skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can accept both that some people get just returns _and_ that weird market failures sometimes distort things. I'm untroubled by any contradiction there.

The best piano player in the world may capture 95% of the album sales for Schumann's Concerto in A minor, without being twenty times better than the sadly impoverished second best. Stuck with number two, the empire would hardly crumble. Some markets, including patent races, just funnel all returns to first place. Aside from first past the post effects, we also have a market containing inheritance, unregulated monopolies, and the swings of fortune to name a few others. Not all of wealth is luck, but some seem to insist it never plays any role. Thomas Gilcrease comes to mind. Great philanthropist and wonderful businessman, got his start by essentially winning an incredible lottery.

Progressive taxation can serve as a headwind to correct some of these excesses without scrutinizing desert[1] on a case by case basis (a monumental judicial task with suspect gains). The downside of a blanket solution is that you end up mixing the sheep of deserving rich in with your goats.

To protect the noble wealthy that end up unfairly persecuted by such a headwind, we should just fight to make sure that tax policy doesn't suddenly beggar anyone, make sure that the ranking of wealth isn't significantly shuffled, limit how much markets are distorted, ensure a simple code that's easy to comply with and difficult to cheat, and make sure government expenditures are constrained wherever feasible. These areas could use significantly more work even if our tax structure went largely unchanged.[2]

We can also take some comfort in the knowledge that a rich man in a progressive society is still, at the end of the day, a rich man, and may somehow muddle through. That's not to be too dismissive, I do think social justice is important for every individual. But I admittedly struggle to give equal weight to the problems of the rich when thinking of other social issues, like racial disparities in incarceration, or the treadmill to homelessness for those without access to mental health care. It's hard to rank "rich people don't have the tax rate they like" exactly among other problems we're confronting, but that's a bit of a separate discussion.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_(philosophy)

[2] While my ideal would include a postcard sized return with higher rates for those pulling in millions, I'd gladly take, even prefer work on these other areas first.
Yes it is secure in that area, I mean for the specific attack this post is about where a hash of your password is hacked. All keepass would do is make your password the product of two hashes instead of one. I wasn't sure if that was that significantly more secure (if it was why aren't websites doing it automatically?)

Of course that implies the attacker knows you used KeePass, security through obscurity and being in the minority should protect you.
Is that "room full of people staring at 4" screens" focused on the same event, such as a football game? Because, otherwise, the purpose of having all those people in the same is defeated. The point is a shared experience, not just having bodies in the room.
Flappy Bird Meets Nyan Cat – Android
I also hate commercials. I won't even pay for Hulu+ because it has commercials. Commercials should exist to subsidize a free product, and they have no place in a paid product.

I feel the same way about magazines. It's dumb that they are packed with ads and yet you still have to pay for them.
direct link:
http://www.math.northwestern.edu/~mlerma/papers/discrete_mat...
Most things in life, as far as I'm concerned, are best left to you to decide what's right for you. This is not one of them.

First, if you're spending sixty hours a week in the office, you're not only harming yourself. You're encouraging idiot bosses to start demanding the same of other people, which ends up causing real and considerable harm. When your actions start harming other people, that's when it becomes appropriate to respond with social and legal sanctions.

Now you could take a social Darwinist view and say "blow you Jack, I'm alright"; if other people can't hack it the way you can, that's their problem. But the reality is, you almost certainly can't either, even if you think you can. Working excessive hours is like working drunk: it impairs your judgment in such a way that you don't realize how badly your judgment has been impaired, but it shows every time it's put to an objective test.

So yes, if you're spending sixty hours a week in the office, I damn well am going to tell you you're doing it wrong.
Hahaha version 2.0
There are next to no stable part-time jobs in programming. I don't really know what you're getting at.
That is protection against companies collecting data. It says nothing about the reach of their secret services. Those two things shouldn't be confused. And even if Merkel would wish and be able to rein in Germany's spooks she has no such power over France where tapping everything is seen as perfectly normal.
Exactly. You are in horrible shape if it's the police alerting you to this. My policy is "You lose my info, you lose my business". I deleted my account.
Never let your schooling get in the way of your education (attributed to Mark Twain). I'm about to graduate, and it's true, there are far too many dumb, pointless requirements you have to meet to graduate. Do them, (the sooner the better), but don't quit learning about what you enjoy. That's where the real learning happens, outside the classroom.

Be smart about the friends you choose.

Start a business (you'll never have this much free time again -- do something with it!)

Question your beliefs, and it's okay if you decide you still believe what you did when you were younger. The difference is now you have made that choice.

Eat fruits and vegetables at every meal. Even when they suck.

Good socks are worth the money.

Don't expect people to pay you back if you cover them for something (it's nice if they do, but count it as a donation -- at least among most of my friends!)

Get to know your advisor. Get to know your RA.

