skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice visualization. Only some minor nitpicks with the funding scale:

* The numbers are a little odd, (10, 82, 163, 245, 326). I prefer something more regular like (0?, 100, 200, 300) or (0?, 50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300). It’s a difficult design decision, because each dataset has different number ranges and I don’t know a good “standard” heuristic to peek the better numbers.

* I’d like to have an option for a logarithmic scale. It would help to distinguish the not extremely big companies. I’m not sure if this feature will be very usefully for the general public.

* In other graph, the axis doesn’t start at 0. I consider this a feature, but some people would claim that it’s misleading. Perhaps add “force 0”, “smallest range”, “automatic” as an option.

Another suggestion: When the mouse is over an item, add the values of the axis to the tooltip (for example: Dropbox (S07, $260m))
That sounds painfully familiar:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propiska_in_the_Soviet_Union
> I don't know about "great place to be poor,"

While the statement makes some assumptions, I do think that NYC provides many more services and fallbacks for the very poor that you don't find, say, in Appalachia.

The linked article presents a quite bleak existence, but many of the problems it brings to light are that the services the city provides are of low quality, whereas there are so many places where those types of services don't exist at all. Rural poverty in America can be, from what I understand, far more persistent than most urban poverty.
There has been a lot of constructive discussion in the Google Groups thread, and a lot of negativity on the same topic on Twitter. Ignoring for the moment the difference in discussion platforms, I am uncertain why the sudden uptick in Redis negativity.

Is it from users trying (and failing) to replace RDBMS or distributed platforms feature-for-feature with a single threaded, memory limited store like Redis? Or could it be FUD from people interested in seeing their new platform-du-jour get more attention?
Will you need to change that definition if I show you a machine learning algorithm capable of significantly outperforming the best human algorithms on the resume classification problem?
This, Exactly This.

Also, cost of living needs to be applied to these numbers, 100k in the Bay Area is 65k in Florida is 45k in Georgia.
Most of the time on Linkedin, you can write a little text when you add someone. You click add, then you and write something like "We talked at x about y and I liked our conversation, let's connect."
So many people live in bubble with no connection to the real world; insulated by religious dogma and partisan ignorance. Debating need not concern with actual provable, reliable facts, but soundbites and appeals to authority. But you can't fool the computer. You can beg and plead, you can say your teacher tells you that it should work, but ultimately you can't make it work unless you actually do.

You can fake your chemistry results, you can argue over the oxford comma, but your loop for(i=1;i<10;++i){} will never run 10 times.
The relationship is different, thus so long as the clients are obeying the rules they are guaranteed someone who will pretend to like them and who will engage them in conversation.

Social networks sort of work for people who have friends. People willing to pay for fake friendship probably do not have many friends. It's alarming to see numbers for people who haven't spoken to anyone for the past week, for example.
What offensive activities have Yulia Tymoshenko, Yingluck Shinawatra, Julia Gillard, Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir, Angela Merkel or Helle Thorning-Schmidt done to contribute to this false-flag 'start of fail'? Where are their wars?

Why even bring in a needless gender divide, instead of just saying 'people'?
We are "in the process of achieving" a whole lot of things we had 30 or 40 years ago, but that never made it into the mainstream OS's of today.

E.g. my favorite pet peeve is how many things from AmigaOS "disappeared" when AmigaOS got relegated to a steadily shrinking niche with the death of Commodore. And this is just one of many "forgotten" operating systems with features that have been left behind.

Consider pervasive scripting of applications (yes, I know about Apple Script, but having spent 5 years in an office full of Mac users, I've yet to see anyone use it; on the Amiga AREXX was something almost everyone used in some form or another; and no, shell scripting is not comparable); consider componentized systems where users regularly install new components that enhance "all" their applications (e.g. need support for 7z? on the Amiga you'd install a new XPK library if you want to support a new compression algorithm, and all programs that want to compress data will support it; need support for an archival format? Install the right XAD library; want your paint program to read WebP? Install a suitable DataType library, and any application that knows how to use DataTypes to load images will be able to load it); consider if end users can replace dialog boxes or other GUI components wholesale in almost all their applications - AmigaOS has a few different alternatives: ARP, ASL and ReqTools that provide things like file-requesters. Because of the nature of AmigaOS, there were quickly apps that would act as shims from e.g. ASL to ReqTools, allowing users to pick and choose the file requester they want without relying on application developers choices.

We took giant steps back when Windows snuffed out most of the competition and with it a huge amount of innovative ideas that current mainstream computer users have never even experienced.

