skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the super-secret password for the clubhouse.

In the search box on the main amazon.com page, there's a drop-down list on the left hand side of the text entry. Click that and change it to "Books". Now just hit search (you can leave the text field blank). That will bring up a search results screen with a bunch of filter groups on the left. Scroll down and select "Kindle Edition" under "Format". After the page reloads, scroll down even further and you'll have a checkbox for "Prime Eligible". Select that, and you'll have only the books you can rent with Prime. You can then further refine by genre, search term, whatever.

The selection is generally pretty awful though.
> Look at dieting. It is very easy and painless to eat 150-200 calories below maintenance per day

Were you intentionally trying to make the reverse point? 'Cause this may be the worst possible example, otherwise: it's clearly not easy and painless to eat 200 calories below maintenance every day, given the huge obesity problem we have.
> If you are arrested, it means you are taken to a police station where a whole lot of rights/procedures/paperwork kicks in. Different countries have different points where they hit the dividing line between detaining and arresting.

I'm not sure that's true. On every UK police program I've seen (mostly traffic-related - Road Wars, Police Interceptors, etc), frequently they'll arrest someone at the roadside, then de-arrest them when they've finished their inquiries.
If you're stalking someone then you already have enough data to perform a more targeted scrape (ie what town to look up businesses from)
The thread was

http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/15/5897811/ninja-pizza-girl-te...

My post was

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8045788

That post and that thread have a lot of lines with 161 or so characters.
IBM Makes $3 Billion Bet on Life After Moore’s Law
"Following the Nokia acquisition, completed in April, Microsoft had roughly 127,104 employees[...]"

I don't have knowledge about managing a company, but is it at all possible to efficiently lead 127000+ employees? Has MSFT become a non-manageable behemoth?
The light seems to turns on for a number of reasons, which makes it an unreliable indicator.

I watched a googled give a talk (on privacy) with his google glass on, the display lit up about 20 different times throughout his talk.
One example of right layoff I have seen is at the rail-road company in my town. They hired consultants to help with the process.
My friend explained me how it went. Each person was given a questionnaire asking whom they are reporting to and who are reporting to them. The organization was so bad that many managers did not know who are all the people reporting to them. These people and others many people who were working from home most of the time were the first set of people to go.
Sugarcoating mass layoffs with "evolve", "culture", "synthesized", "strategic direction"...
I was going to ask why the downvotes but today I switched to a newer Dell keyboard, the kind that looks like an Apple ripoff. I had the Dell KB212-B before. My 'Modifier Key' settings have always been the default. Alt mapped to Command on my old keyboard, "Windows" maps to Command on this one. Searching seems to suggest Windows to Command is the norm. I sort of liked Alt to Command since it mimicked the Apple layout more closely. Hmmm, which to choose?
That thread got very racist very quickly. I don't know if it's intended to be satire, but it conflates a lot of issues and blames it on Indians. AIG and Lehman, for example, collapsed due to very different reasons.
The downside is that the second this kind of thing gets announced, the good people start to jump ship.
> That's plausible, but if I were at Microsoft I'd be sending out my resume right now.

No -- most people who work at a big company know _exactly_ whether they're in danger or not. We're speaking about 5% of the original (pre-Nokia acquisition) workforce. You must know whether you're in the bottom 5%, or if your product is in the least critical 5%. Of course there are surprises and some good/productive guys will be laid off because of politics (as the process is not completely effective), but in general that's not the case.

I've seen similar things happening inside the financial industry around 2008. Many people left (sometimes much more than 5%), but we could usually guess who's going to be affected (with really high accuracy).
I don't think tech journalism as really fallen - Wired has always been fluffy, and Dr. Dobbs is still around [1]. I think the change happened more on the shelves, as laymen with an interest in technology replaced geeks as the most profitable group.

[1] http://www.drdobbs.com/
I suppose I'm a little late. All I get are 404 errors. :-(
If it's not reliable as claimed by the article, then does it really serve the purpose? There might be a code-path in an innocent little app that calls brk() often and then gets tainted as causing IO.

Aside, thanks for reminding me about blktrace. I had forgotten the name last week when I needed the tool.
Updated with Kafka benchmarks: Evaluating persistent, replicated message queues
We started off as a taxi fare calculator several years ago. We are currently developing a booking system to be able to allow users to book a taxi within the website/app.
I can't believe you're the only one who listed wtfpod. I love Maron.
That's almost 15% of the company.
Every model's output quality is dependent on the quantity of data it ingests.

Statistics developed as a science because of the need to overcome the weakness of large samples being expensive. Machine learning has taken off as a direct result of the field's ability to take advantage of and get serious performance gains from the massive amounts of data being generated and leveraged recently.

