skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Information is certainly useful as a potential buyer. I was able to find open houses that matched what I was looking for much more quickly on Zillow. I was also able to get updates for those properties to see what they actually ended up selling for.
Yes, you described a case ("homogeneous P.P.") where the intensity, lambda, is constant over time. In the inhomogeneous P.P., there is a time-varying rate, lambda(t). The derivation of the properties in the inhomogeneous case is almost the same because the key property is independent increments.

When you add up the number of catastrophic events over an 11-year cycle, you get a sequence of "numbers of catastrophic CMEs"

N1, N2, ..., Nk

each of which is Poisson with intensity

\int_{cycle} lambda(t) dt [*]

If you ignore the larger-than-a-cycle variations in intensity, this integral is the same for each cycle. So the N's above are iid Poisson with some common parameter lambda_0, say.

Observing the N's for many cycles would allow you to estimate lambda_0. That's pretty much where the 1 in 15 comes from (indeed, lambda_0 is so low that there are only 0 or 1 events per cycle, so "estimation" is trivial).

The "easy" problem is that, even averaging over a cycle, the activity ([*] above) is not constant, e.g. this graph of sunspot numbers vs. time:

http://blogs.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/files/2012/07/su...

The "hard" problem is that the counts are not, in real life, independent, even across weeks-to-months time scales. This would invalidate the Poisson model at the ground level (see the talk referenced by @gone35 above).

There are reasons (e.g., Maunder minimum, see the plot above) to believe that the counts are also not independent at the decadal time scale.

Lack of independence would be a huge problem for any Poisson model. You'd have to go up to a doubly stochastic process, for example, in which lambda(t) is itself a random process.
It's not much of a problem in the UK. A great many of our clients (and ourselves) use the standard dividends + minimum wage method of paying themselves - that is, the ones who own their businesses, i.e. have not taken funding. HMRC accepts this method as a way for business owners to minimise their taxes. As I recall, the argument is something along the lines of "I am paying myself a salary for the basic director duties but effectively working for free on the company day to day, and collecting parts of the earnings as an owner."

It works fine and is very common for small businesses in the UK. I guess this goes to show how contextual accounting advice can be.

On that note, I'll add that I'm ever so glad that in all my interactions with them HMRC have been polite, friendly, supportive, helpful and nothing like the abusive business murderers that the IRS appear to aim to be - even when I fucked something up that was obviously my fault. I don't understand why the IRS feels that they need to be such assholes about everything. They should see their job as what it is: an essential part of the infrastructure that supports the economy and, indirectly, supports businesses. Their role should be to make business easier, not harder.
Jimmy Kimmel Convinces People That An Old Casio Is Apple’s iWatch
Washington, Minnesota officially endorse a “safer, faster” traffic merge
No bias here as I don't have any affiliation with Zillow/Trulia/Redfin but...

I feel like the only real disruptor in this market has been Redfin - the only one with actual real estate agents.

Zillow and Trulia are, put extremely simply, a map with ads on it. Useful tool, absolutely, but not going to shake up the real estate industry, which is undoubtedly a dinosaur.

When you look at a company like Redfin, who is an actual brokerage but with non commissioned agents, and lower commissions across the board, they're actually disrupting a market that has been ripe for change for years, and they now are offering a better service/product at a cheaper price. I'd expect big things out of them, and expect several brokerages will either change gears to match them or more competition to pop up here soon.
I was joking and not trying to be obnoxious, but I suppose it came off that way. I was more commenting on the impressive gravitational pull of something that has a good chunk of the world's population using it. To a very non-trivial percentage of the globe Facebook is a vital utility and communications tool. That's impressive, considering the turn-over rate of other popular social networks that are or nearly are defunct.

The fact that their revenue is growing, and not shrinking, is astonishing given that a couple years ago people were counting down the days until Facebook dropped off the leaderboard.
I would label any form of "selling leads" as advertising.
In Java8 you can #!/bin/jjs to start a Nashorn (JavaScript) script running on the JVM.

Nashorn has shell extensions that helps you write shell scripts https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/Nashorn/Nashorn+extens...

It's also a great way to bootstrap your Java app with some JSON config http://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2014/05/08/json-to-java-interfa...
> the only true substantial marketplace advantage of BC over sovereign currency is the ability to side-step the banking industry.

I see that as pretty much synonymous with the traditional libertarian rhetoric, considering that the banking industry is considered (at least by libertarians, and probably a lot of other people too) as essentially one with government.
Yeah, I've told some people who work in the financial sector about Trello, but they cannot use it because the would have to sanitize their input so much before regulators would let them send data outside of their company.
As long as you pay the taxes when they are due, it doesn't matter if you collected them with each paycheck or pay a lump sum at the end of your tax period. Smaller businesses are allowed to file (and pay) quarterly.

