skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blu-rays are but a few years old. It's preposterous for any one to claim that they are "guaranteed" for 30 years, let alone 1,000 years. Not to mention that that guarantee most likely has an asterisk that limits damages to the cost of the original blu-ray disk in case it actually fails.
Excellent article. Continuation is probably the most mind-blowing piece of programming theory I was ever taught.

However, this is a complex article. I feel like I was only able to grasp the substance because I already know a bit about continuation — though this automated and hybrid approach is quite new to me.

I wonder how hard this text is to understand, for someone who does not know what "continuations" are.
Java Platform, Standard Edition 8 Reference Implementations is Released
Segways did not fail because they made you look dorky. They failed because they were an extremely expensive toy that didn't solve anyone's problems and were bulky enough that they made new problems when people tried to use them.
The distance to convert math to python is so much shorter than math to C or math to javascript.

You need something like numpy to make working in javasctipt easier before there will be a proliferation of of ML in JS.

I really love JS for its distribution and some of the visualizations are amazing. But the low level, numerically stable, matrix math primitives are sorely lacking.
The NYT had an interesting video-based article [1] looking at the life of a female truck driver who moved to North Dakota due to the oil boom.

tldr: steady work but lower-than-expected wages, poor conditions, male dominated environment, housing problems.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/opinion/running-on-fumes-i...
GitHub language specific trends
You can grab a daily dose of what's trending on GitHub for your favourite languages.
Always wanted to be able to get a daily mail of whats trending on GitHub for languages I'm interested in, Ruby and Objective-C.

So I built this. Hope it helps others.
I don't think there's anything quite like Abrash's tome in breadth or all the other intangibles he eloquently wrote about (I mean the best optimizer is between your ears is worth a book in itself!)

Bur for graphics programming, Foley and Van Damm is probably the canonical text - now in 3rd edition. http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Graphics-Principles-Practice-...
I got a cool looking jazz trumpet piece, but it seems to want me to sign up for a Spotify account. I guess I should have known, I'm just too used to sound cloud.
Hard Truths About the Hard Business of Finding Hard Random Numbers
This is a classic problem. Programming concepts, like math, build. If you are missing fundamentals then you are not ready for the next step, but if you never see that the next step is there, you never know about your missing fundamentals.

recently I asked if people wanted to have a look at and comment on the abstract math pieces I'm slowly writing[0] and a number have said yes. Someone replied[1] that they "would love a simply math blog." The problem is, the simple stuff you'll skim, the complex stuff you'll get frustrated by, and no one will be happy.

Unless you go through the stages you won't have the skills for the next level, and until you get exposed to the higher levels, you won't realize that there's more work to do. This is, of course, related to the "Blub paradox"[2] that we're all so familiar with.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7139635

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7143139

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
I've owned two of those. They are very comfortable. But the back of the chair ended up breaking off at the base both times.
Tabs or spaces? Here's how to see whitespace in Sublime Text
There are criminal offences covering selling of that data, or storing it in such a way that it is released, or moving the data out of the UK.

There are problems with confidentiality of data in the NHS, but this isn't one of those examples. Have a look at any of the very many examples of anonymised information released by the NHS and see if it's possible to deanonymise it.

It's important to note that this story is only about the new development of information held by GPs. A similar scheme has been running for a while now covering information held by hospitals.
Explainer: what is big data?
My book was second hand already so it is showing its age. I like it as a bit of an heirloom but the electronic copy is actually accessible. The original, you need a forklift to remove it from the shelf!
I think Aman already proposed those changes to ruby-core - http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-core/...

He is a member of ruby-core too, so I guess if enough people in core like these patches they should go right in. However I don't see OOBGC patch there in that list.
Greece's unemployment is 28% (unofficially over 40% - my estimation) not because of the banks being saved, but because of a bureaucratic economic model that is stuck in the 70s.
The Little Snapper is the most adorable snapchat hack ever
For neural networks, you can use BrainJS

https://github.com/harthur/brain
Further: it's possible to select for whatever makes your particular shop special. Fifteen years ago "only early adopters with the foresight to learn ColdFusion" might have been the metric.

