skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One way to get at what you're saying in #2 is to have a counter that accumulates the number of epochs spent in state 1, state 2, state 3, for one of these examples. Have a way to reset this counter, and compute the relative frequency (by normalizing the counts-in-each-epoch by the number of epochs so far).

Come to think of it, you could even calculate the first eigenvector of the transition matrix, and show this eigenvector next to the relative frequency mentioned above.

In fact, you could then plot an L1 distance of the relative frequency (above) to the eigenvector, with one point for each epoch. This distance would decrease (non-monotonically) towards zero as the number of epochs increases. I believe it is (in the expectation sense) exponentially fast, but with an exponent that depends on the transition matrix. (Typical transition matrices would exhibit fast mixing, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain_mixing_time).
People, especially with the socialist thinking so popular on HN, don't like to admit that maybe human beings aren't fungible.

Vacuous rhetoric is a waste of everyone's time.
Firefox Devtools 33: Visual Events, media sidebar, Cubic bezier editor
Psychographic Targeting Unhinged: The Zen Of “Whole Customer” Persona
I don't have this problem because I just choose not to use sites that have disrupting advertising.
I've know that Bullit Rye comes from and Indiana factory for some time now, but I still drinking because it's good and not too pricey. As long as they don't try to charge a "craft" price for it, I don't mind as long as the end product is good.
I'll bite. I only wear black tees.
Digital Ocean NYC2 Droplets Down
And counting. Second time in about a week and during prime time hours. If it doesn't get up quickly or if happens again to NYC2 in the next few weeks may be time to reconsider DO for hosting production sites. I love them, and glitches happen, but twice in a row clients have a hard time swallowing.
I live in NYC, and recently I spent two weeks in Simi Valley, a city north of Los Angeles, and was shocked that it's basically impossible to get around without a car. Even in LA, it seems as if the public transport system is nearly non-existent.
WTFPL might have its issues and I might agree that it is not a good license; I can also say the GPLs are bad licenses, since they have their problems too.

But let's not go about making unfounded claims as to what you are allowed to do with it.

> don't accuse me of not backing up my claims when neither do you... at this point, we're just two guys bickering on a forum

Since a lot of your claims assume an exclusive transfer of rights (the method of which is not stated in the berne convention), I have already linked to and cited a US Copyright circular to back up my claim that transfer doesn't happen the way you assume it does. I can also cite the same circular and the Berne Convention to find what rights of authors are protected. Your circular understanding of copyrigts and the rights it reserves for the author assumes rights which appear in neither of the two documents (but the text is online, so prove me wrong). I've also pointed out the illogicalness of your definition.

Even so, the onus is on you to back up the claims you made. You started the discussion by making these claims.

But let me cite one more passage. You probably can't tell where it is from since you haven't read the text. Go do so already.

Independently of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work [..]

So unless you're making an argument about Somalia (in which case you can forget copyright altogether), please drop the bullshit about claiming others' things as your own and then suing the real author. I mean sure, you can try... just as you can try to take the car of someone who released his software under WTFPL. "Because the license said I can!" won't hold up.
Good Enough Recommendations with GER
Self-refering is everywhere in this novel and I've already submited a pull request. Hoping for the best that the original hacker should accept it, yay!!
Already the case with Alberta, which is a major driving force in the Canadian economy, on track to surpass Quebec as the second largest provincial economy.

Feels like a bit of a slight to lump it into an "Empty Quarter."
If your community happens to be Memphis, the only city listed.
"For example, the algorithm Google uses to determine the order of search results, called PageRank, is a type of Markov chain."

I had to research that to understand it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Here is some key text from Wikipedia:

Google recalculates PageRank scores each time it crawls the Web and rebuilds its index. As Google increases the number of documents in its collection, the initial approximation of PageRank decreases for all documents.

The formula uses a model of a random surfer who gets bored after several clicks and switches to a random page. The PageRank value of a page reflects the chance that the random surfer will land on that page by clicking on a link. It can be understood as a Markov chain in which the states are pages, and the transitions, which are all equally probable, are the links between pages.

If a page has no links to other pages, it becomes a sink and therefore terminates the random surfing process. If the random surfer arrives at a sink page, it picks another URL at random and continues surfing again.
I have to agree with you on this one.
I don't care about the cat pictures at all, but my kids is another matter.

Living in a country where rule of law is not to be taken for granted, it is a great source of concern to me that some idiot^H^H^H^H^H naive relative/friend/acquaintance might be unknowingly feeding organized crime with personal information about me and my family.

Unfortunately, Americans will always believe the world is America. When Facebook the corporation opens up their services to the world, they fail to acknowledge that they are changing stuff they are unaware of, but for good and ill. Their cavalier use or privacy data can and will (or most probably, is) be used by all sort of rouge agents, and not just to perform relatively petty crime like CC fraud or identity theft, but also to enable violent felonies.

