skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But, most transaction costs (credit card fees) that I pay are already rolled into the price of things, so I don't benefit by purchasing them with Bitcoin.

It's not common yet, but I have in fact saved money by buying with bitcoins, because the merchant passed on some of the savings.

>Isn't it just easier to buy things with Dollars?

Sure, if you're allowed to, and you have that preference, why not? Bitcoin can facilitate the circumvention of censorship (a la Wikileaks). And once you have bitcoins, sending them is faster than paying with a credit card online.

>Doesn't it require increasingly more capital to mine coins and to maintain the ledger?

Yes, if you ignore hardware advances. It might even be true if you don't ignore that.

>What happens when the value of a coin is less than the mining costs or ledger maintenance?

There are transaction fees that go to the block miner.

>Or, does the coin just keep continuing to increase in value?

Hopefully not too quickly!

>what's to stop people from just using another crypto-currency?

Network effects. People do use other crypto-currencies. Just not as much. For now.

>And, what is the 'value' of a coin? The article implies that the value is created by the users' trust in the value. But, is that how currencies generally work? I had assumed that currencies either have tangible value, like precious metals, or that they are abstract derivatives of another's debt (government or people).

Ah, yes. This is classic. The orthodox economists might tell you that Bitcoin shouldn't have any value at all. Yet, I can sell 1 BTC and pay for months of gas. I'd rather have a running car than an economist's opinion.

There are historical examples of currency which was neither a debt derivative nor an intrinsically useful object being used as currency.

Ultimately, anything sellable is "worth" what other people will pay for it. Bitcoin provides a means of transferring information in a cryptographically signed manner. We happen to use that fact to transfer information about value. Other people are willing to buy bitcoins. The price is capped by the fact that there is a finite number of bitcoins and a finite number of people. Beyond that, it's pretty much new ground we're breaking here.

Bitcoin is not perfect. I don't know the future. But if you have other questions, I'm happy to answer them from the perspective of a bitcoin holder.
The article said 14,000 men. Is that possible that there are that many folks in Pennsylvania that were born between those dates?
Not solid at all, at least according to the traffic I get. In verticals like HN it is quite likely to be high, but in the real world it's not. If anything I would wager that AdBlock usage is declining because of the dramatic increase of mobile traffic.
The Pros and Cons of the Writers Guild of America
Amazon: "It is so difficult to merge user behavior data across different devices they use... I have an idea! Let's create a service which will do it for "them"!
Please remember that Verizon is also a Tier 1 transit provider! They own (via Verizon Business) the old MCI/Worldcom/UUnet backbone that was one of the largest transit providers. Level3 and Verizon are both transit providers.
I'm not sure if this helps you out, but I'm 33, and it also reminds me of ctOS.
If they sealed the bag around the canister with duct tape, couldn't they just tape one of the 3 bags if it ripped?
That's because men are not systematically discriminated against in the way women are. These "won't someone please think of the men?!" arguments are tired and not good.
> "Only 11% of all engineers in the U.S. are women, according to Department of Labor. The situation is a better among computer programmers, but not much. Women account for only 26% of all American coders." - Wired

and

> Track the gender of your applicants, not just the hires.

> "You need to be aiming for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio." - Allison Sawyer, The Wall Street Journal

> *NOTE: aim for this ratio in these early days, as we try to build towards a more equitable system.

This pretty much invalidates itself. You can't have a 50/50 ratio if only 26% of the population of programmers is women. You, at best, can hope for a 74/26 split.

Also? Gender bias in hiring is illegal, regardless of direction. In fact, employers are generally make the "gender identification" and "race identification" portions optional for liability reasons in this regard.

If your objective is 50/50, you need to encourage more women to enter the field [programming] rather than complain it isn't 50/50. 74/26 makes it mathematically impossible for every company to hire a 50/50 split.
Taylor Swift doesn't understand supply and demand
Massachusetts police searches can't be based on odor of unburnt marijuana
Honestly, if you're applying for an engineering position, a monospaced resume (like the markdown one shown here) might actually be a cool idea.
Build your own browser: A Maven repository for GeckoView
Well, obviously if he died in 92 and have been born in 93 he counts as alive :)
Awhile back I read an interesting article about how a city was considering allowing wealthy people to purchase the ability for them to use car pool lanes. Rich person values time over money, city values more revenue and utilizes existing infrastructure. This article seemed like it was eluding the same out of the box thinking.

