skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a wide variety of economists. Speaking as someone with Master's degrees in Math & Economics, this sort of simulation is inadequate in many ways.

I was educated via the Neoclassical approach, where the macroeconomy is modeled through a microeconomic (individual) foundation. What's needed at least is a budget, a utility function (preference relations), and a transition function. The agent then is modeled through optimizing their utility against their budget constraint at each timestep, then the transition function gets applied. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This form the basis of a recursion model, the simplest one being the Solow model [1]. More details are available in Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics by Stokey & Lucas [2]. Computer simulations are definitely used in cases where the models are mathematically intractable.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solow_model
[2]: http://www.amazon.com/Recursive-Methods-Economic-Dynamics-St...
I talked them down to fourty, but had to turn them down because it only allows access to two computers. I've had free access to ten computers for years, now they want 130 bucks to keep that same level of service? Screw that!
I have streamed hundreds of hours of high bitrate video (raw Blu-rays) from WD Green 3TB drives over my home gigabit network, and have never encountered this behavior. I couldn't be more pleased with the drives.
Out Of Touch
NCAA Tournament Possibilities (2001)
The "metric" in this case is a score contrived using your proprietary algorithm. The value I read you describing appears more relevant to you/others interested in measuring populations. It doesn't seem especially helpful to the individual. To imagine one person say, "hey, I'm a 41, you're a 36" sounds like personal vanity metrics.

It's like two people comparing their BMIs - it doesn't tell a lot. I do see your app being potentially _very_ valuable in being able to tell individuals when their behaviors are or are not in line with vetted guidelines, or _nudge_ (heyo!) them to do healthful things at a rhythm in line with their best days.

I once worked on a payments platform whose viability depended on mass adoption. One of the reasons we failed, I believe, was due to being more focused on feeding data to merchants and banks vs. providing value to the consumers who were the actual
ultimate hurdle to adoption.
It's incredible what people can do just because of curiosity. I mean - there's no practical gain from helping another person decipher a code other than just out of curiosity. I'm fascinated by the message and the relentlessness of the person who kept the code and tried to crack it for 20yrs. This is just so cool!
Could someone perhaps explain to me how the "random_split" results in wealth accumulation? From the description, I would expect it to have the opposite effect.

If two actors with initial values X and Y interact, their expected outcome would be (X+Y)/2, with expected change being (Y-X)/2 and (X-Y)/2 for the two actors. If X<Y, then (Y-X)/2>0, and so the person with less wealth expects to gain, and the person with more wealth expects to lose, for an overall smoothing effect.
Cryptography is not dead, but useless. We are heading in direction where just possession of random data will be criminal offense.
The article suggests splitting the configuration in many parts using the grunt.config method. Another interesting way to organize it in a larger project is to define config for each task in a separate module. I first saw this used in React: https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/9182100/Gruntfile.js#...
But I can have an ongoing relationship with a single bitcoin exchange that I trust, rather than N merchants - any of whom might be dodgy.
That would be interesting. I bet the older drives were probably from Taiwan/Japan, and the newer ones from Thailand/Vietnam.

From what I hear though, at least in Vietnam the plants are run extremely well. Japanese or Japanese trained managers, and interestingly enough most of the workforce are women. they all meet some ISO specification of precision/reliability, I think. Actual conditions, I have no idea, since I"ve never actually been to one (and am not qualified to say)
This should be titled "Strawmen that block progress for the poor". Few serious thinkers actually believe any of those supposed myths.

Not one word about the exploitation of labor and natural resources in "poor nations" by rich nations (&corporations). Not one word about economic sanctions imposed on several poor nations by the US and its allies.

Gates sounds like the optimist against a world of cynics, but he ignores major reasons why these nations are poor in the first place.
TIGER (dataset that this is based on) has some giant holes in it, and is based on block faces not building footprints like Google Maps. Its also U.S. only... why not base on OSM, which should include TIGER as well as all the other contributions.
Lifestyle accounts for resource depletion far more than raw population numbers. A mall addicted American SUV driver who flies twice a year is far worse for the planet than than a village woman in Mozambique with 6 children.
This looks interesting. They make all of their money on enterprise licenses and give out their software for free to end users.

