skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right on the page you cited, it says:

"You are not an independent contractor if you perform services that can be controlled by an employer (what will be done and how it will be done)."

Enforcing specific working hours is definitely controlling how a job will be done.
Other than that, what's the use? I'm struggling to think of any other time in my life where I have seen nicely typeset equations ending in "= ?"...
This isn't for charity. In my opinion this startup school is intended to pump college students into the VC environment so that they (Private funds) can capture as many young, smart talents as possible to add to their portfolios.

At the end of the day the "Startup" world is the world of finance, and I think the explosive crop of high risk private equity (Angel, VC, hedge) investors are trying to get as many "makers" into it as possible.

Whether this is good for the new entrants or not is too early to tell. I think it probably is when compared to the alternatives, but my guess is that I am missing something.
Edgar Snow Interview with China Chairman Mao Zedong (1965)
This is true. Sadly there's practically no funding from VCs for it.
it is unclear. I read an article yesterday saying California had just passed legislation to compensate for it. Obviously, it is pretty unethical, especially if you spend the majority of the day on the phone.
Yes, Noah Smith's NLP group at CMU is awesome. Btw, Noah is moving to UWash.
iOS 8.1 and CVE-2014-4449
Yep, agree, very unethical, very hostile. Where did you read about the legislation passed?
This guy took 2+ hours to open the door, so I'm not really worried about him specifically. That said, I did change out locks myself later on, although I'm sure if someone wants in, they'll just bust the window...
Recurrent neural networks work that way, but typically when anyone says "neural network" they mean a feed-forward network, which is as dumb as a lead pipe. It has no memory other than the trained synapse weights. After training, all it does is transform some input data into output data. It's a pure function. It's also a lot like a matrix transform.

I haven't read this paper fully yet, but it seems to be an attempt at simplifying RNNs by replacing some of the magic internal state, which tends to make them hard to reason about, with a more direct memory architecture.
Indian culture is a caste system. It's not surprising that a Harvard-educated Indian male co-founder would treat women, gays, and service employees like dirt and set the tone for the company that it's acceptible to do so.
>Last month, NASA said it would pay SpaceX its largest single contract ever, $2.6 billion

>Boeing, will do the same job but at more than half again the cost—some $4.2 billion.

Leaving aside how horribly this is worded, what does this even mean? Two lines later it said Boeing was awarded a contract nearly twice as large.
Bijoux swarovski
Hacker News I beleive. I will find a link and post in a few minutes.

One link here:
http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/338164/employment+litig...

Edit 2: It was actually on Reddit. This is the link to Reddit commenting on the computer world article focusing on the same ruling at the appellate level:

http://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/2f55j2/california_cellp...
This is just a rehashing of old news. Earlier this year, Mattermark, the company that Bloomberg Beta worked with, was making the bold claim, "Mattermark Founder Prediction Is 25X Better Than Chance."[1]

As I noted at the time:

> Predicting who in a group of 1.5 million technology professionals is likely to start a company presents an unsupervised learning problem. Short of contacting all 1.5 million people and asking them, there is no way to confirm whether the predictions the system made are correct, so you cannot make claims about efficacy.

> There are approaches used to deal with unsupervised learning problems, but there are no details in this post even indicating that the folks involved recognized they were dealing with an unsupervised learning problem in the first place. Instead, we just have claims like "While we believe the future founders group has a 17% chance — 25x higher..." for which no further information is provided.

Beyond the unpublished methodology, it would be interesting to understand the data they modeled against. "Mattermark then mined publicly available information on social network sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to find information on one-and-a half-million professionals who were in some way connected to technology start-ups" is awfully ambiguous.

