happen for non-capacity reasons such as inter network usage, and safety to prevent trains from speeding around curves and falling off.

I expect the challenge will ease partly due to implementing automation of the management to provide safety at increased traffic densities and provide online decision support analysis. Later versions of ETCS could an example of part of that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Train_Control_System Example of some of the budgets involved: http://ec.europa.eu/transport/themes/infrastructure/news/ten...)

Once a future version of that is done (ATMS in Australia for example), driverless tech will be much closer to being the low hanging fruit.
1) drone failure causing damage to people or property

2) limited operational capabilities in regards to weather conditions. As someone who has flown ram air canopies in urban environments, I can tell you that 10mph winds of a building creates some interesting vortices. What's the air speed of a quad/octocopter-style drone?

3) shared airspace issues. These drones will probably fly pretty low (<1000ft?) and they will not be alone. There will be many drones in the air, from various manufacturers and companies. Imagine the ATC complexity in an environment like that. There's no system for that today.

Solving problems like that would probably be very interesting.
I agree with the general sentiment. I day-traded for about a year and came out of it concluding that long term stock "investing" is bonkers. Long term in this context means holding a position past market close. I put "investing" between quotes because I came out of the experience thinking that holding stocks past a day's closing bell was nothing short than gambling. Some of the things I saw happening after market close were just scary. The minute people stopped recoiling at insane P/E ratios it went from investing to legalized gambling.

I did very well day trading but it required massive amounts of work. I devoted no less than four hours pre-market-open and another four post-close to research and data analysis. Taking risks was part and parcel of every single trade. Perhaps the toughest things to get used to was to sell everything --and I do mean everything-- before market close in order to avoid having any open positions overnight. It was tough because there were days when you'd close out at a loss. On any give day you could be up several thousand or down just as much.

The reason I concluded intraday trading to be a better idea (assuming you have the time) was that the charts and a number of other data points almost give you all the information you need to trade. You trade a narrow set of stocks that you get to know very well. Each has it's own personality from day to day. You get used to this personality. You look for stocks that don't have crazy volatility or, at the other end of the spectrum, don't put you to sleep waiting for things to happen. With the right amount of action and the enough experience to avoid emotional trading you can pull back, watch the sheep go up and down the charts and play against them. If you are smart, have patience, luck and don't get greedy, you can make money.

Why did I stop? Because the time and effort invested never results in a profit center that you can decouple from. In that sense it isn't any different than being a brick layer: If you stop laying bricks you stop earning money. I was laying bricks sixteen hours a day.

It's that simple. Instead, if you invest a solid sixteen hours per day, Monday through Friday on a business or a career I firmly believe that, in the long run, you'll be far better off.

There are cases where the stock market is a neat place to make lots of money. You don't have to be in the market to take advantage of those. You simply have to be ready, willing and able to do so when the opportunity presents itself. All you are looking for are market crashes. It's that simple. They've happened before and they'll happen again. And, if you are looking for long term passive gains, that's the best time to jump in. Don't bet the farm on it, but be ready and act decisively when it happens. Go against the sheep.
Cars and trucks are also a distinct threat to birds.

Really - unless you lived on 5th Avenue downstream from a local delivery drone center, I doubt you'd see many drones. I don't see how we would see a sparrow flying past as 'pretty' and a drone flying past as 'ugly'. I would be amused to watch them from a window, just like I get amusement from watching planes take off and land. I guess it depends on your perspective.
Higher productivity through mechanisation also leads to businesses being far more capital-intensive and less reliant on humans, which means a large proportion of the money coming in from those lower prices goes to members of the capital owning class - who, in general, don't spend nearly as much of it - which, in turn, means that spending power amongst the people who do actually spend will decrease faster than prices.
Absolutely love Asus routers. Have been running tomato on a RT-N16 with no problems.

The N66U is an absolute monster. 256mb of RAM on it is almost silly.
> NY, the most subway-centric city, has the longest commutes in the US. LA, "the most car centric city" (probably not literally true) tends to have amongst the shortest.

