skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am an environmental studies major who wanted to be an urban planner. I gave up my car a few years ago. At the time, I was living in The Deep South. There was a bus stop a ten minute walk from my apartment and another one in front of my office building. No bus went directly from one to the other.

By car, it was a 7 minute drive. On foot, it was a one hour walk. By bus, I think it would have taken about 2 hours. I walked and caught rides and was usually at work in about 15 or 20 minutes.

Our modern concept of suburbs was born just after WW2. We had 4 years of dual income, no kids families saving up to half their income and unable to have kids due to the men being at war overseas. WW2 was immediately preceded by The Great Depression. As their reward for defeating evil, Americans just wanted a house of their own. There wasn't enough housing to meet the demand and the nation came together as a whole to create policies and financing mechanisms whole-clothe and we began throwing up Levittowns all over the place.

Decades later, our demographic has changed and we remain prisoners of policies born overnight to service the preponderance of nuclear families. We have a lot fewer nuclear families with SAHMs and small kids yet our entire world, so to speak, is aimed at creating a dream for a generation that is dying out. (My father fought in WW2 and he died last fall. He was just short of his 89th birthday.)

I now live in San Diego county. Transit and density here make it almost like a little slice of Europe, but with better weather. I think I will eventually be able to get the life I want, without a car.

I wish this man all the best in the world. He has quite the uphill battle ahead of him.
yeh but is the growth (I mean user growth not advertiser growth) real or fake?

Twitter seems to be doing NOTHING about dealing with DM spam.

http://mytblocker.blogspot.com/2014/07/yo-twitterwhats-with-...
> Also, textbooks can last for many years.

Which is part of the problem. Shit, in 2008 my geography books still included maps of the Soviet Union!
Part of the point of things like Chromecast is to avoid having to hook things up to a TV.
What's your latency on scraping down the container?
Yes, she is one of our 2 core Web client developers, along with one of the 2 core website maintainers, and does a lot of the docs! I would merge a request with a smiley for Bitcoin for all the work she does.
The full book is somewhat interesting: http://books.google.com/books?id=RNhLAW615QgC&pg=PP1&dq=inau...

He paints an excessively pessimistic picture IMO.
Great! But why not make the presentations available to a wider audience now?
Get ready for Generation Z
yep, they try to learn an image's high level features by learning an autoencoder (that is a transform that takes an image and tries to produce the same image) via a sandglass shape multi layer network. Here is a very readable paper by Hinton himself that describes the approach:

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/science.pdf
I'm not even sure what you mean. They come out of shareholder equity, and all public companies use accrual and not cash-basis accounting. It makes zero sense to strip out those operational charges unless you want to appear profitable for some short-term benefit. I realize companies do this kind of crap. It absolutely does not make it right, and the folly of the stock market is just that: believing just because somebody said or did something that it is also correct, or that something is OK because it looks official on a SEC document.
I personally like the google reverse image search hack :).

I used to just run that python script manually on my computer. Now I can just call it from my front-end js when users upload images and return back some text about the image.

https://api.blockspring.com/users/pkpp1233/blocks/5a1b66ef20...

But you can do just about anything. Users have done r statistics from js. Or python sentiment analyses (lots of good libraries there) whenever they get user comments in their rails app.
An ousted CEO so popular employees are protesting to get his job back
Twitters excessive brand display rules
Shannon's paper becomes a lot more fun once you've grokked Markov chains.

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pd...

There's a bunch of fun stuff that suddenly becomes possible.

It's gently distressing that by far the most use that Markov chains have seen so far is to generate English-like gibberish text to beat spam filters.
Sure, but there are not many people or investment funds willing to buyout $1 billion worth of equity in an Indian company, particularly not a pre-profit one whose assets are largely digital. Silicon Valley accounting doesn't apply, and a lot of restrictions on foreign investors do.

If your fund needs to achieve the largest IPO in a country's history to achieve an acceptable ROI, your limited partners had better be patient, or your growth trajectory spectacular.

