skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> that accept contributions (e.g. chapters) from reputable academics from around the world.

As someone currently doing something like that, I'd say it massively complicates the process of getting a coherent book finished this decade. The first issue is that people never deliver their chapters on time! Everyone's busy, and it's like herding cats to get a bunch of well-known people to deliver a manuscript, which is usually not the most pressing thing on their TODO list. (I'm guilty of it also.) The second issue is that if you want it to be a coherent textbook, vs. more of a collection-of-tutorials style anthology, everyone has to be on the same page about the overall approach the textbook is taking, and the chapters have to fit together closely. This is particularly important when later material builds on earlier material, and needs to do so in a way that works pedagogically (as is almost always the case in a CS textbook). Which requires a lot more Skype meetings and usually iteration on the chapters.

In our case we tackled it by having three primary "in-house" authors, at the same institution, who decided on the overall approach of the textbook, and outlined the whole thing. At least one of us was then also a co-author on every chapter; external contributors were invited within this context, to write part of a chapter in collaboration with us. This helped integrate the external contributions a bit more easily, and made sure they fit in to the book. And we had only about 8 external contributors. I would definitely not want to go all the way to having completely separate chapters written by different people and try to integrate them, and get the book finished before 2020.

The short version is: it's a good idea, but integrating multiple people's contributions into a coherent textbook is hard. If you take 10 people, and take 1 chapter each from the textbook they would've each written if they were writing the whole thing, the most likely result is not a coherent textbook, but 10 chapters that don't really fit together. Not just in the sense that you'd word things a bit differently, but that you'd organize the book completely differently and emphasize completely different material, so the result doesn't introduce material in a progression that's useful to a reader trying to learn the subject.
I believe there are often old rules from when there was no Amazon (which wasn't that long ago). Fifteen years ago if your teacher assigned a book that could not be had at the bookstore... where would two hundred students find a copy?
Ask HN: Comment rendering problems on HN Using latest Safari?
About an hour ago, I posted the following comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7453669

On my Mac running the latest Mavericks beta, this is what I'm seeing:
That link was the most interesting thing I've read on HN all day. Thank you!

If I check the source code for the page, I see the full comment:
<span class="comment"><font color=#000000>That link was the most interesting thing I&#x27;ve read on HN all day. Thank you!<p>My favorite quote:
&quot;As a historical remark, it&#x27;s interesting that the possibility of thinking machines isn&#x27;t something that occurred to people gradually, after they&#x27;d already been using computers for decades. Instead it occurred to them immediately, the minute they started talking about computers themselves. People like Leibniz and Babbage and Lovelace and Turing and von Neumann understood from the beginning that a computer wouldn&#x27;t just be another steam engine or toaster -- that, because of the property of universality (whether or not they called it that), it&#x27;s difficult even to talk about computers without also talking about ourselves.&quot;</font></span>

Testing with Firefox and Chrome renders the comment correctly... I'm no html expert, but it would appear that the <p> tag in the middle of the comment is causing the span to be truncated. Is this a bug in Safari or HN?
That's because Nate Silver shows that all the drama that political journalists manufacture has next to nothing to do with what's really going on, that the race is never quite as uncertain as they say it is, and that numbers really do tell most of the story. In short, he makes them if not completely irrelevant, then much less relevant than they are now. And he shows them to be deeply mistaken at best and dishonest at worst about the reality they're covering. So yeah I'd expect political journalists to be resentful of Nate Silver.

Perhaps they could become relevant again by analyzing the actual data as opposed to engaging in this false personality narrative all the time, the kind of personality narrative that elevates corrupt individuals like Chris Christie because, well, he has a big personality. But I doubt they're going to do that.

