skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mean absolute error (MAE) during the out-of-sample period is 0.486 for GFT, 0.311 for lagged CDC, and 0.232 for combined GFT and CDC.

A combination of GFT search behavior and actual CDC numbers produced the best model for the authors of this paper. The (media) spin is "GFT as a stand-alone flu tracker fails".

Perhaps the article would be of a different tone if the researchers had full access to Google's data. I don't think the mentions of irony, failure, misleading and hubris are deserved nor offer a fair portrayal.
Good point. My comment snarked at the faculty a bit, but I'm sure the rank-and-file don't love the top-heavy bloat either.

It's great for the mid to late career faculty member who wants to take the next step and become an administrator. It's less so for those whose areas of interest are lower priority and must tighten belts.
Wouldn't it be spooky if there were no coincidences?
There are numerous public lists of wealthy individuals. Nobody gets upset about them.

But every time a BTC-holder is identified, somebody claims that the person might be killed. One more fun side-effect of anonymous, irreversible transactions.
Ask HN: How can I get a job in the tech industry out of high school?
I am 18 years old and graduating high school in May. I think that I'm fairly technically competent: I can write code reasonably well and I have experience administrating Linux servers.

I am looking to either take a year off after high school to work, or at least find an internship for the summer. Where should I look? From my searching, it seems that many/most internships require applicants to at least be in college, and jobs require a degree. Does anybody know where to look for companies that will take interns or hire out of high school? (Extra points for something in the Seattle area.)
Hi, I am Joao the CTO of Unbabel. That is definitely something that is on our roadmap while we improve our mt systems. We have very useful data to build better mt systems and hence improve the overall system.
I don't think that explanation quite works. There are two cases:

1. Companies in the Google/Apple/MS cabal

2. Other companies

Companies in 2 can always just pay more for what they want, since they're not governed by the cap. If they did that, of course, they could pull a bunch of people away from 1 and the price level would keep rising. That didn't happen because (mostly) only companies in 1 are able to pay at near the cap level anyway. So there might be inefficient hoarding, but it's just companies in 1 hoarding from each other.

It doesn't analogize exactly to, say, anti-gouging price caps for gasoline in a snowstorm (which, I agree, lead to terrible shortages and inefficient allocations), because this is equivalent to the gas stations setting a price floor (people shop at places with the lowest prices but work for the place with the highest wages). And then some gas station down the street opens a gas station with prices lower than the floor...
We use Spread and Wackamole. I can't say I love them, but they certainly work with not-too-many-quirks.
OVH got a pretty good write-up on their blog[1], well worth a read. It looks as if their solution should be able to mitigate layer 3/4 attacks. From the blog: "Our surplus network has a capacity over 2 Tbps. We have three VAC in production, so we can manage up to 480 Gbps/480 Mpps." Cloud-flare took on the larges DDoS ever seen not to long ago, I think it peaked around 400Gbps.

1) http://www.ovh.com/us/blog/a1171.protection-anti-ddos-servic...
Ask HN: Why are there many sorting algorithms?
So i know there are more than a dozen sorting algorithms out there. I understand some are better than others, but i don't get why there's not one agreed "best" sorting alg. out there. Does it have to do with the order? Which are the fundamentally best ones?
Here's San Francisco:

http://crayonmap.herokuapp.com/#map=12/37.774650/-122.434216
> CDC tracks hospitalisation based on lab reports, GFT tracks search terms

This is the key difference, and after 5 years it is clear that this is not a valid way to predict the flu, or even monitor it. I think it was a great experiment, and thought it was pretty creative when announced, and now it should either be retired or replaced with a new hypothesis. Because as the Mythbusters would say, this myth is busted.
In your rush to bash illegally-colluding tech execs for the engineer shortage you seem to have missed the end of the article where the policy is posted. From that document:

"For each of these 'Restricted Hiring' companies...

"3. Additionally there are _no_ restrictions at _any_ level for engeineering candidates"

The majority of the companies included were just on a "Do Not Cold Call" list, but Google would actively recruit people from those companies based on referrals, and of course based on applications.

So, if you worked at Apple and applied to Google, Google would actively recruit you.

I fail to see how this policy has anything to do with an engineering shortage. It may well be deemed illegal, but it's certainly not as bad as you're making it out to be.
> or use buzz-stuff such as OpenStack (hello Rackspace, HPCloud!)

