skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like you, I place little weight on the findings from a few keyword searches. Such vacuous analysis.

That said, there are a few incentives in play for the "X for Y" or "<this> for <that>" language and why to use it over more simple, implementation-free descriptive text:

1. Newly-entered startups: Your wonderful description about why it is more efficient. See above :)

2. <this> companies (the Ubers and AirBnBs): Having other people constantly repeat the Uber and AirBnB label is brand advertising. Period. The Uber and AirBnB brands have good penetration in the HN demographic, but they are unknown to >50% of the US and >70% of the world. Those companies need advertising to fuel growth, so they have an incentive to encourage this practice since it's free for them AND a lot of startups are getting press in the midwest, etc.

3. <this> Stakeholders (investors, accelerators, etc): Moreover, using <this> in the context of another upstart business suggests that <this> was successful. When you say Uber for pizza, you are suggesting that Uber is both a successful model and a successful business. That makes both Uber and Uber's Stakeholders look really good. It's a form of social proof, which is especially valuable in this boom.

And remember, the Stakeholders eventually make their money in an IPO and not from direct profits. These Stakeholders have a strong incentive to convince others that <this> is a good business and worth mimicking in another market. "Look at all the others who followed suit." The Stakeholders need more fundraising rounds. And at a place like YC, you'll hear how it's a good idea because when you go looking to find the <this> that matches you, you're more likely to pick a <this> from here.

And at the end of the day, using "X for Y" is co-branding ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-branding ). It is a tool that has positive and negative aspects. In some places saying you are "Uber for pizza" means you are willing to skirt local health codes to deliver pizza faster than it takes to cook...

My advice is to recognize the "<this> for <that>" as a derivative of co-branding, and to understand the incentives in play for the advice on how to use it.
By the way, it look even more interesting here: http://biz.yahoo.com/p/s_qpmd.html

Healthcare is the most profitable industry, even more profitable than banks. Insane...
Are these the us labor stats that you are referring to? http://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag23.htm. Because, if so, it seems they paint a more nuanced picture than either side (shocker!). There are plenty of openings (113k), but the median pay is in the 40k/year range, not 55k starting mentioned. The unemployment rate is also higher than the national average.

Not a bad career, but hardly the land of milk and honey.
The "book" for Yesod framework is quite like a walkthrough - http://www.yesodweb.com/book
Add search to your Jekyll blog
Prescriptive, not descriptive.

If you actually believed that stuff to be true about the world you'd be factually incorrect, but the guy who embraces work with that attitude will do better and be happier than the guy who doesn't. Political and economic awareness and a work ethic aren't incompatible.
Sure, but haven't you just made his?
Andreas Raptopoulos: No roads? There’s a drone for that
I wrote a tutorial a while back that finishes with deploying to Heroku: http://adit.io/posts/2013-04-15-making-a-website-with-haskel...
Aye, I spotted that one too.
Really cool, but also not super helpful. Prices are not set. Book prices are not shared. Some prices are protected by crazy nearly anti-trust agreements (heart implants). And you have to know which procedure you want or should have for a particular condition.

But, that being said, I think it is awesome. Anything we can do to fix healthcare needs to be done.
And before you say "Simon Peyton Jones!", you should know that he got a PhD four days ago – http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~muffy/SPJ_oration.pdf
I've managed to get an intuition for backpropagation (the way gradients are computed for neural networks) using a similar analogy. The basic idea is that it's just a signal moving in the opposite direction in the network - it starts with computing the derivative of the loss, and goes back through each layer, like a breadth-first search.
10, Atari BASIC. It was around 1990. My father bought me a computer, for playing games, but I quickly discovered I could make my own (lame) games by myself. They sucked for sure, but I was fascinated by the power I had on the machine. How amazing and frustrating that was to see the machine was doing exactly what I told it, and nothing more.
When pitching a (traditional, paper, fiction) book to an agent or publisher, the standard advice is to provide a frame of reference by explaining your work as "X for Y."

It has nothing to do with copying and everything to do with making your pitch understood.
Rowe addresses this in his article. He describes many of the available jobs as being well above minimum wage. Granted it's anecdotal data, but in the absence of better data, number of available jobs seems to be the best way to determine whether there's a skills gap.
I'm just saying that defining software as information (and therefore nothing but math) seems arbitrary to me. Hell, I'm not even saying I necessarily disagree with it. But I think it's not the only way to look at software, and so not a terribly convincing argument to me as far as SCOTUS is concerned, or the end-goal we all want of significant patent reform (at least in the realm of software).