Even the stuff that made it into systems like AmigaOS and many others in the 80's to early 90's were mere shades of many of the visions coming out of the 60's and 70's, but the features in OS's like AmigaOS, OS/2, BeOS and many others were there - many of them are not hard work, but a matter of culture and support for the ideas.
I got great grades in college, but could never wrap my head around LISP (Lost In Stupid Parentheses). For anything non-trivial, I cheated and handed in somebody else's work.

There, I said it.
This part jumped out at me: Dozens of trade schools offered computer programming courses for the new immigrants in anything from AS/400 to Fortran to Visual Basic, all paid for by government agencies.

As a native-born American citizen who -- like many -- wasn't born into a rich family and worked my butt off to pay for school, I couldn't help but read that and go, "gee, that would have been nice."
The question isn't whether you can live comfortably on $250k/year. Obviously you can. But that doesn't make you wealthy.

Trading off having kids to be able to afford travel and luxury goods is prole. People who are actually wealthy don't have to make compromises like that.
> Validation sets are merely one technique among many to gauge how well your predictions are doing

In Andrew Ng's "Machine Learning" offering on Coursera he talks about having three sets of data:

1. Training data. He uses this for fitting most model parameters.

2. A second set for "more general" analyses -- judging the effects of additional data, regularisation parameters, neural-network topology etc. Performance on this data is used to decide which model to use and how to use it.

3. A third set to estimate how good the choice of model is.

The theory is that the parameters in #1 are fitted to the training data, and the model choice is "fitted" to the data in #2. Even though we think (hope?) that the inferences made in those two steps will generalise reasonably well, we should still expect measures of fit from those analyses to be optimistic. We need a set that has not been used for calibration to reliably estimate how good our model will be on data in the field.
"how wired can ship your marketing as an article"
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Project:Feedback
Instatrade- New craigslist like app I hacked up, let me know what you think
VCs are stupid.
I heard about this on Twitter this morning. Jason Scott from the Internet Archive tweeted this gem :)

"Yahoo! is in talks to buy Imgur. If Yahoo! buys Imgur, @archiveteam downloads what it can of Imgur before Yahoo! destroys it."

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/410168842355097600
Agreed. I went to highschool in Bavaria and we had two programing courses as part of the math curriculum, taught by our math teacher. Turbo Pascal :-)
Xenophobia is a natural reaction to competition for scarce resources.
Adults with free choice should be able to buy and sell sex. There's no intrinsic problem with that.

The trickiness comes from what is meant by "free choice". Is a drug addict free to make a choice about sex work? How about someone with huge debts?

And existing laws should be aimed at protecting the more vulnerable people (children; trafficked workers; etc) but have unintended consequences of pushing away from working from a well run brothel and towards working off the street or a poorly run brothel.
I love when the world divides into two perfectly neat buckets just like that.
Right. The move to create specific legislation around Bitcoin could be construed as a move to denature the present Bitcoin economy and pull it closer to conventional financial regulation. This seems ultimately pretty pointless from a government perspective, however, since the move will happen anyway and there are already popular alternatives that would remain unaffected. Essentially it could weight development investment towards Bitcoin instead of towards financial innovation in general. Such a strategy, if properly considered and so motivated, would be an act of resistance - stalling the inevitable - rather than one of any real efficacy. I think this is really just some people trying to get recognition for Bitcoin: the full story may only be available by speaking to them or reading German.

The potential significance of Switzerland in Bitcoin recognition this should be clarified. SIX Interbank Clearing, the organization that act as registrar for ISO4217-A3 currency codes (ie. codes like 'USD', 'EUR', etc.) on behalf of the ISO, and also SWIFT BIC codes (IIRC), is based in Switzerland. Jon Matonis from the Bitcoin Foundation approached them earlier this year about issuing an official XBT codepoint for Bitcoin, but they denied the request claiming that requests for codepoints much be made in writing from an existing national bank (subtext: from a UN-recognized country in that other ISO list).

My own proposal is to sidestep the ISO entirely and use IANA to register currencies or currency-like commodities as a means to achieve the unambiguous identification of such within multi-currency financial transfer systems, such as present era math based currency exchange businesses like my employer (Payward/Kraken). More details on that over here:
http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/x-iso4217-a3

Ultimately even if the Bitcoin Foundation doesn't support such standardization (and it probably will; I literally have a draft in my inbox to Jon since Friday) I am fairly confident that the new self regulating industry body we have founded, DATA, will. http://info.datauthority.org/

We live in interesting times, and the goal is clear. As Iain Coke, Head of Financial Services Faculty, Institute of Chartered Accountants (UK) said so eloquently in The Telegraph last year: In order to regain trust in banking, what is needed is a real change in culture, embedding integrity and eradicating the 'what can I get away with' attitude.
I have to believe that there is a happy medium somewhere between prematurely categorizing kids and trying to make every single person to learn to code and obtain a 4-year STEM degree.
It's good that you are adding your voice to the chorus, even if someone else might be singing the same notes. There is no law that says that truth and insight, once spoken, should never be spoken again! :)

Welcome back.
I wish I could figure a way to make the following suggestion not so painful on the working poor, but if the social cost of burning a gallon of gas is $2.10, why not hike the gas tax to something north of that AND index it for inflation automatically?

