skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IMO, this is the most important bit in the article, and it also seems to be the piece that everybody is overlooking:

So why are economists obsessed with competition as an ideal state? It is a relic of history. Economists copied their mathematics from the work of 19th-century physicists: They see individuals and businesses as interchangeable atoms, not as unique creators. Their theories describe an equilibrium state of perfect competition because that is what's easy to model, not because it represents the best of business.

Yes, exactly. Pretty much all classical / neo-classical economic thought is rooted in the idea of equilibrium, but a strong case can be made that economic systems are not equilibrium systems. Eric Beinocker covers this ground very thoroughly in The Origin of Wealth[1]. I would personally recommend this book to everyone interested in economics. Beinhocker and the other "complexity economists" present a model of economic activity as an evolutionary system with periods of punctuated equilibrium as opposed to a strict equilibrium system.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Origin-Wealth-Remaking-Economics/d...

In business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death. If your industry is in a competitive equilibrium, the death of your business won't matter to the world; some other undifferentiated competitor will always be ready to take your place.

Bingo. Yes, the "goal" is to achieve a "monopoly" but even if you do achieve that, you don't get to set still and just collect limitless money for perpetuity... because evolution will eventually deliver a competitor in one form or another.
There is usually a pretty good response to important science stories here so I am not sure why the lack of interest.

There are four really worrying aspects to this outbreak:

1. It is showing no sign of burning itself out unlike the other 18 outbreaks we know of. Every single person that it passes through increases the probability of it becoming fully adapted to humans. We really have no idea of the case rate, but it is at least a 1000 per week - that is a lot of rolls of the dice.

2. It is occurring in west Africa where implementing any containment is near impossible. An aspect of this that has not received much attention is the genetic diversity of the human immune system in west Africa population is very high. If the virus does breakout then we can’t rely on it having adapted to limited HLA subset - basically if the virus is able to spread in west Africa then it can spread in any human population (a kind of reverse new world problem).

3. A very high percentage of the medical staff dealing with this are getting infected despite taking extraordinary effort to avoid person-to-person contact. How are they getting infected if not by airborne transmission? This suggest that ebola is already airborne, just not highly efficient yet. Every person infected increases the chance that airborne transmission will become efficient.

4. We are doing almost nothing to prepare.
I think it is much better that he made it clear where he places his bets. If you have kids and over 40, it is very likely that a slower paced, bootstrapped business growth model will suite your lifestyle better anyway.
They're not charging individuals fees. I don't understand all the intricacies of how they're breaking the law (I posted a separate question about how Super Shuttle has been around so long) - but Google and Facebook buses aren't doing it as a business.
* ridester.com

* zimride.com

* erideshare.com
I will never look at normal life the same way again.
You can already buy a fake iPhone 6 replica on Amazon
What does that have to do with the discussion above, which is about contractual arrangements?
> But those systems tend to look like a "single-payer donkey with a free-market tail stuck on."

I wouldn't use either of the terms "single-payer" or "free-market" in describing systems in which there are multiple private sector health insurers (payers), and it is mandatory for individuals to purchase a plan from one, with highly regulated plan provisions and operations.

They don't much look like "single-payer" anything, and don't very much look like any "free-market" bit has been stuck on (there is a market component, but its not free.)

> If that sounds exactly like the ACA, you're correct

The ACA is similar in outline, but the differences aren't particularly subtle (the ACA's isn't universal; the poor, elderly, and disabled -- rather than being subject to the mandate and operating through the same market, potentially with a public subsidy, instead are directed to one [in some cases, both] of two completely separate public insurance systems, etc., etc., etc.)
Maybe you could say that google has a monopoly on high quality/relevant search results?
It's either that, or he feels the law should not apply to Uber/Lyft.
How to Find a Job at a Startup (Even If You Cannot Code)
Yeah, after moving to the UK I was shocked and bemused to find out that the BBC in their arrogance saw fit to ensure that not only would I be denied some of their content whilst outside the country (as I had long grown accustomed to), but that they have taken appropriate measures so that those citizens within the country will also suffer at the hands of the all-powerful BBC administrators who no doubt have very grave reasons to ensure the sanctity of their content distribution lest someone put together all the pieces and obtain the whole picture.

