skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me that these articles are talking about different sorts of jobs. They are both quoting the same numbers, but choose to use different application for those numbers. I would think there is some truth in both sides. For Rowe's part, he is talking about jobs that can not be outsourced and are not optional to those who need the work finished. Pipe fitting, maintenance through welding, and vague post-Katrina engineering jobs are jobs and skills that have to be done on site, and therefore can not be moved overseas. They also pay well. These are jobs that make up part of that 3.5M jobs number, but I would guess a small portion of it. The NYT article talks about machining and factory work. In this field, work can be done here or abroad, so the cost of workers is a commodity. Unless tax breaks help these factories bring higher wages or the owners are altruistic, in my mind we can count these jobs as already gone. Someone could take that job for a bit, making $10-15 an hour but as soon as the commodity cost of wages exceeds the cost of added transportation abroad or the cost of transportation falls or any number of little pieces that fall into the outsourcing equation change, those jobs are gone just like the rest. The issue with these jobs are that they are still considered skilled when technology is quickly making them unskilled.
Huawei Officially Gives Up On The US Market
> You know those "greedy insurance companies" that the US is struggling to wrangle with complicated legislation and broken website markets? They only make 3% margin.

Of course, that's after paying out executive salaries, including bonuses for "cost cutting".
i spent most of my college days producing electronic music in my living room (my roommate was cool with taking up half of it with wires and big clunky hardware)... but to me the biggest killer app of that time was Rebirth. http://www.propellerheads.se/products/rebirth/
it was cheap (or free depending how poor you were) and replaced $1000's worth of hardware.. really it's the highest value app i can think of that time (at the retail price).. of course the analog sound was emulated but it still sounded pretty badass. i later got a 303 clone (futureretro 777) but still kept using Rebirth. one day when the rat race slows down i'll remove the dust from the 777 :)
Apple regularly pays tribute upon the passing of notable individuals by posting a memorial image to their home page. I don't see anything cheesy about it.
They have some vague ideas for scalability that they do not know how to implement.

Also they have some major security issues that I pointed out to them, but they simply ignored. I am sure bitmessage will never be a success because it is fundamentally broken.
He mentions the data several times, go look at the US Labor stats. Infrastructure jobs are open and we don't have the skilled workers to fill them. ND is importing welders from Canada while road work on the eastern side of the state gets delayed. ND has stats on that too.

Some jobs cannot be outsourced.

[edit: skilled workers are need more in infrastructure / construction then factories]
Stop whining: You’re not as old as you believe to be
I think the article short changes the value of startups that can be described as a specialization of another. There's lots of differentiation that can happen in a single space across verticals. Think about what features are important to people who use Word vs. Latex or Blue Nile vs Amazon.

The other thing I would add is I got some advice (which I now agree with) from a college professor that business should focus on being really innovative/risky in one dimension, not in all. This seems like a good way constrain the areas your business will really be innovating in.
AT&T aims to sidestep shareholder request on surveillance data
People need a schema for any new idea in order to quickly understand what it is trying to accomplish.

Saying you are "X for Y" is not being unoriginal; rather, it is a simple hack to enable faster comprehension.

Heck, I used it to get myself a YC interview (although the company I chose as my "X" was the wrong choice given my vision for the startup - choose wisely if you do the "X for Y" thing)
Controlo de Fugas em Sistemas Públicos de Abastecimento de Água em Lisboa
love the concept.
The TR-808 is a fascinating example of triumphant failure. The machine was supposed to emulate real drum sounds, but the limitations of the hardware meant that it was absolutely terrible at that task. The 808 kick is little more than a sine wave, the snare little more than a burst of white noise. The sound generators were designed to be the cheapest, simplest possible circuits that bore any sort of resemblance to a drum sound.

I think it is this electronic purity that has made these sounds so iconic - the sounds are the most natural, elegant ways of generating percussive sounds with analog hardware. Later digital drum machines did a much better job of sounding like real drums, but in doing so often merely sounded ersatz. The 808 is a joy because in failing so catastrophically to be an imitation of something else, it is authentically electronic.
X is not a problem at some fixed instant in time, therefore it is never a problem, right?
Santa Hat on your photo
Maybe that you could hear someone through a wall, so why not through a string?
First order treatments typically get you about 6 months, not years or decades.
On my college freshman orientation sheet, I put down counting binary by finger as something "interesting" I knew. Afterwards , I felt silly but now that there is a dedicated Wikipedia page, I feel better.
Good reference, thanks. I would add, for those that haven't read the Boldrin/Levine link yet, it only starts off with the myth of the lone inventor, but ultimately tackles the modern pharmaceutical industry as well, which is probably the more modern intellectual monopoly defense.