Maybe I misread the tone of this post or I'm fuzzy on the history, but it sounds like you're saying Rackspace is trying to be hip by jumping on the hype-train. My understanding is that Rackspace co-created [1] Openstack and let it out into the wild.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack#History
The only incident I can think of was a paper by Adi Shamir and Dorit Ron claiming Satoshi had a connection to Silk Road, and the actual owner of the coins (Dustin Trammell) came forward and demonstrated that (a) the coins were his and (b) the transaction was with MtGox not Silk Road. Gregory Maxwell was not involved in any way:

http://blog.dustintrammell.com/2013/11/26/i-am-not-satoshi/

I know of no other incident involving mis-identification of Satoshi's stash.
Does that mean I shouldn't press upvote?
>we had people boasting about having a stable job, then hearing about a job at another BigNameCo, and applying for it just to drive up their own wage. No intention of leaving their own company, and that it was turning into a routine process rather than the odd here-and-there.

Regardless of your opinions about the morality of this practice, there's no basis for calling it collusion.
There are good reasons, such as ensuring privacy, dealing with informants, what happens to the video?
If I read it correctly then they are not holding wages down as such, but are trying to avoid employee poaching. Raising wages might be a result of active competition, the question is how much. My guess it would relate to only a small set of exceptional individuals.

Rules for wage negotiation for ordinary employees have generally much bigger impact.
Gold is much easier to melt and cast in new “clean” ingots. It’s not possible to trace it, so nobody could declare some of it void. But each Bitcoin transaction is public, so it’s easy to see the origin of each Bitcoin.

But I think this idea has many technical and psychological problems . You essentially need to fork the Blockchain and convince the “51%” to use the new fork where these Bitcoins are illegal.

Doge recently changed some details of the mining procedure using a hard fork, but they have a strong central organization and they pretend that Doge is not a serious coin. An equivalent change in Bitcoin would be much more difficult.
The term is probably "coin validation" -- it breaks the finality of bitcoin transactions, creates a single point of regulatory exposure, and IMO will destroy bitcoin if widely adopted.
Git with the basics of git-flow, master, develop, feature and release branches, both business and personal, although I don't tend to use release branches and rarely feature branches on my personal projects.
I remember having heard news about companies not hiring from each other a few years ago, I don't know for what exactly. I suppose to not try and steal each other's knowledge by buying people. I'm not sure which companies it were back then, but Apple and Google are very likely candidates. What changed? Why is this news now?
I disagree, but it depends what you mean by "the flu". If you mean hospitalisations, then yes, you're entirely right. If you mean lost productivity and population health outside of hospital, however, perhaps we need a better means to track this other than indirectly via either current stat.
Fair point. The mere fact of having earned a PhD does not automatically make a person a great teacher, and lacking one does not make a person a bad teacher. I certainly had a few full professors who were phoning it in every class, droning over their 20 year old lecture notes.

However, in my undergraduate experience, the most interesting and memorable classes were taught by active professors with many years of teaching experience, who also had a good research program. It helped a lot when they would teach class material, and also connect it to what was current in their field of research.
If the bread is good Its enough to be disruptive. The quality of bread in the US is very poor (if you have had the opportunity to eat at a local bakery in pretty much anywhere else in the world you know what I am talking about).
> I'm against unions as they come with a large political power which I think is undeserved.

This is the same reason I'm against the wealthy.
How Small Businesses Can Gain From Listening To Their Social Media Customers
> Meta: this has front page for more than an hour but has no comments, are you 54 up-voters reading it?

Yes, but I can't add anything intelligent to this article at all! :-)
Luckily there is a transcript:

http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-transcript-...

Q: "the N.S.A. has argued that this kind of intelligence gathering is critical to try to protect the American homeland?

JIMMY CARTER: That has been extremely liberalized and, I think, abused by our own intelligence agencies. As a matter of fact, you know, I have felt that my own communications are probably monitored."
>I feel that if workers tried to steal billions of dollars from the rich they would get thrown in jail

Why is that? All evidence points to the contrary. Take for instance, the collapse of the housing market a few years ago. Not only were the borrowers not jailed, most people even blame the bankers.
Alternatively, you can base your business model on tricking people into subscribing to a service they likely don't know they're subscribing to.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/27/not-so-vip/
The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law
You pay replacement costs to all of your employees, so that you don't care whether they leave or stay. That way it depends on the market, not their worth to you.
I am sorry for Mr. Carter, but the NSA is also reading everyone else's email. He is not special in this regard (although I am sure his correspondance is significantly more interesting than mine).
Actually, I think HN user mrxd hit the nail on the head here:

>Here's another graph showing that the recent rise in tuition in Michigan is due to declining state education appropriations.

>http://i.imgur.com/5gYHQK5.png

====================================

DING DING DING! Why did I have to scroll to the bottom to see this? As far as I'm concerned this is the major symptom that few people ever look at, much less ever try to think of a root cause for.

The states, nearly all of which have to "balance the budget" every budget period, have to find ways to make cuts when economic downturns hit. Seeing as so much of what used to be the purview of the state has been captured by the private sector under the guise of "we can do it better, just let us handle it," the only major expense left to the state other than healthcare is education.