I realize that I have a certain privilege to live 15 minutes from work, and that those who drive long distances to work would be hurt by such a policy, if you take today as a frame of reference. But, perhaps they should be hurt by it, if indeed they're costing society that excess amount.

Phasing it in linearly over an 8 year period starting 2 years from now would blunt some of the transitional sting, perhaps.
Oh man that looks amazing... It'd be something interesting to follow and see how it goes. Even just watching the video got me excited and curious to see how it all works!

Thanks for sharing.
And unfortunately is an example of the "hobby" activists that bedevil the (for want of a better word) the progressive movement in the USA.

Instead of dealing with the hard issues they love to play act.
I applaud the author of this post. I've seen a lot of people suffer with machine learning because they don't understand this basic concept. Taking MOOC classes and reading textbooks is a great way to learn, but they tend to focus on a lot on the mathematical principle and not the start-from-nothing practical considerations.

Machine learning is almost like learning chess in that there are certain obvious mistakes that noobs continue to make. And like chess there are multiple levels of thinking and understanding that are almost impossible to teach to someone that doesn't have lots of experience. Hopefully more blog posts like this will help people get past the novice level.

Regarding technical content:

N-fold Cross validation [1] can be a more effective approach to having a single held out or validation set. You split your data into N groups, say N = 10. Then you use groups 2-10 as a training set to make predictions on group 1, then groups 1,3-10 to make predictions on group 2, etc. Recombine the prediction output files and use the measured error to tune and tweak your predictor. It's more work and can still lead to overfitting, but it's generally better to overfit the entire training set than it is to overfit one held out sample.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-validation_%28statistics%...
>3. Smart assistant that learns your habits and makes smart suggestions such as: ...

Recognize your romantic partner using FB network[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6759866
RabbitMQ supports sharding via exchanges
Cyanogenmod signs its builds with publicly available keys. This is very dangerous - see Dianne Hackborn's comment on this patch: https://android-review.googlesource.com/#/c/22694/
Why do people take LinkedIn so seriously? I will accept stranger's requests if I think they could provide some kind of useful service to me now or in the future.

I'm not maintaining a list of important relationships on it. It's a rolodex to me and a business card can and should be added to it whether or not we've done business already.

This idea of carefully pruning your connections seems quite popular. To those that do it, what's the upside? (The upside to letting almost everybody connect is that, if in 5 years I need to contact somebody or they need me it might be a little easier for us to get in touch.)
People with the median income don't live in silicon valley. 50k goes further in the midwest than 100k in SF.
Relevant quote "a greedy company like Apple or Microsoft could simply install a Bitcoin client on every device and would have the majority vote needed to alter the software, increase the supply of Bitcoins"
How do they monetize the adult dating sites? Sign up fees? I would think there's not a lot of repeat business there, once the users find out it's a scam. Whereas cam sites can milk people forever.
I don't think of it as a single organization, or as an industry that is inherently harmful. There are many adult entertainers who enjoy their work. I do however think that it's something to watch carefully in developing countries in the same way that we consider safe working conditions.
I think that perhaps the quantity of exploited workers in the sex industry is not higher, but the depth of exploitation possible can be much greater than that in many other industries.
This is great, is there a curated list of curated lists anywhere? (of developer stuff)
that is pretty cool! let's say I wanted to do something similar with a light switch (which controls the light) and have it switchable via web at any time and have the light switch on overrides the web setting and has it on.

so basically, ON if either web or physical switch is on.
web-switch : physical switch = output
0 : 0. = 0
0 : 1 = 1
1 : 0 = 1
1 : 0 = 1

let,s say I wanted to also/instead add the ability to trigger the light VIA time without relying on network? (in case of unreliable network) . basically I am interesting in making an alarm clock that triggers my bed room light even if the light switch is off, what are some parts and ideas I can look up if I am interested in doing this?
Yeah, really. It happens.
I would say a general computer knowledge course would serve people better than trying to learn a programming language they'll probably never use, or want to use. Basic IT, networking, security, and simple scripting would probably serve the general public best.
3 reasons to throw out the Fisa Improvements Act, without reading it
Rand Paul Couldn't Be More Wrong About Unemployment Insurance
> Some people like sex, and they like getting paid for sex work.

> That's not true for most people involved in sex work.