That said, Krugman is more of a data-minded columnist, as you would expect since he's an economist, so I find his objections to Silver's new site surprising. I don't think Nate Silver ever said that data without interpretation is all there is; but that data with interpretation tells the actual story, as opposed to whatever all these political journalists are doing .
If you find this weird, just wait until 3d printed open source weapons platforms for consumer uavs with instructions in english and mandarin become a thing. Then you may find that big cars, "assault" rifles, and such uavs will all be grounds for "compensating for small penis" attacks (assuming only self described males are interested in such things) when not in the hands of c̶o̶p̶s̶/̶s̶o̶l̶d̶i̶e̶r̶s̶ "mercenaries" (as quoted from the grand parent post).
Ask HN: is a bot automatically approving pending comments?
Every time I visit https://news.ycombinator.com/pending there are no pending comments. I would expect there to be at least some delay in the approval of new comments, but it seems to be instantaneous. I even tried submitting an obvious garbage comment under a new account, thinking that it would not possibly be approved, but it still went through.

Is there someone or something approving comments at lightning speed? Or has comment approval been disabled already? Or perhaps there is something else I'm not seeing?
A May-December Media Strategy Could Help Locally Focused Startups
Wages are plenty high in the States, or places like London. The rest of us are not on anything special.
Why should the Programmer be the CEO
At this point, it's a facile criticism to say that Wolfram doesn't give enough credit to others. Many people have complained about this.

marktangotango extrapolated this trope to assuming that Wolfram doesn't cite the particular authors in question without bothering to check, perhaps because he assumes (incorrectly) that Wolfram never gives credit to others at all.

Maybe assuming you can extrapolate a common criticism of a person in any way that occurs to you, and then presenting the extrapolations as fact isn't "lying," but whatever it is, it shouldn't have a very nice name.
Lib of Machine Learning algorithms for Golang
Set of Machine Learning algorithms for Golang that I have been developping for the last months, the next algorithms are implemented: Neural Nerworks, Linear Regression, Logistic Regression, Collaborative Filtering and Gaussian Multivariate Distribution
> To say that Microsoft accessing one account based on evidence in order to gather more evidence for a civil suit - with explicit permission granted by the user during signup - is equivalent to Google's behavior is just blatantly wrong.

You are correct that the comparison is blatantly wrong. What Microsoft did is evil and a massive, massive violation of privacy and trust. What Google does can't even be classified as evil. Arguably it's creepy, but that's about the extent of it, and they have been clear about it from the start.

And bullshit on the "explicit permission" part. No where did anybody get a clear "you grant Microsoft the right to read your email whenever they bloody well want to if it suits an internal investigation with zero oversight" checkbox.

> Google's ad mechanism reads all emails sent and received by all gmail users

This is incorrect, as the word "read" requires some amount of comprehension. The automatic indexing algorithm has no comprehension of what it is scanning, ergo there is no "reading" going on.
he's been right about the consequences of the financial crisis

I'm not so sure. He did predict that quantitative easing would not cause inflation; but the reason QE has not caused inflation is that banks are not making loans; they are letting $2.4 trillion of QE money sit in their accounts at the Fed instead of loaning it out.

Krugman most certainly did not predict that outcome; he said QE would cause a recovery in the loan market. It hasn't. Getting one prediction right by accident because you got another prediction egregiously wrong doesn't make you a good predictor.
Advice on YC Application
Most of the nontechnical people you meet who will claim domain expertise are full of shit. The ones with real domain expertise are still technical, but of a different type. For example, in my field, domain experts know programming, but they do it with AMPL, AIMMS, BUGS, Stan, etc. The ones who run around claiming domain expertise, however, are mostly commodities: MBAs that can only accomplish something by hiring someone to do it for them.
10 Simple Tech Hacks To Make Your Life Easier
An overview of the demise of Nortel Networks and key lessons learned
And here is the paper covered in the original post: http://fraden.brandeis.edu/publications/papers/PNAS(2014).pd... with notes at http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/03/06/1322005111.DCSu... It's dense but not impossibly so.

