skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was simplifying, and your simplification is more accurate, but neither simplification quite captures it. Both aspects play a role, with the amount the couple makes essentially scaling the benefit or detriment. If a couple makes the exact same amount but it's a low amount, there's zero detriment, but if it's a high amount there's a significant detriment. If they make very different amounts and it's a low amount, there's a significant benefit, but the size of that benefit decreases and can disappear entirely as they make more.
NSA Can Gain Complete Access To iPhones, But Apple Denies It Helped Them
Hard to find a stable tablet with big enough screen for 299$.

Also tablet is a distraction since kids would want to play games as soon as they have one in their hands.

Also starting in 2nd Grade (At least in my area) kids are taught typing on computer (Home Rose?).
I'm not suggesting that they have or have not received a NSL. I am saying, if they are in compliance with the gag order portion of the NSL, then they must always deny that they ever received a NSL for any reason. The government views not denying receipt of a NSL as confirming receipt. If they hadn't received a NSL, of course they would say they hadn't received one. If they had received a NSL, or course they would say they hadn't received one. The only reply to the question of "have you received a NSL" that is ever legal, is to deny receipt.

So whatever their true status is, it cannot be judged from their own statements, as long as we assume that nobody at Apple gives two shits enough to stick their neck out and risk incarceration for violating a NSL.
I suspect the reason non-technical people have difficulty convincing developers isn't so much about respect but more to do with the idea itself and the person presenting it.

Its come to a point that hiring development staff for web based applications isn't that expensive if you focus on hiring people that aren't in North America and don't need to use the whiz bang language or framework (I would put even Ruby on Rails and Django in this) but instead use PHP.

What I do think is important for non-technical founders is to have an understanding of what software development actually involves, so that they can judge and critique the work. It's worth knowing why a company might quote you, $10K for some work versus another $50K. Is one company using PHP or ASP.NET? Does one company's quote include all tasks such as requirement's gathering, mock-ups, development and production deployment. Where does system testing and end user testing fit into all of it? What's the hosting costs after the fact. Are they using Rackspace, AWS or their own provider and charging $300 a month for it.

I think a smart person can take a good 30-50 hours and read up on all this and get a good grounding as there is no lack of materials to get this knowledge from. I don't need to know the intricate details of how to build a car to appreciate the manufacturing process for a car. We all know there are many makes and models of cars but the design and manufacturing, distribution and sales of cars follow similar patterns (not taking into account the new entrants such as Tesla).

As an added check, a non-technical founder should find a trusted technical person that can help guide the development of the product even if the technical person themselves won't build it.

I think doing this would go a long way to get something built and off the ground. It's easy for a lot of us who have grown up with technology and understand computers, the internet, programming languages, algorithms, software development etc. but for the non-technical person who grew up as a user of the tech not but not a tinkerer its hard to catch up and go beyond and build a product (even an MVP).
Fortress Investment Group to Launch Bitcoin Fund
If they get one in the future what happens? Are they allowed to not make this claim next time, which strongly implies that they got one? Open question, is there any US precedent as to what they're allowed to do there?
A story is almost gone in 45 minutes on HN. You'll often notice people complaining about posting a story posted a day earlier that didn't get any traction and is highly voted on resubmission. Someone has to start a conversion or it has to get up voted quickly. I was the 4th upvote and the first comment.
There are better explanations for why the American healthcare system was the way it was pre-ACA.

This post links a much better examination of the issue:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6992392
Looking hard at dnsmadeeasy... Anyone using them as primary DNS? Basic specs look good: $60/YR for 25 domains ... supports zone imports... uptime guarantee.
The Best And Worst Gadgets Of The Year
This book is awesome - and very relevant to anyone working on marketplaces or other types of b2c products.
i don't know how that'd work - a lot of my writing starts from indecipherable technical details from research. From there i unravel their meaning to explain the connection between the high level intuition and low level workings. Writing the otherway seems like you'd constantly lose track of what's important.
I think that both of these are important, and symbiotic tactics. Officially support the artists who are doing the right thing, and rip off the ones who aren't.
Hackers attack Dota 2 and League of Legends servers
"well, let's just sort of put some train stations around the edge but not do anything that might upset anyone"

And this is the crux of my point. Those CalTrain stations, when they were built, were EXACTLY where people wanted to go. The center of each down town. Look on a map. Caltrain is a very direct route to San Jose. The opposite of your argument that it is in any way "milquetoast". Even BART served where people wanted to commute to when it was planned out. The Bay Area has exploded with building since then.

"If you think you can't build good transit late in a city's history, how do you explain London or Paris?"

Uh...train technology not existing for most of those two cities histories?
not related to the article, but I love the simplicity of the site. No Facebook plugins, twitter BS, huge images, ...