You could define information as state or data, and software as that which acts upon that state or information. You wouldn't (or at least I wouldn't) describe the data in a cookie as software. That's just a piece of information. The browser that handles it is a piece of software. Same with http packets. That's data. Accepting dynamic bits of data and acting upon them accordingly would then be software. Or a database is software, but the data it contains is information. You could counter-argue that the cookie or the packet are not external to the system... that's it's all part of the same piece of software. And I frankly couldn't refute that, because it's just how we somewhat arbitrarily choose to define and parse our understanding of the system.

In answer to your question, software that contains no information (at least looking at it this way) would be something that runs without ever storing, emitting, or accepting dynamic bits of information.
Anytime I hear "we have a shortage of workers" my first thought is, "for what jobs, and at what wage/working conditions?"

Usually when a person says "I have a shortage of workers" they mean "I can't find enough chumps/desperate people to work for the ridiculously low wage I want to pay."
That argument is a bit disingenuous if you ask me.

A company that legitimately needs worker would be forced to raise their offered wages until they can find employees or would be forced to go out of business.

I think the problem is that society has told young people that if they have a 4-year degree they should be making mid to high wages right out of school just because they have a degree. In the real world employers need people with skills not people with a piece of paper.

If you were to learn a skill right out of high-school you could live off of $10 to $12 per hour for a few years while you live with parents or roommates and overtime as your skills improve you should be able to earn much more and become independent. But no people would rather goof off at university for four years and have their high wages handed to them.
MR: [long eloquent response]

JB: "But REPUBLICANS"

Repeat 5x
The syntax for "record types" - elements of named tuples - is really awkward and pollute namespace.

I.e., if I want a module in my app to have two different types containing an element 'customerID' that I'd like to refer by name in that context, then it's a bit painful - and it is a really common need if I need to quickly make a mostly-CRUD webapp, for which otherwise Haskell/Yesod would be as practical as Ruby/Rails.
I think it's because startups have been doing well lately. Whenever anything is doing well, its reputation contains a sort of potential energy that can be exploited by someone attacking it.

E.g. "I found a mistake in Einstein's math" is going to get you a lot more attention than "I found a mistake in my next door neighbor's math."
The argument for CON is that if a new facility came in and charged less, then the existing facilities would have to charge more to cover the patients they lost which would adversely affect their remaining patients. So a new facility would need to show the need of non-served patients - ie that they wouldn't take away patients from existing facilities.

It is of course hogwash, but is a nice way for existing facilities to have a monopoly, prevent competition, and not have pricing pressure. Standard rent seeking/corruption that exists in the US.
FBI’s search for bomb threat suspect highlights use of malware for surveillance
Anyone have information about understanding how inputs affect outputs in a trained ANN? Specifically to better understand the system, which inputs have the most impact and how they interact with out inputs.
I don't think you understood his point. Even though this drug costs $84K, it's still cheaper than current treatments that include prolonged hospitalization and liver transplants.

It's sort of like people complaining that Lipitor costs $5K/yr. The fact it prevents a number of heart attacks, means that it's actually a cost saving treatment.
Stringed instruments, if part of the local culture, would provide another hint.

I'd also guess that strings would sometimes be used for crude 'stop/go' or 'come here' communication over distances, via tugs – perhaps ringing a bell or drum at the far end. One person at the 'clapper' element, noticing a hint of vibrations/sound from the distant end, via the string, in more resolution than a discrete tug/ring, might get the necessary insight.
Speaking as someone who tends towards analytical, rational, and critical thinking with a background in independent studies from a very diverse background the "brainwashing" aspect of institutional education was blatantly obvious to me.

A good example is the approach towards history, which tends towards typical "revisionism" in attempts towards being "corrective" against narratives which were historically dominant, but in isolation such revisionism becomes indistinguishable from bias. In the '90s when I was in college, for example, we read a lot about things like the horrors of the nuclear bombings of Japan and of the internment of citizens of Japanese ancestry during WWII. We didn't read much about the Rape of Nanking or the practice of "comfort women" though. This biased narrative had a predictable outcome. In class discussions it became obvious that a lot of students held the view that Japan was a victim during WWII and America was the "bad guy".

Similar phenomena exist in many other forms throughout the educational establishment. People who have gone through the educational system have a very strong tendency towards a very particular set of view points. Ironically many of them believe that this is because those viewpoints are objectively superior to the alternatives rather than that they've simply been indoctrinated in them over a period of years.
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I think this sort of problem starts at the top, with our time limited democracies. Democratic governments find it hard to implement long term thinking because its unlikely the current government will ever get credit for it. This results in policies which are short term enough to promote re-election. This bleeds down to the rest of society. Where it does happen, it tends to be compromised because one side has to make sure the other side carries the project on. This leads to committee style compromises.

So, in general, from what I can see, long term thinking in western democracies is rare, and where it exists, compromised.

