skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But buying a house is an enormously complicated transaction

Why?

Where I'm from, buying a home is a few pages at most. You need to put down the buyer, the seller, the object, the price, the down-payment and the date.

Same for getting a mortgage from a bank, it's a page of contract, and a page of terms and disclaimers. You need the buyer, the object, the mortgage amount, the date, and the type of mortgage.

(The trick, of course, is that where I'm from, the general proceedings of buying a home is regulated by law, so the only thing that needs to go on a contract is the specifics and deviations from the norm.)
Powering big data at Pinterest with AWS, Quoble Hadoop
That only works out if the salary you can make increases in proportion with the cost of living. I haven't lived in a lot of places, but at least based on the few cities I have lived in, I don't believe the two are anywhere near that tightly correlated.

For example, consider Milwaukee vs. Chicago. Chicago's a major finance and banking center, and a huge percentage of the people living there are in some kind of profession. Milwaukee's still mostly a blue collar town. This difference shows in the very different costs of living: An apartment in Milwaukee costs about half of what an equivalent one costs in Chicago, restaurants cost less for similar quality meals, drinks are way cheaper, etc.

But it does not follow that you can earn twice as much money working as a developer in Chicago. The same job in Chicago might pay a bit better, but the difference is modest. This is because the two cities are so close to each other that at least in tech they're essentially the same job market. There's even a busy commuter train connecting the two cities.

In short, it's not necessarily doing yourself a disservice if you don't move to a big city and get a high paying job. You might do yourself an even better service by moving to a small city and getting a high paying job.
Wait what? What this article is arguing is totally absurd - just because we can't model certain physical objects, they cannot exist?! That's like saying that since we can't model three gravitational objects interacting (i.e. the numerical solutions diverge, therefore to properly model the system, we would require increasing amounts of memory and time), therefore they cannot exist.

I'm not saying that the physical claim is wrong - I'm just saying that the explanation in the article is severely lacking/logically inconsistent.
I don't think OP was trying to offend. It was a purely logical assertion that sexual attraction does not correlate with rape/molestation. You could have put any form of sexual preference there and it wouldn't change the meaning.

I think the point here was that [and I could be wrong] we shouldn't assume pedophile == child molester because pedophilia is currently classified as a mental disorder but more importantly, as a sexual attraction to prepubescent children which does not in any way indicate a tendency to cause harm. For all you know, in 60 years, we might start seeing moves to accept pedophilia as a socially acceptable sexual orientation as we did we homosexuality. Let's not forget the dark history of homosexuality's acceptance into society too soon as traces still linger even today

Again, purely logical statement and not intended to insult.
Fixed: A Mobile App That Fights Your Parking Tickets For You
We can observe processes that rely on lack of observation in the microscopic world. Look up the one-slit and two-slit experiments[0]. In the two-slit experiment, we don't observe which slit the photon takes, but we can observe the interference pattern on the screen.

The two-slit experiment works with photons, but not with bullets, or cars, or baseballs.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_slit_experiment
try http://www.speekof.me
TV is better than movies
Yes, latency is very important. We found that there is a strong negative correlation between bandwidth and latency (faster connections tend to have lower response times). That's why we decided to focus on speed first. We are planning to add ping testing as well.
only thing i had to do was for macs, i had to switch option key to my command key. there was no way i was able to use option key for the emacs meta key.
"Positive network externalities":

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

The bay area has 1) a large, talented workforce, 2) great universities, 3) lots of venture capital, as well as people who have "already done it" to give advice. Plus it's a nice place to live if you don't mind the traffic. Granted, opening an LLC costs X compared to a much cheaper Y in Nevada, but that's ultimately kind of small potatoes compared to all the things in California's favor.

That said, I'm more interested in bootstrapping something: what people like patio11, Rob Walling and company have achieved doesn't look like science fiction, and they're doing it in places that are not Silicon Valley.
If you're excited by Redfin, take a look at Keith Rabois's new startup: http://www.opendoor.com/

They're looking to flatten the home-selling process and cut out inefficiencies. More here from one of the co-founders:

http://www.quora.com/What-can-be-said-about-Keith-Raboiss-ne...
If something can neither be modeled nor observed, in what sense does it exist?
You're missing one other consideration: retirement savings.

If you have a 401(k) plan, you can contribute up to $17,500 of your salary each year as an elective deferral. While it's possible to come out ahead earning a lower salary in a lower cost of living area, for most folks, it's generally going to be easier to set aside the $17,500/year for retirement with a higher salary. If you have a decent employer match, a higher salary can also be meaningful over time.