Even the comment section didn't have a any crap. beautiful.
THAT is a really good point. Thank you for bringing it up. Even after considering your evidence as truth I still have one question left.

1. Isn't a woman, Jessica Livingston (Paul Graham's wife) on the interviewer panel and a part of the application process? It's not just Paul Graham himself.

I'm quick to defend Paul in the same way others are quick to blame him. It seems we as a diverse society are so conditioned to enforcing equal extremism that any time we don't see an industry, a workforce, or a group equally divided between male/female, black/white, gay/straight we immediately sound off the alarm and go on a witch hunt. All of this without considering that certain groups of people are better at something than others. For instance, African Americans make up only 12-14% of the population but over 60% of the NFL. Jewish people make up less than 6% of the population yet they make up almost 100% of entertainment industry executives (see Joel Stein article in the New York Times if you don't believe me). We hold up the majority to a level of standards that the minority cannot even reach. There's this stigma that if you have nice things, you cheated to get them, didn't earn them, and must divide them and share them with everyone else or else you are sexist/racist.
What I don't get is why Twitter didn't shut down the account?

https://twitter.com/DerpTrolling

I mean they are DDOSing game servers one by one right now! Runescape, EVE Online, LoL, EA... etc
The Mac Pro Review
At the bottom of the list is a summary of the number of "best papers" by institution. Interestingly, Microsoft Research is at the top of the list:

Microsoft Research 32.4
Stanford University 26.8
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 24.6
University of Washington 24.1
Carnegie Mellon University 22.9
University of California Berkeley 19.5
...
> the post pulls out some talking points about Mitt Romney and some conservative think tanks

Political or not, this historical description happens to be accurate. Obamacare is ultimately intellectually rooted in the Heritage Foundation's attempt to come up with an alternative to more liberal proposals. It is also the same ideas that made Romney a name to watch nationally in political circles circa 2007.
Because Disney's political corruption is dragging in the entirety of all creative works with theirs. I may hate Disney for its actions, but that doesn't mean I have to hate singing Happy Birthday too.
Unless you take that external HD home with you every night and the fire happens to take place in the office overnight.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/23...

BTC is no different. In fact, all transactions are public in BTC due to the nature of the public crypto system.
Right to vote vs right to Psuedoeffedrine?
Not lucky - the answer is inferable. Exhaustive search is just the primitive way.
Patent Application for Computing Tf-Idf values using Map-Reduce framework
You're saying that they can't pretend that the criteria isn't biased against women -- which they aren't because that's how we got into this discussion in the first place. You seem to want YC to be assholes so you have something more to say about them. When they're not, we still get to have the conversation but now it's hypothetical.

It's not socially irresponsible for the them to answer why their aren't more women in YC today is because the problem happened ten years ago. That's just an answer to the question. It's likely a true and factual answer.

So there's a thorny program that they didn't cause. You don't expect them to change YC's selection process. But they have a social responsibility that's worth this much discussion?!? They have no more social responsibility than the rest of us. And they're already doing more than most of us.
I think there is a sizable minority that wants anybody who isn't in jail to be well armed, whether or not they agree with me politically, and I'm in that minority. I think it benefits society. I sort of vacillate between conservative and libertarian depending on the issue and the day of the week myself, but I think pro-gun liberals are a great addition.

I think there is a sizable minority that wants nobody to have guns, for various reasons, but typically because they actually think it'll stop violence. I think that won't work at all, and has lots of negative effects. It isn't a coincidence that all of the mass shootings happen in "gun free zones".

I think there is a vanishingly small number of people who actually want to disarm society in order to try and push a Nazi-like situation. But, imagine an America where the NSA that Snowden has told us about are the only people with firearms. Do you want to live there?
While Google is unlikely to disclose actual sales figures, their marketing department likely has made some effort to figure out what is happening.

My (anecdotal, N=1) evidence is in seeing people who were frustrated by the iPad. The iPad really did a huge amount of volume and I'm hearing from a few people that they wanted something more like a Chromebook.
Not that compilers don't already make these optimizations. But it's pretty hard to map sequential languages like C to a many-core processor with really large SIMD units. Any abstraction that tries to make code still look sequential even if it is being executed on many cores is going to be leaky.
I used to feel this way, then I built a nice NAS that sits on a basement shelf, connected via GBE. Nowi. Don't care about it.

With 100m optical thunderbolt cables coming, if I has the $$ for a Mac Pro, I'd be building a kickass solution out of sight.
> It wouldn't defeat GPG, or OTR-based systems used in reasonably popular open-source clients.

Until you consider where GPG and OTR are used, e.g. Enigmail or Pidgin, addons or clients which both autoupdate or ask to be updated.

There are very, very, very few pieces of software that either don't need to be updated, or can't trivially be backdoored by the vendor itself through updates.

