skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For any thought there is someone who will find it obvious, it doesn't mean we should discard it, instead we should consider it in relation to the the audience. It only takes a cursory reading of the comments here to conclude that this audience found it not just novel, but helpful in forming their own ideas about knowledge - a hallmark of a worthwhile piece.

Secondly, your summary of pg post doesn't do justice to the its contents. To me it's about the distinction between mere reduction of information, akin to jpg compression, and building a model from it. A model is Turing-complete, a jpg is not. The distinction is important, in that it directs the effort required to correct misconceptions later in life.
"people who don't understand that being on the airplane earlier doesn't make you arrive earlier pay more for no reason"

Being on the plane, where I no longer need to be paying attention, is less stressful. That's not worth a lot to me, but it's not worthless.

On the topic more generally, my biggest objection to piling on the fees after the fact is a lack of price transparency - it makes it much more difficult to compare the same thing across airlines. Of course, that's a problem we could solve with software...
I think one of the points from this essay can be made that "content" discovery is going to be a hot problem to crack if it is not already has been. Because good discovery mechanism leads to more user engagement that ultimately results in creating products with lasting impact.
Author here. This is completely correct. But my main motivation for creating this was getting something working in a easy and portable fashion.

Basically I wanted to have something I could share with my colleagues and which could be accepted as "documentation" if checked into source-control. For that using a dialect of diagram-generators which nobody else can get working isn't going to cut it. Those solutions are hardly "out of the box"-friendly, and even less so portable.

This package relies 100% on websequencediagrams.com, and for that it is restricted by whatever the website supports.

But because of that it's also 100% portable and should work out of the box on any machine, without any other prerequisites. And I think that is quite nice.

I just thought it was useful and wanted to share. If my needs are aligned differently than yours I'm not going to take offence :)
The PDFs that come out of igraph layout are not that pretty. The screenshots I used on the blog post are generated with Cytoscape 3.1.1, which gives better layout and better styling options. For Angular.js, I went with "partialCorrelations_0.3.sif".
Myer and Sutherland wrote a classic 1968 paper on what they came to call the Wheel of Reincarnation: simple displays accrue progressively more complexity until someone comes along and throws the whole thing away with a new, clean, design.

Then someone finds that they can add a bit of processing to that display to make it go just a bit faster...

http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland...
Flying Cars soon to be a norm
Uber's Sydney fiasco: the problem with surge pricing is everyone hates it
His management style would never work in today's tech environment.
The Guardian should be ashamed of itself, what utter twaddle.

Third party sellers used RepricerExpress to auto-price their goods. RepricerExpress screwed up and priced everything to 1p. Sellers lost TONS of money.

But reading this article you'd blame Amazon for this:

> Amazon has refused to come to the aid of thousands of small family-owned businesses that have lost tens of thousands of pounds due to a technical glitch that caused their products to be sold for a penny.

No mention of a third party, they clearly want the reader to think that it is an Amazon technical glitch.

> The sellers, many of whom are operating from their garage or spare bedroom, have demanded that Amazon take some responsibility for the error caused by a third-party software glitch. Some have already instructed lawyers.

Why? Just why? Amazon had no part in causing this. The sellers used the software, the software broke. Amazon doesn't own or make it.

> Amazon has accepted no liability for the loses suffered by its sellers, from whom it takes a slice of each sale helping it to make annual profits of $20bn.

Why would they? They didn't do anything that they could possibly be liable for!

Literally the term "RepricerExpress" doesn't appear until the 9th paragraph, halfway down the article. The article clearly tries to place blame at Amazon's feet (going so far as to suggest they're liable for this!).

Seriously this is the worst article I've ever read on The Guardian's website. It is intentionally misleading tabloid junk of the worst kind. The first article on this topic is far better:

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/dec/14/amazon-glitch-p...

The same author then wrote this second article, linked back to their first article, but tried to blame it all on Amazon in the second article (while giving correct attribution in the first to RepricerExpress).

It is just strange. This junk gives the Guardian a bad name.
So, everyone's already pointed out that it's dumb to compare the amount of money you have now to the amount of money you had at the height of a bubble (where that money was unsustainable and over-inflated).

One thing that's missing here, though, is the idea of amount of money to cost ratio.

For example, say you had $1000 in 2007. Now say that, in 2007, a loaf of bread cost $1000. In that year, you had enough money to buy 1 loaf of bread. Now, in 2014, you have $600 (40% less than 2007). But now, instead of $1000, a loaf of bread is $100. Now you have enough money to buy 6 loaves of bread. You technically have less money, but the value of each dollar you have is significantly more. So, are you really "poorer" now?