Go to outside meetings for things your interested in (seeing as you're posting on HN, I'm assuming it might be tech related -- check out meetup.com and find ones within an hour or two of your college. It's worth the drive.)

Call your parents more often than you think you should.

It's okay to ask for help (for academics, socially, emotionally, spiritually, whatever. Don't be afraid to ask.) Enjoy it as much as you can; you get to decide what your experience will be like.
Yep that got me as well. Ironic considering its the tool they recommend. Clearly they never tested that update procedure.
In one of our courses on copyright law I heard this from the professor teaching that class :

"While yes, there are a lot of exceptions to contract law, I would like to state that only a fool signs a contract he thinks to be unenforceable"

Likewise I'd adopt the attitude of not letting laws pass no matter how unenforceable you think they are.
" Why? Because that’s their job, to meet with entrepreneurs. It also means that if they schedule it on, say a Friday in SF at 11am, they can: a) avoid driving down to Sand Hill altogether, and b) arrive in Tahoe in time for a few evening runs. Be wary in thinking it’s anything more than that."

Thanks for the gratuitous kick in the nuts.

Did you consider that maybe the fact your meetings with VCs didn't result in good outcomes might be a signal of something else?

Having done both, running a company is definitely more work at the peak, but being a great VC is a ton of work, too.

You've got a lot to learn about VCs if you think we meet with you so we can go night skiing. Or that any VC goes night skiing.

<edit for tone at expense of humor >
I'll agree here. The $50/month I'm saving by not having cable included isn't really going toward savings, and we could certainly afford it. It's just that it had a detrimental effect: we'd watch things that we weren't all that interested in, we'd sit through hours of commercials. My wife and I were generally annoyed with the whole experience, but because it was available and easy we were sucked into it.

We cancelled the cable and we are less annoyed. We spend an extra 15 minutes downloading what we want, and we spend less time as vegetables just passively accepting what's coming down the pipe. Less time spent watching commercials that annoy us. It's very much worth it. (Although I miss watching live sports in HD... but not enough to pay for it)
I'd be curious to know if your stance on PyPy has changed at all since 2011 (if indeed it's something that you've taken any new long looks at since) given their progress in that time.

I know that I would humbly submit at the least that my position has moved to believing that PyPy is a viable option for high-speed code (albeit in substantial part due to better interaction with C, nowadays).
Sure. First of all some context. Mankiw wrote one of the main textbooks while I was doing economics at university. I was one of the few people who also took philosophy and the like, who came to economics because I found the area itself fascinating rather than wishes for employment/riches, and who discovered economics as a subject relatively late (after philosophy and IT) so you might say I contrast Mankiw, Marx and Megabytes :P (and don't worry, I'm not a communist :P)

My opinion of Mankiw, and the work of places that have hired him, is not particularly high. I don't think their work is intellectually very rigorous (not to be confused with "academically" rigorous via referencing lots of papers, using models and language the layman doesn't understand, and hiding behind institutional status). It doesn't deal with many of the questions and complexities and outcomes that people actually care about, and they clearly push an agenda behind a facade of legitimacy.

The "rich pay more taxes", specifically, is just such a juvenile, dumb, populist thought terminating cliche. "Queen Victoria" probably funded more parks than the average man, but what the hell does that mean? "The pope" built more churches. If you redistribute money from the rich to the poor, now the poor pay more taxes! And what does that mean now? NOTHING! Should we do it? I don't know! "The rich pay more taxes" is a regular throw-away line from those who generally wish to lobby for the wealthy, reliant upon the idea of "agency of money and those who hold it" in our current society rather than analysing money and its relationship to actual societal outcomes, beliefs, structures and social power. Queen victoria and the pope, of course, didn't actually build those parks or those churches (Viccy wasn't very good at bricklaying for a start), but they had the social power to get others to do it for them. But does that in itself legitimize their positions, power and actions?

So you read Mankiw's editorials, and they contain a whole bunch of cheap appeals that are easily dismissed, and not much content (and that goes for his work as well). Why did wages and the like suddenly take off in the financial sector compared to how it used to be historically in relative conservative banking? Is this because they weren't worth much or very competent before? How does debt, power imbalance, informational asymmetry, and turnover enter into all this? Why are remunerations so volatile if their wages are meritorious? What about when these golden-handshakes aren't connected to their actual performance? How do boards measure the worth of CEO's when everyone else can't? What about intercultural/temporal/national differences in pay/situations? Would we actually be better off if we took money from the rich, distributed it, and had a more even distribution of both wealth and taxes? What about heirs?

No one intellectually serious or competent would ever spout such lines if they genuinely wanted to discuss the issue. But Mankiw, and the institutions that hire him, generally don't want to seriously discuss the issue.

Hence, complete sham.

