skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking at the action critically, what is to be gained by calling attention to Google, Facebook, and others providing their own bus fleets?

A bus fleet that works for everybody? You know, the kind of public transportation that is common in industrialized countries that have their act together when it comes to the provision of public services.
As someone who's tried to get from San Francisco to Silicon Valley without a car, I'd love to see companies like Google advocating and supporting better public transportation as well as just providing a private solution.
Not to mention those Google employees pay a lot in taxes. They fund that public infrastructure, more so than just about anyone else in fact.
A professor of mine stated it very well. If you can imagine that there is a true model somewhere out in infinitely large model space then ML is just the search for that model.

In order to make it tractable, you pick a finite model space, train it on finite data, and use a finite algorithm to find the best choice inside of that space. That means you can fail in three ways---you can over-constrain your model space so that the true model cannot be found, you can underpower your search so that you have less an ability to discern the best model in your chosen model space, and you can terminate your search early and fail to reach that point entirely.

Almost all error in ML can be seen nicely in this model. In particular here, those who do not remember to optimize validation accuracy are often making their model space so large (overfitting) at the cost of having too little data to power the search within it.

Devroye, Gyorfi, and Lugosi (http://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Recognition-Stochastic-M...) have a really great picture of this in their book.
But even protests over ridiculous things tend to have at least some understandable, and sometimes reasonable, argument. Sticking to this scenario, can you not think of a single one for the protesting residents?
Put a Satanic Monument at OK Capitol
China-Brazil satellite fails to enter orbit
pardon me, but is that function writing to the database for each page view?
This is a totally nonsensical post. If you're not friends with the person, the ability to write a small post about it isn't going to change that. If you are friends with them, then the lack of a message doesn't matter.

As for following up after conferences and such, the proper protocol is an email.
That seems like a mighty straw man. He never said he disagreed with the permit process. He simply disagrees with the idea that these companies have been able to park illegally with no consequence for years and instead of just writing them tickets, as the city would do for a normal person, they decide to give them permits to prevent them from having to break the law hundreds of times a day.
I'm getting response times of 4-5 seconds, which I think is a lot.

This is mainly static content you got there, it's the easiest scenario for aggressive content caching. Just throw in a good Memcached server and serve the whole page from cache. Add some good expiration headers + etags and the website will fly. Unless you have problems with request queueing, which would be a completely different topic.
It elaborates on the nature of the protest that was occurring.
You probably meant "being left out of the cloud" in your last sentence.
Poppup is Hiring a Designer
You're not legally obligated, no. It would be a pretty damn good idea though if you wanted to be a positive force for society and mutual understanding.
And spending $100 on Chinese food, instead of $40 on non-perishables, is?
> the $271 fine is what we as regular citizens would get if we tried to pick people up from the bus stop

Kind of. It's not very well enforced by the police for regular citizens either. Lax enforcement all around really...
So is it a question of OS integration, then? At some point these technologies get borged by the OS kernel, and we end up with these features operating as first class citizens. It's hard work, so should we surprised that things start as add-on applications first?

Aren't we in the process of achieving a lot of these goals in a pretty clean way? There was a lot of code to write to get to this point.
Swiping is American? Or the general public isn't aware. Here in San Francisco, RFID readers (Google Wallet, PayPass Credit Cards) are common, but a majority of people still swipe, even if their cards supports it.
Yeah, I was just adding it, but you got in just before me (I had to persona-ify (personafy?) my account first)
I've wanted to make my own version for a while, but using a RBP (which I use for my media consumption anyway) was previously a deterrent.

I think you should make a HDCP pass-thru box because the easy of installation and practicality makes it more desirable to consumers (myself included). I have previously written software that breaks HDCP encryption as well as does a slew of other work arounds that other companies -- despite saying they do not -- actually employ to make input switching faster.

If you need to talk to anyone about HDCP let me know; I can either help or get you in touch with some people who can.
Sam recommends having a mission but never wrote "for the greater good". At worst one could accuse the founders of uninspired copywriting as they attempt to state what they are aiming to do, which is to make something people want, and more specifically to do that in a novel way. People want light, but it makes little sense for someone to compete with GE to make lightbulbs in the exact same way as GE--if one liked what GE was doing the time and money would be better spent working for and investing in GE.

And while they are low-margin business and not exciting, if someone were to genuinely find a new and useful take on tshirt printing or pizza delivery odds are the startup would be worthwhile. There are lots of tshirts printed and pizzas delivered.
As the article states, gentrification and "income inequality" (lol?) were the main reasons for these protestors surrounding the Google bus. I'm sure Google bus is an inconvenience for other busses but that wasn't why these people were protesting.
"The alleged trespass of using 'public infrastructure for private profit' is unsupported. People pick up and drop off people at the sidewalk (required, no stopping in the middle of the street)."