One modification they made to Turing's idea was that each cell has the same composition. They found that, to produce the results they expected, they needed to alternate the composition of neighboring cells.

(It would be nice if your post was at the top of the thread, since it's the most relevant and useful so far, but it is not very controversial. Next time consider adding something like "Biology professors hate him! Read this man's 1 weird trick for explaining morphogenesis!")
Actually, I've never down-voted anybody.

Colluding to not recruit between those players sounds like an intent to limit (to some extent) employees options, which would reduce upward pressure on wages.

What would you call that?
Yup, that seems to be exactly what it is.

I'm consistently amazed at how "high-tech" things from the past worked. Today, nobody would think about drawing off-peak power as a way to cast votes - wasted energy, environmental impact, easier to do it by internet/telephone, etc, would all be good reasons to not do that. But back then, some of those didn't exist (internet, automated telephone polling) and others weren't understood (environmental impact) or didn't have as big of an impact (wasted energy/cost) as they do now.

What we managed to come up with when the technology was so primitive is just amazing. And in a hundred years, future generates will say the same about what we currently think of as amazing.
Unless I've got a bug, it should be saving t low score. Is that not what you're seeing?
The newsonomics of selling Cars.com
There is probably a bug, I manage to have a '4096' tile. The sum of all tiles should always be 2048 if I understand the rules correctly.
Attach server-side pagination to anything (AngularJS)
You know guys, to be fair... with all these stories coming about Snowden revelations, it's not very clear how this information is obtained or revealed. Until now I had been actually wondering why the stuff is coming out piecemeal. If I, a person who is interested in this kind of stuff and reads HN quite a bit, could have missed the mechanism of how NSA stories are reported -- for months, mind you -- then so can other more vocal people. Including journalists.

In short ... this info should be more widely disseminated.
Also essential is the seminal work The Tao of Programming, which is the first that assembled hacker koans into a published physical form, if I'm not mistaken.
Scala seems roughly similar.
Non-Profit Noora Health (YC W14) Reduces Readmission Rates
How about these actual scientists?

http://nipccreport.org/reports/ccr2a/ccr2physicalscience.htm...

Also, Pielke's article referenced the IPCC AR5's own conclusions about the lack of evidence for an increase in extreme weather events.
#cleanUpGitHub pull request on the Linux kernel
So you view a program that gives away money to some people and a program that gives away money to all people, as so completely unrelated as to be utterly incomparable?
Also, airbnb's synapse looks pretty amazing for linking and service discovery as mentioned in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443803
A good illustration that ideas are all well and good but it is execution that adds value.
SVG is astonishingly concise. Most renderers are remarkably efficiently. It is very gzippable.

Your criticisms are based upon nothing.
Bitcoin has a multi sig safeguard you can make it impossible to move funds without 3 people agreeing and signing the transaction. None of these clown run exchanges pay core Bitcoin devs to help them set this up so they get robbed. Incompetence + greed + laziness, they don't want to manually do transactions.
Got 226048 score, and both "You win" and "Keep going, try again" in my first try, by making random moves.

screenshot: http://imgur.com/gGfS5Yn
Python's PyPI gets donations from Rackspace (hosting) and Fastly (CDN) to run. See the note at the bottom of https://pypi.python.org/pypi
The feature isn't currently active, I believe. It was trialed on Friday night and (as far as I know) has not yet been reactivated.
You can get higher ones like 8192 as well. I'm not sure if it's a bug or a deliberate mechanic to make the game more difficult by being able to cluster more tiles that inevitably need division.
The counter argument to Waco would be Afghanistan and Iraq. In both areas volunteer militias have successfully countered exclusive control by what is arguably the worlds most powerful military force.

They have demonstrated that if enough of the population disagrees with the notions of government and are provisionally armed, they can prevent a permanent change in control.