Of course, it is possible to obtain the best of both worlds (make a lot of money in a low cost of living area). You don't need to be in a high cost of living area to own a profitable business or become a consultant, and folks who are self-employed can set up their own 401(k)s.
That's not even remotely my least favorite, as at least salespeople who overpromise too much tend to get caught out.

My least favorite is salespeople who give product away for free (including the support thereof), hurting the bottom line, since their commission is on gross.
That's exactly why we're spending the extra time to polish our open source release to make it really easy to install, fully documented, etc.
This is definitely on point. I've worked for a fairly large regional MLS at one point and interacted with a fair number of other MLS's and what I've found out about this business was pretty mind boggling.

Vast majority of them are stuck in the past (think 1990s) and their only competitive advantage is restricting access to information. A typical real estate agent (with very few exceptions, I'd guess <5%) is adding little to no value to the transaction and is simply taking a middle-man fee. They are in general petrified of places like Redfin, Zillow and Trulia and they do anything in their power to maintain the current business model. Generally it involves limiting access to "their" data and coming up with whatever legal roadblocks they can use to defend against other sites.

The agents

However, they are sitting on an absolute treasure trove of data which would be amazing in the hands of the right people.
My father once told me that what separates people from animals is that people have honor.

People without honor, well...
As someone who has worked in a closely related industry to real estate, I can confirm that technologically the industry is at least 10 years behind. Example: Most of these companies are still using giant XML files pushed around via FTP to send data to each other.
Here's the paper: https://www.facebook.com/publications/546316888800776/

The methods are quite different, but I think at root, it's just more being able to take advantage of much more training data.

The 97.53% "human performance" number comes from my paper from a few years ago [0]. We initially thought that there's no way we would be able to do that well on this task (manually) either, but then we tried it and our scores were much higher (very close to 100%). So the verification task on LFW is actually not that hard, although in part it's because the dataset consists of public figures and therefore you can recognize many of the people outright if you've seen them before. (We tried to measure this in our human studies but found it to be inconclusive.)

3% is not the right way to look at error rates, btw. See [1] for why. But also, face verification is more of a low-level building block for recognition, because most real-world applications don't directly care about saying whether two faces are the same person or not ("verification"), but "who is this person?" ("recognition"). A simple way to build recognition from verification is to compare a test face against all faces in the database, and then take the one that gets ranked highest. In that (simplistic) scenario, your recognition rate scales (very roughly) as acc^lg(N), where N is the number of people in your database and acc is the verification accuracy. So if, e.g., you had 100,000 people to recognize from and your verification accuracy was 97.53%, you might have a recognition accuracy of ~66% (very roughly!), which is not great.

Finally, there are already lots of applications to face recognition other than surveillance, and many more waiting to be discovered.

[0] http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~neeraj/projects/faceverifica...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7393438
I'm pretty sure in reality Facebook also uses your social network graph to restrict the candidate set and get higher recognition accuracy. This makes it hard to compare Facebook's results to a pure recognition algorithm.

On that note, Facebook could do even better by restricting the candidate set based on time, precise location, and compass orientation, given that most mobile users have Facebook installed and are running it in their pockets when they get their picture taken by others. (They could do rough recognition purely based on position and orientation without even looking at the camera image, if they really wanted to, so with the camera image it could really be near 100% accurate, and even work if you take a picture of a friend's back.)
What does modeling have to do with observability?
The rankings are heavily biased against tax rates and employee's rights. They focus on the factors that are related to cutting costs, while ignoring the factors that are related to generating revenues or operating the business, such as access to capital, trained/educated/trainable employees, and customers.

California and New York, both frequently at the bottom of such lists, have all 3 in spades, which is why they're great for businesses that engage in active business activities (sales or services). The states at the "top" of the lists are great for businesses that depend heavily on the exploitation of labor and cost-cutting to generate revenue or growth.

I represent quite a few companies that left California for tax reasons, and ended up coming back. They lost more businesses than they saved in taxes by moving to "business friendly" states.
If someone tried to take over my twitter handle and domain name, I would be upset.

If someone used the same name that I am using for an internet nickname for myself (a person) for their company, I would essentially not care. At worst I'd be annoyed at an increased number of "@" mentions that comes from there being namespace collision.

And, frankly, this happens all the time. There is a ton of name collision out there happening as names which are sufficiently unique for a local context get moved online, which is a global context. Generally, when people find out there's been some name confusion, they are mildly annoyed by the inconvenience of people "@" messaging the wrong account, but not indignant that someone dared use the same name as them. Mostly when I see this happen I see people getting upset about the people "@" messaging them not checking the name more carefully, not at the company for picking the name. That is a pretty strong indicator, to me, that most people wouldn't consider this a "dick move".
+1 on starting with your old friends. The one time I was in this position I called the founder and quickly learned it wasn't going to be worth the effort. Saved them an unnecessary distraction and saved me from counting money I didn't have.

