skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>What's "important"?
(That may seem like a misguided question, but it's not.)

I'm not certain if this question was meant for me directly. If it was rhetorical, I apologize for misunderstanding and answering.

I prefer not to define "important" in this context to avoid excluding any definitions subjective to those who may respond to my question. That way, I may learn both what makes a book important to someone and tips on remembering which were important.

Edit: Now that I know the question was intended for me, I'll provide a little more depth to my answer.

The first thought I had when considering what makes a book important is how strongly it resonated within me, and the intensity of my emotions when reflecting upon what I've learned or how my perspective changed shortly after reading it. I know those stronger emotions may derive from a bias I had at one point in my life, and may no longer have.

Therefore, I can't help but think my definition is wrong because it's relative to the period in my life which I read the book. So some books that were important before may not be now. That's why I was curious to learn others' definitions of "important" books, and how to identify them for rereading.
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Hell, yeah! Good thing Jonas Salk buttoned-up his polio discoveries so he could make mad cash.

Oh, wait, he didn't.

"There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" - Salk
Great article! Thanks for sharing. Unfortunately, finding someone I have worked with before and I think would be a good fit, isn't an option. I've been asking friends of friends for referrals and starting to look into networking with different developer groups. For now I'm outsourcing a prototype, and hoping I can find someone before I put together an MVP so the developer doesn't inherit someone else's code.
A really good place to start (before scraping various data sources) would be to explain how the output will be organized.

For example, it looks from the bottom of the map that they're classifying institutions as:

* Consumer Credit

* Other

* Mortgage

* Debt Collection

* Bank/Trust

* Insurer

* Authorized Agent

* Mutual/Co-op/Credit Union

What is the rationale for this classification scheme? Are there going to be second level classifications? For example, most large commercial bank/trusts have mortgage arms, consumer credit arms (credit cards and other lines of credit), consumer debt, wealth management, etc.

Hell, take just one sub-industry: wealth management. A large bank will have a trust department ("private wealth" or "private banking"), a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA), and a Broker/Dealer. They're sometimes completely separately managed. They're different legal entities and regulated by different government organs (FINRA for the broker/dealer and the OCC/SEC for the other two). And that's just wealth management.

Just getting a zoology of financial institutions would be a great start.
Some beginners mistake "Beginners mistake" as a phrase that can only be used at the start of a sentence. :)
I've been a skeptic of browser extensions. Your service probably doesn't have millions compared to thousands, of users, because your service name does not have the word "pass" in it.

Just tried your service. It's not bad. You are exporting CSV but not importing it.
I think they were building a '1AESS': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1ESS_switch#1A_ESS
Best of luck to you. Bootcamp grad here. Ended up working in something only tech-related (instead of developing full-time), but loved the experience.

Interesting to see a Python camp amid all the Ruby/JS buzz.
PyData talk: Python2 and Python3 working together in the same notebook
It's an interesting case, which raises a few issues.

On the surge itself, I think it's a bit instructive to imagine two worlds, call them World 1 and World 2. In World 1, every person has the same ability to pay and attachment to money - their willingness to pay changes only by virtue of how much they need the ride. In World 2, every person needs the ride precisely as much, their willingness to pay is solely due to differences in their financial circumstance.

In World 1, the ideal response in every sense would seem to be surge pricing. Those willing to pay a higher price would have their greater need met, at a price they agreed to. Refunding them is fine but arguably unnecessary.

In World 2, we're clearly discriminating by class (what you think about that depends on your moral framework; I don't love it) by initially presenting the higher price, whether or not it's refunded. It's interesting to note that refunding in this case is particularly weird - you're giving money back to those who need it least - except when you consider that Uber probably has greater ability to pay than anyone in Sydney...

The real world, of course, doesn't resemble either of these.

In all cases offering more to drivers is desirable, other things being equal.

One thing that I haven't seen discussed is that there could be a distinction between moving people to some minimum safe distance, and moving people beyond that.
> If you really can summarize a book in a sentence or two, wouldn't the author have done that already?

Not only is this possible to do, but it's often done. The problem is that it's not necessarily useful or sufficient to hear a mere summary of something.

For example, let's say I tell you that "Idea X is important." That's a simple idea, right? It only too me four words to express it. But do you believe me? Probably not, because I haven't spent any time or effort convincing you that idea X is important. And do you understand what idea X is? Probably not, because I haven't spent any time or effort explaining that. Etc.

Even if you can summarize it, you probably need to write the entire book for people to get the background information necessary for them to find your summary useful, otherwise it will go in one ear and out the other.
I'm not sure it's that interesting, but I'll write a little here. I have used it for 10 years, so at least it's tested :) But only by one person.