"It is often argued that the best case for patents is in the pharmaceutical industry. The fixed cost of innovation is large, with estimates of the average cost of bringing a single new drug to market as high as $800 million in current dollars... Indeed, according to industry surveys, the only industry in which patents are thought to play an important role in bringing new products to market is the pharmaceutical industry...

The pharmaceutical industry is a complicated beast to vivisect, which can be approached from many contradictory angles and viewpoints. We will stick to ours, narrow that it may be, and ask - how strong is the case for patents in pharmaceuticals? Is there substantial evidence that without patents we would not have the medicines we have, or at least we would have a lot fewer and worse medicines? Would the industry shut down and talent move to some other, more rewarding, enterprise if patents on drugs were more or less abolished, that is, if the world became like Switzerland until 1978 or Italy until a year later?"
Rowe is a bit difficult to figure out. Many of the things he says are are quite sensible, but they seem to be couched in neocon notions of American exceptionalism and blame-the-poor economics.

I don't know much about him except from what I say during his appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher.
So it's just a normal case of Dutch directness?
Heh, I still can't figure out what an HTM is exactly, but I think it's sort of similar to a recurrent convolutional network. It handles learning completely differently (allegedly in a more biologically plausible way).

Personally, I think there are two big issues with what numenta was doing: they diverged too far from mainline neural net research (which, when they started in ~2005 was just before things started getting interesting--it was also a time when "mainline neural net research" was widely assumed to be at a dead end) and they tried too hard to come up with something that was biologically plausible rather than mathematically expedient. Sort of how airplanes need wings but don't need feathers. As far as I am aware, HTMs really just don't work well in practice (and by that, I mean they are not anywhere near competitive with any of the architectures I listed above).
Seconding the internship route. Internships are easier to get due to no or little pay and limited duration. There's no risk to the company to bring on an intern.
You can still use the Google viewer functionality without having to log in (i.e. "anonymously"), if you toss the original URL into the right Google URL. I don't have that particular Google URL (prefix) noted on this machine.

P.S. Here's another way to get at it, and what look to be links to pages with further details.

https://docs.google.com/viewer

https://www.google.com/#q=google+viewer+URL

http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.oreillyst...
Slightly OT, but what's up with the rise of the anti-tech media on the east coast? Who reads that trash anyway? It's all about weird tech CEOs, accusations of prejudice, accusations of unoriginality, and the like.
I'm working on a project that requires a tree datastructure (basically a graph but with only single-direction parent-child relationships) and the number of nodes will stay under a thousand. I could have chosen a graph database, but for my level of complexity I just used postgres and a table that has foriegn-key relationships to itself.

Then I made a rails front end using the acts-as-sane-tree gem, which is designed to use this postgres data model and recursive queries: https://github.com/chrisroberts/acts_as_sane_tree
Was that intended to be a reply to me? You seem to have replied to your own submission ...
Of course. That was the entire point of the article, to point out that you should not use technical difficulty as your primary data point for setting your selling price.

The author purposely picked out an example where the technical difficulty was trivial to illustrate that the value to the customer is NOT related to the technical difficulty of the feature.
Should be fixed on monday. Was a super weird rendering bug.
I'm curious what part of that pledge you think is non-sensical.
It would have been (more) awesome for me if it ran on Linux too.

There is an effort to get it running with Mono - https://github.com/Pash-Project/Pash
The more software you write in it the more that stuff becomes second nature (unless you're a library writer in which you have to reason about your types very carefully).
Lean, mean data science machine
Agreed. I thought at first the ISO I downloaded WAS a USB image. And why the linux installer script ends in .com and not .sh is beyond me. But all that aside, this is a really interesting project!
LinkedIn Seeks Dismissal of Users’ Lawsuit Over E-Mail Hacking
And the HN Pedantry Patrol shows up, on schedule. Do we really deal with computers so much that we forget that human communications allow for a certain level of artistic license and flexibility?
There is even PSReadline - https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine
By default, no. Installable, yes.

Installed in /bin/bash? No as well. Don't start portable scripts with #!/bin/bash.
Did you read the entire post? It ends with:

> But the most important lesson -- and the most easily digestable -- never confuse technical difficulty for demonstrated value.
I'm not arguing as a means to an end, I would prefer to get rid of software patents. I can't really parse your last question, since we're talking about the same software, but keeping the status quo would be unsatisfactory to me.

I just think it's somewhat arbitrary to say that software is nothing but information. Yes, you can state that, and we could all agree to honor that distinction as such, but I think there's nothing a priori about it.

