skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, the reality is that the top ~5% of hedge funds generate all the returns and have real alpha. The rest are beta + noise - transaction costs.

Not dissimilar to the way venture returns are distributed. Only the top startups manage to become big companies and provide a sizable return to their investors.

So hedge funds get away with it the same way most startups get away with it. For better or for worse, the investors do not have the ability to accurately discriminate.
Here is one reason I like the bundled approach. I've been using golang recently which compiles into a machine executable. I was building a REST API that many third parties would use. When they wanted to use the API for development all I had to do was send them the bundle and tell them how to start. There were no other dependencies at all. It didn't assume a particular package manager, OS, or anything else. Take this file and execute it, that's it.
This is progress! Happy to see some success!
IIRC, SQL Server was their first product to use this.
I haven't actually messed with the Postgres JSON type much. IMO it makes more sense to use straight-up dict() within Python and when stored to the database, then let Flask jsonify the dict() if it needs to leave the server context.

Usage:

You have to tell Postgres to use the HSTORE extension for your database. It's shipped with 9.3 but not active by default.

Then for SQLAlchemy you'd add something like this in your models.py:

from sqlalchemy.dialects.postgresql import HSTORE
from sqlalchemy.ext.mutable import MutableDict

class Widget(db.Model):
id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
data = db.Column(MutableDict.as_mutable(HSTORE))

You don't technically have to do the MutableDict stuff to use HSTORE, but it's handy. They're mutable on the Python side already, so why not be consistent. With the rest of the model as appropriate (init, repr), and I'm using Flask-SQLAlchemy which makes the contexts line up and such.

It's nice because it's an RDB field so you can do all the usual Postgres love when you're not wanting to store a dict(). Or you can just do a table with id, data, and id can even be a kv-style key if you want some sort of meaning attached to the primkey. Plus it's dicts, and Python is heavy on the dicts, and it's a quick leap from there to JSON.
Actually most of the toll autoroutes of France are managed and operated by Vinci. Which is a shareholder owned company and most certainly not "semi-private." You're also quoting a Wikipedia article about autoroutes in general. A article, by the way, that cites no sources, unless you consider about.com a primary source.

If you were to compare the Vinci-managed ones with the state managed ones, there's a vast difference in quality.

Which, the point is that some of the autoroutes are maintained by the state, however the ones that are are privately manage are of better quality. The ones that ARE toll roads, such as the A9 are fully managed and operated by Vinci and they are exceptionally good. The A31 (Luxembourg to Beaune where it turns into the A6) on the other hand is not privately managed and it has a higher number of potholes and the overall quality is lower. The A7 from Avignon to Marseille is also privately managed and is of exceptional quality.

I'm not making the case that government-owned roads are all necessarily bad, however I am making the case that private, profit oriented roads are almost always better because they have to be -- why pay to use a bad road? Drive from Hamburg to Marseille and you can see the effects with your own eyes. I've driven all across Europe, with the exception of the Netherlands, which I will concede are probably very good. However the Netherlands can't easily compared to the United States both in terms of economy, demographics or size. Korea, for example has better internet than most of the world, but the population density is astronomical compared to the United States, so there are different economies of scale at work. The same thing goes for Dutch roads.

The interesting thing is the quality of the roads that are publicly operated toll roads, such as the New Jersey Turnpike are terrible compared to the free highways of Texas. So you do have some good government owned things, however very rarely is the government version better than a private version. Otherwise we'd be drinking Evian out of the tap instead of the chlorinated crap that passes for municipal water.

Given that a publicly managed, national internet would likely be run by some government agency along the lines of the Veterans Administration or the New York New Jersey Port Authority -- I would far prefer private infrastructure.

However, that being said, the Internet pipes almost definitely should be considered a common carrier by pretty much any definition of the word.

I'm just clearly arguing against nationalization. It worked so well for Mexico's Pemex that they are actually privatizing it. If you fill up your gas tank in Juarez vs. El Paso, you'll find the quality of the gasoline vastly different, despite the fact that they are refined from the same crude oil.
The goal of Common Core is a good one. But the research was not nearly thorough enough. The curriculum was adopted all at once instead of giving it any testing.

And at least in my area, students must take the math class at their age level, at least through elementary school. Now students that excel at math get bored and hate it, and students who need extra help can't get it. That is the wrong way to improve education.
The ability to make six figures is easier as a developer for the introverted type like me. I could work towards getting a job at hedge fund or something and try to be a portfolio manager and make lots of money, but I worked at a hedge fund for three years and the environment there was shit and people worked way too much.

Developing is a nice place to be because it's easier to demonstrate my value and skills and therefore always easier to find work. Networking is obviously still important, but less so than it is in the finance industry. Also, I sort of enjoy programming, and I rather dislike financial modeling.