You keep going back to "Skype didn't have security"--and I can't tell if you're trolling, or what--but you can't seriously harp on it for auto-updating. So does Chrome, and it's lauded for auto-updates (the downside of not updating is obviously that security issues aren't fixed, arguably a much bigger risk than the vendor backdooring the software in later updates.)
It's important to note that during the USG vs Huawei discussions there were no actual proofs brought by the USG about the allegations it pressed on Huawei. Huawei even wrote an open letter just two years ago asking for investigation and denying all the allegations http://www.huawei.com/ilink/en/about-huawei/newsroom/press-r...

Later on Huawei testified before the US House
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApQjSCUpt4s

To my knowledge, no response has been made by USG justifying the allegations it was making when it was openly called by Huawei. Given all of this, I find it ironic the comments here such as "backdoors in Huawei's devices" are taken for granted. Now with the latest leaks exposing hacking by the USG itself the tone of the conversation (including the comments in HN) has not changed. What am I missing?

The only noticeable change seems was the decreased tone of the US media (CNN alikes) who used to shout extremely loud that 'Those Chinese are hacking our systems!'. At the very least frequency of such news got decreased ever since the leaks.
I hope this isn't being downvoted simply because TillE isn't fellating Linux. We all have different experiences here, and while I'd be interested to see elaboration on this comment there really is no reason to hide it.
Huge issue with that model, while cash has a fixed value against a fiat currency that is known to be stable, bitcoins have a fixed value against a commodity that is known for being unstable.
If you want that Apple quality, get a Macbook Pro instead?
I thought Moore's law had been replaced by Amdahl's law a decade ago. Moore's law is only about the number of transistors in a chip rather than the theoretical speed improvement limits of multicore chips.
My problem with Stack Overflow is that it basically feels like a ghost town when I try to use it. The Ember people encourage users to use SO for help, and shut down posts to the Ember discussion board that are too "helpy". But whenever I've asked a question on SO, I've gotten literally zero responses. I have no idea why. Does having a better reputation actually lead to you getting more answers? I don't even know, so I don't bother trying. Many of the things I try to do on SO I can't, because I don't have the right reputation. It mostly feels like an impenetrable, confusing castle full of useful stuff that I can only watch from outside.

Instead, I just blog solutions to various thorny problems I run into, so that other people can find them on Google. And I try to use whatever domain-specific message boards I can find. I just don't understand how to use SO to get help so I don't bother.

And it's not that I don't want to contribute. I've answered some questions on SO and I'd be happy to answer many more than the questions I ask. But my (uninformed) sense is that I could answer questions til I'm blue in the face and no one would ever answer mine. The ratio of unanswered questions to answered ones is insane. It just doesn't feel like there's a community there that I'm joining.

That said, I find it incredibly useful when there's already an SO solution that comes up in Google that solves my problem.
Show HN: Low-cost SLA 3D Printer
Full disclosure: I'm one of the engineering leads on this project. I'm happy to answer questions here or on KS/social media/etc.

We're trying hard to drive the cost of SLA down. Hope that you all think it's interesting!
I did this in about 20 minutes in Python in an interview.

The trick to solving things fast is to use the structure of the problem to make your problem solving procedure less general. That is, you do premature optimization, except instead of trading readability for runtime speed, your are trading readability for program length.

With real problems, there is a similar tradeoff, so I think this is a useful skill to demonstrate. But it does take practice to find the tradeoff that works best for interview questions, which is not the same as for real life coding.

In my solution, I use mutable state to reduce the amount of code. board is mutated to avoid the boilerplate of copying objects. valid is mutated as a kind of optimization, but the real reason is it makes the program simpler.

def complete_board(board, l):
"""If possible, completes a board (whose first l rows
have been filled with 1 queen per row). Returns
true if this is possible, false otherwise

board is a list of ints representing the position
(0-based) of each queen"""

N = len(board)

if l == N:
return True

# determine the valid positions for a queen in the r'th row
valid = [True] * N
for row, col in enumerate(board[:l]):
valid[col] = False
s = l - row
if col + s < N:
valid[col + s] = False
if col - s >= 0:
valid[col - s] = False

for col, v in enumerate(valid):
if v:
board[l] = col
if complete_board(board, l + 1):
return True
return False
AnandTech Mac Pro Review
>you think the world looks alien because most people small hand held computers around with them???

Alien means different, not magic. This world is alien to the world of 2005, and most of that quality is a result of ubiquitous smartphones. The issues that we are grappling with now around smartphones were only the concern of science-fiction authors 10 years ago. I'm not sure how that could be controversial.

>prefixed your comment with "not that anyone cares".

That's called humility.

>you're not without social media, you're commenting on hn?

Does sending a letter count then?