There is a marginally more satisfying half-explanation at http://halfblog.net/2013/01/16/why-is-this-bbc-website-not-a...
Advertisements. See: Craigslist
I love the part where it says, "Don't worry. Your computer is safe." This is the same thing they say right before you get a blow dart to your neck, a black bag on your head, and driven to an "undisclosed location." Cool game!
42 (YC W14) is hiring a full stack engineer
Hello from 42 (https://42technologies.com)!

Looking for a full stack engineer to help implement our next gen physical retail analytics platform.

We're trying to get rid of legacy retail infrastructure. We take data from their systems, normalize it, and make it accessible through an API. Right now, we're consuming this API via a sweet angular-based web dashboard. Think google analytics for retail.

Our dashboard makes it easy for anyone in the retail organization, from executives to store managers, to make informed decisions based on data.

The ideal candidate would have no problem writing significant chunks of infrastructure. You're obsessed with clean code and API design. You also have an interest in data mining and large-scale data processing. This is a position for engineer #1, and as such, you will have lots of responsibilities and tremendous impact on the direction of the company.

Experience with retail is not required.

Some projects you'll be working on:

- User management system (will be open sourced if possible)
- Personalized recommendations
- Goal tracking
- Customer segmentation
- A/B testing for retailers

Our stack is composed of:

- AngularJS, CoffeeScript, Grunt, Jade
- Microservice architecture
- Mostly NodeJS + CoffeeScript, Python
- Postgres, LevelDB, some Redis.
- Docker, CoreOS / Gentoo / Ubuntu

What we can offer:

- Competitive salary & equity
- Define our culture and technology direction
- Relocation packages
- Whatever gear you need
- A sweet office in SOMA, with snacks!
- Insight on how large retail companies operate

Send an email to nick@42technologies.com if you're interested!
Strncpy like a boss
Vice Documentary on the Islamic State
Research Tools for App Development Ideas
So, Thiel is interested in monopolies:

"But the world we live in is dynamic: We can invent
new and better things. Creative monopolists give
customers more choices by adding entirely new
categories of abundance to the world."

Okay, I'll try to understand this:

I'll go back to the Al Capone "A person can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone."

Well, with a VC firm an entrepreneur can get much farther with "new and better things" and traction significant and growing rapidly than with "new and better things" alone. Or, with the traction, a VC might just assume there are "new and better things" in there somewhere?
I don't think the involvement of the state negates the point. The U.S. government is the ultimate monopolist: almost totally insulated from competition. My suspicion is that the R&D sector in the U.S. has evolved into a highly-suitable structure for invention: a broad mix of government subsidy, large corporate monopolies, and small R&D firms.
It's important to realize that common sense is never a replacement for a proof or emperical result. That is, common sense is not sufficient to refute the claims made by the original paper.

The power of science is that it often defies reasoning and in so doing provides new insights into how things work.
Thanks! You aren't the first to mention this, and we have a good idea of how we want to do this going forward but haven't implemented it yet.
Apache Kafka for Beginners
No.

I've enjoyed reading Borges, and I think there is much to be said for his work. But the 20th Century included the writing years of (mostly at random) Joyce, Musil, Proust, Eliot, (most of) Yeats, and Nabokov, to name only a few, who were as good as Borges at what they did, and did a good deal more.
True, but competing could be a successful short term strategy, if you can identify a target who are burdened with excessive costs for some reason, or can think of a cheaper way to make something.
What is a Software Abstraction?
Brown noise sounds lovely, like a waterfall: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_noise
A.k.a. "monopolistic competition" - a pretty bad term IMO
Your C# IO monad could really benefit from using LINQ (I know you mention it at the end). If you're interested in a full set of C# monads (including a fully implemented IO monad) check my csharp-monad library [0]

[0] https://github.com/louthy/csharp-monad
If the argument is that companies start research labs because of excess profits then that would be negated by the fact that those labs are largely funded by the government.

