skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"...Because the American Dream is dead in too much of America..."

We are quickly reaching the point on HN that we are becoming a parody of ourselves. What is this tripe? Why are we consuming it so greedily?

Look, the poor in America today are tremendously better off than before. And yes, I find it interesting as a hacker to observe statistical data, I also know enough to know that methodology and meaning count for a hell of a lot here. It's one thing to note relative percentage differences in relative quintile rankings. It's quite another to end your article with this over-the-top emoting.

Come now, is it not obvious that the quintiles area completely different now than, say, 40 years ago? Is it not obvious that things like public transportation are probably meaningless when applied to a geographic area this size? How about the fact that the people in, say, rural Florida in 1980 are probably not the same ones that would be there in 2010? Does migration between states play a role? Illegal immigration? Do poor people self-select certain areas? More provocatively, what's the actual movement compared to the movement desired?

I love statistics, but far too often we try to beat meaning out of aggregate information that just isn't there. Then we bandy around whatever meaning we've drudged up to support our pet theories. One of the reasons I love startups so much is that to address a market you take statistical data and then test it. That's what we're missing here. We have a lot of hand-waving, correlation, generalizing, and blame. Not so much with the reproducible testable hypotheses. A little more of that and a little less soft, squishy social sciences, please. Otherwise this place is going to start looking like a meeting of the royal astrologers: lots of posturing and invective but very little of value.

You guys are consuming this great fluffy social sciences mish-mash and treating it as if it were the same as recent results on the mass of the Higgs-Boson. They're different categories of information. All science is provisional, but the soft sciences are the most provisional of all. Bears remembering.
Samsung And Google Bury The Apple Hatchet, Sign 10-Year Patent Agreement
The problem with established companies like Google is that all of the cool projects are already taken.

That, and that they claim ownership over whatever you create, including stuff you do in your off hours, and any ideas you may have had.

But the lack of opportunity is the big one. There's just too many people who've been there too long, with their own projects to work on that overlap with the work you'd want to do, to have any shot at actually doing groundbreaking work.

Interesting work? Maybe. Groundbreaking? Not gonna happen.

As an example, I work on pretty much the same problems as Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, albeit with a radically different approach. Would I be able to continue that work at Google? Extremely doubtful, again, because all of the groundbreaking work is taken.

(Note: Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are awesome, I'm not trying to imply that they aren't up to the task or whatever. Far from it. Just that there's already really good chefs in the kitchen at Google, so there's no point in joining in the fun.)
I'm been a full-stack web/mobile developer for various startups over the past couple years.. I've always thought it would be cool to work at a larger company like google for awhile, seems like I'd learn a ton.. but I didn't really go through school and don't have your standard strong CS fundamentals as a result, so haven't been quite sure about what to do :P. Any tips on the best way to acquire these skills through self-study?
It's also plausible that poverty results in fewer marriages

This an interesting link, but it is a garbage argument. Marriage as a time series is just as plausibly (if not more-soe) inversely related to wealth. People were more poor and more likely to be married in the pre-war years (one example). Furthermore the rate of dissolution in marriages is also (in recent times) correlated with increases in wealth (postwar prosperity). Its far more likely that social causes (both technological and cultural) drive family structures. Wealth is perhaps a boundary constraint in some contexts. This latter would best explain recent trends that show a bifurcation (but this is more ~last decade or two).
Do you know how to try running Movitz? Many links on that page are broken.
PSA: online polls are meaningless. pg, please disable polls.
The issue with the back button seems to be a Chrome rendering bug. I've work-arounded it by scrolling to top on the first query, but I'm still looking for a more elegant way to fix it. (Will be deployed later today)
This is blogspam, you're trying to pull people to your personal blog, where you've written a paragraph (least amount of effort) with a copy and paste of a few paragraphs from the original article.
Penny slots at that.
I've been approached by different people at Google several times over the years, and I've always passed for two reasons:

* You require relocation, with no remote options for working that I was ever able to learn about.

* The interview process seems unduly complex and needlessly difficult.
My point wasn't that it can't be done. My point was about usability and what programmers have come to expect from a modern language. I understand that things get trickier when trying to implement arbitrary-precision arithmetic while keeping performance high.
Reasons to use a paper-based task manager
Interesting thoughts; it would be nice to have a transcript. (It's somewhat ironic in the light of the content that while he's clearly reading a prepared text, it's presented in a way that makes excerpting or reorganization nearly impossible; worse even than files of plain text.)
Very clever idea! So can this be used for any Facebook event (ie. free for anyone) or is there a cost to attach this to an event?
This is an amazing project and I'm really impressed by the overall quality both in the documentation and the web design. It looks very promising, in an ideal world this would be implemented in every institution.
The point of the article isn't what is happening presently in terms of textiles and globalization, but how technological innovation affected the industry in 18th and 19th century Massachusetts.

