skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sometimes what people call luck may be observation, preparation, positioning or things of this nature....yes, that's true.
These are things that can be controlled. I'm sure we have all met people who believe they have simply gotten unlucky while it's obvious to the outside observer that their actions resulted in the consequence they consider bad luck.

But, there is an element of random chance that exists outside our control and always will. This is what I call real luck and there isn't any use in trying to explain "why" because there is no "why" that we can understand. It's just a flip of the dice from our perspective. These kind of articles should really differentiate and stop lumping behavior in with luck. They aren't the same.
Uber is one of the most exciting companies in the world to watch right now
Couldn't agree more, modoc.

Also, while prediction is a dangerous game, I foresee the combination of increased investment in public transit, and the advent of affordable driverless cars, adding up to helping suburbs remain a terrific place to grow up. As my hometown (Arlington, MA) was in the 70's and 80's, and as my new adopted town (Duxbury MA) is today.

Related tangent: IMHO quality of life is less about urban/suburban(/rural), than it is about neighborhoods. I posted about this topic earlier this year: http://www.chrisweekly.org/2014/01/22/neighborhoods-matter-h...
I remember getting lost on hornet.org somewhere around this time frame, impressed by so much free music (if a bit cheesy by today's standards). There was plenty to do, if you knew where to look, and like others have said: IRC/Usenet were helpful to that end. Local BBSs were still around but starting to fade, but some (WorldGroup) had the capability to serve as Usenet readers or IRC clients for machines that didn't have their own installed.

Gosh, I think I still have an archive of MODs, S3Ms, and others somewhere on a backup drive.

This article does offer a window into the life of the average person who saw little use in the Internet, either by lack of curiosity or the walled gardens of AOL. I think it should also serve as a warning to us to keep the Internet open.
I don't like to usually "me too", but the grand parent comment very accurately described my experience of suburbs as well.

We jokingly referred to it as "the suburban cultural wasteland", because you had to walk 2-3 miles to find anything that wasn't more houses, a grocery store with corporate specialty stores attached (Starbucks coffee, various automotive places, etc), or a school.

Most of what you could find in that radius was a mall, which was just a bigger version of the grocery store thing or various pieces of civil infrastructure (parks, community center, etc).

You had to go 4-5 miles to find anything that was even slightly not cookie-cutter, which put it at a fairly impossible distance to walk routinely.

I'm contrasting this with the city I now live in that the suburbs were around, and I'm pretty sure I could hit an oddball business with a baseball from my window.
Will you be explaining how you didn't set up redundancy in the system to handle inevitable outages?
Status page: https://status.digitalocean.com/
Mozilla writes patches against all supported Firefox versions (that's what being supported means!), and as already stated, Debian only uses officially supported versions for Iceweasel. So no, there are never security patches that Debian needs to backport for stable because they are always already upstream.
Then go read http://www.nicta.com.au/pub?id=7371 :)
You need stories to explain why renting space to transients in high density residential areas might cause issues?
I've never understood this one. To me Pepsi always tasted like a diet product. Sure it is sweeter, but never the right kind of sweet. And I can't comprehend the people who can't tell the difference between Pepsi and Coke.
Is this BizSpark for Google products?
The article mentions that property taxes only cover between 4 and 65% of the costs of the suburban infrastructure. Raising property taxes 50% to 2000%(!) would simultaneously cover that revenue shortfall, discourage suburban sprawl and encourage infill.

Obviously such a large tax increase could not happen overnight, but it does seem the obvious solution, or at least part of it.
I host Minimal Reader on Digital Ocean and have to seriously reconsider them for production use at this point. I'm considering switching back to AWS, but want to explore my options. Do any of you have recommendations on an equivalently priced alternative?
So he was lucky to be observant and positive. Heh.
It's sinister. Sorry. Even as you describe it.

There is a huge conflict of interest with what you described.
[ANNOUNCEMENT] GDB 7.8 released
It's unlikely that the islands will disappear entirely. The highest point is 81 m above sea level, and the US claims the area around Kingman Reef ("largely submerged", highest point is 1.5 meters above sea level) as part of its EEZ.

You'll need to consult the Law of the Sea Convention for full details on the EEZ. As an edge case, Japan claims Okinotorishima http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinotorishima which used to have a few rocks on the surface but is now completely submerged except for artifical structures, and Rockall is part of Scotland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockall , with its own complicated EEZ history.

Therefore I think it's a moot issue - it will be a long time (if ever) before Kiribati is gone.
CircleMUD forever.

And Quake/QuakeWorld.
Hi, I'm the co-founder of SFOX. You can see the orderbook on our website. you need to be logged in to see it, but it is there.

We are more like E-Trade in that your order will execute on an exchange and the price is whatever is available at the moment. We don't frontrun your order. We plan to make money on trading fees.
So what's the attraction towards interacting with everyone? That I might find out one of my neighbours is a kidnapper?