What were the "in some way connected" criteria? Was there any validation of the data? Was de-duplication attempted, and if so, how was it performed? How was age determined when it often isn't displayed on public profiles?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7473203
Any substance that produces a rush of good feelings will cause cravings or "withdrawal" to one degree or another when you stop consuming it. Based on observations I would say that for some people, sugar/soda is as addictive as nicotine or maybe more so.
Can you elaborate on your experience? How does it make sense for your company? Did you A/B test this, and if so what was the increase in conversion or average price per customer?
Some people, sure. But I don't think everyone who misbehaves is irredeemable.
Zombie Startups - When to pull the plug on a dying startup company
The training is to teach them to hide it so they can stay employed.

It doesn't matter if somebody is a racist/sexist/homophobe as long as they don't act it out.
Pegurl.js
This certainly does happen for court decisions [1], but part of the legitimacy of the court comes from the idea that it is consistently (and therefore fairly) interpereting law.

It's also important to make a distinction between "the implications of the court's interpretation of the law are different in this new world" and "the implications of this law are different in this new world. For the latter, the legislature, not the court, should fix the law. For the former, it is still within the legeslature's power to fix the law in such a way that the previous court decision is invalidated.

[1] http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CONAN-1992/html/GPO-CONAN-1...
The cancer cured my cough. Wow.
I have zero connection to the deal so this is entirely speculation, but in short, no, "acquired" has not become a dirty word. When a company is purchased - it's usually described as such. (In fact, I think for a public company, it's actually legally required that it be disclosed to shareholders in accurate terms, though the exact level of detail -- i.e. $$ -- is dependent on the "materiality" of the transaction.)

I noticed the exact same thing when I read the announcement(s) -- both Firebase and Google were very specific in saying that "Firebase has joined Google", not "Firebase has been acquired by Google".

So I'm guessing it means exactly what it says -- the Firebase team has been hired by Google and the product is now a part of Google Cloud Platform.
Um, Dreamhost? No. Nightmare.
California passed a law about that I believe. An excerpt from this [1]:

Section 2802 of the California Labor Code requires employers to reimburse employees for expenses “necessarily incurred” with the stated purpose of “prevent[ing] employers from passing their operating expenses on to their employees.” Lest anyone think this issue can be resolved with a waiver of the right to reimbursement, Labor Code section 2804 prohibits waivers of an employee’s rights to reimbursement.

[1] http://www.dlapiper.com/en/us/insights/publications/2014/08/...
Just because Kary Mullis is a surfer does that make him a "bro"? He was a proper scientist when he invented PCR. Although he did quit science to manage a bakery for 2 years!
hang on. im stuck here.

http://imgur.com/F1gLIzb
His comparison though, and the similarity to how WordPerfect managed things, is precisely why I switched to LyX as well. It's not perfect, but it's a huge step better at getting out of my way and just letting me tell the computer what I want to do, and letting it figure it out from there. I get to "just write," and in the end I still get something that honestly looks more professional than the things I did in Word and LibreOffice, with a fraction of the work and far less fighting the model.
It's kind of unfortunate, as it's forced everything to be continuous. Which is not very computationally efficient or easily interpreted by humans.
Ask HN: Explain Me Recycler View and Its Components in Laymen Terms
Generation Y challenges private banking DNA
Why Cloud Computing Mightn’t Be All That Great
As someone who has laid out entire 2-300 page books in Word and LibreOffice both, what you say is a fine idea in theory, but rarely ever works out in actual application at all with the way those tools implement it.

I think LyX/LaTeX presents a saner hybrid here: using styles, yes, but also declarative markup for where to use those styles in the stream. This is far more analogous to how CSS is actually used (ie. in concert with HTML and being auto-applied to standard HTML tags), than how it ever works out in the mainstream tools available.
An alternative theory is that we have evolved just to be good at distinguishing changing facial expressions (and body language), especially within our own social groups. Using this skill to match people's expressions with their behavior over time would give us a tool for making good predictions.

But if we then met a complete stranger or tribe whose face at rest, say purely through random variation of bone structure, happened to look more aggressive or happier or more sneaky than the resting faces of our friends, it would lead us to make biased and unjustified predictions.
If it wasn't clear that I was sarcastic, I can only apologize.