In this case, since they apparently already own a huge percentage of the market, its a spectacular growth trajectory that involves getting Indians to buy a lot more online... which given that Indians with disposal income have had internet access for a while now might not be straightforward.
No... we don't all have to live in 500 sqft apartments. It's just that instead of building our towns like this:
http://i.imgur.com/5donv8c.jpg?1

we build it like this:
http://i.imgur.com/9MpfuwP.jpg?1
> Throw 10 copies of the app up with slightly different graphics in the hopes that one of them catches fire. Good luck trying to sue a foreign company as an independent developer; even if you win they'll never pay up.

Ugh, the dreaded re-skin. In a past life, I helped launch a game, and then push it through two re-skins when the original floundered. Turns out that broken mechanics and poor design doesn't change when you change the art on the outside.

The marketing mattered, finding product-market fit mattered, but a poor game still does shit-all for you.

Just wanted to throw that in there because it gave me the heebie-jeebies reading about it again.
Kanye West wins 'Coinye' Bitcoin infringement lawsuit
I agree that the title was link-baity but the timeline seems to make it pretty clear how SJPD incorrectly stated that they didn't have any documents/information related to UAVs when the timeline for the grant seems to say otherwise. The issue is with SJPD saying they don't have any documents when they must have had something completed to submit the grant. If I'm wrong, let me know and I'll correct it.

* 11/30/2012 - final deadline for SJPD to submit its drone proposal for fiscal year 2013. At this point they had already done enough work internally to submit a proposal for the grant. [0]

* 12/5/2012 - First request for records related to current/future drone use [1]

* 12/17/2012 - An analyst within the SJPD Research and Development Unit specifically responded that the department had no records regarding research into drones or plans to use unmanned aerial vehicles. [1]

* 10/15/2013 - Second request for records related to current/future drone use [2]

* 10/16/2013 - Response stating the the fiscal unit does not have any records related to these items [2]

[0] http://www.bayareauasi.org/sites/default/files/resources/Sou... (Page 4)

[1] https://www.muckrock.com/foi/san-jose-336/san-jose-ca-police...

[2] https://www.muckrock.com/foi/san-jose-336/drone-documents-sa...
containers go up and down almost instantly. time is either in the http request or the actual script run.
Perhaps one of the ways Twitter was able to report MAU increases: subsidized data. Note the lack of geographic breakdown of whence these users came.

http://adage.com/article/digital/twitter-facebook-rate-telec...
We (Orando Labs, https://orandolabs.com) feel the sting of the scorpion. Check out EnduroSync vs Cognito at http://orandolabs.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/amazon-cognito/
The most important figure to look at here is the cash flow statement. Consider that they are actually cash positive from operations, but are spending more than 1.5x the cash they get from operations on buying companies. Consider also that a lot of their staff are cashing out on their stock options which is the big reason for the GAAP to non-GAAP differences in net income.
A lot of good human empathy has done the human race... I think i'd rather trust robot empathy.
The estimated 50% chance of human population collapse between 2140 and 2600, seems reasonable.

Our power to destroy ourselves with weapons or accidents, or use biological and information technology to productively enhance or replace ourselves is growing at an exponential rate.

Any scenario where humanity reaches the year 3000 without either having destroyed ourselves, or enhanced ourselves beyond recognition, seems unlikely to the extreme. The only scenario I can imagine where radical technological change does not result in a radical change to the human condition is if a totalitarian government managed to enforce a no-progress civilization for hundreds of years.

I am marking the years 2140-2600 on my calendar so I can remember to look back and review the results of this prediction using my post-human thinking apparatus. Hopefully I didn't extinct myself.
Ebola virus: Top Sierra Leone doctor, Sheik Umar Khan, dies of disease aged 39
From Chuck Cowdery:

The American Distilling Institute (ADI) begs to differ. It defines 'craft spirits' as "the products of an independently-owned distillery with maximum annual sales of 52,000 cases, where the product is physically distilled and bottled on site."