The smart thing to do is just withhold the tax with each paycheck. But, if you're a small business you do have until the end of the quarter to come up with the money. As I said, it's risky and generally a terrible idea. I was just explaining how companies come to find themselves in this position.
I'd like latency as well as speed. A lot of hotels I have been to have really high ping times.
Might be nice, but the site looks extremely sketchy with zero details about the app you'd like me to download and run on my computer.

Sorry, not gonna happen.
Actually as an S-Corp owner all the corporate income is taxed as REGULAR INCOME. It doesn't become a capital gains tax -- which is what I assume you mean by investment income.

However the US government wants you to also pay Social Security and Medicare tax, which you only pay on employment income. Therefore they force you to take a "reasonable"[1] salary from the company. Everything else left in the company's account at the end of the year is your non-employment income.

It avoids double taxation. It doesn't put you in a lower tax bracket.

1. Reasonable is determined by them.
It would,but most cars have a way to disable it(in mine if you triple-click the lock button it locks the doors but leaves the alarm off).
> “I did not get my Spaghetti-O's, I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this.”

Outrageous!
Good. When I have a problem, I can get a hold of a human at Zillow and they're nice to work with.

As far as I know Trulia is just a very complicated cron job.
In Malaysia and Thailand some BK and McDonald's deliver. But then again, I don't know if it's up to them to decide or if it's being done because of the competitive environment. You can basically find great food at almost any given time within walking distance.
How not to die (as a startup)
FogBugz users: Did you know you can drag FogBugz cases into Trello cards? Spolsky shared the secret...

https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/433355023636897792
its only _locked_ in if you sign a contract with a realtor (which can actually be negotiated, shop around). if you do a 'for sale by owner' you have no such obligation. even if the other party tries to use an agent. the agent will often 'ask' if you offer a 3% buyers commission, which is, totally up to you. even that is negotiable at that point. the downside is, they have less motivation for showing your house. but both times that i did, i hired a real estate lawyer to get the contracts and such, but handled the 'showing' and negotiations myself. in a hot market, a good agent can earn their % in patience and marketing.
Awesome photo of Ly! His smile really shows how good it feels to help :)
I've never had an unpleasant interaction with the IRS. Unlike virtually any other creditor I've ever dealt with, the people I've talked to who actually work for the IRS have been courteous and helpful. I'm not the only person who's said this. The IRS has acquired a personalized reputation for being jerks, not unlike that of Customs, but which totally doesn't square with how the agency actually acts.

I say this as someone who once had a pretty decent unexpected 5-figure liability that I had to work out with them.

I also don't feel like zealous enforcement of unremitted payroll tax is particularly abusive, since that's essentially describing companies stealing from their employees.
But they had a zero chance of converting you to a subscriber to begin with. You represented only an expense to them.
Oakland is getting expensive too from all the overflow from SF. http://www.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2014/04/17/confirmed-again...

I've heard people calling it the Brooklyn of the Bay Area.
> So if I (as a customer or as a service) make a mistake I'm completely hosed.

In other words, the costs of making mistakes is internalized. I think externalities are a bad thing.

> And since the service isn't insured (yay no regulation),

Insurance and regulations (and by that, I assume you mean government regulations) are not the same thing. There is a lot government regulation unrelated to insurance, and a lot of insurance unrelated to government regulation.

> a mistake on one customer's account can harm everyone else.

How's that?

> Escrow is not a competitive advantage.

What do you mean by that? I think escrow is a great idea, but I don't know what you mean by saying that it's not a competitive advantage.
I think we're discussing slightly different things. I'd like to eventually get this line of reasoning closer to where you are, but right now my interest in describing ADTs has less to do with representation of useful things and more to do with "these types form a basis for thinking about computation".

Effectively, products are the quintessential "grouping" notion, sums the quintessential "choice" notion, and implications the quintessential "hypothetical" notion. So those are pretty important for describing any computation.

All that said, I really like relational types and wish they were more commonly used. I do think it takes some effort to model them in ADTs and that a system which provided them more directly would be fun.
realtor's often have 3 days to 'pocket' a listing before they have to put it in the mls. these 'pocketed' listings can be privately shared and thats where realtors keep a little advantage.
As far as I can tell (and I've read LW since 2010), you're asserting that on no evidence.
This just means that they were running their business off of their account balance on B of A's site. It's also known as "flying by the seat of your pants."
That's the one. I'd be worried if there was more than one. Like you said, more power to them. Pretty cool it exists and honestly wouldn't mind trying it sometime.
I was originally using Trulia to send me emails on new homes in the market, and it works fairly well. Problem is that the data can be sort of dated fairly quickly as it doesn't get MLS data immediately (at least in my area). This is sort of troublesome in markets where a home can be sold in 48 hours from being listed.