I don't like the pervasive idea among tech types that you are essentially damaged goods once you turn 30. It's wrong-headed, it makes no sense, and frankly, it doesn't jive with my experience. Some of the smartest, most capable software engineers I know are in their late-30's.

Of course, with Zuckerberg turning 30 this year, maybe now's a good time to short FB. Who knows.
Well, to be fair, the remaining few percent of honey has some ridiculously fancy enzyme action going on, an eminently plausible mechanism for inducing protective benefits and anecdotally suspected of being vaguely beneficial to health.
We’re rolling out our first new build to the Windows Insider Program
Target wasn't actually a startup though - it was an offshoot of Dayton's department store (that name being a relic from the era when it was much more common to name one's business after oneself). As I understand it, the main criterion for choosing a name was it had to be sufficiently distinct from "Dayton's" so as to avoid tarnishing that brand by association with the new lower-cost subsidiary.
The most interesting part of this for me is the “ring progression” they have implemented allowing end users to choose from fast (builds as soon as they are available) and slow (week or more delayed).
I find the title to be linkbaity and misleading (quite disappointing for decorated computer scientists like Hopcroft and Kannan).

Based on the table of contents, a more accurate title would be "Modern Foundations of Theoretical Computer Science with an Eye Towards Machine Learning", and even that is given a disproportionately large weight on machine learning.
Mooj: Hey Andy, don't let him bother you. It's okay not to have started a company. Not eveybody's a mulla magnet. You, uh, what are you, 25?

Andy Stitzer: I'm 40.

Mooj: Holy shit, man, you got to get on that!

A movie quote, paraphrased just a little...
This is why I loved Markdown when I first discovered it. Even without it, a lot of my plaintext files do things like the * for emphasis, or using dashes to underline headers and so forth. It's been done in software documentation for decades (a lot of the Markdown syntax isn't even original to it); it puzzles me it took so long for someone to sit down and just write something to use it explicitly.
How does Caffeine compare to the NoSleep extension?
Maybe it's two compounds in combination? HFCS plus caffeine perhaps? Pure speculation of course.
Here's my attempt at summarizing the paper with the hope that someone who understands it better can correct me.

Cuckoo hashes are a type of closed hash table where any given item has a fixed number of places where it can be located. Unlike other closed hashes, if there is not room for an item in one of its possible locations, an earlier item is evicted (in the style of a cuckoo kicking an egg out of strangers nest and quickly laying its own) and sent to its alternate spot. This repeats until an empty slot is found, or some large number (500) attempts have been made. If no slot is found, the table can be rehashed to try again, or enlarged to make more space available.

Initially cuckoo hashes were proposed to have 2 slots for each item, corresponding to 2 different hashes. Over time, for greater space efficiency (load) it's evolved to have a variable number of hashes >= 2 and a variable number of slots per bucket >= 1. This paper suggests that using 2 hashes and 4 slots per bucket is a good default (a 2,4 cuckoo hash). One of the innovations in this paper is that instead of using 2 independent hashes (the theoretical best case) they use the output of a single hash function and a shorter saved "signature" that can be hashed and xor'ed to find the 'alternate' slot. In this manner, the signature can be used to move an item to its alternate location without actually knowing or saving the original value.

This 'cuckoo filter' can be queried (LOOKUP) to see if an item is already in the hash (INSERT). If an item is present, a 'yes' answer is guaranteed. But if an item is not present, there is a low percentage chance that a false positive 'yes' answer will be returned. The number of bits required to store each signature is comparable to the number of bits required for a Bloom filter with a comparable rate of false positives. Through various optimizations (such as storing the items in a bucket in a known order) the number of bits per item stored drops to slightly below that of a Bloom filter.

Unlike a Bloom filter, deletions are made possible by storing multiple copies of the same signature. But since there only a set number of places that a given value can be stored, only a limited number of copies (minus the number of collisions) can be stored. In this case, that number is 2 * 4 = 8. If more inserts than this are attempted, either the insert must fail or the delete count will be out of sync.