NSA does not really bother me... it's the thug that shows up one good day and demands you to fork $200USD per week or else...
I'm sure there is no real end-to-end encryption. And you can only do that between iPhone/Mac users.
If it was for Linux I'd gladly give it a spin.
I mentioned this on wladimirs blog a few hours ago and he's yet to approve my comment. I asked if he knew about it and what he though about it.
Kunstler says it quite well too:

https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...
Heh, I think giving advice is much easier than actually following it :)
Yes, but it is not secure
I can relate to this somewhat. My grandmother always said I was lucky in life, and joked that if I walked up to a bus stop then three buses would turn up. I do consider myself to be observant to the point of distraction (I am also forgetful, lacking common-sense, and lazy).

Of course, I've not measured just how observant I am against anyone else, and it's just a hunch, so I could be talking shit. Enjoyed the article!
Does anyone have any evidence against Adblock Edge?
The Cold Email Workflow That Connected Me With 140 Tech Decision Makers
I think it makes sense, though the fact that the whitelisting costs money creates some perverse incentives.

People use adblock for different reasons though: some are actually against advertising as a concept, full stop.
Hey, is there anyone here who feels the need to self-flagellate in public over imagined sins, but not to read the article before trying to contribute to the discussion? Anyone here like that?
I'm higly unobservant and my life I would say has been very "unlucky" :D Great article. Something for me to work on:)
It doesn't render all your privacy moot. It's limited to snooping on what you send over the radio, which is the same as what your cell carrier would have access to even with a secure baseband. (Edit: unless the baseband hacks into the software running on the other side of the radio and exfiltrates data right from your SD card... hm...)

What I would like to see is a way to verify that you're connected to a legitimate cell tower and not an eavesdropper.
This begs the followup question, "What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen Tesla?"
I was only half-making a joke, but I agree with with you, in a way.

The model you are proposing is the J2ME that Nokia had, and the result was an utter flop.
I'm a child of the suburbs and have since moved to the city so take this with a grain of salt.

I enjoy the malls, the big box stores, and the clones. Why? I know that pretty much anywhere I go I can get a consistent experience. I can go the local mall and almost anything I can want or imagine is available, which at some level is fascinating. What's more, as cliche as all these places ares, there is a bit of a shared experience for almost everyone.

I enjoy driving on the giant roads, or strolling through the quiet suburbs with headphones on without fear of some incident. I like not hearing people and cars all the time.

I like the city for other reasons; I enjoy the history, the character, the feeling of life, but the suburbs have their place, there is a reason they exist. They aren't perfect and they are the harbingers of some negative social trends, but they aren't as horrible as HN likes to act.
Now look up Hidden Markov models,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Markov_model

How they can be calibrated in the finite case
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baum%E2%80%93Welch_algorithm

And how they can be evaluated for arbitrary models
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_filter
Dror's birthday campaign for hope in Israel and Palestine
Have you ever submitted a fraud report to Facebook? It can take up to two weeks. You could also have called.
Looks nice! I've been using https://github.com/googlecast/CastHelloVideo-chrome plus some custom Java code to stream video content for a few months now. I'd love to have something like this as a UI instead of my cobbled mess. Drop me a PM or email @gmail if you want to compare notes. Cheers!
Show HN: Wake-On-LAN without public IP or port-forwarding
Not directly relevant, but is it me is is lwn.net one of the ugliest sites ever. practically anything, including dropping all the formatting altogether, would make it look better.
In that vein, I think I've identified a CS-specific visual syndrome that makes CS people always choose a bizarre shade of salmon pink for everything. See aforementioned lwn sidebar, and other exhibits
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html
http://www.lyx.org/images/about/main_window.png
(there are others i can't be bothered finding right now, apache foundation has a number of gems, and more that have thankfully been redesigned in the last few years)
Linode seems pretty equivalently priced, especially with their new SSDs. Do you know how their reliability is?
So all the site needs to do is help the engineers understand the benefits of not dressing shittily. It's like doing unit testing or adopting a new framework. Once they dig themselves into the learning curve and begin to see real-world changes they'll become lifelong converts.

(edit)
.....Or not, in which case all they lose is the same amount of time they'd invest in unit testing or a new framework. But definitely the site needs to do something to convince the engineers.
The population and population density in those areas are incredibly low.

At least on the Canada side, the only two major cities in that area are Edmonton and Calgary, with a combined population of less than 2 million.
In the 90s it was common to see licence text refer to "the regents" even when that made no sense, but that's faded away as actual template licence text, meant to be used as a template, has become readily available.