So at some level there is validation of the idea that an individual right to bear arms is a check on totalitarianism. I hope we don't ever have to test that idea of course.
Santander in the UK. It's a big market share ploy, but it's a good one, and there isn't really any catch.
Basic Concepts of High Availability Linux
He's saying that those who understand what it takes to build a secure service see the problem as so difficult that they prefer to use their talents for something else. As a consequence, the services that do exist have been built by reckless people who don't understand the issue.

I don't know whether that's true, but that's what s/he wrote. It's an easy enough to understand and plausible notion.
Addressing you questioning the payout scheme. They are paying off large accounts first. Once those accounts are clear, you move on down the stack. By resolving the lower end accounts, you end up with less total users who 'have a problem'. That serves a few purposes, including encouraging the customer base to continue using the service, which serves the purpose of funding the rest of the users, including those in the middle. It also allows you to effectively address the issue with the remaining people who have funds frozen - something difficult to do with all users.

I think your overall argument is based on cognitive dissonance. You'd like everyone to be paid in full immediately. That makes perfect sense to me, but it remains they lost funds. With that fact at hand, you can no longer hold the expectation of everyone being paid in full immediately and the situation of lost funds getting resolved. This makes you angry, and so you lash out with blaming statements which are logically flawed. Simply put, you are attacking something with an approach that makes no sense. The reason it makes no sense is because you are having an unresolvable argument with yourself! Honestly, I see no way of fixing this in a better way than what they have implemented. To me, that indicates we should extend some amount of trust they'll resolve this in a way that gets people's money back to them.

Your last statement is probably the most valid, but may not be 100% applicable to Vicurex. I agree they appear to have been incompetent (which implies they may still be incompetent) but they don't appear to be fraudsters. Mt. Gox was both, if you ask me, because they never did a decent job of disclosing. To your first point, Vicurex should come clean now they've frozen funds and give estimates of recovery time.
Feedaro is in public beta
Are you are aware that you appear to be yelling at gun users that they are compensating for small penises when you say things like "weird insecurities"?
OK is relative to whoever is making the judgment. US, Russia and China have an imperialistic mindset. They violate sovereignty of other nations to further their own nationalistic agenda, often to increase their influence on the international world stage. Sad to say, the USA now truly believes that controlling the world is crucial for its national security, when in fact this foreign policy invites blowback in many different forms.

Elected officials are known to do backroom deals. However, bureaus and agencies such as the NSA can be even less accountable, since they have YEARS before anyone representing the public would find out. And someone with the technology and incentives like the NSA would OF COURSE go overboard doing whatever they could do and push the envelope because they could do it.

Sadly the system of oversight and checks and balances in empires always gets corrupted.
On the contrary, Krugman's been quite wrong about austerity. He claimed market monetarism could not offset austerity, for example, and that 2013 would be a test of the theory:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/monetarism-falls...

The results are in, Krugman was wrong.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/01/the_parrot_is_s....

Actually Krugman has been getting the consequences of austerity quite wrong. For example, the sequester failed to cost 700,000 jobs:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/22/opinion/krugman-sequester-...
Lol no worries man
Maybe, but how many other modern languages have the same diamond inheritance problem? Most modern languages put more limits on MI.
If it didn't do this, there would be no way to split the numbers any lower than 512 on a rectangular grid.
I heard from a colleague that this deal no longer exists.

I opened a CCB account before my last trip to the US. I was charged a 3USD ATM fee at the BofA ATM. I don't know what exchange rate was applied when the 303USD was converted to CNY, but most Chinese banks load these transactions much less than those in the UK (which usually charge 2.25% to 2.75% above the Visa wholesale rate).
NextBus (or NextMuni, specifically) tracks buses and light rail by GPS... so what you're looking at isn't the actual bus schedule, but the estimated arrival time. Bus schedules are published on the Muni website and I doubt that mang of them are followed strictly.
Minimization of impact to a larger group of customers which then serves the purpose of keeping the exchange running so it can make money to pay off the others. If you incrementally pay out to all customers, a large number will refuse to continue using the service. It's a trust issue, really.
Every time you move, another tile gets added to the board. In the original version, it would usually be a 2 which gets added on every move (larger depending on how well you are doing). In this version, a 2048 tile gets added every time you move, if you combine them together you get bigger numbers.
> If you promise not to do content-based targeted advertising (as Microsoft claims), you have no interest to collect as much data from a user as possible.