Also, they're about to fix their firewall limitation:

"NoMachine Anywhere is the next piece of the puzzle. NoMachine Anywhere is a free service, which will be available to everyone, enabling people to connect to each other's computer behind routers and firewalls, without the need for knowing their IP address. Initially slated for end 2013, it has been moved to first quarter 2014." -from their website
It wouldn't, but the sane way to handle that would be to special-case platform A, and let platform B fall back to feature detection, rather than falling back to the worst possible code.
Access to contraceptives allows people who do not intend to have children, but engage in sex, to remain childless.

No access to contraceptives means that people who do not intend to have children, but engage in sex, will have children. These children will be unintended or unwanted and may not be cared for either through disinterest or lack of ability to provide for them.

A child who grows up in that sort of circumstance is not kept safe, may succumb to disease, may spread disease, will not be educated, and will have difficulty providing for themselves.

A common rebuttal is that people should just not engage in sex if they are not intending to have children. This is maybe ideal in some moral frameworks, but whether it's ideal or not, it's not the reality. The reality is that some people will engage in sex anyways, and some people will be forced to engage in sex against their will. While it might be a goal to prevent these things from occurring, the reality is that they occur, and methods to mitigate the negative impacts of their occurrences are better than just finger-wagging.

That said, if your argument is more along the lines of "The Pope says that it is wrong, and the Pope espouses God's will." then I can't really refute it. I can just disagree.

In any case, if people can choose whether they want to have a child or not, then contraception just helps them make that choice. If they shouldn't engage in sex for non-childbearing reasons, then they can struggle with that decision as well. However, when succumbing to that results in an unwanted childbirth, it does more than just punish the parent, it now involves the child and the whole community.
There should be disclaimers about that when you buy such HDDs. I wouldn't consider watching videos a performance related activity. I say this is WD's failure at properly marketing their product lines.
You can disable the aggressive parking behavior ("Intellipark") with WD's own wdidle3.exe [1] or idle3-tools [2].

Disabling Intellipark was literally the first thing I did with each of the three WD Green drives I've owned since 2011 (got two but one failed early on and was replaced), so I can't really compare their performance with this setting on and off; however, I can say that I haven't noticed the drives being parked more aggressively than similar Samsung or Seagate drives. I used the official wdidle3.exe under FreeDOS for each drive.

[1] http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=...

[2] http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/

Edit: changed "aggressive spin-down behavior" to "aggressive parking behavior". It actually isn't quite clear how disabling Intellipark affects disk spin-down behavior.

Edit 2: There's also wdantiparkd (http://www.sagaforce.com/sound/wdantiparkd/). I have not used it but it might help you if tuning the drive itself doesn't work.
Well, in my comment I simply wanted to distinguish between state-run currencies and bitcoin.

> But fiat currencies are simply currencies that aren't backed by collateral

I've checked wikipedia, and one of the definitions for the term "fiat money" is "state-issued money which is neither convertible by law to any other thing, nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.". Bitcoin clearly doesn't fall under this definition. So your statement is not quite true.
I have heard people worry that since starving people seem to already have a lot of kids, if we send food aid, they'll just have even more kids and then there still won't be enough food. It's one of the things people use to rationalize that people who are in trouble somehow got themselves there and/or deserve it.
I built a dozen or so educational apps. I started each on iOS then have ported a few to Android and Windows Phone. It hasn't yet been a great financial success, but it is almost entirely passive income now. Updating apps for UI changes like iOS 7, the iPhone 5 screen size, Holo, etc. are kind of a pain but not bad at all compared to constantly selling myself on new consulting gigs or chasing down non-paying customers.
Yes, I also forced her to get a Dropbox account. That's how she knew the relationship was getting serious.
Already posted (several times)
> Sustainability means keeping the population at a consistent level. Otherwise, exponential growth means that the planet is eventually covered in humans to a depth of 50ft, and nobody wants that.