NY has much, much higher population density than LA, which probably both explains why it was more subway-centric and why commutes are longer.
>The FAA situation. Drones are going to have _very_ restricted airspace especially in populated metro areas, if the FAA grants them these privileges at all. If you look at Los Angeles/SF/NYC/DC/Boston, you see airspace that is so overcrowded that I just don't see how drones are going to be zipping around here.

How do you figure? Do you realize how big the sky is? For every square foot of land there are tons of layers of airspace above it, and it's almost completely unused except for a few tall buildings and a relatively small number of flying vehicles (compared to what we manage to fit on the ground.)

Drones are fairly maneuverable and could be made with decent collision avoidance and sensors.
Great post. I'm excited to see this discussion happening more and more at the elementary, middle and secondary level. Beyond a 'pipeline' issue, its also an interest and awareness issue among our minority youth.
It's not possible for everyone to beat the market, which is what counts if you treat it like poker.
I will refrain from opining on your newbness and just say this:

SQL is just a query/update language. Most of the "ahem" alternatives are slow, severely constrained and don't have the maturity of 40 years of query optimization behind them.

Most of the arguments against sql have nothing to do with databases but are forwarding higher level abstractions like ORM.

Learn SQL and a programming language. You will go far with just those.
Normally with questions such as these you don't come up with a ridiculous claim and ask others to prove it for you.
Never imagined Toast Sandwich to be anything like that.

This is what Toast Sandwich is in India.

http://i.imgur.com/sP7ctxG.jpg
#3 is wrong. Flying a drone in a windy / rainy weather isn't exactly the same as driving a car. One is more massive and resistive. The drone we see in demo probably can't fly very well under strong wind or heavy ring. Size matters.
(5) I know several people with video-enabled drones. Look on youtube - it's a whole genre. That ship has sailed.

Although you'd have to be a pretty stupid adulterer to get caught by a noisy drone while cheating. That may just be a tautology.
I would love to see every single email by DAs that include her name subpoenaed.

"The report shows that the Hinton lab leaned heavily on
Dookhan’s productivity. Supervisors lauded her work ethic
and assigned her an increasing share of tests."[0]

We should know what her supervisors and DA were saying in private about her work to her and to one another. There is no way that someone is so much more productive, without anyone ever suspecting wrongdoing and turning a blind eye to all this. Anyone who had ever expressed suspicion of her work, but never raised the issue should be liable for criminal negligence here.

[0] http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/05/15/annie-dookhan-drug-t...
Dear God, this is beautiful!
This is what Peter Thiel calls indefinite pessimism, where instead of money being invested confidently in companies that can use it, it is being forwarded to abstract financial entities that generate no value. Not something that a single investor could change, more a reflection of a growth crisis.
Politics at Google (has a section on Vic Gundotra)
People are probably sick of Black Friday by now and still need to buy holiday presents. Excellent marketing timing. Kudos to Bezos.
Okay, but comments on this post seem to be particularly insufferable.

HN is usually filled with poor attempts at being clever; rarely is it ever so completely contradictory and illogical.
I don't think you're following the argument at all. A bitcoin is composed of satoshis, and the price is additive. Switching units doesn't actually change the price.
SEEKING WORK

BigData Consulting firm that specializes in:
Kafka, Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, Storm, Tableau, Oracle, Mysql and other BI, BigData and related tools.

Email me at steve at demandcube.com
Do the tour, read effective go, then start writing. As you have issues not solved by googling, join/ask golang nuts. Not a more helpful group of people in the tech world, in my opinion.
The key is the pacing of the asset streaming relative to the rate of environmental change the player is creating on the screen.

Streaming essentially disables fast travelling and teleporting to some extent, but makes slow travelling seamless and much, much more enjoyable. World of Warcraft was among the first online games to get it about right at launch, and I'm pretty sure the absence of loading screens was a huge factor in its universal acclaim.
> They're just observing that this thing has failure modes because people are dumb.