Someone on HN mentioned Redfin, and I tried it out. It's incredibly fast (guessing 24-48 hours quicker than Trulia) to get emails on new listings as it's using the MLS data directly. Give it another year, and I feel like the UI will be on par with Trulia on the desktop.
It's rather surprising that the IRS wasn't dramatically more aggressive about this. Every year they had people submitting tax returns claiming taxes paid that weren't paid, for years. I would have expected the IRS to have searched the Earth for this company.
This hypothesis seems to rest in the flawed idea that quantum processes must unfold as if by a step by step calculation which consumes time, in the ordinary temporal dimension. And so certain complex state changes are impossible simply because they don't have enough time to execute within some predetermined slot, or something like that. Time in the simulation is not the same as time in the simulator. Come on, this is not even basic science as much as basic sci-fi! :)
> My point wasn't that these things aren't possible with BTC. Rather, my point was that these problems don't go away just because you're not using a traditional currency. Which means the overhead associated with these problems doesn't go away, either.

I think the advantage is that alternatives to the traditional banking system introduce competition in the banking and financial services industry. Obviously, overhead doesn't magically go away, but I would expect competition to result in an increase in efficiency.
Another in the long line of languages that are created to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Even worse, created as a way to force P&C carriers to be tightly coupled to a proprietary piece of software. With one industry being the only relevance for the language and that industry with usually the worst IT technical talent available.

I get it, Guidewire has some very talented engineers. Probably at least a few of the best in the valley. However, you're pushing it out to the dregs of the IT world and hoping to make it fly and gain adoption when those using it are generally just drawing a paycheck for the pulse their body maintains.
This is just how things work in a lot of industries.

You promise the world to make a sale, then once you've signed, work frantically to make the vision you sold a reality. If you were open and honest, you wouldn't sell a thing.

The only people who lose out are those who take salespeople on their word and don't get everything agreed in writing. Never take a salesperson on their word.
I've often wondered why startups locate in the SF/Bay area instead of elsewhere.

Right now outside of truly hot tech areas like SF the hiring scene is stacked heavily in employers' favor: there are fewer job opportunities with fewer companies. That's true even in places like St. Louis (or Austin, or any of a number of other supposedly "hot startup" areas). I get some recruiter-spam from St. Louis and Austin based recruiters looking for candidates for "hot" startups and established businesses in the areas, but these opportunities are all with hospital/medical companies (STL) or corporate-y .NET type stuff (Austin). It's a bit baffling, actually, since my resume pretty clearly puts me far outside of those boxes.

It seems to me there's an opportunity there for would-be startups to exploit. On the other hand, the very same phenomenon leads to a kind of resistance: the density of "talent" to draw from reduces substantially outside of the SF/Bay area because a lot of it has already been drawn here to the very same job imbalance.
OK. But why are these founders so arrogant and pennypinching that they don't just contract or hire someone to do this for them?
Woah, slow down there bud. You're not allowed to have negative opinions on anything a entrepreneur does on Hacker News.
and the most important truth in all of this.... the agent/brokers make peanuts compared to the mortgage companies.
Of course there will be transaction fees if Bitcoin sticks around long enough. There are already optional but de facto transaction fees for certain types of transactions. I'm pretty sure those fees are still significantly cheaper than doing equivalent transactions through the traditional banking system.
Nice to see some PR about quantum computing that's not related to D-Wave.
Oh I was curious too: the whole area is lit up like Tron and painted with racing stripes all over it, in the bottom floor of this large, dark concrete garage. It was really cool.

However, it was late (22:00) and there were just no cars checking in at the time. I had a mental note to find a YouTube video and then this link popped up... =)
Crashed firefox mobile
Problem is the data is so sketchy on Trulia and Zillow. I'd be interested in a house only to find out it already had a contingent offer accepted. They need to figure out how to get realtime data from the MLS systems.

Trulia and Zillow do have the best meta-data on houses though. School info, crime, purchase history, walk scores, etc.
Perhaps a naive question here, but I'm interested in emacs now, and I need to ask: does your left pinky finger get used to all the CTRL and ALT key combos, or do you change the key bindings, or are there special keyboards meant for emacs use, or what? Two minutes into the tutorial I was already thinking about whether there should be some sort of hack to use CAPSLOCK instead of CTRL...
It's taxed as regular income, but the premise under which it's exempt from the payroll taxes every other worker has to pay is that it's not normal income, but rather the return from an investment in the company.

For people in our industry, it's hard to see a definition of "reasonable" that would be financially beneficial. You start a tech company. You pull $100k out every year, putting you right smack in the middle of the income distribution for experienced tech people. But because of a loophole, you get to reclassify $50k of that $100k as a distribution, and not pay FICA on it. To support that (sorry) scam, you claim $50k is your "reasonable" salary --- putting you way on the low side of the industry. How convenient.