I wrote a long comment above about future ideas.

I think the main interesting things are speed and and full text search.

The page loads in 150 ms, with the HTML loading in 75 ms (cold cache), using SSL. That's probably 5x slower than it should be, but it's also 5x faster than most products these days. To me, the speed makes a big difference. I decreased latency significantly 4 years ago, and I know my velocity of note taking has gone up, and it has paid off in terms of increased velocity/organization of the projects I plan with the wiki.

I think it took me 6 to 8 years to get to 1000 active pages, and then somehow I have active 2123 active pages now, after 10 years (although I do delete/archive pages, so this number is fuzzy).

Other features:

- I have a JavaScript "jot" button on my browser toolbar that submits the title and URL of the current page in the browser, and then opens up a form for jotting notes. Then this is appended to a selected wiki page.

- The notes are pretty heavily indented, outline-style, so the markup makes that easy.

- You can edit individual sections of a page, like Wikimedia.
That is actually done intentionally to allow for changing of the tuning parameters while the PID is running.[1] The author of the PID library has a full writeup on the design of the algorithm.[2]

[1] http://brettbeauregard.com/blog/2011/04/improving-the-beginn...
[2] http://brettbeauregard.com/blog/2011/04/improving-the-beginn...
The problem with patents is not whether or not they should exist, but the massive friction involved in licensing them to others. If the patent system had more requirements or controls about requiring a fair system of licensing and ownership division it could serve its original purpose much better in my opinion.
Another source for aviation data: http://ourairports.com/data/
What no one is telling you is that the actual published fare tariffs don't change that often. What does change and is dynamically managed by the airlines revenue management departments is the availability of different fare classes that the tariffs book into. It's the combination of fares and fare class availability that determine the current fares available for a flight (and not just the lowest fare).

On ExpertFlyer, we show all of this hidden raw information that normally only travel agents have been able to see as we buy the data from the airline reservation systems. The first few pages of our education guide give a simple overview of how this works: http://www.expertflyer.com/edu-guide.pdf
You mean, 'the possibility of getting incredibly filthy rich, and the likelihood of making someone else with a more basic patent incredibly rich'? A patent thicket is the paradigmatic tragedy of the anti-commons...
That doesn't guarantee that the secrets come out. Counterexamples are Damascus steel and Roman concrete.
The parent comment claimed that's not the case.
> you should see what happens when you tell these researchers that they no longer have the possibility of getting incredibly filthy rich someday from their discoveries

My personal experience with this is that patents are only used as a kind of status symbol, in that they help researchers acquire new grants/funding ("look, it's marketable!") and make themselves look good to their institution. I'm yet to meet a researcher who's actually made any money off one, and most are by no means adequately compensated for their work.

That all said, I have met former researchers who've made successful start-ups from their academic work, and made money that way, and I'm sure patents were an essential part of that, but by that point they've left academia anyway. For them, I never had the impression that the prospect of making money was the motivating factor for getting into research. It was all just serendipity. Though I'm sure there are exceptions.
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Arstechnica Hacked – December 15th at or around 14:42 PST
These days you'd think they could throw a regulator in the wall plug for a few cents to get around the voltage issue.
Definitely after. Cooking denatures the myosin and releases water; a seared steak soaking in water isn't going to have the kind of texture you'll get (and want!) from the Maillard reaction.

I guess what I mean is that it'll taste fine but the texture won't be quite there.
I like the sentiment of "Friday Experiments". That's exactly in line with how we have hackathons and hackdays. They have also led to very interesting innovations.
Thanks for reporting this -- we'll get this fixed soon.
Ok, we've gone from "top tier venue, basically impossible to have a large fraction of poor papers submitted" to "Most papers are filler in retrospect" and "conferences need to accept a decent number of papers so that people will show up and cover the costs of the meeting". I guess if I am deciding whether or not to hire a professor I would be tempted to disregard publications in this conference.
So the grants they depend on require divulgence to get the grant.
It's not like they are funding themselves ...
It's known to be impossible to create a consistent and axiomatic set of knowledge [1].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_t...
Is SIRCA-Tech [1] relevant here? SIRCA is (was?) an Australian university organisation, that collects financial data for research purposes. I gather that it has outgrown its humble beginnings to be come one of the world's largest collections of international financial data. Perhaps Map the Banks could access this data by hitching up with a local university?

[1] http://www.sirca.org.au/
Seattle Police Investigating Threat Near Amazon HQ
Slower than I thought on this... seems to have been closer to ~12pm PST - http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/15/7397269/ars-technica-is-t...
The Top 5 Paid Marketing Channels
Take a look at, say, Raspberry Pi: 24GFLOP for 1/2W. You won't get this for any number of mobile CPU cores.
Rome's Lost Aqueduct (2012)
You can do some quick and dirty analysis to find classes that change together in the same day. Often you discover that there are some faulty abstractions.

http://michaelfeathers.typepad.com/michael_feathers_blog/201...