And the government is clearly sui generis, you can't compare it to private industry monopolies.
Nice! I don't understand how to link the algorithm to an animation when creating a new algorithm? I'm clearly missing something.
Peter Thiel, seems like people in YCombinator are taking on monopolies. That sort of means competing inherently, and competing is not necessarily is bad a thing. It is bad if you are behind though. For example AMD is 1.5 years behind intel in technology and would you like to buy an AMD chip now? of course not! But they were at some point much ahead of intel in terms of technology. If you want to win a competition especially when you space has already won by a search engine like google, you need to not compete directly. Yahoo could have still be in the business if they were making a good search engine that was giving more relevant results than google. My point is, in order to win any competition and therefore make a monopoly you need great idea and great people making great products, and that is what google has and Yahoo don't. If yahoo can inspire smart people to work for it and make great products believe me even the google empire will be falling down.
Peter Thiel, seems like people in YCombinator are taking on monopolies. That sort of means competing inherently, and competing is not necessarily is bad a thing. It is bad if you are behind though. For example AMD is 1.5 years behind intel in technology and would you like a buy AMD chip now? no! But they were at some point much ahead of intel in terms of technology. If you want to win a competition especially when you space has already won by a search engine like google, you need to not compete directly. Yahoo could have still be in the business if they were making a good search engine that was giving more relevant results than google. My point is, in order to win any competition and therefore make a monopoly you need great idea and great people making great products, and that is what google has and Yahoo don't. If yahoo can inspire smart people to work for it and make great products believe me even the google empire will be falling down.
A large proportion of my students work part time jobs for 20+ hours a week.

I don't really understand how they can afford tuition + room + board but need the $140 (less taxes) a week, but as it turns out this is very common.

It made a big impression on me when a student walked in to turn in his homework wearing a Chick-Fil-A cap. Asking around, I learned that this is typical at the university where I teach.

So, yes, here at least, $264.39 is 37 hours at McDonalds. Well.... taxes.... so make that more like 50.
Senator Challenges Zuckerberg: 'Hire American Workers for a Change'
The site was getting a huge amount of traffic today from this post so it may have been acting funny.

Sometimes after you register you have to the click the "Startups Daily" button at the top of the page to take you to the home feed.

Let me know if it still doesn't work and I will investigate further.
> Page’s work on diversity has been cited by NASA, the US Geological Survey, and Lawrence Berkeley Labs, among many
others

Oops.
I suspect because SuperShuttle franchises have different terms for the TCP permit they carry.

http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/transportation/FAQs/psgfaqs.htm
I have a natural language question answering system build on top of information repositories.

Understanding the intent of questions is an AI topic for sure.
Where? Not in the linked article.

Do you have a reference?
Israeli intelligence agents: 'we routinely targeted innocent Palestinians'
Speeding up AngularJS
Here is a link to the original article in the Financial Post (http://bit.ly/1m1lGdi) with the due credit to the original author, Quentin Casey, and the companies mentioned in the article, fluttrbox and Resson Aerospace (which is conveniently not mentioned by this author).

I am the co-founder of fluttrbox(applied YC W15)
Because the more contractual arrangements they have the more the start looking like employees. FedEx is dealing with this right now with their contract workers.
That's certainly useful, and what Echoprint and MusicBrainz have tried to do.

Unfortunately, many fingerprinting use cases require hashing at different granularities (ie, FFT windows), or need different collision guarantees to trade off space vs. accuracy and so on and so forth.

A perfect example is throwing away part of the SHA-1 hash of a fingerprint. You lose some entropy, but you become more space efficient.