I'm sorry but this is simply wrong. If you tried to pick up and drop off someone in a bus stop everyday, you would get ticketed for it. These buses do not. If you need to make things up to support these people it kind of worries me, especially when you seem to be mocking their opponents. I'm all for criticizing these protestors for certain things, but not so much for made up things.
The new design is sexy-ish, but I think readability suffers because:

1. the contrast is too low, for example that blue colour of links on white background is too light, hurts my eyes

2. the font-size is too small, especially in combination with the poor contrast. 14px is too small on today's desktops, should be 16px ... better yet, it should be left at 100% as that scales better. On the other hand I like the usage of Open Sans, it's a readable font and ensures availability on all OSes

3. some pages are too slow to load. MDN is a great reference and decreasing latency should be a priority.
Blowing up consulates... sounds really familiar...
You want it spelled out?

FB and Google have a lot of money.

Somebody wants a piece of the political action. So there will be lots of hoopla, then a big check gets written to a pet PAC, then it all goes away -- until it's time to pay up again.
Eh, lots of people end up using information systems incidentally to what their main task is. I wrote a script in 20 minutes to automate some email->shipping labels work and saved someone about 5 hours of work a day.

As more people start using datasets in some capacity for their "real jobs", being able to automate things becomes increasingly important. The amount of insane labor going on using Office boggles my mind. Knowing coding will at least get people to say "wait, there's gotta be a better way" even if they can't accomplish it themselves. Not to mention the cognitive benefits from thinking through problems.
My guess is that the protests are targeted more generally at gentrification. People of privilege moving to the Mission, mostly ignoring the culture of the neighborhood and it's long-time residents, fueling out of control rent increases, slowly destroying a cultural landmark.

I suspect the damage has more to do with CA property tax and SF's NIMBy zoning laws than silicon valley bussing, but they do have a point that it's a real problem. Not sure what the solution is. This protest doesn't seem to be it, but I applaud them for taking a MVP stab at it. Time to iterate now, protesters!
My guess is that the protests are targeted more generally at gentrification. People of privilege moving to the Mission, mostly ignoring the culture of the neighborhood, fueling out of control rent increases, slowly destroying a cultural landmark.

Granted, I think the damage has more to do with CA property tax and SF's NIMBY zoning laws, but they do have a point that it's a real problem. Not sure what the solution is. This protest doesn't seem to be it, but I applaud them for taking a MVP stab at it. Time to iterate now, protesters!
New formula for fast, abundant hydrogen production may help power fuel cells
I'd expect an actual performance comparison to be sure, rather than relying on expertise of the teams for assuming it. As much as any claim that difference between languages becomes irrelevant with advancement of the hardware, it still can be relevant in different cases.
Free Marketing Ideas part 13
I should have been more clear on what someone may try to compare.

Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist by authorities in power at the time, and was accused of treason, as is Snowden I believe. History judges Mandela otherwise, and deems him a hero. Will the same be true for Snowden? I guess it really is the same old debate that has been going on - is Snowden a hero or a traitor guilty of treason, and how will the answer to that question differ, if at all, in 25 to 30 years? Nothing new here besides the context in which the question is posed, which may or may not be valid.
The former is strategy is user-friendly. The latter strategy is metric-which-impresses-investors friendly. There's a reason social networks spam more than Viagra merchants.
And are they aren't preventing anyone from doing that.
Where is the data that proves that Google employees pay more taxes than what is proper for their individual incomes.
He definitely caught the coding bug.
I'm critical because this video isn't doing much in the way of taking action. It'd be great if there was some follow through.

Here's an example: Obama can commit to open sourcing as much code as possible and encourage teachers to use the bug reports as a teaching tool. Children can fix the code as assignments.

How amazing would it be if you contributed to fixing Healthcare.gov as a 14 year old? Each successful bug fix from a student could get a bumper sticker: "My child fixed Healthcare.gov". Imagine the pride a parent would have putting that on their car.
I would go that way too. Static content export, put a CDN in front of it, and response times will get < 100ms, even < 80ms.

I have done some experiments with static exports using dynamic frameworks like Rails, and man, it really makes a huge difference. Of course, if your content is mainly static.
The last time I was looking for work, LinkedIn was useful. I heard of a company that sounded like a good match. LinkedIn found a 2nd-level connection working there, and an interview resulted.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mechanical-engineering/2-12-intro...

little advanced for kids but you could probably use as starting point
Wait, wait, isn't that how politics in general work?
Well his title started with the letter C. That's head honcho to me.
Danger pay is not nearly as true as it used to be[1]. Though I guess perception-of-danger pay might still be in play.