If the company is doing well though, they'd be decently motivated to get some shares out of the hands of a former employee and into the hands of an insider (namely, their VCs).
I used Visual Studio, Zend Studio and Komodo IDE in the past. Some (it's not exhaustive list) of the things Emacs can do and mentioned IDEs can't:

Receiving and sending emails. Being an IRC/Jabber/others client. Displaying images and pdfs directly. Bulk editing of many lines, even from different files, at once. Drawing ASCII-art diagrams. Playing tetris. Being an amazingly powerful "calculator" (http://nullprogram.com/blog/2009/06/23/). Transparently editing file on remote machines, also executing commands on remote machines transparently. Formatting ASCII-art tables. Editing outlines/todos with support for semantic movement inside it (Org-Mode). Working in a terminal. Working in a background (--daemon mode) so that new instances just connect to the backend, reducing startup time to almost zero. Dumping a whole Emacs into single binary - all the memory Emacs uses is written to disk and next time you run it it starts very quickly, because you don't need to compile,, load and run any libraries; it's like suspend/hibernate for OSes. Having a decent mode for almost every file format out there. Displaying info about currently running OS processes, like top (proced). Multiple cursors. Rectangular selection and manipulation of rects. Registers for storing pieces of text, locations in files and others. Easy running of external commands, with or without capturing their output. Find&replace with an Elisp function as replacement (quick and effective way to transforms more complex files). Being a terminal emulator (you can run mc inside Emacs, although it's not the best possible experience). Being a shell (Eshell). Easy integration with external REPLs (like IPython, with colors and all). Displaying and working with IPython Notebooks. Splitting windows horizontally and vertically as many times as you want. If you made a bit too many windows (these are Emacs windows, they live inside one OS level window) you can enable tiling window manager for them. Easy integration with external linters for many languages. Displaying man and info pages. Having easily reachable docstrings for all the functions implemented in the editor. Hierarchical keymaps. Semantic editing of sexp (any lisp) code.

And probably much more - I still learn about some new, crazy useful feature at least once a week.

IDEs win in the autocompletion department and project navigation, but that depends on a language being used. For example editing Python with Jedi and Jedi.el (and Rope) in Emacs feels like working with full-featured IDE, with very accurate, context sensitive autocompletion, refactoring support, visual debugger and others.
This program at the University of Maryland[1] seems like it would be worth it.

[1]http://www.mte.umd.edu/
I see the negative effects of early merging regularly. The freeway onramp closest to my home leads to a frequently congested portion of the freeway. People merging ASAP often end up having to stop on the onramp, blocking traffic behind them which can then back up onto surface streets. They do this despite the onramp merge lane continuing for quite some time after it first connects to the freeway.
Disliking travel is the obvious reason (and to be fair, if you're on the board of 10+ companies, that can quickly become a lot of travel). And it's not just for board meetings; it's travel for the board member or for the ceo in order to use the board member's contacts, etc.
What Closed Source Means To Me – GitHub
even if zillow & trulia merge, none of the potential disruptors in the real estate listings space (zillow, trulia, redfin, fsbo, etc.) have any real chance until the MLS system is dismantled... and brokers have a massive disincentive against that--brokers have exclusive access to property data via their local MLS before anyone else. the MLS's allow some access to this data to zillow & trulia, but will never let them have instant & complete info since it's the MLS's core competitive advantage.

agent commissions will remain at 5-7% as long as the MLS system is in place. but MLS's are not going away any time soon. even the DOJ looked into breaking them up via legal action and gave up.

interestingly, new york city does not have a strong MLS presence, but is basically an oligopoly of 6 major brokers, so the effect is the same.

figure out a way to dismantle the MLS system and you're looking at a >billion dollar business (just note that zillow & trulia have been trying for ~decade, so it's not an easy problem).
Or

The granularity of the simulation of our reality is the Planck length. This constraint does not apply to the real, underlying, reality within which our simulation is embedded.
"Right. But the fact that one has to become a member of the group means that it's not an open protocol."

What?

There are plenty of open protocols produced by membership based groups.

I believe you have redefined open to also include some notion of governance, which, while popular, was never the case previously :)

If you want to define what you mean by open protocol, that would be helpful, since everyone seems to have a different definition nowadays ...
$40 dollars a day or $5.50 an hour! I think will park my car myself. Most valets cost half that with tip included.

How can a 1.2 million dollar be feasible when you can hire or even create a valet company for fractions of the costs? I trust a human with my car over a robot at this point in time.
Show HN: YO egg-timer
I don't think so. There are so many early adopter, visionary customers here you can sign up on spec to pay you to develop your product.
Their challenge is they have to scale via people, as opposed to via technology (like Google) or money (Hedge Funds). This can be very difficult.