Here is the best summation I can reference, and I can tell you from personal experience it is very true:

"The accuracy & nature of answers you get on large data sets can be completely different from what you see on small samples. Big data provides a competitive advantage. For the web data sets you describe, it turns out that having 10x the amount of data allows you to automatically discover patterns that would be impossible with smaller samples (think Signal to Noise). The deeper into demographic slices you want to dive, the more data you will need to get the same accuracy."

http://www.quora.com/Big-Data/Why-the-current-obsession-with...
Not what he said in the title though. Should be "don't link to non-canonical urls on github", line numbers are irrelevant.
Show HN: Fav.ninja – makes icons
Could .py have the greatest number of "ugly hacks" because the community's standards for explicit, "beautiful" designs is higher? This would be shown if languages like Go have a much higher prevalence for "ugly hack" than a language like Perl. (Where even core language features, ahem you can complete the thought.)
And no fewer than three "synergies" in there. Impressive.
People no longer use iPhones?
Antibiotic resistant chlamydia, genital herpes, hpv.
Fruits and Vegetables are Trying to Kill You
>I synthesized our strategic direction

>focusing our innovation investments

>our work toward synergies and strategic alignment

>Nokia Devices and Services integration synergies and strategic alignment

>simplify the way we work to drive greater accountability, become more agile and move faster

>Thank you for your support as we start to take steps forward in evolving our organization and culture

You can't make this shit up. It's straight out of Dilbert.
I've always linked to line numbers under specific commits or tags. Didn't know about the 'y' shortcut though, very helpful.
"We used to call this cramming, it allows you to pass an exam, but it's well-known that it doesn't lead to much in the way of long-term learning."

Learning in a compressed time-frame can be highly effective. The problem with college kids is they stop learning and practicing right after the exam.

If they kept spending a few hours each week for the next few months they would retain a large chunk of it.
You and I have a very different definition of fun, and meta-programming.
One of the great things about the Kindle is that I can sample a chapter or two of any book in the catalogue. This is a massive benefit to me and I'm quite happy to shell out five bucks to buy something if the first couple of chapters hook me. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but a free reading of the start of the book is an enormous benefit. It's a qualitatively different experience than hearing a track or a sample from a music service. So I'm not sure it really will help unknown authors become more widely read - it's free to try them already.
> or if your product is in the least critical 5%

In the brave new world of "mobile first, cloud first" what's the least critical 5%? In a "mobile first, cloud first" world, somehow the newly-acquired mobile division is getting the brunt of the cuts.
Is it phone carriers that are really on board with making fast lanes? I'm pretty sure Verizon paints it's red signs with the blood of innocent children.
How does laying off 18,000 people make you more "agile" ?
Products that sell make you more "agile"...
Its more a case of, we bought Nokia for their market, but we don't need their staff!
Do you care to explain more why you think he can't see clearly? I'm curious about your reasons for the statement. From my limited outside perspective, these layoffs are a good idea since there's bound to be a lot of redundancy and inefficiently in a company of this size
Or alternatively explaining the reasoning behind the layoffs. But nah, let's assume they lay off just because they want to.
Does anybody really believe that's going to be the result of this? This is just laying off the people they acquired from that $7.2 billion Nokia acquisition.
I live on the edge of that map and I can't wait for the Tenderloin to get gentrified like much of the rest of the city.

A significant portion of homeless in the Tenderloin are violently insane. I've had several threaten to kill me in the past few months. I've had someone come up and start pushing me until one of his friends yelled, "Leave that cracker alone!" I've had a homeless woman run up to me waving a stick, threatening to beat me up. It's gotten bad enough that I carry pepper spray.

There are some cool things in the Tenderloin, but I'd gladly trade them for not having to fear assault by crazy drug addicts.

Oh, and to those who think nothing is being done about homelessness or that the US doesn't have social programs for this: The city of San Francisco (a city of a million people) spends over $150 million a year on the problem. That works out to $34 per homeless person per day.[1]

1. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/S-F-spendi...
I agree I am for what they are doing but they shouldn't do it in away that endangers the officer or themselves.

Now if only we could get people to follow around our Senators and Congress men and catalog everything they are doing that would be great.
It's still working for me, but the big map is taking a long time to load. I expect they're having some trouble handling the influx of downloaders from the media attention.
Supercharge Apache PHP with mod_lsapi
I live in an area that had a relatively high number of returning vets about a year ago. We instituted a job training program at our college. Many institutions, especially community colleges, provide similar programs.

We have been surprised to see that some of the skills making these young people successful while serving have almost no translation into the civilian world, outside of being able to follow orders really, really well.

It's easy to forget that many members of the services do jobs that don't exist in the civilian world. It's easy to forget that many returning vets enlisted at 18 and have had no practical training to ease their transition back to civilian life.
Papers is a cool product / company based in UK (London IIRC).

edit: http://www.papersapp.com/
We've seen what W3C has put out so far (XML, XSLT, XHTML...) and they do seem out of touch with the needs of developers.