For whatever that's worth. (Not a whole lot.)
> It's gently distressing that by far the most use that Markov chains have seen so far is to generate English-like gibberish text to beat spam filters.

I don't think that's the most use they've gotten, just the most obvious and visible use.
Ah I remember this paper - there was some pretty amusing back-and-forth sniping that emerged from it (ignoring the slightly more respectful alternative viewpoints and disputations at the time e.g Firn et al [1] and Trewavas' reply [2]).

Several years later Alpi et al [3] took (a 36 author) swipe at the original Trevawas paper linked above and the discussion/field (e.g. [4]) it provoked. Essentially "no you are wrong and we all agree".
Then, never one to be deterred by anyone else, Trevawas replied with this letter [5] as did Brenner [6].

All in all it was quite an amusing little academic slapfight.

There was quite a nice New Yorker article talking the general idea of the "plant intelligence" thing if anyone is interested [7].

[1] - http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/93/4/345

[2] - http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/93/4/353.long

[3] - http://web1.sssup.it/pubblicazioni/ugov_files/302981_2007_23...

[4] - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1360138506...

[5] - http://www.linv.org/images/about_pdf/Trends%202007%20Trewava...

[6] - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1360138507...

[7] - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent...
Episode 9 of the Cosmos season 1 talks about this. Good stuff.
Will we eventually get video calling, too? (especially in the browser version, perhaps by using a more secure version of WebRTC?)

Also, I suggest dropping SMS support, and going "data-only" for the new Signal. Or at the very least disable all SMS/MMS stuff by default, and only leave them as opt-in options in settings. Don't even prompt users about it, because most will say yes, without really knowing what they're doing, and that the app will start eating SMS credits without realizing.

But really, you should just drop it. I mean look how successful Whatsapp is, and doesn't have any SMS support, let alone an end-to-end encrypted one.
That was very useful. You've earned that positive review. Thank you!

Feedback: your presentation was very clear, the screencast is great, but on your next course, try to look at the camera's lens more often.
I've read about the (supposed) benefits of fasting but never that it cleans up clogged veins. Got a reference for that?
Is Twitter really an example of a business?

To be a business, you need to have higher income than expenses. So far, that has eluded Twitter -- and there's no indication that they are going to start spending less than they're making in the near future.

Also, I can see them making money from advertising. And after that... what?

I'm willing to believe and admit that Twitter is a game changer in many ways. But I'm far more skeptical of their ability to make money and survive. Clearly, Twitter's investors are bullish on Twitter's ability to make money. But if their optimism doesn't pan out soon, everyone with Twitter stock is going to be quite upset.
What about the top 200 million?
Not being that au fait with big data stuff, can someone tell me what graph processing is for?
Here is a talk given by them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic_iQYYCDxY
This is a great idea and is the thinking behind Meqanic, which is designed to build (some) intuition about quantum physics as you go. Check it out: http://appstore.com/meqanic or http://meqanic.com/
aws is a good fit if you have big spikes and massive lulls.. maybe.
They did an interesting article on that:

http://priceonomics.com/why-do-all-hollywood-movies-lose-mon...
Great, very nice idea. You should be proud and not pay much attention to the negative vibes that some people are putting out. They have their own issues to deal with.
Regarding #4, do you know how common it is to spend over $200k per month. If it is a rare use case I would not be surprised if those companies are making a sub-optimal decision. In my anecdotal experience, whenever we considered that order of magnitude of spend on AWS we ended up building our own infrastructure.
I think "full line" isn't an entirely static concept in IAAS, but I'm using it here to suggest there's no other player offering the same breadth of services. I haven't surveyed other providers in detail lately, but I expect for any given competitor it wouldn't take you long to find some AWS service (http://aws.amazon.com/products/) that they simply don't have an equivalent for.

EDIT: found someone who's made a feature grid here:
http://www.planforcloud.com/pages/resources/cloud_services.h...