The issue with just looking at a single number when analyzing economic health is that it will never tell you the whole story. I can have a million dollars and still be in poverty if a gallon of milk costs 2 million.
Interactive blackhole and wormhole experience, a la Interstellar
How to Speak Startup
How to find your cofounding partner?
There is no doubt that the best partnerships are made between people who have a diverse set of skills. The question is how do you go about to find your perfect technical partner, at a time when everyone is creating their own startups?
Two years is a pretty good runway . . .

Listen to StartupsForTheRestOfUs.com lots of good advice there for building SaaS/Products/Lifestyle business.

This will give you some ideas of what options are out there.

As far as remote consulting it seems Rails is the best language for remote positions that pay well.

I would recommend learning Rails . . .

I usually recommend HTML->CSS->js->jquery->Rails(ruby) or Laravel(php)->angular (or other js frameworks)

That will give you a good foundation of full stack web development if that's the type of company you want to work for or build your own.

To build up two years of runway you're doing well . . . so I would keep up what you're doing, choose and new skill to learn and start on your product/SaaS idea.

Here are some other people you should check out:
Brennan Dunn (double your freelance rate)
Patio11
Nathan Barry
Amy Hoy
Rob Walling (Start Ups for the rest of us podcast)
The cynic in me thinks that despite the tone of the presentation, this dataset and the way it's structured is vastly more useful for creating marketing plans to sell services to the financial sector than for encouraging responsibility in the financial sector.
>"When all airlines have the same tiny seats and no alternative that isn't 5-10x more expensive, that is collusion, not competition."

You should have a look at the term Public Cartel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel#Private_vs_public_cartel
cool! Thanks for sharing the link to your project. I am not really a Ruby expert, so wasn't able to figure out how you calculate the couplings. I will be more than happy to compare the results across these two tools.
Tech and Media Companies Back Microsoft in Privacy Case
You had cheap Christmas lights. We had both. We had the actual bubble lights. Those were more expensive at the time. A bulb could burn out in one of the bubblers and the remaining bubblers would work.
Totally useful – I'd love to be able to use this offline, but I understand that that would probably be a much larger task. Thanks for building this and sharing!
> "when Stephen Fry succeeded in remembering the childhood trauma that prevented him from singing"

Does anyone know what this is referring to? Searching for "stephen fry singing trauma" doesn't return anything useful except pg's essay.
Thanks for the tip! KeepassX works great, but the author(s) don't seem to bother with pull requests and therefore useful features like keepasshttp or autotype won't get implemented. Keepass 2.x with mono never worked for me.
Author here. I used the api as provided by the site author. Details here:

http://www.websequencediagrams.com/embedding.html
Working example: http://phantomjs-pad.ozaur.com/DrDvxMADoP2TdF652
Basically bugfixes would be localized to relevant files, but features would spread across files.

The grandparent's making an important point in that you can't design a system such that all possible changes you might want to make are localized to one area of the code. Engineering is about trade-offs: if you rigorously separate view from logic from database, you make it harder to add features that must touch all three. Conversely, if you make each feature its own file and add in hooks to the view/logic/database layer so they call out to plugins, you make it easy to add new features but very difficult to understand what each layer as a whole is doing.

The best you can do is choose the ideal architecture for your particular project, in the particular point in time that you're working on it. That's why basically every software system needs to be rewritten as it grows up: the ratio of complete rewrites to new features to bugfixes to maintenance refactorings changes as the system matures and the requirements become more precisely known. It's also why we have a software industry; if there was one ideal way to design a system for all domains and all points in time, someone would go design it and be done with it, and none of us would have jobs.
Great example of this was the map they built that show links to subsidiaries and others: http://opencorporates.com/viz/financial
A Beretta shotgun being made.  It's a commercial but amazing
> One thing that's missing here, though, is the idea of amount of money to cost ratio.

That isn't missing at all. It's specifically accounted for. See how the graph says "in 2013 dollars". That indicates that they are using inflation adjusted values.
I have no doubt that graphene will change the world, but as the article mentions, it may take a long time to get there.

The thing that bothered me the most was the mention of the patent race. Everything was "patent patent patent" - 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.

Without the race to patent every single minuscule discovery about graphene and its properties, advancing early discoveries could move at an exponentially faster pace. Don't grab the ball and run with it - grab it and keep it to yourself.

I know all the arguments for patents, but I can't shake the feeling that they do nothing but stifle innovation and discovery by locking up research just when it gets interesting.

(When the measure of success is how many patents are filed, not how many discoveries are made... or how you just beat the Chinese to filing a patent, I'm just a tad less hopeful.)
How to hack your taste buds
Non-transferability is the only one on your list that upsets me. That's some annoying crap.

But the rest, I find no fault in. I doubt that disabled people really get forced into a business class ticket. Buy a regular ticket and get on the plane. If you can't use a normal seat, not your problem, get the airline to figure it out. I'm pretty sure that kicking you off the flight when you have a ticket just because you're disabled would violate the law pretty hard.

