skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>tries to con people into signing up to boost its user numbers

I never understood this. As long as there is a infinite supply of free email accounts available. Any body who asks people to sign up merely to read content is just fooling themselves into thinking people are going to supply genuine email id's to read stuff.

These days I keep a email id handy for purposes like these.

Want me to sign up? Sure why not? But don't expect it to be the id which I use to do serious stuff.
Facebook Will Use Facebook Data to Sell Ads on Sites That Aren’t Facebook
Yes, but who owns it? Who is investing the capital in the infrastructure? Who got to tell those fisherman "yeah, so you're never going to be able to fish here again, here is some farmland." Is the government building everything? Where does the rent money go?
My personal opinion: with an app, which already has 1M downloads you don't need those accelerators anymore. Find a good business angel (or two) with expertise in the areas you need and work with them. Also consider moving to one of the StartUp hotspots (SF, London, Berlin...).

As a side note: I'd avoid to be connected to the "Bild" (assuming you are not in the yellow press business).
They just call them escorts.
I too have wondered this. I think these guys have done some research on the matter: http://www.seasteading.org/

...but I don't know of the current state, if any, of their conclusions.
Facebook Start New York
An irony here: Steven Pinker is himself a fairly bad writer, although he's bad in the way that someone like David Brooks of the NYT is bad (superficial, self-absorbed), as opposed to the classic academic literary sins of prolixity, overuse of jargon, etc.
The Rackspace status page:
https://status.rackspace.com/
Making Adjustments in the Search for the Perfect News Feed
Rocket Internet in Berlin is IMHO also an A but with a questionable business model.
That's the same problem google has w/ display ads. In this sense FB would have an advantage anyway because their demo targeting is much, much more precise.
Go 1.3.2 is broken on Windows
The book (and the notes) definitely will get you excited about 'big picture' thinking again. If business books can be separated into 'strategic' and 'tactical' categories, I'd say this book falls undoubtedly into the 'strategic' camp. While these kinds of philosophy-heavy books always give me a high, the lack of tactical content is somewhat disappointing once the initial high dies off. This very well may be the author's intention, as the actual entrepreneurship product-market adventure is left as an exercise for the reader. I suppose that would be my main criticism of the book.

In any event, I found it a very worthwhile read.
One thing that I am most likely to do is to re-build or replace older and less functional pieces of software used by the educational institution.

It's win win, there is almost always some form of old software that needs updating, new features, or just needs to be completely new, and many educational institutions will jump at "free" work.
> "it’s easy to imagine that Twitter could tinker with inserting tweets that link to a major story that might be unfolding, tweets that are relevant based on whom you follow, or even tweets based on a user’s location. And would that be such a bad thing?"

Yes.

> "Information delivery in the online age is still evolving, and the only sure bet is that no one will ever agree on what makes the perfect feed."

Are the impending Twitter changes intended to recruit Facebook users? It would be helpful to define the target audience which would be attracted to Twitter by the proposed changes.
I actually fond the most efficient solution to a problem recently (generating massive numbers of DNA sequence combinations, and checking for the number of mismatches between them) came from using MySQL and bitwsie operators. I tried Python, it was at least an order of magnitude slower. I tried Java, but that ran out of memory surprisingly quickly. I might try it in C at some stage but that will involve a fair bit more time.
I've asked our support team to contact you.
To the admin who had to hit <Enter> on the script that kicked off these reboots.... I imagine this guy turning and looking the other way before clicking.

What poor execution on this...Xen updates can't be that rare that this is their first rollout.
Purely Functional 3D in Typed Racket [video]
It makes a lot of sense. If a business can turn a variable cost (fuel) into a fixed cost (solar panels) it's generally advantageous.
Barbara Bui a présenté une collection moderne à l’ancienne
The Ferguson protests are a good example. It's already resulted in some sweeping changes to their municipal court system[1], which has been described as, "One Big Shakedown Racket Targeted at Black People"[2]. These are changes the activists and lawyers had long sought, but was refused by the City Council until these protests made that untenable.

It is continuing to force the local police to a higher standards of accountability and transparency then they would have done without[3]. Additionally, this along with the recent national attention to other unarmed black men being shot by cops, has played a huge role in getting police officers equipped with dashboard and body-mounted cameras[4].

eta: grammar

[1] http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/policymakers-eye-big-cha...

[2] http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/09/04/st_louis_f...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Michael_Brown#Poli...