When legislatures are faced with a choice of cutting Healthcare or Education, which one do you think is going to get the bigger axe? Which demographic does more voting? The not-of-age children and teenagers? The politically charged college students that paradoxically never seem to actually make it to the voting booth? Their parents perhaps? The same ones that love to hate on public education and talk about how terrible it is? Or... Is it the hundreds of thousands of individuals that rely on the state for medical assistance in one way or another?

It's not a surprise at all that education gets the short end of the stick. It is the politically expedient answer in the face of economic downturns, when already-stretched state social programs are tasked further still. But the real clincher is this: the state legislatures know that the federal government will pick up the tab; it is ultimately the guarantor of the loans it issues. Better yet, since the liabilities were shifted onto the students individually, the state legislatures don't even look like they had to seek the help of the Big Government they're all so keen to hate! And best of all, thanks to the continued infusion of capital from the federal government, their state institutions actually have the outward appearance of growth: new buildings, renovations, fancy stadiums and gyms and elite professors.

Of course, this is all on the backs of young students. And as a young 20-something, I'd like to know why the federal government agreed to balance states' budgets on the backs of its youths at all, much less without price controls. Just who is benefiting from such a laissez-faire attitude? It certainly doesn't feel like I am.
Thats actually not true. The readmission penalties make it so hospitals are not paid at all for the readmission.
Like many of you I am one of the engineers that's covered by the suit and may stand to benefit from it.

Having said that, I want to play devil's advocate for a second. It's just my natural reaction when the press embeds big unquestioned assumptions in reporting for the sake of sensationalism -- namely that this is obviously "illegal" and nefarious behavior. Because, after all, it kept down wages for people like me who might otherwise have been more actively recruited.

If your reaction is OF COURSE IT'S ILLEGAL, just hold on a second. Try to think about the counterargument rationally, even if it's against your personal interests. (That's what I'm doing.)

There do exist many precedents for agreements and restrictions on seemingly "competitive" behavior that is deemed "unfair".

Let's consider a related example from another domain: countries "dumping" cheap goods into foreign markets. For example, China is accused of "dumping" subsidized steel into the U.S. market, which hurts the industry here. The U.S. steel industry works with the government to put in place tariffs that block the practice.

So is the U.S. steel industry being anti-competitive here? Have they engaged in an anti-competitive pact with the U.S. government conspiring to keep up the price of steel here?

Well, on the surface, yes they have. But the distinction is that "dumping" is meant to describe a particular form of competition that is short term and unsustainable in nature and designed primarily to destroy competing business. It is meant to isolate a specific practice that actually hurts competition in the long run.

So, what about the practice of poaching employees from competitors? Well think about it for a minute.

What is the value of a Safari engineer to Google's nascent Chrome team? The truth is, it's a lot more than just that engineer's skillset. There's also the value of undercutting Apple's Safari development. That's HUGELY valuable to a competitor.

So, I just wanted to put it out there that at first blush at least, that the practice of "poaching" may actually have an anticompetitive angle. Just like with "dumping", you have to look beyond the immediate act (restricting/boosting prices) and examine the particular practice it's attempting to curtail.
Using Blaze (Meteor)
This is true and of course it's hard to quantify how much wage impact this had on the numbers. But since the companies' explicit goal in these poaching rules was to keep salaries in check ("we are driving up salaries across the board"), I think it's safe to say it was substantial. Poaching usually requires giving the poachy a raise.
I love the Unix philosophy, but...
Yes.because it cheap and i want to test ssd. I want to test how include or require in php can be speed up.
Totally agree.

People who are going to argue against you are going to say "But what about products that are so great that they go viral, people share them and your customer acquisition goes through the roof!". This is marketing. Making frictionless experiences that satisfy needs very quickly is a great way to market your product. Note - Many of these experiences are frictionless because the security sucks. Security is accessibility's worst nightmare.

WhatsApp did this by making it easy for my parents living in the US to download the app, add my UK phone number and voila, I can IM them for free.

DO did this by making the interface on a VPS provider "not suck" and the pricing in line with all of the junk shared providers out there.

What I've noticed about "Bubble 2.0" is that making great, frictionless products is the new marketing. It is still marketing, and I feel it's best that people recognize it then pretend it simply doesn't exist.
... and "i told him we were not building a browser". I can see 3 possibilities:

1. That was a lie. Perhaps I'm naive, but I would expect him to say that he's not going to discuss the Google product line-up.

2. They were not building a browser, but Steve's accusation got them thinking about building a browser.

3. They were not building a browser, but later decided to build a browser.
Did you read to the end of the article? You know, to the part where the actual internal policy document is posted.

If you had actually read that far you would have seen that this was in fact a "no cold call" agreement for engineers.