That said, there are some omissions. The American Colonies / Early United States were labor-constrained. The economy was growing rapidly, and there simply weren't enough warm bodies to meet demand (discussed in Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter VII). Wages were high, supplies of finished goods were limited, and the benefits of industrialization were high. This contrasted with England in which factories drew masses of labor from the countryside, city populations exploded (Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham grew from small towns of 4,000 - 6,000 in 1685 to major cities of 393,000 - 552,000 by 1881, see Arnold Toynbee's Lectures on the Industrial Revolution), and working conditions in general were abysmal.

Which suggests other reasons why picking the Lowell factories as the analysis point is somewhat misguided. Toynbee's Lectures paint a markedly different picture of how industrialization proceeded in the UK.

The challenge now is that virtually all basic needs of survival ... and then some ... are satisfied. Does this mean that there's no additional demand or demand growth possible? No. But ... the situation's markedly different from the late 18th century.

Too: the dawn of the Industrial Revolution was a period in which there were vast untapped natural resources -- virgin land (or, if you prefer, newly cleared land by way of the aboriginal genocide and pandemics) in the Americas, forests, untilled prairies, and of course, untold gigatons of coal, oil, and gas in the ground. William Stanley Jevons noted that increased efficiencies tended to increase consumption of resources by increasing their marginal utility (the so-called Jevons Paradox)

We're looking at a constrained resource environment going out, which may well invert the logic of Jevons Paradox and see fewer resources consumed with increasing efficiency. Which would mean that automation would idle, not employ, hands.
Whenever I see those classic demos like Engelbart's in the 60ies or the first Mac, I feel a bit ashamed for our profession. Computer Software really doesn't seem to have developed much in the last 50 years. We have turned working academic prototypes and concepts from back then into products, not even to the full extent they were perceived. Other than that everything seems to have turned in circles. The minicomputer, the PC, the LAN, the Web, mobile devices - it all brought cool new hardware capabilities, but when it comes to software it was just reinventing the wheel again. The hardware has usually dictated the way the device is to be operated instead of the other way round. Mac and iPhone have been notable exceptions to this.
OK, we've added more servers of larger instance types! You should be good now.
Really enjoyed everything from painting the figures to creating maps and characters to staying up all night with friends geeking out.

Sadly I can't find anyone willing to give it a go to see if I would still be into it. Would really be a good use of something like Google Hangouts.
> How can the normal distribution exist without mediocrity and poverty?

So you think wealth distribution follows a normal distribution in the US?
Try wrapping each of these in BigInt. Example: factorial(BigInt(1000))

Julia defaults to what is fast on your machine. If you want to use BigInt you can do so but it doesn't do so by default.

You can also use 128bit integers in Julia. Example:
rand(Int128, 10)
Using the article's analogies, they talk specifically about web designers.

Would a web designer from 1996 have a job in today's market?
In the same vein, it would be like saying the autoloom would still work today, obviously it would, but no one would use it to produce goods to sell commercially.
Probably the same person that gets points when they cause an accident with their bicycle: i.e., nobody, because you don't get points for that.
I am creating a web browser for iOS that focuses on online privacy.

Like many of us, I use a number if privacy-focused plugins in my desktop browser (ABP, NoScript, Lightbeam, self-destructing cookies, etc.) but I also find myself increasingly browsing the web on my iPad -- where these protections are non-existent. Privacy mode helps a little, but it was never designed to combat the online tracking we see today.

So yes, I am building for myself. But hopefully I am not the only one wanting a powerful mobile browser that protects me and my loved ones from being tracked and fingerprinted online.
Fixed now. We have added more servers of larger instance types. It should work great now.
Keep in mind that the lifetime of this mission is actually pushing other missions out of scope. The budget needed to continue support of Opportunity could be dollars spent elsewhere. So, overspending doesn't make sense. They're roughy, $128 million (combined for both rovers) over their operating budget [0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Exploration_Rover
The headquarters of a company like this isn't interesting. Headquarters are administrative centers. It's not where you send a laptop to have a bug installed.
Removing loops or mutability from Julia would be a terrible decision. There's nothing inherently wrong with mutability or imperative programming.
All fixed now. We have added more servers of larger instance types to support the Julia RELP.
Consider Fred, who is paid $1 and produces $10 in value. Every employer would love to have Fred come and work for them. In fact, another employer would likely offer Fred $2 to come and generate $10. Fred, not being an idiot, takes the offer.

Another employer offers Fred $3, and so on, until Fred is making ($10 - opportunitycost).