Implication being that Chinese long term strength lies in its ability to plan in the very long term, which they do. I think the west needs to find a way in which we can also effectively and flexibly plan long term.
One attempt which comes close, I think, is Shelly[1]. It's in Haskell and it's definitely not quite right for interactive(!) human interaction, but I'd use it for any remotely non-trivial scripts where quoting might be an issue.

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/shelly
This Company Is Crowdsourcing, Gamifying The World's Most Difficult Problems
I've been messing with Neural Networks for years. Including doing AI college project and taking class on them later. What I learned - unless you structure and query your neural networks in a very special way all they do is approximate higher order functions. It is not trivial to correctly structure neural network and input/outputs.

TL:DR Neural networks are super powerful, but really hard to use properly for anything slightly harder than simple functions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal

It explains why 12 and 60 are such important numbers for measuring time and angles, amongst other things.
My experience with bash: Once you do something a bit more complex where bashisms would be handy any shell is so slow and complicated to use that you're better of with Python, even if all your system provides is Python 2.4. And Python is pre-installed under every (non-embedded) Linux distribution I've seen and also on Mac OS X.

Python is more powerful than shells but at the same time has a much simpler syntax (much less to remember). The only thing I miss in Python sometimes is how easy you can do complex piping in shells. It's possible in Python but not at all as handy as in (ba)sh.
I would check Neural Network class on Coursera. Subject is so complex that you need to put time to get anywhere.
> Think about it. Universities get to decide how much money to charge their students. Likewise, parents and students decide if they can afford to pay it. It’s a pretty simple proposition. But when the government suddenly makes hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans readily available — under the popular (and voter-friendly) theory that “everyone should go to college” — we see an unintended consequence.

Well that's also ignoring the point that colleges used to get the majority of their funding from States, and almost every major University now has the majority(and sometimes a >90% majority) of its funding coming from other sources. College used to be subsidized by society, and now it just isn't subsidized, and in his argument that entire position is ignored.

Like most subjects this is a much more complex problem than either side lets on, but just because Mike Rowe is eloquent in his response doesn't mean that it isn't ignoring rather large portions of the facts.
Ah, also FreeBSD, Solaris and probably many other Unix (like) operating systems have Python pre-installed.
It's very telling how Rowe comments on how workers wanting more for less is the human condition, but then never considers the same about employers.

One example he gives is of one employer who doesn't want employees with a union mind set. He also cites a "success" where a guy got good pay for working 60 hours per week. What could this mean? He doesn't want workers who want good benefits and overtime pay? I bet the $50k/year job he brings up expects 60 hours per week under physically demanding conditions without time and a half and pretty and weak benefits. If you make $15/hour and work 60 hours per week you start getting really close to $50k/year.
True, but there are wannabees in every field where the people who succeed become rich or famous. There's nothing newsworthy about that sort of background radiation lameness. Or more precisely, it's one of the recipes for an Onion article.
There are a few different solutions to the record name space problem that are due to land in the next year. And already some decent lens based solutions too.
Mid-case scenario - you get valuable business experience and when you do get that other job you leap up the ranks quicker than if you just went and did something conventional.

Obviously you have to weigh up, for you, the lifestyle you want to lead and the stability you need, but it's not like it's a dumb thing to take a chance, especially when you have no dependents.
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028246.do

This is a good book for a quick intro to graph dbs for anyone interested.
I can only imagine how frustrated Mike Rowe was answering those questions. It's a shame he's too tactful to scream "Maybe if you stop blaming literally everything on the political party you weren't raised as, you could spend a minute focusing on real ideas for solving problems!"
Reminds me of a finger binary ASCII art generator for Python: https://gist.github.com/sublee/600592
No, to believe that the current system is a deliberate form of torture might show that you have some scars from that time in your life that could do with talking out. I didn't say (or even imply) you were mad.

And you didn't have to be there, your parents had a choice like everyone else's.
It's being fixed.

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1rpte3/explanation_...
What are your thoughts on the vectorized represenation? I understood the object oriented representation after a while, but I've noticed that, despite what looks like magic at first, when there's a lot less code to look at with singular weight vectors for the whole network vs different kinds of neurons, setting up graph structures, etc.it's easier to grok.

This is probably just a personal preference though.

I find if you're tackling neural networks in the first place, it's great to have your fundamentals down in the first place though. I think a lot of the problem with people learning machine learning is that they just dive in to it without going back and understanding the moving parts that make up the whole.

I made that mistake personally when I was starting out a few years ago. I've seen that with others as well.
I just installed it. How do you give an address to people without disclosing it to the whole world if they don't have PGP?