The idea is to eventually transition out of web dev into a more of a regular dev job.
You stand by your principle or you don't have one.

"We 98% stand by our principles but at the end of the day, if it is important enough, we will cave like we did before"

Is not an inspiring message.

Mozilla should stop the whole "We are Mozilla
Doing good is part of our code", "Different by design" shtick because it is no longer true, they are now just another software house that makes a browser.
I sincerely doubt it was esr that was advocating closed source or non-free proprietary software. He's pretty staunchly in support of FOSS.
Offer HN: freelance full stack web development with Node.js (Express or Sails), Angular.js, and your choice of SQL/NoSQL DB (Postgres or Mongo by default).

Since I'm a student on vacation, I'll do it for a little less than you'd pay typically, I'm always willing to fit your budget unless its borderline exploitation ;)

Also, if it means anything, I was the winner for GoCode Denver, and thus a top 10 finalist for e overall GoCodeColorado competition- the top 3 won $25k plus a contract and opportunity for $250k more, so I think that's worth mentioning in terms of my ability to complete the work you need done.

http://www.itskrish.co/#freelance
What's funny is this is what Quark did in the 90s and then they got their market share stolen by Adobe. The same thing will happen to Adobe at some point. There will be so much user frustration that people will pack up and leave to the first reasonable tool that comes along.
> Why are you worried about this?

Hold on. I am not the one who came with this argument that NaN == NaN should be false because that gives us a way to test for NaN, you are.

> Can we finally give up the pretense that such usage isn’t justified and widespread

Not yet. I've looked at a couple of your examples, and so far all of them either test whether an absolute value is zero, or whether a value that was previously assigned the exact value zero is zero. So they do not actually support your case.

And yet again, this is beside the point; your original claim was about NaN, not 0.
I made a point about the importance of patents for this invention, but it is better to receive it straight from the source: http://imgur.com/Q99L8V3

(the bottom just quotes my letter, already visible)

This product and company would not exist without patents on what amounts to an idea.
I had no previous experience with Scala or FP. I thought it was an excellent course, and one of the most intellectually challenging things I had done in a long time.

I review the course in more depth at http://bigscary.com/2013/02/27/functional-programming-in-sca...
Well, so would I. The spoon doesn't cure the symptoms.
Planimeter
These Numbers Show That Box CEO Aaron Levie Is A Genius
I've been a longtime user of Chaplin and I love it, particularly when it comes to the Composer and Dispatcher. I've been experimenting recently with killing the view layer completely in favor of React templates, since I think react does a better job of managing view state, but doesn't include the rest of the stuff I need for my app like routing and data management.
> Predictability, and my own risk.

Bingo. I can believe this is an issue for discussion in Idaho, but in urban environments (where I assume most reside)? A bicyclist is a bag of calcium and water perched on some welded aluminum pipes swimming in a sea of tanks. When you're driving a car, predictability and muscle memory are pretty much the only thing that keeps you alive and anything out of the ordinary is a danger that you must prepare for and avoid.

As an LA bicyclist who learned to drive after moving to SF (oh the irony), I find behavior like this absurd. Physics doesn't care about your right of way and while a crumple zone can protect a driver in even some of the most gruesome accidents, few 150 pound blobs of jelly can survive getting flung across the street.

The worst part is that in some situations, there is nothing you can do to avoid hitting a biker who runs a red light through the intersection. I've been in a situation twice now where swerving to avoid a biker put other people in the intersection in danger, people who were innocent and could have lost their lives. One of my worst nightmares is hitting someone, anyone, with my car but at the end of the day, it is my responsibility to keep my car under control and everyone else on the street out of unnecessary danger. When a bicyclist flaunts the basic rules of traffic, rules meant to keep people safe in a world of multi-ton vehicles, they force drivers into situations that often end badly only for the person without the airbags.
I did this back in college with XEmacs (90's). I'd leave gnus running at school and open a new frame from home to check mail and news. (You can use this to have two people editing at once too, but you have to avoid avoid opening a minibuffer.)
Elvis Presley Reincarnated?
Researchers fear that a fungus could cripple the world's banana monoculture
Photo of NSA technicians sabotaging Cisco router prior to export
My main reasons for using docker have been for portability and a development environment that is an exact match to that of production.

It's also very useful in deployment, I have different containers for my web, primary worker and mongo replicasets. Combined with Digital Ocean it makes it very easy for me to quickly spin up new servers and set them up as needed with only a few commands. There is also comfort in the fact knowing that I can do the exact same thing on linode without any modification to the container.
One of the reasons why I believe GOOG moved toward defaulting to HTTPS is not for your security, but to ensure that only they have a copy of your browsing history, research interests, etc.