But is this "business as usual"? From my point of view these companies are no better than patent trolls, wasting everyones time and money just to protect themselves from loopholes all while making the consumer suffer more complexity (that is, more complex parking rules or restaurant reservations that need to be held with credit cards).
The biggest thing that I feel like these initiatives always miss is that the onus on fixing the problem of gender equality in tech shouldn't be on the companies at this point in the game (not to say that won't change), but on getting more women interested in tech in the first place. Overwhelmingly women don't seem to care about the technology field. We need to focus less on bending over backwards to find appropriate female candidates from such a small pool, and focus more on what organizations like Girls who Code[0] who are trying to get more young women interested in technology. Once there is actually a sizable amount of women involved in the field, then maybe the conversation over discrimination or lack of diversity may be worth having. But until then I cant just make female engineers poof into the interview room like magic and thats not for lack of trying.

[0] http://girlswhocode.com/
Damn, these guys are on a streak! 2 great products released in 2 days. This one seems a little more innovative than Zocalo though.
If by stable, you mean "decreasing steadily," then sure.
I read a claim at one point
(I believe it was in responce to a comment similar to yours, Wherin the person who corresponds to you in the analogy gave the specific example of coal mining as a dangerous field)

And the claim was that women HAVE had harder times entering coal mining jobs, and for some time in some places were forebidden from doing so. (and that recently at the time of the claim in a certain area they were allowed to have that job.

However, I don't have a source for this, only a vague memory of what someone else said. As such, my memory may be faulty, and what they said might not have been entirely true. I don't know.

This is just something I thought could be potentially relevant.
They might not even have a specific goal. It could be one of those cases where they want to track and store the data, because it's available. It would be similar to being a developer, and wanting to track user information (user ip addresses, when they last logged in, which articles they viewed, how many times they viewed them, etc). Even if you don't have a need for that information now, it might be a key piece of data for an upcoming feature you develop a few years down the line. It's difficult to predict the future, but saving the data you have available is a good way to be prepared.

Now, I don't agree with what they're doing, but I could easily see something like this happening.
He is related to an inventor in one of those things :)
> I think the best candidate should always be chosen, as that's fair.

I'm not saying that companies shouldn't hire the "best" candidate, where "best" has some vague, unclear and subjective definition. But whatever best may mean, I doubt it is "fair" unless inherited wealth and traits also fits into your definition of "fair". Question of "fair" totally sidesteps the bigger problems. I think what this post states is that not having a monoculture may have a greater benefit than hiring a subjectively "best" engineer.

As an anecdote as an example of larger issues of fair being a weird thing to think about, I have an example. I have a 6 year old daughter in chess class. All last semester she's been too shy to raise her hand to answer chess questions from the male chess teacher. He's a great teacher, great with kids but I noticed he predominately encourages the boys to answer his questions, and sure enough when I finally convinced my daughter to raise her hand on the last day of class he totally never picked her.

She was raising her hand for almost every question and this teacher sometimes even ignores the hands up and asks the same boy he's been asking all day, even though that kid didn't have his hands up, and even though this kid sometimes yells out answers without raising his hands even when the teacher says not to do this. My daughter was so dejected by this experience, of raising her hand, finally being ready to answer a chess class and this guy totally doesn't even see her. She was crushed, and I was too. We're still going to go to this chess class, but if this teacher doesn't change I'm going to talk to him. This is an example of why "best" and "fair" are hard. A few generation of teacher tracking encouraging boys over girls makes me sceptical that the produced "best" was fair in the first place.
Sort of like google's cloud endpoints, I suppose: https://developers.google.com/cloud/samples/mbs/ and https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/endpoints/
Pixar’s wage-fixing cartel
SoundCloud Has Given Universal Music Group Ability To Directly Remove Content
IMO the Coin is a tricky thing. While you can argue that it balances the two player, the second player has the additional choice of when to use the Coin.

The first player has the advantage of going first. That is a given advantage, with no choice involved. It is harder to "waste" that advantage. The Coin, on the other hand, is much more linked to choice (when to use) and therefore, easily wasted. It is also an additional "thing" for the second player to think about when playing, while the first player doesn't have this burden.
I cannot say enough good things about Instaparse, which is a flex/bison/jison for Clojure. It's amazingly feature-full and very fast. I could not have built Funcgo without it. Big kudos to Mark Engelberg.
Please don't politicize civil liberties. If progressives and libertarians can come together on anything, it's this.
So Amazon is now competing with Facebook / Parse?
The article also said that they sent letters addressed to individuals who were no longer living.
Helpers for Haml, in Haml – Haml User Tags
This makes Amazon competitors to various backend-as-a-service startups (like Parse), so yes, it's interesting.
And new iCloud. And new Dropbox API. And Helios.
Possibly, but I assume the astronauts would have been the judge of that if it did happen. Remember they were also very constrained on how much duct tape they had, so using a spare may have been more efficient than using more tape.
Hey, how about you give me all the account numbers and information to access your bank accounts?

It doesn't mean I will take your money in the future. That's just fear mongering.
Research is significantly different from private, for-profit business.