Thus in many cases, while the core algorithm might be the same, the parameters and constraints of the individual use case often mean that the fingerprints themselves aren't universal in size or format.
Google's web video ambitions bump into hard reality
It's interesting - a lot of "geeks" or "hackers" dislike sports, and many maintain that sports have little value (especially compared to intellectual pursuits). But... if you're a fan of (American) football, or baseball, you can immediately and intuitively grasp the ideas from this article in terms of an easy to understand metaphor. In fact, if you are such a fan (and/or participant) you probably already have this mindset, which could be summarized as:

"Just pickup a first down, you don't have to score a touchdown on every play"

or

"Focus on hitting singles and doubles and the runs will come"

To the extent that sports represent an analogy to "real life" the experience gained from doing these things can actually be very valuable.

Let me also refer back to one of my favorite sports stories of all time: The 2002 NCAA wrestling finals. Rob Rohn wrestling Josh Lambrecht for the 184lb championship. Rohn is down by 12+ points late in the match, and is close to losing on a technical fall, and certainly doesn't have enough time to come back and win. The announcers have already started congratulating Lambrecht on his win with just over a minute to go. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, Rohn pulls out a "cement job" from a front headlock, puts Lambrecht on his back, and wins by pinfall with a few seconds remaining. As a metaphor for persistence and "never say die" spirit, it's hard to find a better example, IMO. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRB6m4VdeJQ
Still doesn't seem to be working.
When I try to register with Twitter, the sign in modal pops up, then disappears before anything loads.
Some random thoughts:

- Economists don't like monopolies due to dead-weight loss. However there is only dead-weight loss if the monopolist cannot price-discriminate. If they can price-discriminate, it's simply of a transfer of wealth from customers/employees/suppliers to shareholders. So there is some room to argue against it on efficiency grounds (if they can't price-discriminate), and definitely room to argue against on equality grounds (if you care about such things).

- Unregulated monopoly is the most profitable form of business. Abusive monopolies are probably more profitable than nice ones. Abusive monopolies are illegal (?). As a manager at a US public company, you are legally required to maximize shareholder value, ie try to create an abusive monopoly, ie break the law.

- Monopolies are bad for everyone except the shareholders and probably management

- Oligopolies probably do more R&D than monopolies, as monopolies don't have an incentive to spend money on research. Perfect competition leaves no profit to spend on R&D
and ridejoy.com (YC-backed and failed).

And my friend made https://github.com/thedjpetersen/ridezap_os

And I've seen countless school projects trying to address ride-sharing.

I don't think it will ever catch on.
I don't think either AT&T nor Xerox PARC were ever "largely funded" by the government.
I also work 20 hours/week, but it's still nowhere close to covering room and board, let alone tuition.
One of the fundamental concepts in algorithmic information theory is that the physical design and construction of your "novel golf club" is completely and perfectly equivalent to a mathematical equation in exactly the same way the RSA algorithm is. The argument generalizes to all patentable subject matters. And as fabrication technology is becoming more sophisticated this fact is starting to become more obvious in practice.

No one patented modular exponentiation, they patented an encryption algorithm that employs modular exponentiation. That is a distinction with a real difference. All patents have this type of construction. The same argument could be used to assert that all chemical process patents are patenting common chemistry or facts of nature.

The deeper issue with both copyrights and patents is that they are based on legal distinctions that don't exist mathematically. The law must therefore necessarily be inconsistent and ambiguous in its treatment of such things. Piling yet another mathematically unsupportable fiction on top of the existing ones won't mitigate the problem.

I can live just fine without algorithm patents but as a matter of principle I also object to the obviously selective and inconsistent application of standards for what is and is not patentable.
You must not have had an In-N-Out burger, they hardly have high quality. I did a blind taste test study on 23 participants, between McDonalds meat and In-N-Out. There were no significant results - people were only able to identify the correct meat 53% of the time (and it was McDonald's, not In-N-Out's, indicating a slight preference towards McDonald's taste). Essentially, every time you ordered a burger, you could flip a coin and you wouldn't notice the difference in the meat.