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/us/todays-police-put-on-a-...
If you jump to 11:52, you’ll see a neat demo that shows off the engine’s performance: 70,000 spheres (ray traced on the card), 500 lights, at 60 frames per second. Great stuff!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3xdv4UP9-U&t=11m52s

The source code is available on GitHub:

https://github.com/ntoronto/pict3d
Off-topic, but the markup of that page is really interesting. I've never seen someone do this before:

<h1>LibreSSL: More Than 30 Days Later</h1>
Ted Unangst<p>
tedu@openbsd.org<p>

LibreSSL was officially announced to the world just about exactly five months
ago. Bob spoke at BSDCan about the first 30 days. For those who weren't there,
I'll quickly rehash some of that material. Also, it's always best to start at
the beginning, but then I'll try to focus on some new material and updates.

<h1>openssl</h1>
You really have no idea how a lot of the world live.
The WD docs for Intellipower indicate that RPM is one of the things they vary to conserve power. I can't find much in the way of specifics, but since they list the RPM of the drives as "Intellipower", the assumption would be that they don't operate at a fixed RPM.
Source: http://www.chinanews.com/shipin/cnstv/2014/09-26/news500277....

They actually got some "celebrators" standing in front of the protesters claiming everybody is having a party.
Advertising is a tricky business.

Facebook's Like button was really a brilliant move by Zuckerberg because it essentially gave FB a tracking page of the majority of the Internet. I don't mean this in a nefarious way: this is how display advertising works. A cookie allows the advertiser to see what sites you visit and, from your behaviour, develop a profile of your interests, likely age/gender, etc (all based on modelling).

I should also point out that before the inevitable cries about privacy, an advertiser doesn't care about you, specifically. They care about the characteristics of groups of people because that's the only way statistical modelling works anyway. If you visit some fishing sites, you as an individual may or may not be interested in fishing. Take 1000 people like you and there's a much higher chance that a member of that group is much more interested in fishing than the general population.

Anyway, I thought a couple of years ago that FB was poised to become a major player in the display advertising business. This hasn't come to pass. Not because they couldn't. They simply have chosen not to go down that path. They don't' want to risk cheapening their platform by becoming another AdSense (which is the lowest CPM you can get and is really for the very long tail).

This is one reason advertising is tricky. It's a balancing act where you're trying to cultivate premium publishers and advertisers while segmenting both (premium, remnant, long tail, etc) without cheapening the premium side, which is where you make all your money.

So you can buy an impression on the WSJ through a guaranteed reservation. This by far generates the most money for the site and is how the WSJ would like you to buy advertising. Still, they can't sell all their impressions this way so there are various sources for monetizing so-called "remnant inventory". Thing is, you don't want your premium advertisers buying impressions through those (cheaper) channels instead.

So Facebook seems to clearly be protecting its potential value. It really is potential value until it's realized.

I have a theory about this: I don't think all that data we give Facebook is actually all that valuable. What sites you visit on the Internet vs what you tell Facebook is really the difference between what you do and what you say. What you say is filtered through how you perveive yourself, how you think others perceive you and how you want them to perceive you. What you do (IMHO) is a far more genuine representation.

So time will tell. I think at this point if you see FB enter the display advertising space, it's a de facto admission of failure (meaning it hasn't met expectations) of monetizing all that data.

Disclaimer: I work on display advertising for Google.
Happy to see a Tyler Cowen recommendation.

Thiel is still very much worth reading though. FWIW, Tyler Cowen would say the same; "The Great Stagnation", his book before "Average is Over", is dedicated to Thiel.
I do pay a lot of attention to these things, and to the best of my knowledge, nobody has considered something like this. I'm not sure it would be possible, but it would make for some interesting hardware level optimizations. There's always a chance that some company has figured something out but is keeping it secret to maintain a margin over their competitors.
Its a pretty big rift from my perspective. We were right alongside mechanical and architectural majore at VTC, they all learned some really crufty cad programs. The worst was SolidWworks, scripting that thing is a pig if damn near impossible. As a wanna-be tech startup in the field, I'd stay away from those tools like a plague. I heard there was way to do it, but its the kind of thing hiding behind their coprorate pay-wall and for profit training material.

I've been impressed with tools like freecad - Its all implemented on top of a great Python API and lets you run code against some of their core modules. Developing procedural and programatically (parametrically?) designed hardware is much easier - and you can still interface with the average CAD worker / engineer.

That being said, the average designer is SOL in this workchain.

Still haven't found a good mix.
Now you jinxed it.
That applied to tablet apps only, which Android devs justifiably ignored. Android devs never had the luxury of assuming devices were of any particular point size, which is something iOS devs did habitually until now.
Hmm... is it just a coincidence that our school services portal had a semi-scheduled downtime this sunday from 6am-6pm, but we weren't notified of this until late friday... Also there is never maintenance for this and when there is the official time is 2-5am on friday....
I agree; it's a great demonstration that machines, despite being many orders of magnitude faster, are capable of only the same types of very simple operations that humans can do.