You know, if you dropped "sex" for most other domains wherein people might work, that'd probably still be true. There's probably a few areas of work where most people work in the domain because they like it, but for most domains of work people work in the domain because they need the money and working in the domain is the best way they feel they have of making the money they need.

Socially taboo -- and, even moreso, illegal -- domains of work, naturally, increase the risk of people being stuck in them and being less able to move to other domains of work later, and they also increase the risk of exploitation (because people feel trapped in them, because subject to abuse have less ability to address abuse, and because the social taboo (or illegality) of working in the domain naturally means that people, even if they like the domain, are less likely to choose it as a domain of work if they have other viable options, meaning the people that do end up there are usually the most vulnerable to exploitation in the first place.
Is the bug in that code snippet intentional?
A lot of it is also the mental structures you form, so you understand what a computer can and can't do easily instead of thinking it's all magic.

You may not have the specific chops to write a program to do it, but you know that doing something to (x) files is just a loop with a if thingy inside of it.

I think part of the "learn to code" movement is also hope that currently non-tech-literate people will learn to help themselves. Once you've googled "how do I do this in python" and found answers enough times, you (hopefully) gradually replace "All of this computer stuff is confusing! I need someone to help me with it. My cousin is good with computers. I'll call him." with "I got this shit. What up, google."
Why Your Website Is Important
The app is a mash-up between Craigslist and Instagram that allows users to easily post pictures of items they no longer use anymore and list them for sale. App also includes bartering options as well as an inboard private messaging system. Check it out and leave feedback.
I am sure somebody who has kids and can afford to travel would tell you that what they have is not truly wealth because the truly wealthy don't have to make reservations, they can all schedule last minute and fly first class to another hemisphere on a moments notice. Planning and budgeting for your travelling retirement is for peasants!

Some of those people may even have the audacity to tell you they even they are not wealthy, because the those who are actually wealthy don't need to fly in the same planes as the poors.

It seems like nobody ever stops looking up.
For varying definitions of "voluntary." I find it difficult to believe that the majority of these workers would choose of their own volition to work in this industry if they had the option of equally well paying source of income. Just because something is economic coercion doesn't mean it's not coercion. Just like "consenting" sexual relationships with prepubescent minors aren't actually consenting, since the minor hasn't developed the capacity of sexual consent, neither is the "voluntary" working of sex workers voluntary when it is one of the limited means of getting a living wage.
I've actually never used Four Square myself but I saw a lot of people use it back in the day... This new feature seems like just the stepping stone for them to implement what they really want, so hopefully in the near future it'll process the type of data you two have mentioned here.
very profound analysis of a button (sarcasm) with a catchy title...... NEXT!!
> A company is not a living being. There is a person driving the bus. His boss who told him to park in the middle of traffic is a person. And so on all the way up the hierarchy of bosses and stakeholders.
We should expect civility from people even if they are acting from behind the shield of incorporation.

Does the Milgram experiment ring any bell ?
I thoroughly enjoy living in Mountain View, which is preposterously diverse compared to 99.9% of the country. Anyway, like many other things in life, it's all about what you do with it. Someone living in Antarctica might have some cause to blame their boredom on their surroundings, but generally if someone claims their life is boring because the city they live in is boring, the problem is with them and not the city.
An oldie but a goodie: http://contrastrebellion.com/

HN makes the cut.
If I want to open a PDF, I use a PDF viewer - or increasingly, a web browser. If I want to open an image, I use an image viewer - or increasingly, a web browser.

A text editor for programming is different. It swims best in a sea of programmable components that can be recombined endlessly. Elisp is one part of that; the shell is another.

I've increasingly isolated my dependency on OSes down to two things, the web browser and the terminal window, both because those are the two things that are consistent and available across all platforms I use - from production servers down to my phone - and because they're the best platforms for what I do.

I know UIs will improve over the next 20 years as they have over the past 20 years. But I also know that I spent a good 18 of the past years using one GUI IDE and editor after the next, and had little compounded return on each iterated investment. Meanwhile, the parallel investment I made in the terminal and the shell has paid off handsomely. I'm no longer pissed off at the crap Apple and MS pull with their OSes, because I'm no longer dependent on them. I spend more and more time in the terminal. Using a world-class editor in the terminal is just another extension of that.

Another thing. I transitioned to using Linux on the desktop fulltime at work last February. That transition would have been much more painful if I hadn't lived inside Cygwin on Windows since 1998 or so. If I had to live with the horrific car crash that is X userland, I doubt I could have lasted as long as I have. I want to have little to do with X as possible. It's a colossal pile of crap. Every app beyond a web browser and terminal emulator is an app too many.
I recently spoke at Ignite Sydney and spoke about teaching the world to code :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EYx5eEqVBE