This was a small sample size, but I want to expand it with a more comprehensive study. Where most In-N-Out fans go wrong is that they compare a $1 McDonalds Cheeseburger that has no lettuce or tomatoes, etc. with a $4 In-N-Out burger that lots of garnish and Thousand Island Dressing. A more "accurate" comparison would be between one of McDonald's Quarter-Pounders, of similar price, and In-N-Out, but ultimately the dressing is going to cause the divide... not the "high quality/freshness" of the burger.
This article is shallow and misleading.

Economists do indeed have models of perfect competition, and perfect monopoly. But these are not the only concepts that economics has. For example, the market for pharmaceuticals is competitive ex ante, but monopolistic ex post. Anyone can choose to put research into developing a drug. But having discovered a particular drug, they have a monopoly over it.

Even though the monopoly is bad ex post, the promise of a monopoly is needed as an incentive to engage in productive activity ex ante. The same applies even more to company's like Apple and Google who maintain their monopoly by creating a unique product.

So the article is completely wrong when it says "To an economist, every monopoly looks the same, whether it deviously eliminates rivals, secures a license from the state or innovates its way to the top. I'm not interested in illegal bullies or government favorites"

Every kind of monopoly looks the same ex post, but monopolies achieved through innovation and monopolies achieved through bribery or favoritism are completely different ex ante. The first kind of monopoly incentivizes inventing new things. The second kind incentivizes unproductive activity such as bribery.
What a great idea! It should be a part of Inkscape.

The Bezier tool in Inkscape or Illustrator is essential for doing smooth vector graphics illustrations, which I need only about once or twice a year. Each time, I need to struggle to get the path under control using a combination of luck, random button pushing and cursing. I'm bookmarking this page so that I can brush up before I use the tool next time.
Attribute and Macro Syntax in Rust
But a clearly absurd or nonsensical result should be enough reason to double-check that the proof and results are actually valid.

Common sense may have a somewhat low weight for evaluating how probable some scientific result is, but it doesn't have zero weight. And neither does the possibility of experimental error.
But the assholes insist that they're _required_ to be that way, by the rules of capitalism, and almost no one seems to argue with them (except those "spouting left'ish wing propaganda").
> Can anyone explain how this is different from services like Super Shuttle?

Super Shuttle is a Passenger Stage Corporation (of the subtype defined as a "Door-to-Door Shuttle Service"), whereas Uber, Lyft, etc. are Charter Party Carriers, of the recently-defined subtype defined as "Transportation Network Companies".)

The rule at issue here applies to Charter Party Carriers, and therefore does not impact Super Shuttle and similar services, just as there are many rules that would apply to Super Shuttle as a PSC that do not apply to Uber/Lyft.
the only thing more exciting than new senses is improving our current ones. the sky is the limit once we have strong understanding of how our brain interprets its inputs.

replace your eyes with cameras (20/20 vision, ability to see "invisible" frequencies, night vision, 360 degree vision). replace your ears with microphones (hear "invisible" frequencies). if we can do that, we can also directly input synthesized sources (think oculus rift without the headset. or your iPod without the headphones.)

granted, if we can do that we've built the matrix sans software and at that point all bets are off. not that I think it's a bad thing, a body is a pretty shitty vessel for a consciousness.

im not sure we will have such a reliable interface in my lifetime, but it's amazing to live in a time where it seems completely possible.
In my opinion the reason "portfolio theory" works in the cases that you mentioned is that it most perform well across a time series within a highly dynamic environment. But if one is allow to pick an optimal team for each discrete problem then it will surely outperform.

In my mind diversity will help when you have little to no a priori knowledge and then for can not predict what attributes you will need.