That is one idea intro CS students certainly should get used to, as I've found that manually executing algorithms is good for debugging and learning too.
it's state of the art in society.
that is, because someone long ago discovered it working and society isn't pushed to try out better means, because the bad effects aren't overall noticably punishing enough for the pusher, ironically, and because negative feedback is a cheap basic part of the constant learning process. It's pretty productive, because it's focused on the product.
There is a question in QuizUp which says "Where does 163.com take you?"
I think most of the 2 million dollars went towards the 1993-vintage HD plasma TV, not the game hardware itself. Those are a lot less expensive now too, but you'd still need a fair bit more than $35 to get a screen big enough to comfortably fit 10 players.
Day 101 – Reduce, cut, simplify, repeat
I'm curious if you could recommend a way to do parametric design with SolidWorks.

The way my friend was doing it, the system ended up chugging like a pig and he had a rather impressive machine.

I'd prefer a system involved with a programming language. I get the impression that SW isn't geared to do that because the market they serve doesn't care for that level of control.
I highly recommend everyone to go through the book http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ before, or as a complementary direction to, diving into any "operating system" resources mentioned on this page. (you could try this on a QEMU/VMWare/VirtualBox/KVM/whatever instance instead of risking your current hard-drive partition setup).

(alert: it's not really a book, it's a project: to compile and install linux without using any distro! the whole process could take somewhere from 1 day to 1 week, depending on the speed of your machine and your command-line skills.)

Because then you would discover (if you haven't already) that what all these people call "operating system" is essentially only a nucleus of the operating system (kernel) and that there is much more to an operating system than whatever is discussed in an OS class.

Also LFS is enlightening in ways I may not have expressed here. If you successfully go through the process, your first thought might be to roll your own linux distro!
While I agree, poverty reduction will likely lead to a more consumerist, less environmentally friendly lifestyle.
China Blocks Instagram Amid Hong Kong Protests
I built something similar for my desk using a raspberry pi and this 2.7 inch e-ink display: http://www.embeddedartists.com/products/displays/lcd_27_epap...

The nice thing is they have python drivers for it and it works with the gpio pins.
But still no data to back this garbage claim. Still data that does support a narrower spread in the presence of HFT.

Leave the condescension out, huh?
They're getting pretty good though at predicting intent.

A couple months ago, I was looking for a cheap hotel in San Diego on several travel websites outside of Facebook. I didn't click any FB like buttons on those websites but not much later "Hotels in San Diego" ads started appearing in my feed.
> an advertiser doesn't care about you, specifically

Of course they do. They just haven't figured out how to personally market to individuals without running afoul of regulations or public sentiment. Removing those impediments is a marketing wet dream.
Oh, also apparently the iconic 'hands-up, don't shoot' gesture from the Ferguson protests has migrated to Hong Kong: http://www.vox.com/2014/9/28/6860493/hong-kong-protests-mike....

That's pretty cool.
> a population casually using RDF and Prolog but losing sleep over HTML and JSON?

Have you met academics?

Just kidding ;), but by exaggerating, not by lying. (Also I know for a fact that you have met academics). Of course any compsci academic can pick-up HTML and JSON in half an hour of time, but it's not mad to imagine that some of them never were interested in actual web technologies (working on RDF can be done from a purely theoretical point of view) and seeing this sentences on HTML and JSON may be a useful information to them, just as mentioning a practical use-case at the end of a paper's abstract can be.
I think some clarification is necessary:

If South Korean government were really serious about addressing the problem of over-centralization of Korea (hint: the present administration isn't), they wouldn't have built yet another new city reachable by Seoul's subway system.

In contrast, the construction of Sejong city (pioneered by the late president Roh Moo-Hyun) was fraught with legal/political objections from conservatives, who were worried that such a move would undermine their traditional position of power (and potentially do something to finally stabilize the housing market of Seoul, though that's rather far-fetched). The struggle culminated in our own Constitutional Court declaring the original Sejong project (which wanted to make it the new capital of governance) as unconstitutional, on the grounds that it would be against Gyeongguk Daejeon, the "constitution" (or close equivalent) of our dead Joseon dynasty (1392-1910).

(Yep, these guys were desparate, and had the backing of half South Koreans, so "being logical" wasn't a high priority. So went the chance of building a balanced nation...)

Needless to say, none of these guys raised any objection in building Songdo: unlike Sejong, Songdo poses no danger to any established political power, and it might even serve as a convenient way to funnel tons of money into construction companies.
Relatedly is there an SSL implementation based on NaCL anywhere?
Praise for Carmen Segarra
I think the larger the craft, the more this would make sense. I had the idea of a long pontoon craft for inter waterway trade powered by solar panels based on a patent I had seen[1]

Although that was for a ground-effect craft[2], the long flat deck seemed perfect to mount solar panels. I'm not well versed in hydrodynamics, but I imagine the smaller contact area with the water would reduce drag for the initial launch phase as well.