This is one of my addresses, I feel lonely HN :-)
BM-2cUHuH7sJdt3GchrqSikvzWP4w7Vm2cjhK
(so much for not disclosing to the whole world, but this is just for fun)
Isn't it weird that this author did most of his research on angel.co which itself can be described as match.com for entrepreneurs?
Looks like the Affectiva Q sensor is discontinued and the company said they're moving away from that into facial tracking instead. How does the Q3 come into play then?

Discontinued site: http://www.qsensortech.com/
Press Release: http://www.affdex.com/news-article/affectiva-accelerates-inv...
That font is garbage, hard to read, it's like they'd been downvoted on HN.

Please end the light text trend, let us read.
Show HN: Disable Custom fonts in Chrome
they probably recognized sound as just vibrations in materials. it's a pretty straightforward observation, in my opinion. actually thinking of using a string in that way is the "outside the box" part

i think generally ancient people don't get the credit they deserve. they weren't dummies. even now-silly-sounding ideas (e.g. geocentric model) had logic to them (e.g. stars had no apparent parallax)
I have to head out now - this was nearest I could find at the moment - http://www.spandidos-publications.com/ijo/43/6/1833 - if clicking "View Affiliations" you can see where study was done, who's involved, and could do more searches. The study's conclusion is 70% increased in certain cancers if used 1 year or longer, and 300% increase if 25 years or longer (cordless and cellphone) - though not many participants had used cell or cordless phones for 20-25 years.
TB-303 I saw as low as £50 in the UK, but I never saw a 909 going for under £200 and I was looking in the Ads every week from the mid-late 80s onwards. TR-808 was a machine I wasn't so interested in so I can't remember what they went for.
Disillusionment of the Early Career Engineer
Scott Metzger is a religion. His deity is Vray.

Having worked with the haircut himself, he does do some wonderful things with mari/maya. He also requires super beefy machines.
he forgot to trap exit.
It would be "interesting" if Microsoft's lawyers analyzed the law, concluded they were guilty of violating British law, and plead guilty at trial.

If Microsoft were as concerned about their data integrity as they seem to have been goaded into, after learning that pipes between their data centers were monitored by the NSA, you might reasonably think that they were concerned about the integrity of all their data, including that data in other countries that the NSA compels them to share.

I think pleading guilty to cases like this would be enough of a shock to the system that governments, including the US, would be forced to rethink their clever scheme to break the internet and treat the world's citizens as enemies.
Can someone American explain what the core of the issue is for people like me?
I have written a small series of posts which show (with some simple Python code and math) the relationship between the training procedure of an ANN (backpropagation) and some simpler, more basic machine learning algorithms (like logistic regression):

http://cjauvin.blogspot.ca/2013/10/neural-network-101.html
Half of the value is in the interface, with dedicated knobs, the multiple outputs, the way the sequence is not totally perfect, and the workflow that brings about.
Weber rails like web framework with CoffeeScript
> - very weak data structures support - no typing at all, everything is a string - it does not have a complete standard - stunning amount of pitfalls in syntax and corner cases, escaping hell

Sounds like the next JS. I better create Node.sh before anyone else thinks of it so I get all the credit.
I'm not sure if you use Facebook, but on Facebook there is a constant wave of quotes mis-attributed to Einstein and Thomas Jefferson. It's really interesting, they all get 10000's of shares. Somebody somewhere (or just the crowd accidentally) A/B tested a ton of different historical figures and came out with Einstein and TJ.
Also, because the US has an increasingly unequal income distribution, that makes a college degree relatively more valuable. In addition to the social-status factor it certainly still seems to pay off despite the increased tuition (http://priceonomics.com/is-college-worth-it/).

My point is simply that maybe college costs so much more now because it's just worth it. It used to be that you could still do alright without a college degree, but a ton of manufacturing jobs have moved overseas and there's a ton of downward pressure on peoples' wages who don't have engineering and computer jobs.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that this is the reason why college is so expensive these days, but I think that it's a point which isn't brought up enough.

I think there's a tendency to say: "oh well not everyone can have these high-paying jobs", "college isn't right for everyone", etc. which Rowe also says. Maybe that's true, but we certainly seem to have a shortage of qualified people in this country. Seems to me to be a failure of the educational system and while it makes sense not to saddle yourself with tons of debt for a degree if that degree won't help you pay off the debt, I don't think encouraging people not to get a higher education is a good idea either. Now I'm just rambling - I just wanted to point out that that attitude is a sign that something is wrong.
Node.js Is Big, And Still Getting Bigger
Mine is more of a step by step story. Worked customer service for internet banking at a major world wide bank. While there, I got into VB 4/ 5. Left that, took a contract job at a medical company doing visual foxpro. Left that for entry sys admin job and web development job. While there, I scored side work from a Canadian designer; did that 7 years on the side while at the day job. Was at the day job for 8 years; now I'm 100% freelance.