I don't like to talk to everyone I meet or even be in a city for too long as it overstimulates my senses. It is the same reason why I don't like large crowds and prefer living in the suburbs.
Isn't this intuition math?

E.g., the uncertainty principle is intuitive once you understand the math behind waves.
>higher than GS15s?

Yeah, I forgot to mention Congress and the SES(the higher than GS-15) guys. Yet, even when there is a simple set of program requirements, the guys I already mentioned are going to keep adding shit on until the very end. If you give a high-ranking government employee authority over an IT project, they start imagining that they are Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Johnny Ive, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo DaVinci all rolled into one. Then bad things happen.
>Usenet even allows noting threads, blacklisting users, etc. But not controlled by any single company...

Because it relied on third party clients, which have more or less been replaced by everything being done in the browser and the closed black box that is a "website".

Although I suppose you could still do that with a site which provides an API, or some kind of official set of browser plugins but the experience probably wouldn't be the same.
Right. Thats my point.
That gives them 1/5 of India's entire ecommerce business (if the figures in the article about percentage of retail are accurate) which is not inconsiderable.

On the other hand, since the gross margins on those sales won't be large, it also suggests that the volume of ecommerce carried out in India will have to grow by an order of magnitude (even if Flipkart can grow that large market share) if Flipkart is to earn a return on that huge investment. Bearing in mind the Indian middle class has been internet savvy for a while that's asking for a lot unless the investors are very patient.
My iOS Indie-Game Numbers
Here's another more layman presentation with a great video, and its previous discussion at HN.

http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140624-fluid-tests-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7964848
Kali to play IPX games.
It honestly looks like a mixture of blackmail and Tortious interference.

Blackmail: pay us or we will cut your advertising revenue.
Tortious interference: Your company counts on (double_digit)% ad revenue. We're going to harm you in significant ways... unless you pay.
Yes, that's how they did it. Quoting from the paper:

"Note that we have integrated all proofs into an automated proof checking suite, similar to an automated regression-test suite, but using machine-checked formal proofs instead of executable tests. This provides an automatic check, after each commit into the version control system, of the state of all the existing formal proofs, and identifies which specific portions of the proof must be re-established."
This is really nice.

Minor nit #1: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2meqa8hhen9ztba/Screenshot%202014-... Seems like the graph visualization is sticking to the wrong coordinates (dragging it to the left doesn't help; it moves back to the center)

Minor nit #2. I'd love to see a visualization of the "probability mixing" interpretation of markov chains and stationary distributions, which is what PageRank is really about. That is, it'd be really nice to have a visualization of the fact that Markov chains are ultimately memoryless (it eventually doesn't matter in which state you start for the distribution of events). I think it could be done by exchanging "probabilities conditioned on the past", which is most easily done by multiplying the entire probability vector by the stochastic matrix and visualizing that.
Many people are already familiar with Moxie Marlinspike's WhisperSystems because of their Android apps: RedPhone for encrypted calls, and TextSecure for SMS messages.

The release of Signal is a pretty big deal for iOS users; previously, we had to consider a paid option like Silent Circle, or a larger corporate option like FaceTime Audio (which isn't really the same).

Although I haven't actually used the app yet (it's registering now), the screenshots appear to be a fairly direct port of RedPhone to iOS.

Edit: Yep! And it looks like Signal users can make secure calls to contacts with RedPhone installed, too. Very nice.
Could you be specific? You're being more specific about pointing out exaggerations in your simile than about your subject.
Isn't there a basic math aspect to this?

Everything like looks, basic intelligence, rhythm, musical ability, sportsmanship are
distributed among people according to a (mostly) uniform distribution.

I would believe you can say the samething about luck.

Now don't get the wrong idea that I advocate people to be bums waiting for the "luck" to happen to them. Not everybody who works their ass off(while being smart) is successful.
We can quote a lot of examples from history to see this isn't the case.

And then there are people like Kardashians, who got to where they are, by what?
Find products made in your community
install/conf fail2ban and tripwire along with caw's list
No it still works. I mostly travel in the Midwest, though, so maybe security standards are just a little lower in Lawrence, KS than the big cities.
My personal favorite part of the commercial is how it's all about these people 'sharing' their homes, which is actually legal in New York state. Except there's that little fact that the majority of AirBnB's NYC rentals are illegal whole-apartment rentals without the owners there. AirBnB isn't real big on honest representations.
I wouldn't call it blackmailing. It's flat out extortion; they build a script that blocks ads for specific domains then tell the owners they can pay to have it removed.
I completely agree except I feel that the "topia" suffix implies it's some sort of paradise. Given the controversy around environmental damage, something more ominous like "gasland" might be better.
Presumably in the B row it should read "P(A|B)" and "P(B|B)"
Summary:
mozjpeg slightly better than libjpeg-turbo but slower to compress.

cloudflare assigned an engineer to optimize the library for speed and they plan to contribute the optimizations back.
If you're concerned about the likelihood of being the victim of a crime, you should care about rates per capita. If you care about happening to be geographically near to a crime when it happens, then you should care about incidents per unit area.
HTTPSB is for Chromium, but I expect it to work on most Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Opera, Yandex, Maxthon, etc.)