The more bags you have, the more you'll pay, whether it's for checking them in or for earlier boarding, or paying with time by getting your bags afterwards. I have no problem with people who use more paying more. If I bring no luggage, why should I pay the same as somebody who brings a bunch?

Plenty of places have tiered access to services, and airports have plenty of places to sit and eat and drink, so I don't see the big deal with airport lounge access. I've never actually been in one so maybe they're way nicer than I give them credit for.

I don't see how this stuff is either "dishonest" or "bad faith." "Dishonest" to me would be the time a flight was hours late even though the status board continued to say it was leaving on time. "Bad faith" to me would be the time my flight was canceled because of SARS and no effort was made to inform me before I showed up at the airport to discover nobody at the check-in counters. Thankfully, these don't happen too often.
This was for mid january, so about 4 weeks out. Leaving on a Friday and returning on Monday.
I know, right? I was really happy when I learned that this branch of the CS is also referred to as evolutionary, because I was inspired by the evFold approach, which is related to evolution in multiple organisms. This is a bit confusing for people coming from the biological science domain, but also nice that we share some terminology between two fields ;)
I just checked, and I'm running 5.1.1. No crashes, no problems worth mentioning. Sure it's not the fastest thing on the block, but most sites and apps I use run perfectly fine. Admittedly I don't really play any CPU or graphics intensive games.
Google's search is creaking
And the rating industry, and geopolitical actors, and the World Bank, and hedge funds, etc, etc. I absolutely agree. But I'm afraid this could get into perfect being the enemy of the good territory. Unfortunately no model is going to be complete - even including these primary actors you would need to eventually model entire populations to capture macro-scale effects of the markets at play.

I don't think they need to be so perfect, however. Teasing out this sort of information ('mapping it') is not going to be a panacea that can detect all fraud. But it will probably be a useful tool to human experts who can combine knowledge from a partial map with information from other sources and a generally mature understanding of the industry.
I think what's clearer is that bad coding is one reason why we often have to change too many files at the same time. We see software where implementation details surface in so many places that you have to change five files to change anything.

Now, it's affirming the consequent to say "you change two files, therefore you must have repeated yourself/coupled two things too much", but if you think those are common problems, then it will still be sound to say "you repeatedly changed these files in sync, you should look there to see if you've coupled them too tightly."
Snapchat Names – Share Your Snapchat or Find Snapchat Girls, Snapchat Boys
So the rationale is that if you want change the first thing is to identify what needs changing. If you want changing in the world of international banking, you should understand the world of international banking, right?

Now, that does depends on the level of "change" as revolution can simply ignore the current state and wipe the slate clean, but I would imagine that understanding how the system operates is not a waste of time if you want to change the system (and not remove it).
I once read a about a small scale study on some super-duper speed reading method. By small scale I think there were like two participants. One was a an expert in the method. The other was the guy doing the study. There were 3 main findings.
1. Yes, you will "read" much faster.
2. If you take a standard reading comprehension test on what you've read, you will score much lower.
3. If you don't take such a test, you will be under the mistaken impression that you absorbed more than you did from the book.

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/2000001...
Argument based on popularity doesn't prove your notion, it is nothing other then the fact that it is popular.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/bandwagon
Well then if it's worth something to you then it should be worth paying for.

Price transparency is a problem, but not a huge one in my own experience (yours may, of course, vary). Airlines are rarely close enough in price for things like baggage fees to tip the scales, and when they are it's not too hard to see just what their policies are.
Great article. IMO, CVD is the most promising scalable, manufacturing method, but the following advances have to happen:

- Able to grow Graphene of arbitrary thickness on a wide variety of surfaces
- Achieving CVD at low temperature
- Control of grain size, ripples, doping level, and number of layers
- Coming up with a cost-effective way to handle to the Transfer step, or eliminating it entirely

As the current market for graphene applications is driven by the production of this material, there is a clear hierarchy in how soon the applications will reach the user or consumer. Those that use the lowest- grade, cheapest and most available material will be the first to appear, probably in a few years, and those which require the highest, electronic- quality grades or biocompatibility may well take decades to develop.Also, because developments in the last few years were extremely rapid,graphene’s prospects continue to improve.
Unfortunately, the bypass wire doesn't actually always burn out to make the rest of the lights work. There is a device called a LightKeeper pro that sends a larger "zap" through the string to encourage the needed bypass wire to burn out. Its saved me a bunch of time figuring out which bulb was bad in a string of lights.
>"It has nothing to do with "comfort." It isn't a luxury feature in the same vein as a complementary back massage, hot flannel, or free alcoholic drink. It is what people need so they aren't in physical pain for the duration of the flight."