In other words, Fred being way underpaid according to the value he produces is an unstable situation.
If we're talking about Google, I assume it would rank people based on the number of friends they have in Google+.
Market Explorer: Use U.S. Economic Census data to find total addressable market
Saying the crypto is good because he XORs the usernames to avoid collisions in the PSK's doesn't exactly make be believe you're an expert at applied crypto too.

Sorry.
And regardless of how you get your iPhone, you are stuck with Safari as your default browser. I would rather buy a phone that has bloatware (that can be disabled) than buy a phone on which I am not free to change the default applications.

That said, you can have the best of both worlds by buying a Nexus device.
Well, the average user does not know how to do neither, and removing system applications (all bloatware is set as system application) is impossible unless the phone is rooted.

What is the average joe to do to get rid of all the crap that inhibits performance and drains the battery at double the speed to boot?
Depends on what you consider bloatware too though. For instance, the weather app on the iPhone is annoying to me and I never use it, same with the Mail app. I've heard Android users complain about having the Gallery app pre-installed.

Personally I don't consider any of those items bloatware, I just wonder where the line should reasonably be drawn.
Here is a visualization of the tax policy (married vs not) in the US system: http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/...

If the German policy just lets you use the mean it sounds like it would be free of the effect of creating a penalty for marriage for equal incomes that the US has.
Randi Zuckerberg Thinks We Should Untangle Our Wired Lives
The tinfoil-hat scenario here is that the USPS is doing the bidding of the NSA. So it's a USPS screwup either way.
> It seems that the protestors have no other clear goal in mind except joining the EU

Incorrect, the main goal is to prevent the current government mafia allied with government-connected industrial oligarchs in Donetsk region to become even less representative and even more Russian-controlled.

> I wonder if there are Russians living in the west part of Ukraine, how violently would the protestors deal with them.

So far the protests were targeting the government, not civilians. This is a very good thing.

> Because it seems that the protestors are driven by their hatred towards not-signing the deal with Russia instead of EU

Again, incorrect, the protests are driven by resentment against the current tightly-connected pro-Russian ruling elite.

> nazi supporters.

There is indeed a party with extremely right-wing views that regularly receives up to 8-10% of the vote. However it is questionable as to whether that portion of the population actually holds those beliefs or simply uses them as signaling to antagonize Russia.

> And the EU/USA always support the more radical parts of the society(with media, weapon support etc..)

Current Western support is nearly non-existent while that of Moscow is extremely significant and some would say heavy-weight.
Apparently, South Koreans got fed up with Samsung "additions" :)
You of course have evidence that Bezos is interfering in the editorial operations of the Post, right?
It is likely that an AI sophisticated enough to make the consideration will be sophisticated enough to avoid the question.

That is, there isn't all that much reason for the cars to be operating on the precipice of disaster.

(If you want to say "But what about uncontrollable and unforeseen circumstances?", we should hope that we make the test out to be 'better than most humans', not 'perfect')
Actually no. The keyboard is still an old fashioned PS2 device on the majority of laptops. It connects to the LPC bus (low pin count - similar to ISA) via a PS2/ISA bridge in the embedded controller. It's just like in an oooooold AT PC. There is no possibility for it to deliver anything but keystrokes. It doesn't go anywhere near the USB stack and can't inject devices or play with the HID drivers.

Connection-wise it looks like this:

http://i.imgur.com/ayFybSd.png

Keystrokes can be dangerous on their own but engineering a solution to this that assumes the correct state of the machine and can operate software is unlikely simply due to the margin of error.
>What happens when the sekrit tech elite want to kill you and so they make your car drive off a cliff?

It's considerably easier to physically tamper with a car, such as the good old Hollywood standby of cutting brake lines.

Why worry about a fantasy of people trying to attack you remotely when there are plenty of real organizations that are much more likely to tamper with your car now?
Related must-watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kuM_NTTxAc
I just launched my first side project a couple of days ago. It's a tool for mathematical optimization of bids in online advertising campaigns (http://www.dopfer-software.de/ad-budget-optimizer/), which I can't use for my own adwords campaign, because I do not have any historical data yet. I have used it successfully with other companies' data, though.
The Checker Framework: Custom pluggable types for Java
I doubt it has anything to do with 1/e. Someone in marketing probably liked the number 37% and manufacturing said, "yeah, that won't cost us much extra". Nothing to do with infinite sums or the distribution of chocolate chips in dough. Just marketing.

For the same reason, why is Ivory 99.44% pure? Because 99.44% sounded catchier than 99%.
Is this like a beautiful version of PHPInfo?
Correct. So most online blogs that "recap" news do the same correct? Would you agree then that Marco and Daring Fireball are spam as well? if not, please tell what is different?
I hope this was not posted before the keyboard arrived. Should be easy enough to have it taken apart by an expert and see if anything is fishy (and to check if tracking numbers match).