Performance wise, at the same level of space efficiency, insert speeds are better than a standard Bloom filter when the hash is mostly empty (low load), but significantly worse than a Bloom filter at high load when the hash gets filled and many 'evictions' are necessary for each insert. But if a tradeoff for space is acceptable (to stay at ~50% load), the Cuckoo Hash inserts much faster than its Bloom counterpart. Lookup speeds for existing keys are 2-3x the speed of a standard Bloom filter, and about 1.5x than the "Blocked" Bloom filter variant. Negative lookups (key not present) are about 2x faster than Bloom at high load, but about 3/4 the speed at low load.

Overall, it's a nice technique that should probably be used more often.
Jailbreak iOS 8.1 using pangu Evasi0n or new jailbreak tooliPhone jailbreak
A warrant is needed because there are explicit wiretapping laws that protect the content of phone communication. This was not a legal principle that was bootstrapped from an interpretation of the fourth amendment.
Oh, what a coincidence! I thought someone posted my project here :) I just made a toolbox last weekend during the rails rumble. It's http://hackertoolbox.com (right now it's being judged by judges and other teams so I have to redirect it to railsrumble site). The seed data is from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5235137 so all the tools are suggested by HN hackers.

I will add any tools posted here. And of course, you're welcome to post your favorite tools to hackertoolbox.com or/and review them.

Lastly, thanks for asking the question :)
Do Doctors Have a Duty to Treat Patients with Ebola?
This is cool, but how can you write a book about data science without mentioning causal inference or experimental design? Most people that do data science are not applying black box algorithms to clean data. They are actively manipulating and shaping the data, coming up with theories, and testing those theories. Inference is more important in theory and in practice for data scientists than theoretical models of graph formation and some of the other topics covered in this book.
I always found the Greek system mildly befuddling.

A couple of my friends found their way into fraternities and I honestly couldn't see what the appeal or big deal was. But to people in the frats it seemed like the entire world was wrapped up in it.

Supposedly you get some kind of life-long connection or social network or whatever. But I've never really had a problem making friends or meeting people when I want to.

I dunno, I've never been much of a joiner, so joining any kind of club or activity, especially one with some kind barrier to entry always seemed kind of meh to me.

Maybe you can provide some color as to what exactly they're good for and why universities offer them so much special treatment?
Love to see a poll: will Ethereum ever launch?

I can't tell if this is all horseshit, or too deep for me to understand.
Facebook Mark Zuckerburg real topcoder profile
"Nothing could be less cool, at this point, than calling a startup “cool.com.”"

Interestingly enough, that domain name is for sale.
A lot has happened in modern day India since 1911 Britannica encyclopedia came out which where you evidently got your racist generalizations about Indians from...
Unfortunately, deliberately clicking the ads may get your favorite websites and youtubers banned from their content network. The network will see the abnormal increase in clicks and they'll blame the publisher and will pursue them for click fraud. So...this tactic might be counter-productive.
A sprinkle of compost helps rangeland lock up carbon
>I've gone to FreeBSD for now on my personal dev box,
I've been contemplating that, too. How do you like it?
I see it as just a way to out the guy without actually spelling out his name.
Zero demand? Wouldn't it be nice to send confidential email to business partners and know that it's secure?

I am surprised that large businesses have tolerated this for so long. Maybe SMIME isn't the answer, but it's surprising that we haven't seen some method to guarantee secure delivery of mail between companies.
A big ass whiteboard, some pizza, some beer, and some people who are smarter than me.
Apparently it's not quite settled. A 3rd company which lost the bid is suing over just this issue. How can you pay two companies such drastically different amounts for the same end product?

I think it represents the varying levels of perceived risk in delivery, and a tacit acknowledgement that SpaceX is simply operating (at least) 2x as efficiently. If SpaceX fully delivers on their contract, I hope we see Boeing squeezed harder next time. What would be even more interesting is if SpaceX were to hit the finish line on time and budget, and Boeing getting lost in billions of cost overruns and delays. The article talks about "cost+" accounting, so that may play a part in how this happened as well.