I'm not in "physical pain" from the seats as they currently are. The key qualifier that you should add is "some" and replace "need" with "want", perhaps even "feel is necessary". Neither of which apply to me. I neither want more space, nor do I feel it is necessary for me in any way, hence why I suggested you change your view on the matter by adding the qualifier "some".
I agree with your example of a pipe. But what if you manually retyped it and you were supposed to carry out a format conversion as you did so?

My understanding of the MCO failure was that it was a manual step in the process that failed. The humans were supposed to do something, and didn't. I don't see how that can be defined as software, or anything even close. It's analogous to seeing a highway sign that says the speed limit is 80km/h, setting my car cruise control to 80MPH, and then saying that it was a software defect that caused me to get a speeding ticket.
Abbyy Finereader (paid, Windows) is one of the best OCR programs, most of the books on archive.org are OCR'ed with Abbyy.

If the PDFs already have OCR text, calibre (GUI or CLI, Linux or Windows) can convert to .txt and many other formats. The recoll.org search engine will index PDF files that have OCR text.
Spell check, no hyphen. Easiest way to figure out what needs a hyphen IMO is to google it. Otherwise, just try to avoid hyphenated words, a simpler word will often do.
How Paubox Makes Tough Money Decisions as a Startup
What tacos is trying to say is that in an FFT, you will have the same number of samples in the time domain and the frequency domain (weeeeellll, I'm simplifying a bit, half of those 'frequency domain' samples are actually phase information, so you really have half as many frequency domain samples as you do time domain). So, if you wish to have a high resolution in the frequency domain, implying lots of samples, you're going to have a total sample time that is quite long, and you won't be able to say exactly when each of the different frequencies was actually present in the sound.

Take a concrete example. Let's assume that I have a recording in PCM at 44.1kHz, and I want to see all of the frequencies present, to a resolution of 10Hz. Nyquist tells us that we only have 22.05kHz of signal present in the sample (well, one can hope, otherwise if the recording didn't filter out everything above that when coding to PCM, we're going to have a mess of aliasing going on, which is outside the scope of this post - just assume the person doing the encoding knew what they were doing, mkay...). So, 22.05kHz. And we want a resolution of 10Hz, so we're going to need 22.05kHz / 10Hz = 2205 samples.
Of course, we actually need double that in the time domain (we throw away the phase information remember), so we need 4410 samples in the time domain to get our 2205 samples in the frequency domain. 4410 samples at 44.1kHz sampling is equal to 0.1 seconds.

If I decide that I want a better frequency resolution, say down to 1Hz, then you quickly arrive at the conclusion that you will need a full second of samples. In other words, your resolution in the time domain has decreased as you improve the resolution in the frequency domain.

You can improve a bit on this situation by using a sliding window with a carefully chosen windowing function. The frequency information will still be smeared out in time, but the windowing function reduces the amplitude of a frequency the further it is from the centre of the sampling window, which sharpens up the smear a bit.
Perspective is helping us find product market fit
The title should be changed to reflect that this is from 2007. The graphics that the article praises now look dated.
This guy hacks cameras for NatGeo
I am surprised the committees were "tasked with a 22.5% acceptance rate". Couldn't more than 77.5% of the submissions have been of poor quality?
Many airlines offer seats with a few inches more legroom for a modest increase in price. If you want more room, pay for it. Despite your protest to the contrary, you can.
Ah, yeah, good point. I didn't read that one.
Bitcore, Sift.js, Btapp.js, KOAN Stack, Metalsmith and Other Cool Stuff
This site is awesome
This post is not a good fit for Hacker News.
http://mapthebanks.com/#section-why-does-this-matter

first time I've seen CSS3 columns in the wild, pretty neat.
Ars Technica is the latest site to fall victim to hack
I'm not sure if there's a question here or you're just advertising a commercial product.
We have been teaching kids Scratch for 3 years in a weekly free class in downtown Oakland. The response has been wonderful. It unleashes the creativity in kids, and some children that are utterly silent and shy open right up when they have questions about how to make their game do this or that.

I have literally heard kids shout out "Oh! That's why we learned those x y things in school!" when learning how to move sprites about on a grid. They have no idea they are learning math, and they generally have a spectacular time making even the simplest game, like a scrolling shooter, or moon lander.

My favorite discovery during our three years has been seeing how kids name their games. It's never "David's Moon Lander." It's always something more like "David's Super Awesome Cat Launching Space Lander With Flame Throwers." It's like watching kids draw anything they want with crayons: they get to theme and tweak games however they see fit.

As a volunteer organization, we can always use more teachers to help us spread Scratch to the masses. Our classes are free and offered to kids ages 8 to 14, and we do a simple game each week.

http://www.themade.org