This doesn't even include more esoteric stuff like Redshift and Elastic Beanstalk.
If so, that's a brilliant pun. This book's been added to my reading list.
Airbnb Squatter Vows To Squat Again, Hasn't delivered on Kickstarter game
Show HN: Pathshare – realtime location sharing for iPhone or Android
Awesome, thank you! I'll provide feedback soon.
"It also increases the consequences of getting banned by the XBox staff. Not only can't you go online for multiplayer, you can't play your subscription games either."

Sounds like a classic case of "this is feature not a bug". With this system the stakes will be significantly raised for those who are verbally abusive on Live. Although admittedly I don't know if increasing penalties for the riff raff will improve their behavior or not.
They aren't that excessive, most is actually required by trademark law so Twitter doesn't lose it.
> Get a team together under the researchers to work on every part of this battery problem

That sounds like what is already happening. This is a well funded well staffed lab we are talking about.
Show HN: Dead-simple file lock implementation in C#
Well a lot of that starts with not flying them across your own country fully armed.

Nukes are incredible hard to set off, you could blow one up with a missile. It would be a mess but that is not enough to set off the full on detonation of the core material.

The scary thing isn't a nuke going off accidentally, I mean if you keep enough of them it's just a certainty on a timeline. The scary thing is a miscommunication about whose it was, and the vengeful actions that follow.
Bay Area first
>2 more months and I am done!

This attitude is typically a very bad one to have when dieting. Ingesting fewer calories should be sustainable after you've reached your target weight.

Anyways, good luck to you in your efforts. If this is a way for you to start, then there's nothing wrong with it at all.
Great, thank you for taking the course and for the feedback!
From what I've seen, PhDs in IS (aka MIS) are typically full-time; the professors are interested in having research assistants who will help them produce publications during and after the PhD. Also, IS departments are very small compared to other departments within the b-school. If an IS department only takes on 1 or 2 new PhD students per year, you would have a hard time convincing them that you're their best bet. Some business schools, however, have "DBA" programs which are doctoral programs geared toward tuition-paying students.

I would not assume that my generalizations apply across the board, and certainly not count on them applying to engineering schools, i-schools and other programs.

What part of the country are you in, by the way? That's probably going to determine your options.
I like the suburbs.

I like that I have about 1/6 of an acre of land that my house sits on.

I can grow a garden. My children have a safe yard to play in. I have a nice warm and dry garage in which I can perform my automotive repairs. I can barbecue without choking my neighbors with the smoke from my grill. I can play loud music late at night and not bother everyone nearby. I have trees from which we get organic, pesticide free fruits.

Suburbs will never die, as long as there are still people like me.

The author's epiphany seems to have come from the realization that despite his engineering background and his status as an "expert", he still didn't know as much as the hoi polloi about what was best for their neighborhoods but he still didn't learn the correct lesson.

The problem was caused by other "experts", to whom the state deferred for determining the standards in the first place. Every town is different. Every town has different needs. Forcing them to all use the same plan has consequences, even if he was not able to see them.

Widening those streets and removing those trees only encouraged people to drive faster and caused more accidents and deaths. It was a bad idea to help people drive faster through residential neighborhoods. Were he not so enamored with enforcing external standards, he might have been able to see that.
Figures that I submit this for karma myself eons ago but it only now, via another HNer, pops to the top. :)

- The fat MMO guy
Russian Hacker Claims To Have Infiltrated Both Wall Street Journal and Vice
That was technically the literal interpretation. :)
German Minister Thinks Snowden Should Give Up Being 'Hunted'
you also need people to babysit, manage, and build out ec2 instances. They are constantly failing, being retired, getting random poor performance, etcetcetc.

The failure rates vs physical hardware are incredibly high (just personal experience but I doubt you'll find many who disagree).