All I'm hearing from you is "the gods will help us" when it would be better if W3C were smart enough to specify a sane bytecode and then let innovation run its course on top of that, instead of trying to predict our needs (which they've shown time and again they're bad at).
How come everybody in north Texas is totally reasonable all of a sudden? People want to film the police but don't hate them, and the police is totally fine with it, but asks them to do so from a safe distance without distracting the police officers.
People can become illogical when faced with emotional scenarios. "If I loose my job my family/friends will think that I'm a failure". I was at IBM during a similar situations and it was people that were in the top 40%-20% that were the most worried.
I would've gone with "Billy, Billy don't you lose my number". :)
Short but informative
works well when planned well. example, if you don't know linux, you can download the whole linuxfromscratch.org and read a few page during weekdays, and burn your weekend implementing it... or if you don't know much c++, you can download and find a few pdfs and videos online during weekends and burn yourself during weekdays... at least it works for me and gave me food for survival... :)
Everyone talks like 'Last week in my email to you I synthesized our strategic direction'?

This guy is trying too hard to sound smart. Everything that's written by him reads like a try-hard freshman English major.
I was not surprised to see tex (even though it is not a popular language on GitHub). It seems that one have to resort to (ugly) hacks when dealing with it.

(That said, I love its fruits.)
That was my thought exactly. Scary to think that we now consider the US more harsh than China. Amazing what can happen in 20 years.
In 1.3 the GC is concurrent mark and sweep
Well that didn't last long. Clobbered by Viacom.
Uhm, how about

> The first step to building the right organization for our ambitions is to realign our workforce. With this in mind, we will begin to reduce the size of our overall workforce by up to 18,000 jobs in the next year. Of that total, our work toward synergies and strategic alignment on Nokia Devices and Services is expected to account for about 12,500 jobs, comprising both professional and factory workers. We are moving now to start reducing the first 13,000 positions, and the vast majority of employees whose jobs will be eliminated will be notified over the next six months.

That says '18000 job cuts' pretty clearly to me.

The rest is general high-level direction because 1. that's probably the only thing they have right now, it takes time to work out detailed restructuring, 2. that's the level at which high level managers operate - fuzzy strategic directives, up to lower-level management to implement them in specific ways.
I immediately felt the same and left a comment. But what would distinguish it is if "Go" had a high proportion of such comments, where "Perl" would have a low one.
No. The outcome is the goal.

It's rapidly becoming apparent that some algorithms (eg Deep Learning related models) work much better at scale than on small amounts of data. It doesn't make sense to discount these better algorithms because they don't work as well as other models when tested against less data.

It is also apparent that these models require significantly more computing power to perform well than other models. That doesn't make them less worthy, just a cost people must consider.

It turns out that intelligence is hard..
Has anyone been inside the process for determining the number of layoffs in a situation like this? Is the goal to cut payroll to a certain number, or what?
M dot or RWD. Which is faster?
It seems the police is having trust issues from the people there; with stories of cops beating up people, I'm not surprised either. This is a good initiative, but to be honest I think it should come from the police precincts themselves. I've read that some police forces use helmet cams, that's a good move - as long as they're mandatory and all footage is checked by an internal affairs department. If someone turns off the camera, that's suspicious.

tl;dr, police should work at regaining trust and respect themselves. Them not beating up people following them with a camera is a good first step.
Show HN: Pastor generates and stores passwords without storing any passwords
Maybe you could get a proof reader first?
That's another good point. The required computing power that is now cheap and widely available has changed our ability to even try these methods.
Or... nobody writes in Perl anymore... or... every Perl developer is a seasoned Perl developer.
It's just typical big-company-CEO babble, which I think they must teach you when you do an MBA. (And yes, Satya Nadella has an MBA.)
sousveillance to maintain the balance
> No disrespect, but surely that's your problem?

Not really: I have what is called a 17" screen. Such a screen size may still be common on desktop computers and has to be common on laptop computers. For tablets and smart phones, the screen widths are much narrower.

My solution is to copy the text to the clipboard, copy it into my favorite editor, and use a macro I wrote that reflows lines but honors the existing left margins.

The screen I have was a relatively large screen when I
bought it. But, sure, the
next time I buy a computer, and, thus, put up with all the struggle of getting all my software running and configured again, e.g., get the 2003 version of Microsoft Office running with all its many updates, no doubt I will get a wide screen.

Still, there is an issue: Readability. E.g., long newspapers used pages, like screens, so wide that they could easily have had 161 characters per line but, still,
stayed with narrow columns, supposedly for 'readability'. There are suggestions that a narrow column permits less left to right eye movement.