If reliability and predictability are the goals (and I think they are with this kind of thing), I think a far more sensible approach would be to treat developer groups like cults. "You can code however you want at home; here we are dogmatic, and everyone uses JetBrains. Everyone tests, everyone debugs, everyone ships."

It sounds draconian and not altogether pleasant (and I agree), but I wonder if it might be a solution for companies who distrust off-the-street devs so much that they erect hiring barriers out of fear.
UK fair trade body lays out new rules for in-game purchases
> Imagine a half speed version of Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn mating with a Klezmer band and you'd be about right.

Thanks, I will definitely be checking this out later.
People will get into just about any fad these days it seems. Well, this world is bizarre. There is just too much free time in some places and just too much hunger in some.
Learning to be a developer is still a hodge-podge, unstructured process, scaling is definitely not taught and often talked about in extremely abstract terms because a lot of authors have no clue themselves what is and isn't scalable.

A small VM can take huge amounts of traffic thrown at it. If you happen to be running basic PHP. But install wordpress and it's a whole other story.

Often until you've been hit by a spike like this you won't even know what is and isn't scalable.
As an Icelander I cant say I agree with his description of us. Its like saying Brittain sucks because of Margeret Thatcher, without considering she was not the sole inhabitant of that country.
PayPal Denies Providing Payment Information to Twitter Username Hacker
this is not true.

you have this impression because your typical engineer will wear a cheap, ill-fitting suit he bought the day before. this will make him look like a schlubby teenager trying to make a good impression among his cooler peers, instead of a manicured professional.

also, the suit isn't going to make you any smarter. you have to be competent. engineers also shy away from suits because they see morons wearing suits. correlation != causation.

show up looking like vint cerf, and the story is different. if you don't know who vint cerf is, look it up. he happens to work for google at this point in time.

http://pseudodoctor.com/2012/06/vint-cerf-is-the-architect/

scroll to the bottom.
> So for that reason alone, dynamically typed languages make it harder to maintain a large codebase, because the work that is done by the compiler "for free" is now work that you must do in the form of writing test suites.

Static types are not enough to ensure that your algorithm receives correct input, to ensure you that you will need to write tests anyway. So with static languages you get one check "for free" out of the many that you will have to write yourself.

If you rigorously write tests for a JavaScript code as you would have for a Java code, it becomes just as reliable.
I haven't really, no. It would be interesting but also haven't played EVE in a couple of years by now so I don't have the right level of enthusiasm for the game anymore to really write about it, nor the time. Sorry :/
I bought the latest Macheist Nanobundle and got PaintCode for $20.
Mass surveillance isn't legal and isn't effective
Would probably still trust FSCS upto it's stated limits (although I would reread/print relevent bits from their website and might do research before investing in Icelandic, Greek, Cypriot and maybe even Italian banks to check there is no risk of devaluation and default that isn't covered.
Don't use the wrong tool for the job, it's as simple as that.

On Akka home page, in bold "Build powerful concurrent & distributed applications more easily."
Only a question of time before the Machine Learning wave arrived at the arguably least suited--but certainly the most popular--platform!

There's money to be made with this combination. The field is ripe.

Good write up too.
Quantum Cloud Simulates Magnetic Monopole
Thou shalt not stop liking a band just because they have become popular.[1]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWrMGXwhFLk
Really, one that supports any other country that isn't the US.
Introducing Paper – Stories from Facebook
There's an additional article in Nature that describes the research:

http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-cloud-simulates-magnetic-...

No it's not a monopole, Div B is still zero everywhere. Yes it is interesting. :)
> PayPal Denies Providing Payment Information
> to Twitter Username Hacker

Well, they would, wouldn't they.
In the last 2 years? Holland, Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary and Italy.
I still view JS as a UI-oriented language, and I really don't know why would you want to implement processor-heavy algorithms in a browser environment, which need a lot of data and don't use the networking.