1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbradley/2013/03/25/oil-gas... (honestly, I can't really be bothered tracking down the BLS reports.. this is the first article I found with any numbers and it reinforces what I've been told by a friend in the industry)
It makes "more than 30 stops", but it wouldn't be physically possible to make that number of stops with 100 buses (even ignoring that they then have to make the hour+ trip down to Mountain View after that). The math doesn't make sense.
It helps a lot in a general sense, being able to reason through how a system might work can give you a lot more confidence in figuring out where to start on a problem.

Of course when it comes to very specific issues it is always nice to have the luxury of opening a ticket and letting somebody who can do it 1/10th the time fix it for you.
Obviously you haven't done your research on this topic yet. The midwives are state registered and are legally bound to only serve woman who are in perfect health condition, with no complication during pregnancy whatsoever and prefer woman who had previous births without complications. Still, hospital is on standby and yes, it makes more sense if you are not 100 miles away from one.
Learning the technology used every day - more specifically and most importantly learning not be afraid to explore that technology - can be done without even touching on programming. It's a lot more akin to learning critical thinking: do not accept that things must be the way they are because you have been told it is so (or because these are the default options presented to you.)

But "learn, explore and become comfortable with technology that runs your life" is quite a bit different from "learn to code". I guess to an extent the former qualifies as building better operators - but there seems to be a negative connotation there that I disagree with.

You can become a better car operator by learning what all those buttons in your car do. You (and others on the road) benefit from this. As you pointed out, there's little benefit to learning the technical elements of it - while they do affect you, you derive no benefit as an operator of a car from learning them.

"I feel like we haven't drawn the line between user vs creator as clearly in technology."

I missed this on my first read through, and I think that's a very valid point. My only objection comes back to the negative connotations of being a 'user'. It's always of benefit to learn to be a skilled user of anything you use on a regular basis.
Funny enough, I prefer to disable any existing notifications so that I can walk about or sit around undisturbed. (SMS and phone calls are ok, but mostly because I get them so rarely and if I do they actually might be important.)
What’s Really Standing in the Way of Amazon Drones
Gender issues thread on HN? Requisite /r/MensRights post. It's like an iron law of the universe or something.
In a word: insurance.
According to a comment below they have a permit for it which they pay the city for.
The picture they took is of the MUNI stop where my 48 bus used to stop, and yes, the Google bus would actually block out the MUNI busses.

I haven't experienced it anywhere else though. I think this is basically just a highly visible spot for these buses, and they do interrupt MUNI service during morning traffic. Though I'm not sure they interrupt service any more than any other piece of traffic..
Or someone holding an appreciating currency dodging capital gains tax.

By using btc you avoid paying capital gains tax since basically everyone who holds bitcoins right now has seen their investment go up in value. Converting back to usd is not as good as spending the btc.

It is kind of nice having a currency that appreciates in value over time vs slowly getting robbed by inflation or capital gains tax.

As a vendor right now it makes sense to accept bitcoins and immediately convert back with bitpay or equivalent because there is no risk, lower transaction fees, and you open up your business to selling to people who want to do business with bitcoins for a variety of reasons. Some crazy reasons, some more rational reasons, but it really doesn't matter because they have money and want to spend it in btc.

Also I suspect there is a lot of "new money" in bitcoins right now made up of people who got lucky as early investors but have little or no sense of money management and tons of disposable income. This group of people make up a very desirable customer segment. I expect we will see a lot of businesses selling luxury goods rush into the bitcoin space soon(Like people selling space trips that may or may not ever exist).
Ok, that confirms what I suspected you meant. I can agree with what you are saying; basically that an audio driver is just about the world's worst electrical power supply and thus should generally not be treated as supply. I was just a little perturbed, fearing you were trying to claim an audio signal delivers no power.
They are, if they're occupying their spots.
They are not paying for permits. The MTA has proposed a permit system for a limited number of shared private/public bus stops, but it has not been introduced, voted on, or even released publicly, and has lingered since as early as October 2012[1].

Even if the pilot program succeeds (maybe some time next year), and Google, et. al., start paying for bus stop permits, there's still the issue of the city turning a blind eye to all the illegal stops that have gone on for the last 5 years or so.

It's great for the city to create a program that encourages mass transportation, but subsidizing it for only a select class of people is a poor use of public funds at best, and discriminatory at worst.

[1] http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/rules-proposed-for-co...
CyanogenMod is far from secure. Moxie has talked about this before.
Try placing it at the very bottom of the page. Something like "This site is in alpha/beta/whatever. Please send us feedback by email or on github."