Once your systems are up and running you don't need to do much. Remote hands will replace a hard drive for $100, for example.
My results (yeah, a tough image) http://imgur.com/pbH52xW
Key quote:

Documents filed this week show that 10 of the named defendants lost by default because they did not respond to the case.
Breaking Antivirus Software [pdf]
...which is an implementation of a Hidden Markov Model, so, yes.
I love the part where the sim flips on its back and starts flailing. Thinking outside the box!
Bandcamp.com is great. But I also support artists who are releasing work into the Creative Commons or the public domain.

I've also been doing experiments with practice recording and one-off sound files in the vein of Cory Doctorow's 50% as good for much, much cheaper concept. With any luck, I'll have a stand up comedy show to put into the public domain within a year.

I try to boycott anything from the major label studios. (Though I did pay to see Transformers 4 and A Million Ways to Die in the West) For a while I've experimented with a Richard Stallman-esque boycott of any non-free works, that is, anything not in the public domain. Maybe it's my own lack of willpower in this area (I just love Transformers) but I've come to the conclusion that a Stallman-style boycott doesn't work well with culture, because culture is too important.

I want my kids to know the history of the culture they came from. But I also want to give them a culture of freedom and an understanding of the history we've lost as a result of copyright.
This is really good. I thought it was odd that people were mentioning online that the new $15 minimum wage laws would not apply to most fast-food locations because they are technically franchises and therefore small businesses. At the time it seemed like a legal loophole I'm glad the regulators have sorted this out.
Coding Summer Camp for Underserved Youth in East Palo Alto
Apple acquired one in 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomp_(search_engine)
Ask HN: Write a C compiler in Ocaml?
I have completed an internship in a research lab
in the compilation field, specifically in program
analysis for embedded systems and I've always been fascinated by compilers.

After writing a basic C parser in Objective Caml and since I'm fairly comfortable in C and low-level programming, I'm asking : what do you think of writing a C compiler in Ocaml or C, given the main goals : fun, getting experience in compiler writing, and maybe bootstrapping (maybe not directly).

However, I am not crazy enough to believe that I will be able to support the whole language or compile any non-trivial program in a short term, I am talking more about a long term experiment.

Note : It would be based on Lex / Yacc.
Crypto is the big winner in all of this as Kanye just gave the field a whole load of PR. Bitcoin to the moon!
If you look to my comment below, you'll see why I used "topia", which just means "place" from the Greek topos.

(u)topia = with the negative prefix means "No Place."

(Dys)topia = with the prefix δυσ (dus) from the Greek meaning "bad, hard, difficult" place.

Obviously extractive industries are harmful, as we can see in the recent shale oil and natural gas boom, but I thought the "extract" part of that would convey the message with the additional "dys."

But my favorite explanation of all in these etymological games is that its a deliberate pun on Rub' al Khali in Saudi Arabia, translated as "The Empty Quarter", which contains some of the most massive oil fields in the world.
As soon as I registered, I started getting "No Caller ID" phone calls every few minutes from some unknown person speaking Chinese (which I don't speak). This is pretty annoying, to say the least.

There doesn't seem to be any way to deregister your phone number? So what now?
This would be like trying to patent the letter 'A.' Sure, it was a great idea and sure, it's incredibly important.

But it's been a thing since way before you were born.
I think you're both saying the same thing -- he's just talking about how economist's models don't include this type of thought in their definitions of rationality because it's very difficult to quantify. Instead, they simplify down to money over time and pretend like that's the only valid formula for defining all behaviors.

This excludes more abstract, intangible elements of the exchange that are likely to lead to increased income down the road, but it also excludes behaviors that aren't geared toward maximizes income. It's totally possible that a person is behaving rationally with a different, more abstract goal in mind, prioritized above money over time, like building good friendships or having a flexible schedule. In fact, people make those kinds of tradeoffs where they explicitly prioritize an intangible, subjective quality of life measurement over raw income all the time, but economic models don't account for this.
> Wouldn't your proposal mean either that parents are paying about 5x more than they should, or introduce new overhead costs of creating a secondary market for parents to sell used textbooks to other parents?

Well, sure, but think of the benefits for textbook publishers. It'd be like extending the college textbook market down into grade school.