Sorry for commenting, it's just that they only give me one downvote.
This isn't the right problem to be fixing: The right problem is a distributed data store.
The Ruby on Rails Tutorial (http://railstutorial.org/) has been a successful product business (six figures per annum), and in fact I've recently taken the core publishing technology and turned it into a platform called Softcover. It's currently in private beta; sign up for an invitation here:

http://www.softcover.io/

As part of developing Softcover, I plan to write more about the details of making and publishing the Rails Tutorial (including a more detailed discussion of revenue numbers) starting some time next year. Stay tuned.
> Haven't seen one in a coffee shop. No one in my family. Some web stat source says..."), with the same players regurgitating their old hits, I do wonder why people trust StatCounter so much?

And what has the actual result been over time? Are we looking for confirmation anecdotes in the wrong places? It seems to me that many of those early stats turned out to be true. For example, Android devices dominates the global smartphone market at over 80%. That's either a lot of shipped but not sold devices sitting on shelves filling up every inch of floor space in retail stores around the world, or this kind of stat tracking has some validity.
The relevant case here is a recent decision regarding the Sherlock Holmes books published before 1923. The characters represented in those works (i.e. without later developments in still-copyrighted books) are in the public domain, and can be freely used in new stories. There's no reason to think that the same wouldn't apply to Micky and Donald.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/27/sherlock-holmes...
"Indeed I went from the top 4% of contributors at my time of departure to the top 3%"

That seems to indicate that stack overflow had considerable growth in the number of contributors, relatively few of which acquired large scores (for example, if there were no 'effortless scoring', they would need 33% growth of users who all have lower scores in order to make the former top 4% become the new top 3%)

That might be an indication that there are fewer users who play the "I want points" game. It would require access to quite a bit more data (who joined when, what do the distributions of scores look like, etc) to prove that, though.

If it turns out that there still are lots of users chasing high scores, I think it might be worthwhile for Stack Overflow to play with different scoring functions. For example, h-index is popular in scientific papers. One could do a SO h-index (has X answers that got at least X upvotes). Maybe, to encourage diversity, one could add "... With X different tags" to the requirement.
If anything, they would package IronPython - which wouldn't go over to well with people expecting C-extensions to work.
This is a beautiful machine. It does look odd but every hardware built into the Pro looks amazing fit and stylish. The only complain, of course is when you need all those extra cables and just make the Pro looks uglier. I am going to one of these a year or later, like when the 2nd or even 3rd generation comes out. When iPod first came out, it was a big hit but it was a monster. 2 generations down it was slim.
That's fine until your Internet connection is down for 4 days and she's due an assignment that needs to be emailed or printed.

The device is a lemon then.

At least with a normal Mac/PC you can plug a printer in it.
But the GP comment wasn't just addressing porting projects (which I would understand), it was "one single dependency that doesn't support py3 is the death knell to using it for anything, EVER" (emphasis theirs).

That's a fairly strong opinion to take, and in my opinion, goes far enough to be ridiculous.
Hmm... TL;DR?
Revenue Growth 20x in 2013
Crouton needs dev mode and ChromeOS wipes your local files when you enable it.
This. Not all generators can be converted to a list in a timely manner, seeing as infinite generators are supported.
Think about what the NSA really did here in 2008. Apple didn't need to help the NSA do this. Here's why:

The NSA exploited a bug in the iPhone in the same way that the jailbreak community has been doing since the iPhone came out in 2007. The only difference is that the NSA installed malware where as the jailbreak apps install Cydia.

Remember jailbreakme.com? That is a browser based root vulnerability. Find an exploit in the iPhone's mail, sms, browser, or any other app, and you could too install malware. Of course this is not easy with the security of the iPhone, but with NSA like resources there is no such thing as bulletproof security.
Ask HN: cheap reliable host for Wordpress blog
I had a post at the top of HN earlier today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6989971) but Bluehost went belly up and is down for some hours. Any reliable (no downtime) and cheap WP host you can recommend?
A wise man once said, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/python3
I just spent most of my morning on my day off trying to solve someones problem on one of my user groups.
Apple says never worked with NSA on iPhone backdoors
Don't generalize. If anything sellers have drowned big tech companies with unwanted contracts, long term support of legacy products. You are driven by "making money" which is ultimate greed. Thanks but no thanks. I'm more than happy making one customer at a time happy then having you guys whore engineers out.

Sellers as the peanut gallery, should be kept in check.
You don't even have to do the assignment at the begging of your snippet. You could just refer to the builtin module explicitly.
Sure, he had to kill his project but I can only imagine the experience will help him land new opportunities.
It seems the more transactions are on exchanges, the lower they make the rate. Some like Bitpay I think offer flat rates per month, too, for businesses (starting at something like $30 a month, no extra commissions).

So while Bitcoin's transaction fees may not be zero, it does seem like it's trending towards zero, much like the price of everything else on the web trends towards zero.