Edit: I personally block domains in global rules which are rather ubiquitous: `google.com`, `twitter.com`, `facebook.com`, `linkedin.com`, `gravatar.com`, etc. I enable these narrowly using scopes only when on a related web sites. I am pretty confident this cripples severely the ability of these ubiquitous servers to track me, regardless of the browser used.
Doesn't seem to detect ABP 2.6.4 on FF for me.
Indian here. Will give you an idea of whats happening here in India. This online sellers got an impact only 2-3 years back. Now its like local government are formulating rules to curb online sales. This is in part fueled by the influence of local sellers.

Now people have moved to online stores for buying things, with local sellers feeling the heat.

First it was thought that Amazon entry to India will bury Flipkart. Not it seems Amazon is in trouble. Things looks like going in the same way as of China.

Flipkart started by IIT'ans the brightest minds of India. They recruit from top tech schools of India with hefty packages. They have a nice site and customer care. They also bought rival in Apparels, Myntra

There is no reason one shouldn't buy from Flipkart.

*http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/society/keralas-o...
The worst effects of a crime are directed against a single person--you mug or murder a human being, not a plot of land.

I'd add a caveat that many of the side effects of crimes are area dependent--a gunshot will disturb and affect the psychological wellbeing of far more people in very dense areas. That's why many people end up with an overstated impression on how common crime in cities is.

Though I think even per capita, most cities have it worse than the suburbs...
20-25 million revenue? I think you left off a zero there.... Unless those phones only have an average price of $20-25 in India.
There are a lot of different types of suburbs out there. I grew up in an old streetcar suburb in the Midwest where almost all of the kids walked to school (though most people still drove to work, since many jobs had sprawled out to office parks). I could walk to my job at a grocery store and there was a nice bike trail, and once I realized that biking was a practical form of transportation, in addition to recreation, the narrow side streets on the grid made for great biking even without any specific infrastructure. There are bars, restaurant, and a movie theaters, all within a quick walk.

But a lot of newer suburbs make it somewhere between unpleasant and dangerous to walk anywhere.
Amazon Fire Phone now available
Because if you're in the area that a crime is going to occur, but it's only going to happen to k of n people in the area (with k usually equal to 1), you have a lower than certain chance of being involved?

For an example, if you're on a block there's 100% going to be a robbery in the next 5 minutes, if there are also 200 other people on that block, then you still only have a 0.5% chance of being robbed.

Essentially, because so many crimes only involve a single (or relatively few) victim(s), your odds of being involved need to account for how many other people are around you, and not just the odds that it will happen in the same area as you.

Your measure of "per unit area" doesn't account for the fact most people aren't going to be involved with the crime (eg, robbed), but will all be in the same impacted area.

So, essentially, it over-calculates how likely you actually are to be the victim of a crime. Per unit area is only useful if you want to know how close you're likely to be to a crime being committed, and not how likely you are to be the victim.
The explanation mid-way down about modelling the distribution of sunny and rainy days really made it click for me.

Another very easy to understand is language. Say, I give you a small text. You could create a small state machine containing the possible transitions between words. You could also compute probabilities (estimated from the text) of going from one word to another (e.g the -> text vs. the -> possible, etc), and you'll have a Markov chain.

Of course, this is a very weak model of language, and usually in such models probabilities are modelled on at least the previous two states. But it turns out to be very useful in practice, e.g. you can compute the fluency of different formulations of the same semantics.
Suburbs are small towns, but most small towns are not suburbs. Suburbs are largely a post WWII symptom of white flight and government subsidy.
that's as good as saying "i'm sick of arcs, square windows, rafter roofs and linked lists". of course patterns aren't the end-all-be-all of software development. but it's the trait of a good craftsman and engineer to know what patterns exist and how to use them.

Sadly, and in that I agree with the author, people in interviews only ask for knowledge of patterns, not when and when not to use them.

in that sense, the title better were: "I'm sick of people thinking of patterns in an idiotic fashion", avoiding creativity at all cost". But then, that's just complaining about the single-mindedness of less experienced colleagues.

The patterns themselves and knowing how to use them I still consider a valuable asset and in parts, the author says that.