/my, that sounds really harsh.
I deleted my account immediately.
I've had problems with un-bundling all ready. I've had Comcast for almost two years now - the top internet service for 19.99/mo. Of course they tried to raise the price on me once but I was able to call and get it back down. The next time they raised the price, there was no 19.99 internet only option. The customer service agent checked and checked and checked, but "couldn't find it available in the system". There was, of course, a 19.99 deal for the same speed internet AND basic cable + HBO/HBOGo. So I'm riding this promotion out for as long as I can. Although they were required to send the set-top box, I asked them not to send out a tech to hook it up. I honestly couldn't care less about basic cable. The HBO Go on the other hand, I enjoy thoroughly. I was finally able to get around to watching Sopranos =].

Eventually they'll learn that story-telling isn't meant to be interrupted by advertisements. The content is gravely diminished when this happens. I find myself not caring about plot after so many commercial breaks. Made worse by the terrible, "coming up next on blah blah blah" hook.

I can see some sports fanatics enjoying the 'luxuries' of basic cable, as I don't believe there are any fool proof options online yet - I also don't care.
Bad boy Amazon and George Packer’s latest salvo
It depends on your definition of "risk". In economics, as well as business, it is usually defined as the standard deviation of the percentage change and is usually annualized. There are a whole bunch do sensible reasons for this (basically it makes various risks comparable).

By this measure the rich face much higher risk than the poor when you look at either income or wealth. In the case of wealth the poor have little if any while the rich have much of their wealth in the very risky stock market (e.g. down 50% in last recession). Incomes are generally less volatile for both the rich and poor but more volatile for the rich.

You are right it does not capture the impact on individuals. As far as I know there is no such measure but it would be something along the lines of the standard deviation of utility. Unfortunately any such measure would be subjective and hard to understand across more than a few individuals.
This is a different filter-attempt than the porn filter. As the article says that can be turned off. This is more in line with the piracy filters, but implemented by government not the courts after private cases.

The big brother spokesperson suggests that if content is to be blocked it should be after a court order. I'd prefer for most of it not to be blocked.

> Last October, Prime Minister David Cameron condemned Facebook's decision to allow videos showing people being decapitated back on its pages.

That was a weird decision, especially when they had earlier been deleting images of breast feeding women.
So was I. I remember a posting about deep learning on HN, they managed to let the algorithm play a NES game purely by analyzing the video. So who is up for the challenge?
Upvoted both of his comments so people learn it is not worth working this much for someone else.
I'd like to see a two-dimensional chart that plots Click vs Do Nothing for the two input parameters. (Vertical distance from lower pipe
and Horizontal distance from next pair of pipes)
See the comment I made above. I mean if a site like kickstarter has compromised your password even if it was from KeePass.
> Yes, for me this is a showstopper. All MySQL projects I've worked on have REPLACE INTO and/or INSERT … ON DUPLICATE.

Curious. What is your use case?

From personal experience, I've used "ON DUPLICATE", but we ended up dumping it and making our API better/more secure. This was even before we switched to Postgres.
This delay is not repeated, though.
The video seems jerky in a way which suggests the engine is taking longer to make decisions at certain points in the cycle.

Is that plausible? Or just my imagination?
Sorry, while you are certainly more knowledgeable about security, I have to disagree with you.

We don't yet know what is going on and recommending password manager makes no sense until we know the actual problem. And deferring security breach to an external tool is not a recommendation anyone should make.

So having a password manager would solve a SQLi? It might be the case that this is just some stolen account from phishing attack. But do we know? We don't. So now using LastPass makes the user more confident about his or her password security inside KickStarter? How can anyone be happy with that conclusion?

Secondly, password managers don't make your password more secured. Maybe I should rephrase: don't even consider any online password manager. Storing multiple passwords in a single database that someone else owns? I don't see how that's going to make me feel better about password security. If anything, decentralized means we don't give a single person all the identity. Now we do. We tell LastPass here are the list of passwords I use. Great. I probably will be slightly happier with an offline password manager, but in the end, your brain can function and scale better than a service.

Sorry, fundamentally and practically I will have to disagree with you. And I stand by my own view and there is nothing wrong with my view and any downvote just seems ridiculous. In fact, I think people should think deeply before utilizing ANY password manager. If you have a security breach, focus on disclosure and tell people what went wrong because that's the only thing can tell people how to do better with their account.
I really want to build a Lego Mindstorms robot (or similar) that watches my phone with a webcam, holds a stylus, and plays Flappy Bird. I have played enough (high score 194) that I am pretty sure I know the right strategy, I just want to take human error out of the equation.

Are there open source vision libraries that are low-latency enough to play this in real time? Assuming the robot could keep up with some regular servos. Would be a very interesting project.