And those studies are always IRB-approved. The IRB takes into account the conflict of interest, and will sometimes protest if you don't pay the student subjects (e.g. if the study involves a significant time commitment).
According to this graph [1] and to the fact that the population of Pennsylvania is 12 million, it doesn't seem plausible.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...
While this (and other similar) Backend-aaS look very appealing at first glance, it seems to suffer from the same problem as most AWS offerings - terrible platform lock-in. Show me that I could move all of this to another provider if I need to, and then we can talk seriously.

I also wonder how they "manage[s] the complexity of conflict resolution" without manual intervention.
"Jo" seems it is hard to search for. "Gojure" is already taken by another Github project.

I also considered "Clogure", but someone already had that too.

Keep the suggestions coming!
What I want from Internet radio
A buzzword used in Cognito and Zocalo is "secure". I'm assuming that means that it's server-side encrypted at rest.

What would be really impressive is if there was an option to client-side encrypt the data before sending it to AWS. Of course, that would mean you'd have to move your syncing logic to the client-side, too, but having a good client-side encryption option would be a real differentiator.
We gave a talk on this at hadoop summit recently[1]. This is also what I've implemented in deeplearning4j [2].

The approach called iterative reduce is basically training on mini batches in parallel and averaging the outcomes. The trick is to do it in multiple iterations on each mini batch averaging the parameters at runtime. It's a surprisingly simple technique that works really well.

Unfortunately, it's not as async as sandblaster LBFGS by dean and co[3].

Andrew himself has told me that the gradient was unstable with this approach though.

Right now, distributed training of neural nets is still like the wild west. I can see a few approaches coming up over time though.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2Ixpfn-DTg

[2] http://deeplearning4j.org/

[3]: http://research.google.com/archive/large_deep_networks_nips2...
DSL as in write your own language? That sounds complex.
Java programmer here.

That's ok. Python is a good language, and it is especially good for learning environments. Java is heavy -- the smallest possible "Hello, world" program in Java is five lines -- and it tends to force concepts on beginners that are not appropriate. "Oh, don't worry about that 'public static void main' stuff for now."

Python hello world:

print "Hello, world."

Now, Java is a solid language, and it is widely used in the business world. If college is intended to prepare students for the business world, then Java is a good choice of a language to learn/teach. BUT: if the goal is to teach, then yeah, languages like Python and Ruby are better starting places. With these, concepts can be introduced in a more natural way over time than can be done with Java.

And heck, there's always Jython.
It's just a thought experiment. If the accuracy is -+n%, then lets say "2*n% worse".
To answer your first question: Yes. Many of those who work on services are very interested in cloud-based systems, and Amazon happens to be a major leader in this.

Ancillary factors:

1. The title is clickworthy. While link-baity titles do work well on HN (compared to very vague titles)...this title sticks out because it is two words: One of them is "Amazon", which has very immediate connotations and brand recognition. The second is a proper noun. Those of us who haven't heard of "Cognito" are likely to think, immediately, "Whoa, new Amazon product, must click-through to see how it will impact my work". That it is two words also makes it visually distinctive regardless of what those words even are.

2. It's 11AM, which means almost every developer on the East Coast is awake, and West Coast developers, particularly the ones responsible enough to reserve HN viewing for before-work hours, are getting their coffee and checking HN. So, lots of potential upvoters.
I object to the part about gender coding the language. I think people should be able to speak and write the way it comes naturally to them. It gets to a point where being friendly to women is so strenuous that it becomes hostile to men. Apart from that, the "better" descriptions were vague and unclear as to what the focus was. "understanding the engineer sector intimately" sounds like it is actually NOT an engineering position.
How to use Julia, Google Maps, and Epicenter to find your route through a city
The road to robust democracy is not paved with rules.

People need to pay more attention to what the government is doing, pretty much all the time, and at every level of government. It would also be nice if people were a little more willing to consider that permission from 51% is still some pretty shitty permission.
"Research Specialist" and all I'd do was to Google stuff.
Much better name than "Zocalo", if nothing else.
Yup, just enabled those that do. Good for them. Keeping their hands clean.
Yeah, I'll take a fairly predictable rate of inflation over an inherently deflationary currency with absolutely no controls on its motion. I guess we're supposed to be excited about currency being able to flit around like a panicking moth?
I'm working on a version in JavaScript. I will send it to you when it's done.
>Economies rise and fall because of the struggle to control the price of their currencies

Economies that fall have struggles to control the price of their currency. The correlation is there, the causation is not so clear.
Developing for the Mac: AppKit vs. UIKit, Scripting, Plugins, XPC
Travel to Cape Town, South Africa
Or maybe it's part of the global project to eliminate the world's installed base of land mines.
Literally no one was arguing to not hire based on qualification. Why is it that, whenever this comes up, everyone starts babbling incomprehensibly about qualifications as if that’s relevant?