I don't think it affected the interpretation much. If the author and the regents disclaim the warranty, and there are no regents, the straightforward interpretation is that the author disclaims warranty.
Usually you have some sort of concept of which branches are rebasable and which aren't. For example, I keep a fork of the canonical repository I work on, and do force-pushes to that all that I want.

Similarly the git development involves many throw-away branches, plus the "next" branch may get rebuilt every time there is a release.

People often say: "don't rewrite public history" but that's a simplification of: "don't rewrite public history unless people should have already known it was going to be rewritten"

If someone checks-out a branch from my private fork instead of from the official repo, they better not complain to me that I rebased it. Similarly if they checkout a branch named throwaway/test-integration-of-foo
Summer of Hacker League
Definitely a huge win for Apple consumers. :)
How Google's Mapathon May Have Compromised India's National Security
I'd like my children to grow up in the "The Burbs" style suburbs.
We're going to need verifiable sources for claims like that.
They claim to use SIP to establish an SRTP connection with AES-256. But I don't know any way to verify that the data is being encrypted well or sent only to the intended recipient. https://ssl.apple.com/iphone/business/docs/iOS_Security_Feb1...
I wish I had something more poignant to say other than this is dumb and EA is dumb.

They're nickle and diming their customers into oblivion. I guess there will always be the diehard sports game console-only fanatics, but there is no way EA can keep up with the trend of indies and on-demand on Steam.
Yeah, you are right. It is Gaussian distribution.

We have to come up with an accurate definition of luck, and
a way to quantify it. It is a function of work put in and
the results obtained. And we have to define how to quantify work.

Another way is to think of world with no luck in it. How would
it affect us? Would the world be the same?
you are mixing things up. Privacy and Opensource. For a true open source project look at http://www.replicant.us/
And regarding privacy: Use SIM cards which do not require an ID and which you can throw away ;) but this is only the first step.
Sure.

Yes, I need a car. I love cars/motorcycles. I love driving. I always owned at least one vehicle even when I lived in the city and didn't have to. So this isn't a bad thing for me at all. Having a garage to safely park and work on my vehicles is a huge bonus.

I am far less isolated from my neighbors and community than I was when I lived in the city. Living in apartments I had essentially zero contact/communication with my neighbors other than uncomfortable elevator rides. Living in the suburbs I know all my neighbors well. We help each other clear driveways after a big snow. We BBQ together. We watch each others houses when we travel. We talk.

I love having a huge lawn. It's not a burden, it's wonderful. I love having a nice hammock, green grass to lay in, a big space for my dog to run around in, a place to put the raised garden beds I built for my wife, etc...

I enjoy not having ugly/loud/smelly commercial buildings hemming me in.

We have good pedestrian infrastructure. Wide sidewalks that let me run, walk the dog, walk into the town forrest for a hike, or stroll into town for lunch or to grab ice cream with my wife on a hot summers day. There's no high speed traffic, and no irrational fears about kids getting kidnapped.

When I have a party, everyone can easily park in my driveway if they also live outside easy public transportation. I can play music and have 20 people over for a bonfire without bothering my neighbors.

There's a lot of things I miss about living in the city, likewise there's a lot of things I miss about living in the country. But honestly, right now, my current neighborhood and home are a great spot for me.
It seems to be http (perhaps load balancers) rather than the instances being down - I'm ssh-ed into a droplet and everything is working fine, except remote HTTP connections.
Did you see Peter Warden's post? He's the creator of that map.

http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-s...
This really is a very important point. The fact that James immersed himself in the world in all respects(day job and as an amateur) likely increased his chance of success.

If you were asked on the spot to name the names of a few acquaintances(not people you know, only people you know of), you'd probably name those who pepper your life most often. Now if those people made it known that they're fisherman or actors or really into painting or programming or etc. Then the next time someone asks "Hey you know of any good programmers? You know of anyone interested in painting? You know...etc"; you'll be able to say yeah I know a guy, he washes my car every other week. It works out for you(because you recommended a person) and it works out for the other person because they get a shot at doing something they love.

James Garner allowed himself to seep into the consciousness of as many people as he could so they'd associated him with what he loved; smart move.

A corollary may be that the more people that know what you love, the more you become a person who loves that thing; both personally(mentally associating yourself as an actor/writer/programmer/etc) and professionally("Yeah, James he's an actor. Ben wants to be a painter. Sheila is trying to be a cartoonist").
Probably from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub'_al_Khali
Void Linux: runit enabled by default, replacing systemd
Look, the version of Iceweasel in Debian Stable is based on Firefox 24. According to the Firefox ESR calendar, Firefox 24 will got out of support in October. But the new version of Debian Stable won't be released before December, at least, and Debian doesn't upgrade the major version of a package in Stable.

