skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of your examples are social membership tests. You have to publicly say "XYZ" to join the club, where "XYZ" doesn't necessarily mean anything, but joining the club does. Like saying Abracadabra to open a door.

(Spoiler alert don't read till the 26th)

Do you believe in Santa? I believe in Santa. Oh how nice you also believe in Santa. Aren't we all happy members of our club? It would be so antisocial for someone to say Santa doesn't exist, because then how would we tell who is in our club? This is the best club ever. Santa? Who's that? We just talk about him to pledge allegiance to each other, we don't actually care about fat dudes in red suits.
Here's the theory behind the price changes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_management
A: Presenting macros!

B: Look what you can do with not-macros.

A: Great.

;)
> making sure the monthly amount is doable is really important.

Of course it is, but you can't be so preoccupied with the monthly affordability that you forget about the total cost. (N.B. this is a trick car dealers use every day to get you to pay too much for a car)

In this sense it's not unlike the US healthcare debate where everyone was so preoccupied with how to make hospital bills affordable with government-mandated insurance that we totally forgot to ask why an aspirin costs $75 in the first place.
This makes me want to ask: Where did all of the money go? It had to go somewhere, right?
Is this the Neural Information Processing Systems convention you're talking about?

I'm sure more than a few people won't have any idea what "NIPS" stands for.
An interesting Wired article on the topic: http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go/
It's actually more than that, our API doesn't only provide access to the Browser module. We provide an SDK that can help people build real-time applications that can connect with almost anything. We're getting ready to release our Raspberry Pi integration. We are also going to be going open source fairly soon.
Kayvon teaches at Carnegie Mellon now and his class slides are definitely worth reading:

http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/courses/15869/fall2014/
http://15418.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2014/
So your reason to drop LastPass is that you don't like their implementation of an optional feature even though an alternative is readily available (auto-logout)?
Shouldn't water be flowing in a good sous vide cooker to maintain even temperature throughout or am I talking out my butt?
Perhaps because OOP was the big thing for so long, younger people learned on OOP. Those arguments from 40 years ago were either not taught or not emphasized. As a result, functional seems fresh and interesting. Throw in a few problems that become trivial with it and people get very excited and it becomes the "new thing".
Esp. if you were running Windows, I would assume. I haven't seen that kind of propagation on non-MS platforms (just my observation).. I'd like to know if a browser on an Ubuntu box would be equally vulnerable - correct me if I am wrong.
I like going to airline price search sites for the simplicity - camping various sites for cheaper prices takes time and effort.
"I think that perhaps very squishy subjects like politics are particularly vulnerable to this sort of disconnect, where a complex viewpoint is formed based on the hot topic of the day, and this viewpoint persists for years or decades even if the basis for its formation is completely forgotten."

Not only disconnect: What I've read of psychological studies indicate the mind amplifies those facts that support it's current model of the world and actively ignores those that do not.

Which goes a long way to explain why it's nearly pointless to argue with fanatics of one kind or another.
Good point. On reflection, I suspect the context was predictable surges (New Years Eve, &c).
More Open Source Goodies: Npm Simple-sitemap and Leaderbin
>mainstream America just collectively forgot how it felt to have enough money.

Yeah, no more easy line of credits for deadbeats and people with zero collateral who want to flip a home they can't afford and sell at a price that won't work. Banks shouldn't provide insurance for investing.

> We have become accustomed to the 60 hour work weeks for folks fortunate enough to have jobs

This kind of thing happened way before the recession and the mythical 1950s worker who went home right a 5 is just that, a myth.

> chronic unemployment for those unfortunate enough to work outside of tech

Tech sucks. I know blue-collar guys who paint or install drywall making my salary. Except they have no student loans, no office politics, etc to worry about. Granted a lot of them pay union dues, but its okay as Joe Taxpayer has agreed to pay their pensions. Do nothing jobs like HR pay six figures. The average salary for a Chicago school teacher is $85,000. If you think tech has all the money you obviously have no finance, lawyer, or doctor friends.

>Being poor is the new norm

If you're an American, you're far from poor, globally.

It bothers me that there's so much whining from people nowadays. Its like they never became a bazaillionare so they buy into the fallacious "things were better in the past" mumbo-jumbo. Yeah, the past wasn't too bad but try not to be black or asian or latino or a woman back then if you wanted to get ahead.

It also helped that the rest of the world was rebuilding from WWII while we had all our infrastructure, business, etc still intact. Maybe being relatively poorer is a good thing if it takes a world war to make us "rich."
I only recently started taking notes in my own books and already see the flaws with doing so. I like that you approached the problem with a more direct solution.

I wonder about future technology when PG says "Eventually we may be able not just to play back experiences but also to index and even edit them." I also wonder about the iterations between now and then.