The link presents several non-qualifications-based ways of not hiring more women. Another one I think might work (that has already been very successful in increasing the number of women speakers at conferences) is to actively approach women and ask them to apply and talk to them about the job if they say they are not sure whether they are qualified.

The actual selection process between those applications can and probably should still be blind, but the pool of applications will be a better mix.

Yeah, it’s more work, but nobody says this is easy.
It doesn't matter.

You choose the candidate that your process deems the best.

If it's inaccurate, so be it, it's the best measure you've (currently) got.
If you factor out all 'external factors', then everyone is equal and all hires should be random. I wouldn't personally go to a randomly chosen doctor, though.
I guess it's cultural, but I wouldn't IM "your code is crap" during a code review with or without an emoticon. If the code really was crap I'd be more constructive. If it wasn't crap I wouldn't say it was. Why wouldn't you just say what you mean?
I'm really impressed with this post in general. I understand that these concepts are beyond the scope of this page, but I hope to hear more from OP about getting more women prepared as candidates for engineering/software jobs. I agree that there is a gender bias in hiring practices, but I think it's a symptom of the more systemic problem driving women away from STEM fields.

I was disappointed in the "Re-evaluate your job post descriptions" section. It had the potential to be a really good point, but the descriptions were contrived. The "Average Description" was a straw man, and the "BETTER" seemed wishy washy. I'd prefer real world samples rewritten in OPs recommended voice.
Exactly. It is anectodal but, every women who works in our office (and mostly on other offices I see) is either business related, or semi-techie (QA Engineer). We just can't find any women coders that can actually pass a basic competency challenge for more than two years.
Very interesting! May be can build a model system based on that. Anyone of you have used that?
I think people need to take a good hard look at where the society in general is heading. I've heard from older folks that they used to be "disciplined" by parents and teachers alike in the 50's, 60's and 70's (and I'm sure the arrest percentage wasn't 40% at the time). And now it's "I don't want a lawsuit so let's just call the police". A book on Asian "Tiger mom" is lambasted by the popular media and people in general. But Asian kids aren't being arrested in such shocking numbers, are they? Isn't it obvious that there is some merit in the "Tiger mom" philosophy? If kids are allowed to do whatever the hell they want without any repercussions ("Mr./miss you're grounded" is not one of those) then what do you expect they're going to do?
What if Massimo Vignelli designed legal systems?
I don't know how Amazon comes up with names for its products, but recently they all strike me as weird and stupid names. Do they confer with marketing first? Zocalo, Cognito? Really? These are the kinds of names you invent when you're looking for a cheap domain name for your startup. For Amazon, they don't make a lot of sense. They just seem like some executive out of their marketing depth and out of touch trying to be clever and anyone with sense afraid to speak up during the meeting when they come up with these names.
A child doesn't get picked once, and that's evidence of institutionalized bias?
I've been playing around with this, too. Markdown -> PDF with a CSS3 stylesheet was what Iw as aiming for. I tried a few engines and none of them would preserve text, which I see as quite important for resumes. You've done a nice job though with ConTeXt.

I mostly wanted to be able to style my resume using CSS3, which is not possible with your method, which is a shame - but this is still pretty great. Nice job :)
A number of projects on the list (e.g. Blueeyes and Jerkson) are not even maintained any more.
Their recruiting zombies i tell you! :P

Sorry couldn't help myself.
Can you style it yourself?
I agree entirely.

I'd be a noisy activist but I'd rather subvert the system silently and educate my children to be ethical, upstanding and to quietly have zero respect for implied authority. Better a grey man[1] than a dead man walking.

[1] from the survivalist wingnuts, but a valid philosophy: "Grey man - an individual who possesses the skills, ability and intent to blend into any situation or surrounding without standing out, concealing his or her true skills, ability, and intent from others."
> "You need to be aiming for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio."

This advice is completely ignorant of other forces outside of the hiring managers' control. For example, women only account for ~12% of the graduates in computer science and computer engineering.[1]

As for the job description rewrites such as:

"We are committed to understanding the engineer sector intimately."
"Sensitive to clients’ needs,"

Sorry, but that is ridiculous goop.

I can't believe that any woman of substance requires new-age touchy-feely rewrites to respond to job descriptions. In my opinion, it's patronizing and underestimates the technical reasons that may attract women to the job.

As an analogy, if only 1% of kindergarten teachers are male and we wanted to "fix" that ratio, please don't rewrite job descriptions with sports metaphors such as "we're recruiting teachers to keep kids from fumbling the ball and get them across the goal line."

[1]http://cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_Degree...