Once someone in the middle has a copy, the value of their trove of data falls precipitously.

I'm surprised as well that Amazon doesn't use HTTPS, they have a lot to gain by being the only one that knows you're interested in a particular book and not anyone else. It could help them get the sale instead of competitors relentlessly targeting ads against you as soon as you express an interest to their site.
_Ringworld_, anyone?
Or "Coming soon" segments for movies release a decade ago.
I wanted to ask you, what about running multiple operations in parallel? I've long been contemplating async/futures vs lightweight threads and yet to have come to a conclusion.

With futures I can say, start operation 1 and operation 2 in parallel, then chain a callback to execute using both pieces of data, saving me some latency of doing the operations serially. How do you do this using quasar? Now that's a trivial example... what about arbitrary dependency trees? This falls out naturally with futures but I don't know of a nice way to do this with lightweight threads. e.g. 1 operation branches off into 5 other parallel operations which then chain some of their own additional callbacks for processing before finally bringing all the results back together, perhaps to form a json response. Does this example make sense?
Toronto or Vancouver: Which is better for startups?
I'm currently planning to study CS in Canada, and have received offers from both UBC and UofT. My main objective going to school, however, is to go find the right people to found a startup with, or to recruit the right people to join me.

Which has a better startup ecosystem? Which school would be better for recruitment for this purpose? Which school has a better pedigree?
From farmer's pen to plate, now I know where sausage comes from. I enjoyed the presentation, thanks.

While I have found it improved my understanding of functional idioms when I explained them to others, I believe I am more helpful if I point people directly toward Hickey and Graham and PLT. I can paraphrase The Value of Values but it's better watched without translation.
Not to mention that the Creative Cloud app itself is a battery vampire, automatically sets itself to launch at startup, constantly nags about updates, and then screws everything over when you do update.
On the topic of reasonable alternative tools, Sketch[1] has started to gain a tremendous amount of traction within a short amount of time within the web design community.

[1]: http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch
Was just restored an hour ago apparently, with no compensation for the downtime of the people affected....
Chartio is hiring Senior Engineers
IMessage Might Eat Your Texts If You Switch To Android
Wasn't a fan of the CC move. After using Photoshop for 10+ years I've switched to using Sketch for UX design and haven't needed to look back yet.
I can hear the sound of Yahoo! getting its Alibaba money ready…
The one thing that annoys me about Pinterest is that it's one of those ideas I really could have thought of and done (but obviously didn't).

I don't mean this in a way to take away anything from the Pinterest team. They had a great idea and seem to be executing really well.

It's just one of those ideas that seems so obvious in hindsight, particularly if you've seen how, for example, women scrapbook for wedding preparation and the like, the rise of "selfies" (and just having a way to list what you're wearing) and so on.

There are many other services that have tried to allow you to share "things" in a given context (eg locations in Foursquare, purchases on Blippy, social integrations with the various music streaming services and so on) but the real genius of Pinterest for me is that it's really about sharing the combination of things, which is of far more value than the individual things themselves.

Pinterest is probably the startup I'm most bullish about. Seriously, congrats guys.
If you're one of those, I highly recommend Pixelmator - download at pixelmator.com. My choice for a really simple, easy image editor is Acorn from Flying Meat Software - http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/.

It's like Apple's Numbers compared to Microsoft's Excel - there are things that the most sophisticated couple of percent of users will miss, but for most people it's a great alternative.

Adobe can't die quick enough to make me happy.
Thanks!

I do use dashboard (have my Selfoss RSS reader pinned to it) but only with my trackpad swipe-left :)
Ok, if that's what you think.

Thanks for expressing your opinion. I'm sorry you feel the need to be hostile.
And, I don't agree with you.
Unlike bacteria, cancer isn't spread from person to person, so it's impossible for the treatment of person A's cancer cells to impact the treatment of person B's cancer cells. However the cancer cells within in a single person can become resistant, which is why this treatment is a one time shot.
> Your underlying assumption (which is unfounded as it turns out) is that drivers are (you imply always, maybe you meant majority... both are wrong) at fault.

Where did I assume that? I was intending to speak about all vehicle related fatalities, of which the majority are due to driver error.

> Bicyclists are often found as the CAUSE of accidents due to erratic (and illegal) road behavior, leading to a finding of no-fault on the driver.

However, since you bring it up, do you have statistics for this? I haven't researched this topic carefully, but a quick google brings up this:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/05/20/136462246/when-bi...

There does not seem to be a clear cut answer. Likely the ratio depends on the region and time period being studied. However, in none of the studies cited were bicyclists significantly more likely that drivers to be at fault.