I think that this sort of repository analysis is going to be standard practice within the next couple of years.
I'm really interested in how these ways to game the system spread throughout a given market. I've referred to it as the "psychology of markets" and heard it called "behavioral economics." Could you recommend any other sources to read more?
Bit of a tangent but I recommend the Polish miniseries Decalogue.
http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0092337/

All are great vignettes and ultimately quite secular.

The first episode is what made me think of it here. Watch to find out why.
It really is the starting point. I work at OpenCorporates and have worked on this campaign! We don't know what the data will tell us unless we scrape all of it though one of my colleagues took a look at the financial licenses from US and found some interesting insights. For instance, if you think about which companies have debt collection operations in other jurisdictions? There are 178 financial services companies from India that operate in the US. Many are presumably outsourced - he have found some controlled by Ocwen and by Bank of America. This may be useful information for various reasons but we can't get there if we don't do the step 1 which is to have all the data scraped and published as open data so we can have many eyes examining it.
Or you could use a transformer.
For those who didn't read the story: NIPS decided to run this experiment themselves to identify problems.

That's a a really brave thing to do, and deserves serious credit.
You'd probably see something similar when looking at a C/C++ project. I would expect significant coupling between header and source files.

The solution there was for future languages to combine the two. Maybe we'll see a future language combine unit tests and source into the same file.

Heh, maybe such a language would refuse to compile if public functions did not have an associated test.
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Hi, Chris from OpenCorporates.
We're also getting the native classifications, i.e. those given by each regulators, and in a sense these are mappings. When researching this, the are many, many different classifications (particularly in the consumer finance and shadow banking area), and one of the side benefits this will surface those classifications, laying one of the foundations for a more formal ontology.
http://nestoria.co.uk/ did that. Users didn't mind.

It was later removed because not enough users could be convinced to sign up at all. That was more related to the product (value proposition of registering) than the password-less login. The ratio of users never clicking the 'confirm' link in the first email was industry average I was told (not sure what the average is).
> I do molecular dynamics simulations (and am in fact performing simulations on graphene currently), and an individual layer of graphene easily stays intact in both a vacuum and other environments.

You can make a lot of 'stable' things in molecular dynamics simulations that don't exist in reality ;) You could construct any number of 2D materials that exist quite happily because they're close to some local minima or other, or because of some quirk of the potential forcefields you use. So I don't think "I can make it exist in a computer" is necessarily a good reason for expecting it to exist in reality, even if in the case of graphene it's relatively straight forward. Though useful, classical molecular dynamics is also quite dumb: it's really good for simulating known materials, but not so much for discovering new ones.

As for "2D" materials generally...well, we can make monolayers of a lot of things, sandwiched between other materials. And we can make other things that act like they're 2D even if they're not. There's nothing spectacular about it per se. The difficulty, as with all these materials, is that predicting that something has useful properties and actually being able to manufacture it at scale and relatively defect free is huge. You're fighting entropy, basically. So I think the surprise was not that graphene could exist in principle, but that it could be made reliably.
* I missed my mission for Czech Republic

* even when I found the data to be scraped, I did not what/where to scrape

* if you are Czech, I just submitted a mission: https://www.cnb.cz/cnb/jerrs_en
I'm assuming that people who lost their homes lost their equity. I'd assume there was a transfer of wealth in those situations.
Sure, and some sets did. It doubles the cost of a basic light set, though, so they were usually only found in the higher-end sets.
I'm happy this application made its way onto Hacker News. First heard it from a founding team member and thought the use-case is immense.
I often make this kind of argument as well, but the demands we put an email client through these days are nowhere near what such a machine could handle.

I have around 80.000 messages in my inbox, most of them with attachments around 10MB, and I can browse and search them instantly.

Then again, I mostly use Gmail's backend, my preferred interface is Mail.app
They have obviously changed the copy in the last few hours. The second half of that sentence ("Using…") was not there earlier.
This sounds like this would be fertile grounds for an airline to be disruptive.

Imagine what would happen if there was an airline that could set fixed prices for, let's say, the next 2 or 4 weeks. So you can search for a ticket price on the 1st of a month and it would be the same as on the last day of the month.

I know that this is probably not realistic since you can't just open up an airline like you can a startup, but it would be interesting if it was possible and see who gets a bigger revenue/piece of the pie: the airlines with the uber-sophisticated yield management systems, or the one that treats customers as people and not factors in an equation.