But the third myth section covers your proposed malthusean explosion, and declares that it's not a valid concern.
Signed Installs, Upgrades, and Packages
When you first wake up, don't consume, think
Coinbase (and others) provide merchant services, whereby they accept a small (1% if I recall) fee to convert BTC into USD, at the current spot price. So users can pay for a product in BTC, and the merchant receives USD at the spot price of when the transaction occurred (minus fees).

This eliminates BTC price fluctuation from a merchant who does not want to speculate.
For Beats' target market, they don't factor in price either.

When I personally go to buy stuff, price is third or fourth down on my list of concerns.

I've bought two pairs of over-the-ear headphones in the past few months, and sent them both back. I was shopping on price/value, but the headphones I was getting were way too loud for an office environment.

For whatever reason, whenever I'm looking for decent headphones, nobody indicates whether I'll be broadcasting what I'm listening to to my workmates or not. Not the manufacturer, not the reviewers. Giant pain in the ass. It might not be long before I'd be willing to shell out the cash for Beats just to not have to fuck with it anymore.
I absolutely detest FUD about quantum computing and how it's going to "destroy all cryptography; there's no use anymore", completely ignoring the fact that only asymmetric systems based on DLP and IFP will be compromised due to the efficiency of Shor's algorithm.

I always get particularly pissed because it makes the average person think it's no longer useful to encrypt their data, thus making them a vulnerable target. I wonder if it's a deliberately orchestrated disinformation campaign.
So, one big reason for merchants to accept bitcoins is the high fees charged by credit card processors? So, suppose they cut the fees? Does that kill bitcoin ?
DWave’s updated quantum optimizer gets beaten by a classical computer
>because a common hallmark of the successful / venture-backed startups in the UK (you seem to conflate the two) is that they don't really go in for the bullshit: networking, accelerators where you get a communal office and access to a shitty lawyer, ec. The good startups in the UK don't obsess over Tech City News or go to networking events with cold pizza and warm white wine. They work out whether there's an opportunity in a market, raise capital, and build things.

So do you think that there's more of an emphasis on getting the product make or the job done than the start up/hacker culture side of things?
>This is quite possibly the craziest article I've read all day (and that's saying something as I've spent the better part of the morning on Reddit)
Let's start with the iPad. First iPad was called the iPad. Awesome start. The second, the iPad 2 ... even better. The third was not the iPad 3 but rather the iPad ... or the "all new ipad" aka 3rd generation. Starting to lose it a bit here but let's trust Apple. The iPad 4 was not the iPad 4 but actually the iPad ... with retina display/4th generation. Ok so maybe we're starting a new naming scheme? Good then. The 5th generation iPad is/was called the iPad 5th Gen... oh wait no it's called the iPad Air.
To top it off, the 3rd and 4th generations are discontinued, leaving the iPad 2 and the iPad Air as the only available models. Try explaining that to a non-Apple following family member and watch their face contort.
Now I did RTFA and was amazed at how the author could spin the atrocious naming scheme for the iPad into something that matched his hypothesis. Kudos to him for sticking with it.

For one, you managed to miss all comperative context.

What you descrive, however ..."attrocious" sounds to you, is nothing compared to Sony's naming schemes and model variance he compares it to. We're talking several orders of magnitude worse.

Second, you don't have to explain much to a "non-Apple family following family member". He doesn't care for the history of the iPad lineage, and neither he should.

What matters is that at any given time he might want to buy an iPad there are 2 or 3 base models sold by Apple, that have clearly different characteristics.