That said, if the plan is right, sometimes it is energy that's required to make things happen. If some very wise board members have set the right strategy, I think he can pull it off.

I'm not sure if it's any harder or easier than Facebook, but in today's economy, the right skills and intensity are more important than the longest resume.
No. Alignment is done by every face verification method, and even the "new" 3d alignment done here is on par with other alignment methods in practice today.

At their talk at CVPR, they made clear that the biggest factor in getting their numbers was having tons of training data and a high-capacity learning model. The paper even shows that if you replace their 3d alignment with a standard 2d affine alignment (something people were doing 15 years ago), you lose only 1.5% on LFW (table 2).
Just do it! yeah, go for it. That's the point of going to startup school, build your network, connect with like minded individuals.
This is pretty brilliant, but how do you encourage this without a light or years of including it in driver education?
I'm a competent Lisp developer (and fanatic), yet I use Vim. I've also met Vim-bashing Emacs fanatics who didn't know the second thing about Lisp (the first thing, of course, being all those parentheses).
Yep I love the idea of a decentralized, free network (mesh or otherwise) but it has to be very specialized or it gets used for CP all day long. I think the answer is way less bandwidth so it can only be used basically for text-based data - chat, scientific stuff, streams from temperature and wind gauges, etc.
Wondered the same thing. A waffle taco? How about an egg burrito with some salsa and cheese? That's my idea of a Taco Bell Breakfast (go Del Taco Breakfast!)
The thing with products like BK, TB and such is this:

Inventing something is "easy"

Now, after inventing it you have to:

- engage your whole supply chain for the needed ingredients and make sure they reach their destination

- engage marketing, produce all the needed support (packaging, new menus, new billing items, etc)

- create procedures and train staff

- deploy new equipment if needed
Sure, but the numbers in the research paper are "pure" (i.e., not using all this additional information). In production, I'm sure they must be using all these additional cues as well.
Go is an incredibly complex game but its complexity is not arbitrary. DF has both go like depth complexity and arbitrary waste of time complexity. Many people like depth but don't like bad interfaces.
The potential downfall of general measurements like this is large conferences like WWDC, where if there's a geek in every room, the whole-hotel performance is going to suffer unless they've provisioned massive peak bandwidth.

(Thinking of the Marriott near Moscone.)
The funny thing is that this lie would only work outside of Boston - in Boston proper, companies big and small see this all the time, and are very alert for it (in part because of the presence of successful Extension alumni at the firms).
We do this all the time for features on our roadmap, if a high level client wants to "sign up" and basically pay for the new feature we move it up in the roadmap.
You are not too far off. I would use 730 hours = 365 * 24 / 12 instead of 720. You could add little (or not so little) things like the cost of IOPS, bandwidth differential, etc. You could add a little more for the core diffs. But all that won't close the gap.

Regardless, if you want the cheapest, I would go with Digital Ocean, though it is a different kind of hosting. For Rackspace, you really go when you need their support people and not just a server.

I hear a lot more developers this year going to DO than last year, but I have never used them though, trying to stick with the "devil I know."
In practice zipper merging works amazingly well. MNDOT has used signage to tell drivers to maintain speed and stay in their lanes for the past few years of construction in the northern Twin Cities. You wouldn't believe how much faster traffic moves when these simple reminders are posted.

The problem is that without the signs (and enforcement) drivers in the Twin Cities Metro regularly shoot to seal any gap that may allow someone signaling to enter their lane, regardless of the distance to the merge point. This behavior also occurs in on-ramp situations where drivers are entering the highway and slow lane drivers refuse to move over, but don't want you in front of them!

I have driven in many states and never has the mentality that you cannot, MUST NOT, let someone ahead of you been as bad as it is here. Minnesota Nice, indeed.
There is such an advantage to being in a startup-dense area, why would you fund companies without this overwhelming advantage? You have a choice, and the valley startups come out on top.
This is such a poorly written article. I can't even begin to point out the mistakes. I'm sure Scott Aaronson will write a response and strike this down.
> "Because it can have potentially harmful ramifications for collaborative boards, permanently deleting a board is not currently possible. We kindly ask that you close the board"

> "Because of the collaborative nature of lists, they cannot be deleted. We ask that you please archive them per the above."

How come you can delete cards then?
I hope this catches on and it can be used to shame and blame hotel chains. I can't recall a single instance where hotel wifi, let alone wire, as even remotely fast.

These hotels normally charge $20-50 per day of internet and they provide shitty service. It drive me mad. I have learned that you can complain and get some significant bonus points out of it. I wish more people complained about the internet service in order to push for faster speeds and better latency, let alone not having your connection drop.