Yeah, and people were damn scared of electricity when it was first introduced to the masses and many did not want it. Go forward 10, 20 years down the road and it was massively adopted. Of course there are always failure modes, but what's more critical to look at is, what's the benefit of this new technology, and will the benefits outweigh the failure modes? I'd suspect the answer will be a clear yes.
You shouldn't, unless you are running a server and wants to install it once and only do as small upgrades as possible.
Yes, but the fact that most websites these days have to load seven dozen javascripts and CSS stylesheets to become usable probably doesn't help either
Would Paul Walker survive had he been riding a Tesla?
I live in the East, have read a lot about Tesla's specially the burn out safety considering the recent fire cases. I am just trying to understand the technology difference vs trade off with road accidents. Was the collision the major cause of death? Or does the fire play the primary role? If fire plays a large role often, is Tesla really as good as it looks on the web? Reason of mentioning Paul Walker's case was a recent example of a fatal high speed accident in a comparatively good sports car vs Tesla.
you realize that would help the defendant, if anything, right? perhaps even to the extent of getting the evidence excluded entirely?

(also chemists generally don't want some random guy's cocaine. they know the awful shit street drugs get cut with. once you're DEA registered, you can basically just order pure drugs from the government. that's the stuff that gets diverted, and it's also how you'd up the concentration of a defendant's sample.)

even so, that's why two people are supposed to be present for the handling, and samples should be homogenized early on and then split up for independent testing if the defendant wants it. add on lots of tamper evident tape, etc.
>WAAA WAAA NIMBY NIMBY WAAAA
For OpenWRT, if you'd like a Netgear R6300 do not get the v2. I've been told on OpenWRT's IRC just recently its not supported so you won't get usb, ethernet, wireless etc.,pretty much all that is vital. Whereas v1 is supported and said to have worked, it's not on the officially supported hardware list. There isn't much info on this model with regards to openwrt I'm afraid. In fact, I'm atm busy trying to build a custom fw for it myself & will update if I manage to get it working. (Though fyi, I can confirm DD-Wrt is working for this model)
I don't see how access to medicine makes any difference

Look over the history of the Industrial Revolution -- roughly 1750 - 1950. At the start of that we had no real working engines, transportation systems, concept of energy or thermodynamics, understanding of evolution or germ theory, and a whole host of other concepts, as well as practical technologies: steam engines, metalurgy, steel, chemicals, electricity, communications, fertilizers, drugs, information technology.

The countries modernizing now do have all of these things, and the possibility of avoiding many of the mistakes which were made by the countries which pioneered the transition (England, the US, Germany, France, and the rest of Western Europe).

As late as 1860, cholera epidemics were killing millions of people throughout Europe and tens of thousands in London alone (imported from India, as it happens). Sewerage systems, water treatment, antisceptics, anesthesia, and eventually antibiotics came out of this -- but the first two alone provided the lion's share of life-expectancy gains in England and the US.

The other thing we're very well aware of now is that 1) continuing to extract fossil fuel resources at the rates we've been doing will drastically change the climate and living conditions on Earth, possibly irrevocably and fatally to no only the economy but humans and most large animal species, and 2) those fossil resources will be too difficult to find and extract for net energy gain within the forseable future regardless. And those are only two of many impinging constraints humans face.

The recycling economy of which you write is only one change which will likely become far more widespread. John Michael Greer's notion of "catabolic collapse" -- which explains both much of the financialization and "software eats everything" aspects of the past two decades -- extends that idea:

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/01/onset-of-cata...

http://www.ecoshock.org/transcripts/greer_on_collapse.pdf

Look to your own Indus Valley Civilization for an earlier instance (an no, this time is not different).
Exactly, let's not extend the conclusions of the article: it's not that it's impossible to consistently beat the market average, it's just that it's extremely unlikely for the "general public".