People obviously do it and get away with it. I'm glad it's an audit flag.
Summary of front-end performance optimization
RationalWiki editors (including me ... and Dmytry, which is part of why he can be an asshole on LW) have had email from people traumatised by the basilisk. It turns out you can't think your way out of things you did think your way into, too. This is why the RationalWiki article http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk was created, because personal email doesn't scale.
I wanted to use Kiln but then they silently stopped supporting the server version and removed it from their webpage. Good that I had not started with it before that happened.

We use FogBugz, hosted in house (can't have our data out in the open for several reasons) and with some custom plugins to integrate with other in house systems like serial number lookup. I recently learnt that they most likely kind of cancelled that codebase too, but did not tell anybody. They just stopped to provide updates and also removed the excellent and powerful ability for plugins with the "performance update" enabled (instead they but popular plugins directly in their code):

http://help.fogcreek.com/fogbugz-release-notes
http://help.fogcreek.com/7562/fogbugz-plugins

The only info I can find on the future of FogBugz is here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19543512/is-kiln-for-your...

A VM is not really a solution for me for several reasons, especially if plugins are gone and our own will not work. I can only speculate, but it really looks that way. (They send newsletters to customers and announced the "performance update", but never talked about how and when this would come to "FogBugz for your Server")

I wish they were able keep the version for your server with plugins and without VM around.
To cite one example, here's Texas:

http://www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/Docs/LA/htm/LA.61.htm
I noticed that when using ghostery you can't do anything; clicking login doesn't do anything, neither does clicking sign up.
It's probably obvious to most, but I recently came to the realization that if you're paying off debt, a high COL works in your favor, whereas if you're living off cash, it works against you.

That means that if you're fresh out of college with lots of student loans, you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't move to a big city and get a high paying job. You can effectively inflate your way out of your debt by making your salary much bigger in comparison (assuming COL and salaries roughly match up).

And if you're about to retire (without having Fuck You Money), you should move somewhere cheap, all else equal. The same could be true for many bootstrapped startups.
Urban Jungle a Tough Challenge for Google’s Autonomous Cars
Glassdoor Debuts Job Explorer, A New Interactive Job Search Mapping Tool
Check out OpenHomes.co - 1 year-old startup. They take 1% commission, list your house on the NMLS, and give you the tools to take care of boilerplate legal etc.
Well, that's good to hear! This reputation the IRS has makes me worried about the idea of some day operating in the US. It's good to know that they actually employ human beings rather than attack dogs.

From what you describe, they sound much like HMRC.

And yes, withholding payroll tax (or VAT) and not passing it on to the government is pretty crappy. HMRC is typically understanding if this is a few months or even a year down the line and they think the business will be able to pay up - they frequently agree payment plans for such things - but three years without noticing kinda takes the piss.
Also, how can N bodies orbit each other? Don't they know there is no analytic solution to their problem? Sheesh! (Maybe they are using floating-point?)
You keep telling yourself that. I've had email from them.

(It's not stupidity - as far as I can tell it's a combination of aspergism, OCD, a weak sense of self and reading way too much LessWrong and cut'n'pasting it into their heads. LW is a superstimulant for people of this description, which is how an organisation that really truly isn't trying to start a cult has inadvertently accumulated something around itself that is highly reminiscent of one.)
Tips on Configuring Elasticsearch for High Performance [Slideshare Deck]
Well, that's just embarrassing.
Ask HN: Which mobile ad network do you use?
I am trying to publish my first app to the iOS app store. I am having trouble deciding on which ad network to use. There seem to be a lot of options in addition to google and iAds. Also I cannot get any insight into the effectiveness of specific ad networks. So can HN recommend one for me or at least educate me a little?
Hey Yuri, 2 questions:

1) For my personal/own company use, can I set up AeroFS on my FreeNAS server? I'd like to have files synced between it and my MBP. Helpful if you could point to any articles.

2) I'm overseeing a large datacentre deployment for a brand new office tower, and I'm thinking it may be worthwhile to offer AeroFS services to tenants in the building. I have a VMWare ESXi server running here. Is it possible to run the AeroFS central server as an appliance? We'd likely need to provision a separate SAN to provide appropriately redundant storage.
For the record, the only performance problem that Scala implicits give is just extra compile time, but there's no runtime overhead of using it. (as compared to explicitly call the function)
On the other hand the printed edition has no servers, no CDN, no developers, no sysadmins, no pay-per-click advertising pipeline, no app developers, no tech support, and no 30% to Apple for Newsstand.

I'd like to see what the cost differences are, but it's pretty hard to speculate.
Why boarding an airplane feels unfair and chaotic