False. Microsoft is still hoovering up every scrap of data they can get. They'd be stupid not to, as data is insanely powerful. You don't need much data at all to do targetted advertising, by the way. Seriously, Google uses at most 1% of the data it gets from you for ad-related reasons, if that. No, Google's obsession with data is because data is tremendously powerful at building better products. Microsoft is just shooting themselves in the foot if they aren't doing the exact same thing.

Besides, if you don't want targetted advertising just go turn it off: https://www.google.com/settings/ads/
Nate Silver believes you should be purely frequentist viewpoint of the data first.

Does he? A recent column on 538 (not written by Silver himself, true) talked about using Bayesian methods to help find the missing airliner:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-statisticians-could-...
Ben Horowitz on wage-fixing
Ask HN: What events are worth me attending?
I am tech-lover based in the UK currently working as a web designer for a small web startup.

I am curious to know about technology events such as hackathons, meetups etc that occur around the world that you recommend I attend.

Thanks for your help!
This type of filtering made the EFF's HTTPSEverywhere common in my last school
Minsky was one of the ones who formulated Moravec's paradox, and the difficulty of computer vision probably played a big role.
Ponders if they are also blocking Twitter on IPv6.

Anyhow here is how to circomvent the filter
https://www.hidemyass.com/proxy/
type in twitter

Background is Turkeys prime minister and leaked audiotapes.
http://www.todayszaman.com/news-340552-full-transcript-of-vo...
FWIW, we didn't choose the animal. O'Reilly's design department does a voodoo incantation and choose an animal...the authors/editors have zero input :)

I quite like the snake though, think it looks nice
Indeed, and as I recall there's some Federal case law pertaining to that, which is why I said "perhaps".

But the flip side is that attitudes today would not say that a woman "taking up arms" like men do is illegitimate. See, e.g., the one law that failed in the recent Colorado gun grabbing batch, that would have banned concealed carry at public colleges (note the minimum age for a licence is 21).

Women did not like being told they weren't fit to carry to defend themselves against rape and made a compelling case. Evie Hudak, the woman legislator who took point on the opposite side, had to resign so that she wouldn't be recalled like two previous state senators, replaced with a Republican, and flip control of the state senate.
> San Francisco used to be weird, beautiful, edgy

> the fault of the NIMBYs, who [...] deserve far more hatred

When I lived in SF, the "weird, beautiful, and edgy" older culture was very much also the anti-development and NIMBY culture. I'd be surprised if that were no longer true.
I don't get why CRUD work is so under appreciated here on HN.

I do CRUD work (at least I think I do - I create and maintain the database and front end for a DNA sequencing centre). I have in in depth understanding of SQL - my database returns some moderately complex results. I have solid database design and optimization skills. I know Django in depth. I know Python well. I have a solid understanding of Linux, and know enough to get Django running on the server. I have read up a fair bit on NoSQL, but have yet to find a suitable use case for it. I can do some Javascript / HTML / CSS.

Bioinformatics on the other hand seems to be considered a lot more brain power, when most of it is just scripts to count stuff an plot it on a graph. Its' (often) an order of magnitude simpler than what I do. The majority of bioinformaticains I know have never used a debugger - so the code can't be too complex - or they are WAY smarter than me.

Or when people talk of CRUD, do they mean the sort of thing you should use MS Access for?
Not a bug. The difficult piece in this version is that the tiles multiply so fast. I kept the merging to get larger numbers, because I think it makes it harder - if you don't manage those tiles well, they become so large they only work against you.