It's probably very difficult to even do the mental experiment, but I sure would be glad to see these kind of companies show up. I know there are already lots of companies that treat customers as their most valued asset instead of just a cash-cow, and almost in all cases that I can think of, these companies are doing great precisely because there's more and more people that want to be treated like people, and are willing to pay extra for that, instead of getting the lowest price and be kicked in the behind in the process.
Reasonable people might disagree, but I think that what they say there doesn't answer the question at all. Cock means rooster in English too, after all, but somehow the name doesn't get used.
I love the "cost" table. Having recently built a mobile phone out of a rotary phone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSkdWQswpc8), my costs look something like those, except:

Cost of materials: $50

Time cost: $1500

Then again, it is a prototype, which has to go with all the fixed costs, but to say that this cooker only cost $X isn't entirely accurate.
You're overestimating the difficulty of Facebook by over a factor of 50. Not to mention similar systems already existed. In fact, this is the first time I remember someone claiming that actually building the FB initial product was challenging (versus timing, acting on the idea, marketing, etc.)

Edit: parent comment was saying it's so much easier to with work with inexperienced people, and that an experienced "corporate" dev couldn't make Facebook if all the screens were given to them.
I wonder if this will cause some parts of the motor to heat up more; since the blade is 1:1 rotations with the motor then driving more torque (power) during certain phases of the cycle will put more watts on certain coils.

It's a cool idea. Human size helicopters would love to avoid all that blade-pitch complexity. :)
The original Graphene paper:

"The reported graphene films were made by mechanical exfoliation (repeated peeling) of small mesas of highly-oriented pyrolytic graphite as described in the supporting online material. This approach was found to be highly reliable and allowed us to prepare FLG films up to 10 μm in size. Thicker films (d ≥ 3nm) were up to a hundred microns across and visible by the naked eye."

Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films (Science, 2004)

http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0410550.pdf
Tigon: High-throughput, real-time stream processing framework
Perhaps there is room for a specialized marketplace?
but that's GLES 2.0, which is significantly less flexible than the kinds of GPUs we're discussing here and is not even in the same ballpark as a CPU (and almost certainly significantly less strict in terms of floating point precision than a GLES 3 device).
It does but only if the device is locked and not associated to a wifi network. Even if those conditions are met, the device will only broadcast the "random" mac on set intervals and the locally generated mac will always have the second-least-significant bit set to 1.

From a consumer perspective, it's quite easy: to prevent being tracked, don't walk around with wifi turned on.

From an engineering perspective, toss out any mac with the U/L bit set to 1.
which means instead of a discovery in lab A spurring a totally new way of thinking in lab B, it restricts lab B from ever thinking that way.

This is not necessarily true.

Patents, unlike copyrights, are additive. If you write a book based on the Harry Potter characters, JK Rowling owns the copyright to your derivative work. But if Lab A patents a way of making graphene, Lab B is free to research and patent non-obvious refinements.

So you tend to see a tree of patents by different people:

1. Awesome new invention Foo! (Lab A)
1.A. Small but commercially important refinement of Foo. (Lab B)
1.A.i. More performant version of small refinement of Foo. (Lab A)
1.A.ii. Different way of increasing performance on small refinement of Foo. (Lab C)

... where you definitely need to license Patent 1 from Lab A if you want to sell your own Foo, but if you want to sell a Foo with Lab C's performance improvements you need to license Patent 1.A and 1.A.ii as well.

This is why there is a "race to patent every single miniscule discovery" in the first place -- Lab A getting Patent 1 doesn't remove the incentive to discover refinements. It is not obvious that the search for refinements would happen faster without this incentive.
Yes, I've noticed no-one works on compilers unless they can use IP protection to get filthy rich. Or web servers. Or operating systems.
Yes, if you shunted enough of the bulbs in the strand you would get a cascading overvoltage down the line. It wouldn't trip a conventional breaker, though. Those bulbs can't pull enough power, even in over-voltage conditions. Might trip an Arc Fault Circuit Interrupter, though.
Two things:

1) I have neither a computer science nor a teaching background. (I'm a self-taught web-dev hack) but I am interested in introducing local kids to programming. I helped run a couple Hour of Code sessions last week at my kids' elementary school, and I think I could get support there to start up some kind of after-school program. But I'm a bit lost as to what a good curriculum would look like. Anyone here have any pointers or suggestions?

2) I believe that Blockly (https://developers.google.com/blockly/) was the engine behind the Hour of Code exercise I used last week. It's available as a client-side library to include in your web applications, but I couldn't track down its license. It looks like, if one were to nail down a good curriculum, you could use Blockly to build a learning environment to accompany it.