On readability, in

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8046141

below in this thread is

> "The aim of web design is not to use all available screen space. It is legibility. Text is most legible with no more than 70 characters per line."
I'm not a native English speaker but I find the construct of this sentence "Did you ever wanted to crowdfund your idea but don't know how" false. Maybe I'm wrong.
Interesting, especially since a severage package of $30k-$50k or how much ever it is, is basically like a seed funding round for each employee that is let go. Could be interesting...Microsoft Mafia :)
Fake screener probes passengers at SFO
Yes, employees can tell when their project is not a high priority. I don't think they have any visibility to whether they are in the bottom 25% or the bottom 5% though. So that's a quarter of the work force feeling the threat of layoffs.
And the SuperDevMode in GWT 3.0, will it be browser-only debugging like the current experimental SuperDevMode?

Because if it's browser only, then it would pose a problem for most Java developers, that like you mentioned prefer their existing tools, in this case the IDE-based debugger.
What device is a Samsung Nexus Android (S4)?
>If you thought contraception brought on a sexual revolution, a world without sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy or social restrictions will for the first time in thousands of years allow us to mate in the way nature intended: without restriction.

If this is how nature intended, why does it require thousands of years of technological progress to get there?
Based on the letter he recently sent out, it's extremely long considering the intended receiver (everyone), and you need to read it several times before you fully understand it. Which resulted in big newspapers not agreeing how it was to be understood (eg. Was Xbox a core business, or not)
This layoff round was kinda expected.
Thanks for writing that. As a European I'm always shocked by this aspect of San Francisco. Come on, you, the great land of free, surely can afford to help the disadvantaged. But it looks like nobody's even trying.

I was looking for pointers on how I can help - and here they are - thank you!
Kickstarting Django REST framework 3
Where's your blog? I'm curious to read more.
> Products that sell make you more "agile"

Uh, no, being capable of designing things cooperatively rather than playing political games and supporting status-quo is what makes you agile. Products that sell are the effect, not the cause.

It's much easier with a smaller company, though I doubt that's the primary motivation for the layoffs. More likely, they want to re-evaluate their internal culture, fire people most out of sync with what they'd like the culture to be and hire people that are more similar.
"[..] In addition, we plan to have fewer layers of management, both top down and sideways, to accelerate the flow of information and decision making. [..]"

At least on concrete and positive note in his email. Wondering if that tripled the initial estimate of 6k cuts.
Show HN: DConvStr: A better way to convert between double and string
See autozotbib zotero plugin. It may be close to what you are looking for.

https://www.zotero.org/support/plugins
I used pexpect as a base technology for ShutIt:

http://ianmiell.github.io/shutit/

it really is 95% of tcl's expect functionality, much easier to debug and understand. I'm grateful it exists, and it's much under-used I think.
Um.

Libraries.
I understand now, thanks.
His writing is shit. Compare his writing to anything from Bezos or Cook.
How do you propose a corporation the size of Microsoft decide who to fire without it leaking internally that layoffs are coming? It would have to be an incredibly coarse-grained and thus terrible decision.

Besides, I fail to the see the logic that advance warning isn't objectively good. If you're going to be laid off it's better to have some additional time on the job before your severance, even if there's uncertainty. And besides, how much peace of mind did employees at Microsoft have anyway? If they were paying any attention at all to how the company is doing everyone at the company had to see that layoffs and restructuring were inevitable sooner or later anyway.
This is where the Bob's come in...
Looks like about 15% of their employees, although 10% will be former Nokia folks.

This has to be part of a multi-year effort to reformat the company. I would expect that there are going to be soft costs that have multi-year impacts. People left behind having to take on more work without necessarily any incentive.

With numbers this high, there will be some degree of randomness in the people selected for the layoff. This will have long-term impacts on morale.

Microsoft has a ton of cash, right? Wouldn't it be smart for them to, once the layoffs are over, incent people to perform in the "new culture"? Give their key people more $, more responsibility, etc.?
How quickly does a model's accuracy and precision improve with increasing sample size? Indeed, there are counter examples (like the periodogram estimator for psd) where variance does not decrease with window length.

We often don't know which model to use. Occam's Razor [1] can be effective in favouring simpler models, but I tend toward the view that a good data scientist is invariably needed to build good models. Hence I view Big Data more as a consulting business than SaaS.

[1] For an excellent Bayesian discussion on why Occam's Razor actually works, see Chapter 28 of David J.C. MacKay's book 'Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms'.
This is pretty interesting, I haven't really seen a place that filters out the Degree Pedigree and name from the CV. I'm curious if they actually have any in depth data on this, because the hiring manager working the job sounds great in theory for them to know a lot about the job, but it can also really create an environment where everyone thinks the same way.
I'm curious to know how much of that $25.99 hardcover goes to the writer.