Sure, you could work out software problems on a chalkboard, but I would say doing so is different than creating a piece of software that does the same thing... in the same way that a story that is told verbally from one person to another (and not stored say, via video) is different than a book.
My boring list of 29 writing tips & life lessons from Neil Strauss & Tim Ferriss
Sounds like Chisanbop/Fingermath:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisanbop
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy
might be useful to the author of this article.
New unclassified unmanned stealth aircraft now flying
Rappid: visual languages toolkit - online docs
> Has anyone shopped at a Target Canada recently?

Nope. Then again, I never shopped at whatever the Target stores used to be (K-Mart?).
The Antikythera mechanism still remains by far the most fascinating ancient artifact.

That and Heron's steam engine.
You can also go pseudo-base-5, which will get you 99 and it's relatively easy to know where you are: right hand fingers are 1s, right hand thumb is 5, left hand fingers are 10s, left hand thumb is 50. Edit: Someone in another comment points out this is just Chisanbop: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisanbop
I think this is just the general level of discourse provided by the average CNN viewer.
Nobody builds nuclear reactors for fun anymore
I'm just going to suggest this as well. When working with neural networks, you can see the learning curve for them go down massively if you understand linear algebra.

Numpy based neural networks are a lot more digestable as far as understanding all of the moving parts due to the easy syntax.

Neural nets are usually verbose if you use an object oriented representation. Things like feedforward and backpropagation don't require loops if you know how to think about individual neurons and weight matrices.

Also, for working with them, here's something that cleared up a lot for me: when initializing neuron weights, it's randomly initialized. It seemed like magic to me at first and kept tricking me up when getting started with them.

For those who do the JVM, I'm working on finishing up a library for myself to use in various bits of work I do.

Java based, but you get access to fortran matrix routines, and it's interopable with scala and the like as well.

https://github.com/agibsonccc/sda-jblas

For those of you who need hadoop or want to scale out neural networks, I'm going to suggest a friend of mine's iterative reduce project for neural nets on hadoop.

https://github.com/jpatanooga/Metronome

I just finished up a parallel training setup I'm going to release based on this for neural nets as well. When working with them, you'll discover crazy long training times. Multicore tends to make things easy if you know how to balance out the weights though.

I'd be happy to answer any other questions as well.
I mean by all ways. Abolishing or shortening patents maybe part of it sure. There's a lot of people/scientists who want to work and help people. We just need more effective ways to let them do so.
The Killer in the Pool: Effect of captivity on orcas.
Assuming this means what I think it means, I can see one huge benefit of this policy. All local crimes such as petty larcenies, non-violent possession of drugs, etc. where there was an arrest will be kept out of the paper, protecting the privacy of the accused. The problem with newspapers printing all these minor crimes is that in the eyes of the public you are seen as guilty automatically before you get your day in court. This can ruin or derail someones life when they are innocent or can result in much larger consequences beyond the punishment meted out by the state when they are guilty.

Once this information is public, it gets printed on the internet, and then it ends up in dozens if not hundreds of extortionous "mug shot sites" on the internet, each of which try to get a couple of hundred bucks from the person to remove the information.

Crime statistics should be public information. Guilty verdicts should be public information, but for non-violent crimes with no victims, the entity getting the information should not have reprinting rights, especially not the right to print the name of the convicted.

At the end of the day, it is out justice system that is responsible for sentencing. Violating the privacy of the accused (even the committed when there are no victims) only serves to subject people to a second public "trial", where members of the community each mete out their own sentence without due process.
"Number of available jobs" is a meaningless statistic.

HN-ready example: I'd like to do a web start-up, if only I could find skilled engineers. I'm willing to pay 100 experienced, skilled Java programmers $10/hr to build the site. What? No takers? Not one?? Well, there you go! 100 jobs unfilled. Skills gap!

You can't offer poverty-level wages for skilled jobs, then complain that "we don't have the skilled workers" when college educated workers instead choose to go sell shoes at the mall.
It's not an edge case: we were quoted that price a few years ago. We carry high deductible insurance, and that was before the recent US health care legislation mandated maternity coverage. (Before it passed, most insurers refused to provide maternity coverage outside of large groups, or charged insane prices, since the probability of a claim was so high.)

In the end, we opted for homebirth midwifery care, which was fantastic in every way. We ended up paying around $2k for six months of prepartum care, delivery, and six weeks of postpartum care. In the event of an emergency, insurance would've covered a hospital transfer.

It was such a good experience we did the same thing for #2, and we're planning on delivering at home if we have more children in the future.
I have been messing with ANNs since I learned how to program. For years, understanding of ANNs eluded me. Here is the breakthrough I had some time ago that finally let me understand ANNs:

Think about them like circuits. It is easy to see that a circuit full of NAND, AND, OR, etc can carry out computations. An AND gate is a gate that requires all of its inputs to be true and then it goes high. An OR gate requires at least 1 of its inputs to be true and it goes high.