What do you think could be an intermediate step (company idea) between your wiki and something like a searchable memory catalog that would do what PG describes?
I don't know about "cool" but here are some companies that employ remote coders:

http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/telecommute/

I'll have lots more soon - I have identified the companies, but do not yet have complete information.
Designing for Small
CIA Agents Assess: How Real Is ‘Homeland’?
Natural Course of Refactoring – a refactoring workflow
It's possible - and IMO likely - for both to be true.

Media outlets are scrutinizing Uber's every move because scandal is popular and everyone wants to break the next Uber story.

They are doing this because public opinion for Uber is at a low, mostly due to Uber's own doing and shocking lapses in basic business ethics.

Uber got themselves into this mess by behaving deplorably, but one must acknowledge that there's a dogpiling/witchhunt going on as a result.
>> We never left the recession;

The OP suggested the American economy is still in a recession, which is false. Not according to any obscure "technical definition" of recession, but according to the only widely accepted definition of the word.

> Over-aggregating and being pedantic about technical definitions adds nothing to the conversation

His post opens with a statement that is plainly false. Spreading misinformation (even unintentionally) is not a good way to contribute to a conversation either.

While you might find it pedantic to learn how to use words correctly, others may appreciate the opportunity to learn about subjects outside their area of expertise.

Pvnick ultimately makes a good point, but he quite unnecessarily loses credibility among anybody who knows what a recession is. Imagine someone telling you that "The best tablet is the Android" or "Git is a bad compiler." You're likely to consciously or unconsciously discredit whatever comes out of their mouth next.
I think you are at a point where you just want to argue to argue because. I'll give one more spin and I am out.

The world you paint isn't the real world. The world I am considering is this one:

http://langpop.com/

In other words, one where your total languages are virtually nowhere to be found. Not by a small margin, by a landslide.

So, as they say in the movies, in a world where the top 5 most used languages are C and and C derivatives and total languages are almost nowhere to be found or a thing of academia, then, yes, what I am saying is very relevant and, dare I say, true and appropriate.

And, BTW, even experienced programmers screw up recursion because it just isn't used that often. I don't want to blame newbies.

So I look at this world, as evidenced by the charts on that site and a data I am sure could be dug up on a bunch of other sites I can very easily conclude that total languages are still mostly in academia and so is safe recursion. In a world dominated by C and derivatives, recursion can be really dangerous. Bad recursion hidden inside a library can be really bad news.

Anyhow, I am done with the back and forth. I understand where you want to come from. I am just asking that you understand that the frame of reference you have constructed is not one that matches our current reality. Which means one can't say that recursion is safe because when total languages when virtually nobody, in relative terms, uses them. And then, when they do use them, you have to ask what they are using them for. Is it Academia or real world application?

Enough said. Thanks for a good discussion. I wish people were not so nasty with down-votes on HN as it detracts from trying to have a discussion based on ideas contrary to the underlying HN culture. That's just the way it is.
"Let's not let facts get in the way of a good argument." :-)

Many times we tune out feedback that isn't congruent with our worldview and get locked in. That's why it's good to follow Paul's lead on rereading and revisiting. Sometimes it's hard to remember the anecdote or story that steers us, but finding it again allows us to question it. There was a specific retelling of a Vonnegut (of all authors) story that got me interesting in technology. Rereading the story in it's original form 20+ years later allowed me to understand the first better.
It doesn't seem like clickbait. It seems pretty important to think about, actually.

Little story: In 2007, a member of my family landed a lot of signed contracts to commission him to do a certain type of job. These were actually so lucrative that he quit his dayjob.

Then 2008 happened. All of those signed contracts became meaningless. People simply said no, we're not paying you anymore, sorry. Fast forward a month, and he's contemplating ways to kill himself to make it look like an accident so that his family will keep their house via life insurance payments.

Luckily, things didn't turn out that way. He was able to get his job back. Somehow.

Might it be true that comparing the present to the lucrative year of 2007 isn't necessarily productive? Possibly. Probably. But it's an interesting historical perspective, and it's also interesting to remember how much people's faith in the economy matters. The type of work he was being commissioned for wasn't anything related to tech or housing. The ripples are profound, both in the upswing and the downswing.
Haters gonna hate. I think you're arguing from a very narrow perspective, the vast, vast majority of Uber's users wouldn't know a "valley company" if it walked up an introduced it self, much less "love to hate" it.

You're right that surge pricing is a counterintuitive concept for many people to accept, and it's a major gamble, but let's not confuse the HN filter bubble with the millions of people who actually use, and keep using, Uber.
An associated problem caused by a change in the mental model due to reading is the "Curse of knowledge" principle - which essentially states that "....better-informed parties find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties."