I would still stick to python. Or java. Or anything else which has a clear syntax and can run at a useful speed (I'm not mentioning C++ because of the coding overhead and dirty tricks which makes it a bit unfriendly for learning an algorithm)
Introducing Paper
> I seriously doubt, in 15-20 or 50 years, you will have the media reader available to read either of the media, whether tape or BD.

Today's Blu-Ray drives are perfectly capable of playing an audio CD from the 1980s, and compatible players probably will continue to be available for another 10-20 years even after everyone stops buying content on physical media.

I wouldn't be surprised if I can plug in my USB 3.0 CD/DVD/Blu-Ray combo drive into a USB 7.5 port in 2030 and use it to play an audio CD from 1980, provided that the disc is in good condition. That's a lifespan of 50 years!

Even in the digital age, well-designed and highly forwards-compatible forms of physical media can last a long time.
List of Medium collection by category/subscribers
Wifijammer – Continuously jam all wifi clients and access points around you
Awesome Art of Endangered Animals As Killer Drones
backups of images/videos/posts/everything
I think he's referring to the "[edu]" label on the browsing pages (like [0]) which indicates that the uploader has a .edu email address. I'm not too sure about other countries, but at least in Germany, not many academical institutions actually have those, just normal .de ones.

[0] http://academictorrents.com/browse.php?cat=5
But to call that a Postgres variant seems to suggest that they have way more in common than they really do. The trade offs that vertical databases are making are kind of alien for someone who is used to using Postgres.

Really cool work though!
Well, this link is also on Reddit's front page now.
The Mistery of Times Arrow
When I use Wolfram Alpha, I am always terribly frustrated by the natural language input. This "natural language" only works when the exact query you put in was anticipated by an engineer at Wolfram. I'd rather have auto complete where I can type "least common multiple" and it shows me that the function is lcm(n,k).
I wouldn't bet hard money that it doesn't exist, there is always Rule #34.

http://xkcd.com/305/
Also, the stick.

To me, Segway with stick = http://s3.amazonaws.com/rapgenius/Y810072B.jpg

Segway without stick = http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/TkyLnWm1iCs/maxresdefault.jpg
"Through this series of articles, I’ll teach you the fundamental machine learning algorithms using Javascript"
'Priceless' Stradivarius violin stolen in armed robbery in Milwaukee
I wonder too, is your daughter more able to completely focus on the game?
to clarify: torrents are marked "edu" if the user has a .edu address, this makes those torrents stand out. The majority of non us universities do not offer *.edu addresses to their staff and students.
The Darker Side of Blinkx
Facebook Gets Into The News Business With A New Story Curation App Called Paper
>I'm gonna be "that guy" and complain again that developers (web developers in particular) really need to learn the basics of scaling.

Why, would anything bad happen to the developer if his toy app breaks down under the pressure?
You seem to think that the NHS is releasing all this information.

It is not.

GPs send this "pseudo-anonymous" information to HSCIC. The HSCIC needs the extra information to create statistically useful cohorts. The HSCIC control access to that data. The HSCIC do some of their own statistics work and they release the results (but not the data sets!) which are often reported in UK news. Researchers, after being assessed, get access to anonymised sets of data. Researchers do not get all the information, but get an anonymised version of the pseudo anonymous data.

Note that reports released are also carefully anonymised.

You also seem to think that your GP holds your full medical history which is laughably wrong.

Start here: http://www.hscic.gov.uk/patientconf
Facebook Announces Paper
Alternatively, if this hacker had a method different than what he/she described to obtain the necessary information, it would make sense that he/she would describe a false sequence of events in order to throw the account holder off the trail.
Facebook Paper
Dells ship with linux, if you buy enterprise. I got mine with ubuntu, have since moved to mint, works like a charm. Never been happier.
Why have parasites promoting mating success been observed so rarely?