In fact, by summarizing all the iPad release history in 2 paragraphs, you nullified your own argument. Trying to do the same with most companies product lines and naming schemes is an exercise in futility.
I'm just an amateur at statistics, but I would think this would be a useful set to do generalized linear mixed models on, to see what factors could be statistically significant (manufacturer, model, factory location, etc etc etc)
The logic is that fewer moving parts means a lower failure rate. It amounts to paying a premium for longer-lived drives. How much you value that is a matter of taste and means.
> It is ironic that the foundation has a reputation for a hard-nosed focus on results, and yet many people are cynical about the government aid programs we partner with. The foundation does a lot to help these programs be more efficient and measure their progress.

It's not ironic. Some people value government charity spending less than they value private nonprofit spending. Gates implicitly acknowledges that government aid has weak points (poor focus on outcomes, inefficiency, and lack of good measurement). Aside from that, there are also principled concerns about using tax dollars for aid projects.
It's true that Green drives aren't intended for performance-related tasks, but it's wildly incorrect to imply that streaming video to a single user qualifies as a performance-related task in this context. Blu-ray video maxes out at what, 50 megabits per sec? WD Green drives from 2010 have no problem attaining sequential read speeds of 100 megabytes per second. They'll manage 50 megabytes per second even with random reads.

Also, I have streamed a lot raw Blu-ray files from my WD Green drives over a gigabit network with absolutely zero issues.
> Such kind of "lossy compression" was used sometimes to transfer secret messages. It's impossible to fully decipher it without knowing the text, but it serves as a reminder for those who know it, so they can reconstruct it in full form if needed.

This was the way that the Qur'an was originally passed down. Originally, the Qur'an was meant to be a recited work. Furthermore, at the time, Arabic writing wasn't so much a complete orthographic system as much as a reminder of the roots of words[0]

This works well in Semitic languages, in which the consonants denote the general meaning of the word, and the vowels change the specifics.

For example, one might write "SLM", which can be expanded to any of the following (capitalization for emphasis)

1) iSLaM = "submission" (literally)

2) moSLeM = "one who has submitted"

3) SaLaaM = a greeting, similar to "peace" (etc.)

The writing is not enough to reconstruct the entire text, but it's good enough for someone whose job it is to recite the work, and simply needs a little reminder.

[0] In fact, not only did traditional written Arabic lack vowels (much like Hebrew), but I am told that even consonants were difficult to distinguish from each other.
This is an interesting campaign trying to tackle those exact issues of perception: http://www.africafornorway.no/
Interesting on the corking stuff. I looked at this a long time ago (http://baus.net/on-tcp_cork/) and found it could make a significant difference for event driven applications.
It is sort of strange. The letter also talks about looking around and seeing a bunch of middle class people and assuming that no one is poor anymore. If I can't see it, it doesn't exist. . .
The United States' news coverage concerning Africa perpetuates these myths.

It seems as if 95% of news stories focus on poverty, war and chaos in the continent. They rarely go so far as to differentiate among countries.

In fact, many African nations are great centers for innovation. Kenya and Nigeria spring to mind for higher education and mobile computing.

As a way of confronting condescending stereotypes, I have often fantasized about organizing a group of Nigerian school children to "help build a school somewhere in America" — a twist on the cliche trip that many U.S. students take to Africa — because education in some Nigerian cities is far superior to most U.S. high schools.
You're doing something right. I have never been so well hydrated than when I used Nudge in an inter-office competition.
I don't really like Swiss Army knives either many of the features are not very functional, or redundant within the tool itself.

I do have a, non-leatherman brand Leatherman and it's totally great.

It's great because I have it on me when I need it, and that's not going to happen with the rest of my tools, as I'm not bringing an entire tool box on a camping trip, or a bike tour, or traveling around the country.

I mean, ask Aron Ralston what he thinks was a good tool to bring along (other than a freakin' clue on things to do, before going on the types of trips he goes on).
Phablets have become... a thing
Localizing the Firefox OS Boilerplate App
In my limited knowledge, this would be a generalized linear mixed model to look at factors influencing drive failure? or more of a poisson thing?
Bitcoin is the first Internet-wide payment system where transactions either happen with no fees or very low fees (down to fractions of pennies). Existing payment systems charge fees of around 2 percent to three percent

As long as consumers are paid in their local currency and vendors pay their employees, their taxes, and their other costs in local currency, then bitcoin as a payment technology has similar costs as credit cards. Those costs are reflected through exchange fees and bid/offer spreads.