I would guess that the at-fault tends to average out to 50-50 with large and diverse enough sample sizes. This makes sense because I don't think bicyclists are any more or less prone to error than drivers.

I said:
>It seems insane to me that we blithely accept the number of deaths caused by drivers and don't hold them more than minimally responsible.

What I was pointing out (and what I find insane) is that drivers (and bicyclists for that matter) who are at fault for traffic fatalities are usually not held criminally responsible for their actions.
> With alternative sleep cycles popularizing

Are they really? I don't know of anyone who uses an alternate sleep cycle.
I am especially fond of his view on database layers. There's JDBC, which is extremely verbose and needs scaffolding to make it usable, and then ORMS, that will quickly fall apart the moment you actually need to do anything interesting with the database.

The Spring solution to this problem was always my favorite part of their stack: JDBC template removed most of the error prone boilerplate from JDBC, adds a couple of features, and still lets you write SQL directly, which is probably what you should be doing in almost all the cases where a relational database becomes valuable.

I can't wait for shops to start to use Java 8. The removal of so much boilerplate when trying to build functional interfaces should make the Java toolsets move forward very quickly.
Tech super PAC startups could tap billions
While I haven't designed my own furniture I insist that it should be real honest wood (now). Which means I can just give it a polish if the kids scratch it. Or sand it if necessary.

Also a lot of the furniture is bought from someone around here who had found something they liked even better.
Which is why I think it is silly to insist that bicyclists for the EXACT same rules of the road as drivers with NO EXCEPTIONS.

There are different rules of the road for Semis, for cars pulling trailers, for motorcycles, for tractors, for public transit.
No reason. In fact if you're doing things right you're probably testing within a virtualbox or docker instance anyway and that same script can be used to deploy your application to any vanilla cloud provider without getting hooked on Elastic Beanstalk.
> A CDN only carries traffic for those who’ve paid to be on it.

A CDN doesn't carry traffic at all; it hosts content (multiple copies of it in different locations) for others to carry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network

CDNs operate servers, not routers. The servers can be located in data centers with easy connections to ISPs and transit providers, but their traffic still doesn't get privileged over other traffic coming in to the networks of those ISPs and transit providers. There are no separate routes that CDN traffic takes to a user's computer, that other traffic from sources in the same data center, or going through routers in the same data center, can't take.
This is good feedback to consider, thanks for that, appreciate it.

When we say 100 updates, it's 100 good ones :-). The thinking behind starting at 100 is so that the customer gets a couple updates a day in order to keep their audience engaged.

That said we are definitely looking into being more flexible with the plans. We have had some requests for a larger package than the Gold, > 225 updates/mo, and are willing to do this. Also thinking about top up credits, if you have an acute need like an event or product launch.
Archey, an ASCII art system information tool
So he made a profit of $25 (minus about $5k for a printing error) doesn't sound too bad to me.
You have to take into consideration your costs for producing your extra's, as well as things like shipping and fees.
The US Interstate Highway system is a very small fraction of total road miles (1%), but carry 25% of traffic (vehicle miles). So yes, the old 20/80 rule applies, for small values of 20 and large values of 80.
Kim Jong Un Takes on the Capitalists in New Video Game
"In the future search will be a discovery tool" ... I think this sentence needs some work. It feels empty of meaning. Am I missing something? Or does the sentence really simply mean: "in the future search will be a way to discover things"?

Because in that case the future may already be here :)
Don't you get tired writing variations of the same comment over and over again?
They better watch out for Alibaba getting its Alibaba money ready
it is our early release of the product (More focus was on the functionality). We will improve look and feel (such as icons, theme, etc) in general in our next iteration.
Some resources that I've found useful: http://nathansuniversity.com/, "Compiler Design: Virtual Machines", "Compiler Design: Analysis and Transformation", "Programming Language Pragmatics", https://github.com/kvalle/diy-lisp, http://codon.com/, http://www.itu.dk/people/sestoft/pebook/. A few more I don't remember but that's a good selection both for beginners and intermediate practitioners.
We (PagerDuty, YC S10) use Scala + Cassandra to build distributed services that comprise our realtime infrastructure - receiving alerts from monitoring systems, sending out email/SMS/phone/push notifications and everything in between. High availability is a requirement.
The linked site seems to be down.

Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?authuser=0&outp...

Scribd link to document: http://www.scribd.com/doc/224332847/NYT-Innovation-Report-20...
Comcast plans data limits for all customers
OK less extreme.. I should be able to ride in the middle of the road, and only overtaken where it's safe as indicated by a broken-line.
I like to mention this: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=24116953#p24116...
These kids are better with money than you are
Its good to see article like this. Many just don't realise that drug boost usage may result in serious damage. So far the best brain booster is healthy lifestyle and practice.
Buy a bicycle?