Paywalled article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002251931...

Abstract:

Host manipulation by sexually transmitted parasites which increases host mating rate and thus parasite transmission rate has long been viewed as a plausible parasite adaptation. However, empirical evidence for it is rare. Here, using an adaptive dynamics approach to evolution, we explore conditions under which such disease-induced mating enhancement is (or is not) likely to occur. We find that increased mating success is less likely to evolve if the host reproduction rate, or the baseline disease transmission rate, is reduced, and the parasite affects just one sex, compared to when it affects both. We also find that it is less likely to evolve if the virulence-transmission trade-off curve is stronger, since we assume that enhanced disease transmission can only be achieved at the cost of increased virulence and as this trade-off is concave. In addition, we demonstrate that if disease-induced mating enhancement is equally acting in both sexes the mating system has no effect on evolutionary outcomes. On the contrary, if disease-induced mating enhancement is acting in just one sex, the potential for its evolution increases with the degree of polygyny in the host population. To study the examined phenomenon in greater detail we encourage further empirical research on this apparently less explored impact of sexually transmitted parasites on host fitness.
I blogged for 1000+ days straight
Traditional professions are still on top:

http://porngram.sexualitics.org/?q=pizza%2Cdelivery%2Cplumbe...

I sense a business opportunity there.
>It's the booze. You can't go anywhere, do anything or talk to anyone in the tech industry these days without a drink in your hand. If you try to fake it with a soda water you may as well give up trying to have insightful conversations after the first hour, because everyone else is wasted.

If "everyone else is wasted" then why should they catter to the non-wasted demographic? Should they spoil everyone's fun to make a minority feel "included"?

I understand that the STATED purpose of the event is not "getting wasted". But an unstated and real consideration for people attending is the opportunity of having one or several drinks with friends. Not everything operates on the "stated" level.

A better way would be to have several types of such events, cattered to the different demographics. And if some demographic is not big enough to organize one, well, sometimes in life your tastes are different than most people's and you have to accept that.
I am doing research on the value of information. From an economic perspective one could argue that the value of privacy can be inferred by the value of the lack thereof. I am not strictly of this opinion, but let's assume that works as a heuristic for argument's sake. Still the problem is that I am leaning towards the opinion that information has no intrinsic value and value comes from the processes that surround its use. Improvements in information processing capacity would therefore increase the value of privacy but we would also not be able to assert a value on our own privacy not knowing how the information that breaches it is used.

The truth is that privacy is much more complex to assess. In the context of our social existence we customarily sacrifice parts of our privacy to assert identity. On the other hand we do so in communication contexts. Communication has attributes that limit its scope (geographical, temporal etc.) It is very difficult to understand the impact of the acceptance of an overarching and limitless communication context, whether that is with a company or with a government.

If you are interested in the outputs of my research do not hesitate to pm me and I will keep you posted.
Year 2014: Java gets lambdas.

Java 8 is pretty nice actually. Lambdas, date/time API that doesn't suck, filter/map/reduce in the collections. I'm looking forward to work with it.
Brad Pitt eats in lots of movies, maybe a western equivalent?
Meet “Paper,” Facebook’s New Answer for Browsing — And Creating — Mobile Media
One of the odd pleasures of reading for me is noticing how hard it is not to mimic the style of novels I'm reading

Say, after reading Anthony Burgess, I'll use more $5 words than after I've just read a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

Also, how painful it is to write in what passes for academic or business formal style.
moneydashboard somewhat does, but I'm not sure how good it is.
Or you know, it's a bad idea, and we'll find something else to replace it, like bionic eyes or 3D sensors.
Some beautiful design and thoughtful UI in the app here, and this is also a lovely microsite - I love the use of the video full screen. It'd be great to see some of this sort of thoughtful design go into the UI of web browsers on mobile platforms (which are also platforms for reading and sharing stories).