Let's walk through a transaction. I want to buy something that costs 1 bitcoin. The going rate on the bitcoin exchange is $825 bid by $830 offered. I take my cash to the exchange and convert it to bitcoin. Assume exchange fees are .5%. To buy 1 bitcoin I pay $834.15 (fees included). I transfer the bitcoin to the vendor, who then does the reverse transaction. He recieves $820.875 (fees included). The cost for transaction was $13.275 (834.15 - 820.875) which comes out to 1.59%. That is cheaper than the oft quoted 2.5% rate for credit cards but is very much in the same ballpark. If you factor in that some credit cards give you 1% cash back then bitcoin and credit cards are back at basically even in terms of net transaction costs.

With bitcoin as a payment technology, the transaction costs flow to the bitcoin exchanges, market makers, and dealers. A dealer is sort of like an exchange combined with a market maker. The dealer quotes you a price to buy or sell bitcoins and you transact directly (not on an exchange). The dealer, like a market maker, makes money on the bid/ask spread. The only reason I'm going on about this is because one of a16z's big bitcoin investments is in a company called Coinbase, which is a bitcoin dealer. When you buy or sell bitcoins with Coinbase, Coinbase always takes the other side of the transaction. They make money on the bid/ask spread, and in some cases ("instant exchange") they charge you a 1% fee on top. It's a pretty clever business.

Just putting this out here so that everyone understands how the guys out there touting bitcoin for payments plan to make money from the people using bitcoin for payments.
You're doubling the problem no matter how you look at it, because the problem of you sending money to the bitcoin exchange is the exact same problem as you sending money to the merchant.

No, because we've introduced loose coupling. I need to figure out how to turn USD into BTC. My wordpress guy needs to figure out how to turn BTC into UAH. Either of us can swap out our solution and the other doesn't care.

Suppose we used Paypal instead. If Paypal decides they hate Ukraine, we can't transact anymore.

Similarly, if you build your company's internal architecture using JSON over HTTP with a common json schema, you have doubled the problem. The Scala side needs to turn java data structures into JSON, and the Python side needs to turn them into python objects. Doesn't mean it's a bad way to go.
I like the OP's summation that we should approach code reading as code decoding. My interest in literate code and readable code has recently accelerated in conjunction with my interest in code correctness. I think the way forward in both these contexts is through functional programming.

In particular I, and the IT shop at Tachyus, have chosen F# as the way to go forward for a number of reasons. Sticking to readability, F# (and other FPs to a greater or lesser extent) allow production code that "reads" more expressively in terms of conveying what the code is actually accomplishing to the reader (and to the compiler) rather than the frequently tangled instructions to the compiler on how to accomplish the task coming from traditional imperative and OO languages. F# also has some very useful tools to emit a form of literate code that produces publication ready HTML or MD, http://tpetricek.github.io/FSharp.Formatting/ (This project will soon be accepted as a top-tier project by the F# Software Foundation, http://fsharp.org/) It may not be to the letter of Knuth's idea of literate programming, but certainly in the spirit.

I did read some code lately. Actually I had to go so far as stepping through it in the debugger to properly decode it, http://jackfoxy.com/transparent-heterogeneous-parallel-async... (the code snippets here have tool-tips in my article, just one of the features available with FSharp.Formatting), but this is really the exception in F#. The vast majority of code is easily accessible to any programmer of reasonable quality (with proper introduction to FP) in any IT shop. The deeper functional stuff like Continuation Passing Style and Applicative Functors (e.g. heterogeneous parallel async) in most cases is already available in core libraries. And when not a literature search and/or getting in touch with the FP community helps.