[1] https://www.google.com/patents/US5746146

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_effect_vehicle
How is that amazing? Both GratisDNS.dk and QuickDNS.dk offer roughly the same features, and they're gratis.
For anybody asking the question, "Why Atlas?", please see http://atlassolutions.com/why-atlas/introduction/:

> New possibilities for a new advertising reality. Atlas drives advertising impact for today’s multifaceted brand journeys.

A lot has been written about Facebook's epic engineering staff, but the copywriting talent the company employs is clearly second to none too.
I'll just note here that the current protests were not started by the pan-dems at all, rather it was led by high school and university students.
I think ground effect requires too much power to be practical, hydroplaning on the other hand may be possible.
You have clearly never worked on a large, non-OO code base designed by competent engineers.
Template Metaprogramming with Modern C++: templates in depth
Ad networks have cookies on the travel sites you visited

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting
Can someone please define for me what exactly 'interface pollution' is and why it's so bad?

Because I read this article, and the article from the Jooq blog he references, and I can't see anything beyond one guy's preference for one thing, and Java 8 does it the other way.
Cassandra is easier to scale than mongo, and yeah Riak is even easier, but they're still not easy unless you don't care as much about consistency and you can wait, and if your app is more about writes than reads.
Show HN: “bm” – Use Bitmasks of Arbitrary Depth in JavaScript Without Thinking
Only when you forget about:

- tail call optimization

- AOT compilation as part of the standard toolchain. No need to rely on third party vendors

- value types

- reifeid generics

- painless FFI with external code

EDIT: - Forgot about direct control over SIMD instructions.

All of those issues are being discussed for Java 9+ and have corresponding projects at OpenJDK.
What do you think happens when enormous sums of money are handed out to fairly young mostly male people?
I got bit by this over this weekend, too. I received the initial email September 27 @ 1:35 AM local time. I called Rackspace to see if they would be sending out emails prior to each VPS being rebooted 30 minutes or so before just as a heads up for human monitoring purposes. The representative told me that it "was not feasible" for them to do that for every VPS. Instead... I've been camped by my computer all of today (Sunday) to monitor the reboots since I have servers at DFW & ORD and they have a 24 hour time window for those regions.

While their status page was somewhat helpful, I find it absolutely absurd that they can only update it once every 60 minutes to cue customers in. In addition, their Cloud Control Panel doesn't reflect the reboots. When a VPS goes down for a reboot... the CP shows the server as "Active - Online and functioning as properly". Thankfully great third party monitoring services (using Scout) exist so they can notify in-place of Rackspace's incompetency.

As someone who shells out a significant amount of money to them each month, this is pretty disheartening. That being said... I seem to have survived the Great Rackspace Reboot of 2014 and can only hope they handle the next event better.
Shellshock protection enabled for all customers
Can you out-race a computer?
What is SAM synthesis?
Well dang, that is a very good clue.
Follow up: we enabled basic Shellshock protection for everyone.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/shellshock-protection-enabled-fo...
World’s Best Restaurant: A Data Analysis
> If it's so empty, why hasn't it been filled up by people looking for low-cost housing?

I'm no expert in the exact situation of Songdo, but I think I can answer this. It's because no one wants it to be low-cost housing, least of all Songdo's residents (there must be some).

Housing price is akin to religion in South Korea. Those who finally buy a house, frequently do so only after working for a decade and making heavy loans, and they may literally become homeless if housing prices drop. They will do everything to keep the price afloat.

So, even if a construction company finds half of the apartment units empty, it cannot readily offer reduced prices to potential buyers, without angering everyone already there. You don't want to face a thousand angry Koreans.

(If only they were half as angry at the daily procession of political corruption... sigh.)
I really wish this was less of a puff-piece for the "City of the Future" Songdo (TM)

Speaking of that, nearly every city in Korea has an official marketing slogan in English:

http://waegukin.com/english-slogans-korean-cities-the-comple...
OccupyCentral
In the context of the NT kernel, I supoose ReactOS.org might warrant a look (I don't really know how closely (or not) the kernel design matches NT beyond being compatible with drivers...).
Infinity: does it exist? A debate with James Franklin and N J Wildberger
Hmm... I kind of want to figure out a way to make CAPTCHA-coin work now. Cryptocurrency mining for the people!

I just can't think of a good way to generate CAPTCHAs (or something similar) from a block in a fashion that would give human beings a significant edge over computers.
When will alien life be proven?
The Google Formula for Success