In the end I like that they awarded two contracts. There really is nothing like good competition to motivate everyone.
wow! lots of decimal points! must be legit.
>I can't tell if this is all horseshit, or too deep for me to understand.

A mixture of horseshit and mildly interesting stuff.

Even though ethereum is technically feasible, it's plagued by developmental issues (including, IIRC, failed attempts at roll-your-own crypto), and even if it does ever get launched, the incentive structure doesn't make sense and the whole platform is essentially useless. It's absolutely no good for distributed apps; you still need oracles for those to do anything useful, and if you have oracles, you might as well put the apps on the oracles in the first place. It might be useful for digital contracts, but Bitcoin already handles those very well in the vast majority of cases.
I can do one better. I went to a job fair type event with one of the cofounders of the company, and I was pushing a very qualified woman we met there. The cofounder told me, with a very thoughtful look on his face, "I'm not sexist... but I just don't like working with women."
Interestingly, it's a social red flag in Australia to brag about your history by name-dropping. I gather your team wasn't Australian at all, but I can't ever imagine a local name-dropping in the same way and getting anywhere with it. Possibly name-dropping in terms of "I worked with Dr Famous", which would be uncommon but accepted in the right crowds, but not for institutions. It's part meritocracy, part preferring the underdog, and part tall-poppy syndrome that keeps people quiet, I guess...
Am I crazy to switch from Software to Finance?
I'm in NYC and I do design, dev, and marketing for a software company. I have non-liquid options and a decent salary (call it $140K).

In NYC suburbs, with my current family situation (I'll spare details) I need more monthly income.

Assuming I want to max out short-term cash, should I:

* Shop for another full-time software job (how much higher can I get?!)

* Start doing freelance software dev/design consulting

* Try to get a banking job

(A few of the guys I ride the train with are making 3-4X my comp in hedge funds and i-banking, which is why that's on the list.)
2.6 + 2.6 / 2 =
2.6 * 1.5 =
2.6 + 1.3 =
3.9 < 4.2

“Half again” something means 1.5 times something.
I hate this kind of thing. Hack should almost always mean subverting a system IMHO, except for less common definitions of the word (hack up, MIT hacking).
The Atlantic would not have published this if it was the other way around.
The terminology is wrong: the polynomial curve fit is still linear regression. The "linear" in "linear regression" does not mean that the resulting function is linear, it means that the resulting function is a linear combination of basis functions. For a polynomial, the basis functions are 1, x, x^2, ..., x^n.

The exponential fit, however, is non-linear.

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial_regression)

> In statistics, polynomial regression is a form of linear regression...
Discussion on the best ways to monetize your WordPress website
Valuation of Foods Is Driven by Implicit Knowledge of Caloric Content
RCS is a good option for dotfiles.

RCS is a version control system that is useful for individual files which must remain in a specific location.
The Atlantic should not be taken seriously any longer. They've been nothing more than a slightly upmarket Buzzfeed for several years now.
Word has outlasted its original functional spec and is now fighting to retain relevancy and usefulness in a much different world. WYSIWYG used to be hugely valuable, making it easy to avoid wasteful reprints of work that didn't look right, or, worse, using an experiment/print/assess model to experimentally get markup right.

But that problem has been solved for years, it's no longer interesting, and it's not how people use editors today. Today word docs are not used for print media, often they are the primary form of media transmission or are used for collaboration, uses to which word is almost uniquely poorly suited, but because word is there it's used. Word is horrible for collaboration because it's focused on appearance, not content. Editing in word fails the principle of least surprise and it's generally non-deterministic (you can't see the markup "under" your cursor that will take effect when you start typing or make other changes). Too much effort is spent fighting the tool rather than actually communicating or collaborating. This problem can't be fixed while maintaining word's compatibility with it's previous functionality so it's unlikely ms will fix it any time soon.