So how exactly can Debian patch Iceweasel using Mozilla's patches between October and January?
I'm not sure why you were downvoted, some suburbs are exactly as you describe. Perhaps the vast majority are not like that in the US?
I don't even know how much time I spent on IRC (dalnet) and when I discovered my local ISP had a Quake server it was huge!

We used to play Duke Nukem or Doom 1 vs 1 via a direct dialup connection, but playing agains 20 other guys on a Quakeworld server was just something else. The server was so badly run that every now and then something would happen to it that we used to be able to outrun our own rockets. I shot myself in the back with my own rockets many, many times.

I don't know how I even managed to graduate from high school really.
Glad to see that Hacker League is getting some much needed development love. Keep up the great work!
Is there any way you can substantiate any of this? I wouldn't be shocked, but it seems borderline implausible that we'd be getting all this interest in various ways to hack into iPhones physically if you could just dial a number--and I think it also goes without saying that, whether Apple provides official backdoors or no, it has a high interest in ensuring that there aren't any unofficial backdoors for many other reasons (preserving DRM for one example, if you need them to have a selfish motivation).
> These values come from running a logistic regression on the factors that were most statistically significant. The y-axis represents the standardized value of the coefficients in our regression.

"Most statistically significant" does not imply that the variables themselves are statistically significant, and it does not imply that the logistic regression itself is accurate (especially since the regression uses only 5 variables). What is the accuracy of the model?

The value of the logistic regression coefficient is the log-likelihood of the estimate, not the "Significance of Regression Coefficient", which is a completely different value altogether (the p-value).
Two nuclear bombs nearly detonated in North Carolina in 1961
Thanks. Will reach out once I get a chance: the video transcoding/streaming will be the real heavy lifting. This was mostly just a node-webkit exercise, but not sure how cleanly it will merge with the Chrome code you linked to.
Amazon’s Scorpion Problem
Free, Encrypted Calling Finally Comes To The iPhone
Not entirely different. If a thing is so consistently misused as to controvert its original purpose, it's fair to say you're "sick of X" as a proxy for its community or educational standards or other meta-application.

I don't agree with the author's approach either, but I don't think he's trying to say what you think.
TLDR: recruitment letters need to have attached in them with a competitive (at or above average) salary number, personalized to the prospective employee. In other words, actually email the person and be transparent with what you're offering.
Why are the forced to hire subcontractors, and a certain # of them? Do you know what the thinking is behind that?
What you call suburbs others would call the country.

But it can be varying degrees. I live in a gated neighborhood in a private planned subdivision with city water, city sewer, natural gas, cable, electric, and phone. Less than a mile from my house is city planned subdivision (blocks) with well water, septic systems, cable, electric, phone and partially paved streets.
Hard enough for most recruiters to read a resume, in my experience.
But was that tested in court?
>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 ...

>...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.

I think those assumptions are where I disagree. a) I care about (not) being near crime, and b) crime doesn't randomly sample across the set of all people, but makes me have to avoid certain times, places, and activities.
Let the genuine ideas spread.
FWIW my suburban town has almost no chain anythings. I can walk to local coffee shops (have to drive to a Starbucks). We have an amazing collection of local restaurants covering almost every possible cuisine. We have a great library, rail trails, public forrest and green spaces, a local CSA my wife bikes to once a week to pick up our veggies, and much more.
Thanks for reading my article! And thanks for the insight here. I really wasn't trying though to make it part of my thesis that you should have a terrible childhood in order to create a non-anxious state to make yourself more observant, or that you should give your own kids a terrible childhood to make them more successful.

But it was to show how relaxed James was, and it also seemed to stem from how he interpreted the terrible things that happened to him. I thought those stories could help some of us realize that if we could re-interpret some of the bad things that have happened to us the way James has, we could probably become more observant too, and hence spot more opportunities.

Also, Malcolm Gladwell has some interesting bits in his latest book, David and Goliath, about how childhood trouble like dyslexia can turn into opportunities. I'm going to butcher the research if I try and bring it up now, but there's some neat bits there if you haven't read them.
Now we just need legislation that limits the phone company retention of these records to (say) three years.
The only ones who truly profit from urban sprawl are land developers. They wipe out forests and wildlife to make a quick buck on cheap low-density housing.

The taxpayer foots the bill to have the grid and city services extended for these suburbs.

So the taxpayer loses, nature loses, and the losers who bought these ugly disposable houses are losers. Only the land developers profit.
An Ingenious Plane Design That Makes Room for Your Carry-Ons
It will be available for Linux (at least Ubuntu): I just need to brush off my old scripts for generating .deb packages and I'll have something. Just didn't want to dawdle and let it fall into my pile of neglected projects.
Very few people live there: http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/downloads/maps/grump-v1/gru...