Shame it's from Facebook.
Quick plug, but https://www.BudgetSimple.com handles this correctly.
Is this a SV thing? Anyone in other cities care to chime in? I've been to a few "camps" and "confs" and tech meetup groups in Philadelphia, and none of them were at bars nor catered with free beer. "We're meeting up at X bar after if anyone wants to come" is a common thing to hear or even see on a schedule, but the actual events are about the panels/speakers/networking... usually with ample time to socialize.
Segways solved problems:

Does your job require walking around on a flat service all day? Segway for Mall Cops.

Do you want people who have a hard time walking for a few miles so they can do a tourist tour? Segway for tourist.

That's about it from me.
From a mystic point of view Kundalini cannot be hijacked :D
http://porngram.sexualitics.org/?q=teen%2Cblack%2Chot%2Ccock...
1. It doesn't count word frequencies, but sub-string frequencies. Moreover, if a sub-string appears more than once-per-title, then it is counted more than once. I draw this conclusion by submitting "a,b,c". And from their paper [1]:

our algorithm strips out dashes and catches any
occurrence of the query in the title, for example,
'blow' catches 'blowing', 'blowjobs'

This explains the results of these queries: "ada,erlang", "tea,beer". As an alternative they could have used a stemmer [2].

2. The "slow,fast" and "love,hardcore" trends illustrate an interesting trend. Perhaps towards women or mainstream viewers.

[1] http://sexualitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/PORNSTUDIE...

[2] http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/html/htmledition/stemming-an...
Fun times listening to:

Lesson 7: Education and Government part 5
by Morris Schreiber
Ian Cooper has a good talk that's relevant to this blog post. It's called 'TDD, where did it all go wrong?' and a recording from NDC 2013 can be found here: http://vimeo.com/68375232
I would start with wondering if all STDs have the purpose to be transmitted sexually. Like aids doesn't look to me like it's purpose is sexual transmission. Other exchanges of fluids might also result in infection.
Ordem dos Engenheiros Discute Qualidade do Ar Interior em Edifícios
Apparently the scientist responsible for this discovery is a 30 year old Japanese woman that struggled for 5 years to convince her colleagues that she could be right.

She was told more than once that what she was proposing was wrong and that she should give up.

A young Japanese woman going against the status quo in Japan for 5 years is a very hard thing to do.

I congratulate her courage - I might benefit from it one day.
Christ, I am too old to binge drink, it slays me the next day, so I avoid partying like I used to. I don't moan about other people's lifestyle though. Conferences are one of the few places I have a low amount of beverages though, it does speed up the networking.

If people want to go over the top, embarrass themselves, then fair enough, that's their prerogative. People want different things in a conference.
Interesting, I didn't realize this kind of thing happened. Most of the conferences I go to do have social events in bars or restaurants, sometimes with open bars, but they don't really have an "epic party, man!" kind of feel, or sloppy-drunk people. Culturally dependent, maybe? In much of Europe it's normal to socialize in a bar or restaurant at lunch or dinner or afterwards. But you'd be having some wine or beer and/or food in some kind of reasonable establishment and chatting, not slamming back vodka shots while a DJ plays through huge speakers, at least if the attendees are mostly post-university-age.
The video was choppy and froze part way through. Seems to happen to me a lot with these types of websites. On different computers, even.
Perhaps not everyone who is wasted actually wants to be wasted but they do it anyway to fit in and because there is nothing else to do?

Perhaps some of the people who don't want to get wasted just stay away from the conference because there is nothing else to do?
Sorry to plug it twice in this thread, but I've launched one, https://www.BudgetSimple.com would love your feedback!
Acid treatment could provide breakthrough stem cell technique
Jouw Gezonde Recepten | Bak zelf je gezond kamutbrood
> Traditional professions are still on top:

Time to change positions, then!
Nitpick: Everest is the highest peak, not the tallest i.e. the peak is the highest above sea level, but there are mountains for which peak_alt - base_alt is greater. Mount Kilimanjaro is probably the tallest depending on how you measure it.