Re the contact link, the contact us page seems clear enough now that I actually peeked at it. (The problem here isn't so much what the Guardian is doing than it is what others are doing. All too often, it's impossible to find any useful email or phone number, and taking a step to contact a company amounts to wasting your time. I can't remember the last time I bothered to look at any large company's contact us page.)
Forcing folks to learn his own language is a pretty big conceit. You think he'll be able to get away with that at Fbook?
Good article. And I admire your cute and clever selection of fonts. No, seriously.
Great point - it's never below freezing where I am. It's amazing to experience water in a brake line if its not too dangerous. You get most the normal functionality if you stamp on the pedal.
Not to not-pick, but just riding the bus that is illegally stopped probably isn't itself illegal (although the bus driver would likely be breaking some law or other).
> considering that land (and property) is more or less in fixed supply, SF could justifiably implement price/rent controls.

> Supply can be increased pretty easily

First you say supply can't be increased. Then you say it can. No it's not Google's fault there is not enough supply. It's bad zoning laws that limit the number and size of buildings. And rent control that makes building less profitable.

Houston and Austin get a way bigger influx of people and even money (for Houston at least) than San Francisco but they don't have these problems.
Italian company to sell portable cold fusion plant deliverable next year
Considering things in this perspective, is it so far-fetched to at least consider the possibility that 9/11 was a false-flag attack?
NYC has certainly had a lot of issues with gentrification and skyrocketing rents, but I don't think the issues in NYC are comparable to SF. Huge parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn have very high rents, but the lower-middle class haven't been priced out of the general area. I know many people who live in New Jersey, Long Island, upper Manhattan, and the other boroughs who have very reasonable housing expenses and commutes.

A random data point: a friend of mine lives in Jersey City and has a huge (for manhattan standards) one bedroom apartment in a safe area for 1200/month and a 30 minute commute to wall street.
As with government-run education, SF's problems with government-run transportation aren't a lack of funding. I imagine you'd find we spend just as much per capita on our mass transit systems as other industrialized countries. Our government institutions just aren't very well-run.
Would facebook's data actually be useful to the NSA? I think they would get a lot more actionable data out of emails, SMSes, phone transcripts, accounting software, project management software, etc. The only thing I can imagine facebook being good for is perhaps knowing who they want to start looking at in the future. Search engine history might be more effective for that, though.
AllThingsD Editors Are Said to Complete NBCUniversal Deal
Or even more simply, their investors offer to let them to cash out a few million worth of shares as idiot insurance. This still doesn't really explain why a 22 year old Mark Zuckerberg had the cojones to turn down $1 billion. Very few people in the world would have done that.
Isn't the marginal support per child something absurdly trivial after the first few?
Non-mobile link for those not on a phone

http://www.vice.com/read/bucharest-webcam-studios-america-ou...
Is this on-topic for HN?
Interesting, even from the comments it seems people either blankly accept all the requests or don't accept them at all.

Somewhat related - I remember reading that when Facebook engineer decided to add a message feature to a friend request, Zuck got really pissed at him. I suspect that's because "# of connections" is a really hot metric, and it grows exponentially for people who blankly accept every request.

Thus, from LIN point of view, it makes sense to sacrifice UX for some people to get a sure growth for everyone else.

Now, if that "growth" is just a vanity metric, now that's a whole other story.
Such dogma on Apple's part, taken to extreme, devoid of common-sense: the strangling innovation is a great way to push apps and their developer entourage to other platforms. There's curation and then there's disproportionate culture of "No."
I've just spent 5 minutes trying to learn what Vagrant is and how it works. The home page didn't help me with that AT ALL. It's full of vague terms like "development environment" and "work environment" and buzzwords claiming to "maximize productivity".

In your About page, please describe the typical USAGE SCENARIOS of your software and how does it help in those cases exactly.
That was not implied. Google employees generally have high salaries, and therefore pay a higher net dollar amount than the average taxpayer.
You can have all these things. A combination of Plan 9 and VPRI's DynaBook jr. is probably what you desire. :-)
"It makes me wonder how much 'political theatre' slips right under our noses. ... Spammers want to drive traffic, political parties and partisan hacks start to swing the story their way, governmental PR agencies start going to work, etc."

In fact, there was an example of political theater in the news just yesterday which came from the highest levels of our government:

Seymour Hersh Alleges Obama Administration Lied on Syria Gas Attack

http://news.yahoo.com/seymour-hersh-alleges-obama-administra...

The original article it was based on:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/2013/12/08/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin
It elaborates on the actions of one individual, who may or may not have had anything to do with the rest of the protesters, and distracts from the actual complaints (valid or not) those protesters have.
Your profile is not immediately available after login with persona.org, as you also have to provide a username (in case you don't have one already). You're logged in only after providing a username in this second step.
I don't think it's a stupid question at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6218004
Data - DOM binding using ES6 Proxies