If it was posted before...why would you do that.
Unless of course there are 10,000 Freds and only 1000 jobs like Fred's.
This is a fascinating discussion. It is especially worth watching to the end.

Among other things, it seems like one could apply this argument to claim that the-web-as-interface is strictly better than the PARC-style GUI.

It well known, however, that Nelson objects to the web nearly as much as he objects to the "PUI". And this is because web is at best as a leaky simulation of multi-part document rather than a real implementation of Nelson's Xanadu vision (articulated in the 60's).

The thing is the Xanadu vision, multi-part documents with living links (distributed version control, permissions and etc) is more or less impractical to implement fully.

On the other hand, the point that a single-person word-processor certainly could use a series of piece a-la the pre-computer method he describes.

As Nelson mentions, one of the key ways the PUI was able to dominate was by organizing a variety of operations with a single metaphor. I suspect that Nelson is underestimating how important that is for making computers accessible to people.
I don't know about England in the 1700's, but during the industrialization of the US, 1800-1900, the life expectancy and just about every other measure of health got dramatically better throughout that century.

Another way to look at it as go visit Fort Williams in New York, they have a display of 18th century clothing. Look how tiny it was. It's a dramatic illustration of how hard life was in pre-industrial America.

Next visit some Civil War museums and look at the uniforms on display. They're about halfway between colonial sizes and modern sizes.
You appear to be claiming this is a bad thing, when (assuming it worked as planned) this would make you safer, since on average you'll be in the other car.

Of course, an irrational fear of safer cars is already considered to be one of the big stumbling blocks for self-driving cars, even without this scenario.
I agree, the libs ecosystem is growing at an amazing pace (partly because macros make it easy to create wrappers around C, Python or Java libs).
No he's not. He doesn't talk about that subset of the "this for thats" until the last graf of the article. The balance of the article is spent explaining the concept of "this for that", suggesting that "this for thats" have a harder time getting funded, and acknowledging that several USV investments can easily be described as "this for thats".

I found the article hard to follow, not least because it's hard to find a startup that can't be described as "this for that". Every startup is "for" something. And very few startups are sui generis.
The study compares numbers who reach the top quintile of national income levels on a regional basis. It's no surprise, then that the poorest part of the country has the fewest people who reach the top quintile. I'd like to see the numbers if you control for regional income differences. How often to kids born into the lowest quintile of Charlotte's income distribution make it into the top quintile of Charlotte's income distribution? And how many people in Charlotte are in the top quintile of national income distribution. I'm guessing it's a lot less than 20%.
A bug is only one of many possibilities for what they could want with that keyboard.

The people in that building are highly trusted whereas the NSA has good reason not to trust the brilliant geeks working for their contractors.
Translated transcript of the Snowden interview running now on German TV
Do I hear a authentic reproduction kickstarter?
But you can totally audit the PHP code. There honestly isn't that much of it, and absolutely none of it takes user input. I'd be way more concerned if this was a Rails or Django app, because then there would be lots of library code to worry about.
I noticed that Eastern Nevada has one of the highest mobility rates according to this study. This surprises me. That side of the state is one of the least populated areas and the most desolate. I wonder if there is a statistical bias at work here.
If they work well they should be a more efficient use of capital than a normal car (higher utilization, better adherence to maintenance schedules, etc). That creates an opportunity for per mile charges to be cheaper than owning a car.

(they should obviously be some combination of more profitable and cheaper than a taxi service...)
You can't work from home at Google.
Gee, I don't know what gave me the impression that NSA was secretive.
Finally, we can have the technology they had in the 70s. I hope we reach 80s tech by 2024.
I answered weekly for my not-actually-a-product http://sea-hag.net, although I absolutely do not NEED it. I just enjoy nhl94 ;)
It's happened enough with other figures & papers that some people take it as good practice to assume, proof or no, and simply disregard the paper on suspect topics.

Certainly nothing you can take anyone to court over, but perhaps prudent.
html/template is literally nothing more than an "HTML-safe" version of text/template, which is Go's arbitrary text template language. It's meant to be completely a drop-in replacement for text/template, and as such, its design does not give HTML output any special consideration, which an HTML-specific template language would.

I understand the point you're making - I just want to point out that Haml is explicitly designed for HTML, whereas html/template more or less "just happens" to be useful for HTML.

As for ERB, I'm not convinced that it is too different in this regard. I'm not much of a Rubyist, and I find it incredibly frustrating to use, but perhaps that's a matter of personal preference.

{text,html}/template have their warts - I literally started Jetpack because of an unusual html/template quirk I ran into that was tricky to debug. However, I don't think it's any worse than other template language in this regard (my main points of reference are Jinja2, ERB, Haml, and Scribble).