Edit: I'm thinking I could run an Android emulator, and then use MonkeyRunner with Python OpenCV processing my monitor to do the work. Anyone who has any relevant experience please reply, I'd love to hear if this is feasible.
I would try but how can you get input and output from the flappy bird game?
reenforcement learning is not an optimization algorithm, and his times are consistent with an off the shelf Q-learning approach.

reenforcement learning is trying to find the optimal policy of action from a given position in the discrete state space.

The policy is roughly a map between state -> action. But it understands the temporal nature of the world.

It will start knowing nothing, then discover hitting a pipe is really bad, therefore states close to nearly hitting a pipe are almost as bad. Over tons of iterations the expected negative value of hitting a pipe bleeds across the expected value of the state space.

With regression and optimization, its never clear what you are optimizing against. Obviously hitting a pipe is bad. But what about the states near a pipe? Are they good or bad? There is no natural metric in the problem that tells you the distance from the pipe or what the correction action should be.

So that's the major different between reenforcment and supervised learning.
Nothing in this comment constitutes an argument for password managers being a bad thing, or even simply not an unalloyed good thing. I am if anything more confused about what your argument is now.
Also of note, the author has a nice summary of advanced physics topics: Hamiltonian mechanics, thermodynamics, relativity, E&M, and quantum field theory, all in 26 pages: http://www.math.northwestern.edu/~mlerma/papers/physics.pdf It's not really a lesson, but a nice review for someone who knows these things.

You can see these notes as a testament to the universal power of math---someone knowledgeable in advanced math could easily understand this handout... Learn your math people: it's like superpowers!
IE 11 Crashes After Clearing 5+ Input Elements fixed
What I would love is one of these that lets you chain your VPN.

E.g. I want a 10 chain VPN proxy, here is my API keys for N servives, please distribute the VPN across these.

Obviously this is a slightly different use case than just protecting against passive monitoring, but I think it'd be cool.
> The problem is the opposite. Coming from one of Europe's quasi-socialist states, rewarding the "deserving" doesn't work.

Coming from another one of Europe's quasi-socialist states (Romania), not rewarding the brightest, most capable and hardworking is also bad. Many poor countries have significant brain drain towards the rich/developed ones.
In my experience, I didn't cut my cable tv, but instead cut my home phone and ported the number to google voice to use with an ObiTalk device to have home phone for free. The retention department gave me their best "double play" package they had and I saved a whole $20 a month. Well guess what, the next month they raised rates on the DVR rental fees and upped a few other things effectively canceling out any savings I had. A few months later when the promo period ended, I had them switch me to a triple play (tv, phone, and internet) just adding a dummy phone number that is not even hooked up and it's cheaper than just having internet and tv. It's just completely ridiculous.

And on top of this, of course my ObiTalk will cease to function in a few weeks when Google pulls the plug on the interface it used to make the free calling possible.
Greenpeace praises Apple for reducing use of conflict minerals
>Seriously? You think this is going to materially impact kickstarter?

No, I don't. That's not what I said.
14,000 years is about 700 generations. That's not a little bit.
I would also argue that the spread and popularity of "social" networking, and the cliquey nature of American undergraduates (which is the stage in their late teens) also heavily contributes to this.

Over-supervision by parents leads to college students around in a coffee shop working, hooked to their iDevices, staring into their Macbooks while they "like" the last 20 items their "friends" posted on Facebook. They go to the supermarket for most of their needs, but are almost surprised if anyone actually talks to them. They don't get to interact with basically anyone outside of their tiny little group of (real) friends [although they have tons of Facebook ones that provide limited mental satisfaction], and thus are often awkward and lonely when they move away for work.

The only solution I can see for this is for parents to

a) let their children be outside, unsupervised for longer periods of time, and

b) to intensely monitor their online activities at a younger age, and not give them access to smartphones.

This will act as a forcing function for simple social skills, like talking to a stranger without going goggle-eyed.
I don't know what it is about discrete math, but I just absolutely hate it. I'm in the second discrete math class required by my university for their CS program and I feel like I'm just barely "getting it". Will give this a read through to see if it explains better than Rosen.
We've been lucky that the 1st Amendment has been respected by the courts.
You should prepare to be extremely disappointed by almost everyone you do business with online. At least Kickstarter was alerted by law enforcement and not Pastebin.
Someone made a robot that played Angry Birds:
https://us.pycon.org/2012/schedule/presentation/470/

I was wondering if this would work for Flappy birds. Due to the speed of the game, I think it is going to be quite a challenge.

P.S. If you are interested in the mindstorms robot part, I'll put a shameless plug for a robot I built some time ago (based on some work by David Singleton). Code is on github but here is a pycon video: http://pyvideo.org/video/1195/self-driving-lego-mindstorms-r...
It's not what you learn, it's where you go.
and soon critics of the regime will also need to be filtered to combat "foreign hosted slander".