Think of a neuron as being somewhere in between that (I understand that in the article he shows how to simulate gates, but doesn't quite describe neurons as being fancy gates (which is where my breakthrough happening)). It requires N of its inputs to be true and it goes high. Then imagine that the "wires" in our neural network don't carry information in the form of bits, but instead in the form of real numbers. Each wire has a "weight" associated with it, such that when the wire is turned on, it outputs that value, rather than a simple binary 1.

Now imagine that the neurons take all of these real numbered inputs, and apply some function to them to decide if the neuron wants to turn on or not. It might simply sum them, multiply them, or something more complex, but based on its inputs, it turns on. Its on signal then gets sent to all of the neurons that it points to, etc. The same way you can extract answers from a circuit of logic gates by seeing the output of the gates, you can extract answers from an NN by examining the output of certain neurons.

This description is quite simplified and doesn't go into the architecture of ANNs, but if you are really having a lot of trouble grasping how ANNs work, this description should give you some intuition. The hardcore ML people will probably dislike it, but you have to start somewhere. After understanding it like this, I branched out quite a lot and now all of my academic research involves machine learning. But it took that initial breakthrough!
I don't think you know what a neoconservative is. Neoconservativism is about foreign policy, and, to the extent it engages with domestic policy and the economy at all, it has centrist tendencies; "neocon" is a label originally applied pejoratively to academic liberals who shifted to the right during the cold war regarding the US's role in the world.

Your dismissal of Rowe's post as "nonsense" would be more compelling if it was accompanied by words you actually understood.
#1 and #2 are a bit conservative and nationalistic, but I see nothing wrong with the rest.

Basically the summary: "I love America, and am lucky to live here. I'm going to work hard, because hard work is the path to success. Lazy people suck." OMG! Tea bagger!
In what part of the linked exchange did he 'blame the poor'?

There are many causes of poverty and I don't think lack of hard work is a big one. However when it comes to young people deciding how they will make their way in the world I think a lot choose to go into debt for a four year degree that won't help them in the real world. That is not a wise decision and so we should encourage those people to make better decisions even if they don't get their dream job right out of the gate at least they would be employable.
I just joined a project using neo4j. They're using the latest version so we've had to build our own python tooling. It's still very immature but hopefully we'll get it into an opensourcable state.

Modelling in graphs is new to me so I was wondering if anyone had any tips or pointers.
The Rise of the Machines (video)
For those interested, ocharles is talking about Theorems for Free![1] by Phil Wadler. Also be sure to check out his 24 Days of Hackage 2013.

[1] http://ttic.uchicago.edu/~dreyer/course/papers/wadler.pdf
[2] http://ocharles.org.uk/blog/pages/2013-12-01-24-days-of-hack...
Newest iPhone 5t
Beware of the silent killer
"American exceptionalism" is indeed a notion of neoconservativism. Unfortunately for your comment, it is entirely absent from the post we're commenting on. Perhaps you can find some other source to back your assertion up? Let's be clear on what "exceptionalism" means: it does not mean that the writer believes America to be a great country, because most writers believe their countries to be great; some even believe many countries to be great simultaneously! Exceptionalism means an argument that America is so great that it should function by different rules than all other countries. My bet is that you're going to have a hard time finding Rowe saying anything like that, because he doesn't write about foreign policy.

Meanwhile, "blame-the-poor economics" are indeed an (unfortunate) notion of right-wing conservatism. But unfortunately for your comment, (a) nowhere in this post does Rowe blame the poor for anything, and (b) the "neo" in "neocon" alludes to the fact that neocons do not in fact hew to the domestic policy notions of right-wing conservatives.
That's one of the things I like about Debian, is that /bin/sh is dash (Debian Almquist Shell).

Somehow I got known at work as a guy who knows shell scripting, but people never ask me about simple problems and so I always end up telling them to use Python or C#.
Would you have any good resources to conv nets? I've done the tutorial on theanos site and the related stuff on Andrew ng random wiki (ufdl?). I'm still confused on the filters part.
Where do you see Rowe singling anyone out as "lazy"?
While that misconception is true, it doesn't negate the point that there are a lot of start-ups that are just playing house, trying to act like a start up in the hope that they'll strike it lucky.
The combined 30 day volume of the five exchanges on the homepage of http://bitcoincharts.com/ is about 140 bitcoins per minute. Adding 100 per minute all on the sell side would be a 70% increase in volume, and there would not be a corresponding buy interest added until the price of bitcoin fell considerably. This would reduce the value of the bitcoins.
There are too many Copycats in silicon valley