But beyond that, the value of patterns is that you can easily communicate with other developers about architectural decisions. And communication is 80% of software development in a team.
> The water already present in the atmosphere absorbs almost all IR radiation

This does not seem to be correct. The earth's is gaining a significant amount of energy from the sun. Since temperature is at an equilibrium we can assume it is losing a very similar amount of energy. We know that the earth gives off less (visible) light than it receives so the obvious explanation is that the earth is giving off a significant amount of heat. We can also directly observe heat leaving the earth from IR cameras in orbit.

> No. It's just a hypothesis that greenhouse effect takes place.
> And there goes f*ck your claim that it was a fact.

You misunderstand me. It is a fact that the green house effect is happening. You yourself continue to insist that is is happening with statements like "The water already present in the atmosphere absorbs almost all IR radiation". Observing it happening is not the same as knowing how it would change in different conditions. That part is theory.

Let me give a similar example:
We can observe that the sun heats the earth. That is a fact. We have a theory that if the sun were to go out, the earth would get colder. Since the sun is still shining we cannot observe what would happen if the sun went out, so we deploy reason instead of direct observation. You could insist that the earth would stay the same temperature without the sun shinning and point out that we can't know for sure because it hasn't happened yet. Any statement we make about the future is not an observed fact because the future has not happened yet, but e can draw reasonable conclusions about the future.
> That I might find out one of my neighbours is a kidnapper?

The far more likely scenario is that you find you have some common background, and waste an evening relating stories that you would probably never dredge up again otherwise. The world really is a surprisingly tiny place.

> I don't like to talk to everyone I meet or even be in a city for too long as it overstimulates my senses.

It takes all kinds :-)
I live in a suburb of Philadelphia.

I find the original description absurdly accurate.

I don't drive/have a car and it is crippling.
Virtual Assistants: Should you fire your executive assistant?
>Small towns die out

Most of the issues discussed in the article don't really apply to true 'small towns', but instead they're applicable to sprawled, growing suburban/exurban development near-ish larger cities. Small towns far from big cities don't tend to have growth in the form of housing developments, and have smaller infrastructure overhead.

In my hometown of 3,000 people, people living in the center of town have public water and sewer services, but everyone living farther out has wells and septic tanks. In a low density, low growth environment like this, the town doesn't need to be responsible for those things, and therefore stays out of debt and doesn't develop massive, unsustainable infrastructure.

>everyone moves to the big city

Sustainable infrastructure can exist at smaller scales as well. There is certainly boom in big cities right now, but smaller cities (25-100k people?), that had a bustling 'urban' core 100 years ago, are starting to come back. I think that these cities (many of which fell into decay after WWII) with walkable 'streetcar suburbs' and dense downtown areas, will become much more popular in the near future.
Ask HN: Online Advertising Resources
Is there a comprehensive resource (preferably in book format) that covers ins-and-outs of online advertising? I am looking for a resource from an online advertising client perspective.

What are different online advertising avenues? I am aware of Google Adwords, Commission Junction, Amazon Associates. I am looking beyond such majors in this area. How effective they are? What type of advertising work best for each avenue? Something that will help me make decision on appropriate online advertising channels and maximizing return from these channels. List of online advertising avenues, best practices for creating and serving ads, specialized channels.

Thanks
The upside of a bridge isn't passenger transport, it's freight. There's an awful lot of trade between Africa and Europe, e.g. for agriculture.
debian/ubuntu users can `apt-get install redshift`. you can add it to your ~/.xsession if you're a luddite like me, or find some other way to make sure it's always running when X is running.
After US Airways' 1549 "lucky" ditching Capt. Sullenberger said that "for 42 years, he's been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education and training. And on January 15 the balance was sufficient so that he could make a very large withdrawal". So you might say that he got lucky, but you never see a student pilot with 4 hours flight time being this lucky.
Love this. I wish more recruiters were this data-driven.
Desktop computer? They probably decided it was either too big to carry away without being caught, or that it wasn't something easy for them to sell. I would guess that cameras, cell phones, and tablets are easier to sell. They're all one piece, don't look very different "used" or "new", and you could probably re-package them with some bubble wrap and an envelope. A desktop computer with lots of parts, some of them obviously used, is going to be a lot more obvious and harder for the thief to deal with.
A new journey
The article is summarizing the report by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. The linked PDF contains some of the figures you ask for, such as:

> The CEO of Artmotion, one of Switzerland’s largest offshore hosting providers, reported in July 2013 that his company had seen a 45 percent jump in revenue.

This tells us the company is large within the country, and Switzerland isn't exactly small potatoes.

I think what you are looking for is the PDF itself, not the summary of the PDF that is this article :)
Hero worship + survivor bias + "I did it all myself" autobiographies = "there's no such thing as luck, it's all hard work".

Hey, is there anyone here who was born in a first world country, grew up speaking the world's pre-eminent language, was born to parents in the richest 1% of the world population, grew up eating an ample supply of extremely nutritious food, and received a first-rate education while still a child? Anyone here like that?
But goto is considered harmful!