EMT is probably approximately true, specially with fast algorithmic trading and automated analysis. But the degree of accuracy is key -- some applications are highly sensitive to how good this approximation is, allowing big gains. Also, in practice, there is a "zero sum" part of trading, and that necessarily implies that someone is going to make money and someone will loose (disregarding the other part). Whoever has the best model wins consistently.
> People expect intelligence to be always found alongside ambition.

The amusing thing is, ambition is seen as more "inherent" than intelligence--part of your personality, rather than just a skill--and yet, improving general intelligence (by more than 5-10 IQ points) is nearly impossible, while improving ambition just requires taking some dopamine agonists.

I would think it would be rational, given extremely high intelligence, to self-modify toward larger ambitions. I mean, if the ambitions you have are basically cached thoughts that stick around due mostly to inertia, from the limits you were unable to surmount while you were younger and had fewer resources... then why not challenge them? Ask yourself what you'd truly want, if you had every tool available? In fact, why not ask that now?

Of course, the answer you arrive at, after this self-awareness comes, can still be an ambition that's limited in scope. But it'll be limited by choice by your current self, rather than imposed on you by your limited past self.
Just a summary of what Little Eye Labs does:

Little Eye Labs offers android app analysis & performance tools. It develops tools that provide detailed insights about the performance of the app. This happens without changing the code or integration. So a dev could debug an android app and find ways to optimize it quite easily without altering their code.
Bitcoin discussions on Hacker News are subject to Poe's Law.
> That would mean Amazon will have a whole lot of hubs all over the country in 1 hour radii.

Amazon is already building distribution centers all over the countries where they operate. They are massively upscaling their distribution network, and it's fair to expect that by 2015 they would have reached a point where they can guarantee 30 mins delivery in all major hubs.

Note that even currently, "prime" is not available for all items sold on Amazon anyway. I expect there will be similar restrictions as to what applies to "prime air".
Clojure, Xtend, JRuby, JPython, and Javascript (both Rhino and Nashorn) also make good scripting layers for Java!
When the coins run out, will bitcoin collapse?
will the bitcoin network inevitably collapse once all of the coins have been mined with no incentive in the system to maintain the blockchain? http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Shouldn't we then build sites with that assumption in mind?

For example, why is It that almost no site uses appcache, when it is a way of ensuring that resources are already local and the only network traffic is the truly essential part? Why do we care about retina imagery, when it is obvious that the majority of users get a worse experience as a consequence? Why have sites doubled in size in two years time without adding a meaningful percentage in content?

These all point to an industry that lacks perspective on their user's actual user experience because they are sitting on a nice fiber line two hops from the server.
For thread pools, use ExecutorService or the Guava flavour. The lack of pattern-matching is a pain, but note that you can use Enum values in switch statements.
Y'all are getting hung up on insisting that Bitcoin is a currency, which nobody is arguing. There are important differences in the use cases that make a currency valuable to society, though. And Bitcoin is a far cry from demonstrating its value beyond the anonymous use case (or speculator use case). It is not stable or trustworthy yet, and will not be used as a reserve currency until making huge gains in both areas.
If you think a criminal background check is going to be effective at ensuring this woman will never work in this particular field again, that may be one thing, but you were suggesting that mere awareness of this woman would cause potential future employers to use Google to ensure that they never hired her. This would of course be ineffective, since she has been proven to be a liar.

I don't know why you think I have a bone to pick... You seem a little annoyed that I am responding to something that you did not mean to be your primary point. You are going to have to find a way to cope with that.
The transaction fees will make mining still profitable forever.
HP Print Service Plugin bundled in stock Android 4.4 ROM (KitKat)
3-5 years is fine as long as everyone else who colluded or was complicit also gets caught up in this, especially DAs. The citizens of Massachusetts should demand a thorough clean up of the lab to bring it back to reputability, and that means cleaning house.

I reckon that all other 49 states should see this as a sign to perform their own audits. I just hope that if such audits are performed, that they don't get swept under the rug. Otherwise the problem will be solved, but many who didn't get due process will continue to rot in jail so that other states can save face.

20+ year jail sentences are already excessive for the overwhelming majority of people in jail with 20+ year sentences.