If there is plenty of evidence to support your alternative claim, would you mind posting some? Because the original document posted in this article appears to show clearly that the policy was simply "do not cold call".
I'd like to see criminal prosecutions here.
I need an Ember expert to compare it to ExtJS. I've skimmed over Ember. It feels like it'll take the same amount of pain as ExtJS to get through it, but the overall feature set is inferior.
There are trade-offs.

Can you use extra memory, or do you require an in-place sort?

Does your data even fit in ram, or will you be continually reading from and writing to disk? (Alternatively: does your data fit in L1 cache, or will you be continually reading from and writing to slower parts of memory?)

Do you need a stable sort? It'll be slower.

Do you want the sort that's faster on average? Or the one that has the fastest worst case?
You're pretty sure raising the minimum wage is illegal?
I'm not implying it's standardized; it would just be a descriptive name.
Professional organizations, Unions, Licensing. Don't be anybody's employee. You lose much leverage & tend to get stuck by being an employee.
I got an internship at a company in Bellevue while I was still in highschool. The key is to attend networking events and meet people in positions to hire you. Come off as impressive, either technically competent or showing interest/knowledge of the company's area of business.

Where around Seattle are you from?
If there are police officers in my home, 99 times out of 100 it would be preferable for me if they recorded everything and uploaded it directly to youtube on purpose, than if they recorded nothing.
I think you need to re-read what you wrote in response to that.
I may have been generalizing. But there was a post here on HN with a link to such article about that PNAS one that was a bit selective on the parts it picked and ignoring some answers already in PNAS article to questions it asked, and that's what I don't like.

For instance the reason why there wasn't enough backed ventures that were led by women.. The PNAS article hinted that the fact women pursue less (and those who do, do mainly in cosmetics and such matters) has something to do with that.. Yet the article chose to ignore that and asked the question as if there were no answer to it, and then picked the part good-looking men get funding, and used that to answer the question.

Sorry for late answer.
One of the most useful apps I've purchased in a while as I'm constantly clicking on Links from Twitter, HN App, Facebook and this just makes the whole process more desktop"ish".
flu is like the communist, everybody is afraid of it, everybody believe they have seen one, but upon serious examination we can't find one.

I guess the flu epidemic is just a conspiration created to distract us from the fact that nobody walked on the moon or something.

On a more serious note, what's exactly the deal with misdiagnosis? If the real thing is another virus, it could also be a virus that we should treat in a similar manner? Or the doctors are loosing precious time often with a wrong first diagnosis in a significant number of cases?
But does the English law recognise bitcoins as "goods"?

Bitstamp Limited is registered in the UK, but the trading address is a proxy run by UK PLC (http://www.ukplc.com/contact-us.html)

Bitstamp is owned by a couple of Slovenian chaps:

https://www.duedil.com/company/08157033/bitstamp-limited/peo...

https://twitter.com/nejc_kodric

https://twitter.com/damijanmerlak
Two.js: a two-dimensional drawing api
> If I read it correctly then they are not holding wages down as such, but are trying to avoid employee poaching.

Well then you are not reading it correctly. What does it say?

>> Google is the talk of the valley because we are driving salaries up across the board

Schmidt says as plain as day, in e-mails that escaped his admitted attempts to remove a paper trail, that this is about holding down wages. He says it as plain as you can say it.
I can read this, and the other HN readers can read this in black and white. That people like you feel the need to deny this happened when they have been caught red-handed says more about you then it does about what happened.
> We have to ask ourselves why college is so expensive.

I think there is a more simplistic answer to this question.

1. Obama said everyone should go to college. (demand increases)

2. Supply is scarce (we don't have enough good teachers, so people are battling to go to the best university however way - money - possible)

3. If demand increases, and supplies decrease, it means price elasticity expands (prices go up)

4. Right now we are trying to increase supply but are struggling (MOOC's will save us!)

So let's all go back to the beginning now and ask ourselves "Why does everyone need to go to college?" I think that's the real question to be answered here.
My garden.

CA is being hit with a drought, but we conserve enough water to not really worry about it.

My goal is to have enough raised bets and suitable seedling production/crop rotation to have at least 2 days/week of fruit/veggies from the garden between late april and September. Potatoes and a new raised bed were on tap. Seedlings already moving along nicely.
The main problem is that this is done behind your back. Thats your life they are basically agreeing to control.

There should be no issue in people hiring from each other and thus no need to make agreements behind everyones backs.
Except salaries aren't high in finance. Bonuses are high, and are usually based on performance.
I really like the idea of apps that overlay data and interact with the currently focused apps. Over at blekko we have incorporated a similar technique within two of our Android apps. We wanted to add functionality to the Android system that we felt was missing, so I developed an overlay search box that can be used from any app in the system. It takes some coding tricks, but the results are very useful.

The apps are :

izik - our tablet/mobile friendly search engine

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.izik.izik

rockzi - a discovery app that lets you browser or search within topics.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rockzi.roc...

Video explaining Rockzi:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpq6G1o7pmM