Once you have read something and your mental model of the world is adjusted to include the new information, you have a difficult time understanding why others don't see what you see. This is compounded by the fact - as highlighted by pg in the essay - that you also forget how and when your mental model changes.

This is one reason why not every expert is a good teacher - as they fail to see the world from the point of view of students.

But it is also relevant and useful to remember this in the world of startups. Established large companies routinely get disrupted by novice startups - often because the experts at the large company fail to see problems the way novices do. It is impossible to become an expert at something while continuing to view the world from the eyes of a beginner.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
I actually think this might be the best use case of this proto-tool.
How does this all work in space?
Its actually imaginary points. It doesn't have to go anywhere.
Ahh, now you're affirming the consequent. I said all software is the product of humans. I did not say that all human products are software.

Where our disagreement seems to occur is where the boundaries of software systems lie. You appear to be making the claim that it is at the granularity of individual programs whereas I am claiming that the entire software system must be considered. If you were to write a bash script that pipes the output of curl (presumably an html file) to /dev/dsp0 and a horrible screeching noise emanates from your speakers, what you have produced is a software error. It does not matter that each of the individual components is working as intended; the system as a whole is not (unless you actually intended to produce that screech, of course).
It's a private Wiki, which started out as a Python CGI on shared hosting, but is now a WSGI app on a Linode.

I started it 10 years ago, and side benefit was that writing a Wiki is a good project to learn about web programming. The first version was of course riddled with XSS and escaping problems :-/

I think writing a Wiki is still a good exercise now. I'm not a front end person per se, but every programmer should know something about the web. I'm always a little taken aback when I meet some back end guy who doesn't know how HTTP or the browser works.

And IMO there is too much bloated JS on the web now. I think people forgot how to make a simple web app with a form and plain buttons. There are too many fast-moving frameworks, so just doing it "raw" (or to WSGI) is a good learning exercise.
'Reliving experiences' is part of the Exposure Therapy that is used to treat PTSD. I remember watching on NOVA or some science program how virtual reality was being used to treat veterans suffering from PTSD. By reliving a dangerous situation in the VR world, they are able to 'recompile' the program in a safer context than it actually happened.

EDIT: Found the link
http://www.nami.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Top_Story/Using_V...
SurveyMonkey Snaps Up $250M More in Funding
It's an XKCD styled graph by the looks of it. There are a couple generators out there that take data and make the hand drawn looking graphs. e.g http://xkcdgraphs.com/
> Object pools at the language level would be an alternative. (I.e. every object is allocated in a "pool", including pools. When a pool falls out of scope the entire pool is "freed". You can copy objects between pools as necessary.)

This might be called "memory regions" in the literature, or at least the work on using this memory management scheme in an ML (ML Kit).
Ars runs on WordPress, yet another WordPress exploit, or even more commonly, yet another WordPress plugin exploit would be even less surprising than DNS.
The best people do, indeed. I'm still fairly young, but I'm starting to understand that "adapting to new information" is not something that happens by accident. "Continuous learning" is a lifestyle thing; I've never had to think about it. But forcing myself to re-evaluate things that I already thought I knew--that is a conscious and often difficult process.
That's why you choose the marshmallow now and can't wait "15 minutes". You want instant gratification now. I want the human race to move way out into the solar system, permanently, and in a big way.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140919.html
To be honest, I don't actually think Windows is more vulnerable these days - it's just that the average user of Windows is more vulnerable because they're less informed. They'll see the elevated permissions prompt (whatever it's called) and just click yes anyway. Similarly, Windows installers will often come bundled with crapware, but if you read what you're doing you can avoid it.
Your narrow technical definition of the word "recession" is by no means universally accepted [1] [2]. In addition, as another post adjacent to your's points out, there is a common meaning used by everybody outside of economic-savvy circles that refers to periods of general economic difficulty. It is this definition which is more important because this is what the technical definitions of recession attempt to formalize with math and economic indicators, and the tendency to play semantics and say "since GDP hasn't fallen for two successive quarters the recession is over" when the economy is clearly still in shambles ignores the real struggle of millions of Americans who are not seeing the benefits of our "recovery," other than hearing about it on the news.

[1] http://www.nber.org/cycles/recessions_faq.html

[2] http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/11/23/what-is-the-difference-b...
I'd always recommend turning on Click-To-Play for all plugins no matter what your platform. Mac isn't immune from this type of thing, even if Linux is due to obscurity.

Most drive-bys are targeting either old versions of IE, Java, Flash, or rarely Windows Explorer issues in XP.

Chrome is great because it auto-updates regularly, and auto-updates Flash. But even in Chrome I turn on Click-To-Play (since I need to have Java installed, and don't trust Java).
The FN has historically been a mix of economic liberalism and nationalism. They may surf on a more socialist way because it's fashionable nowadays, but that's all.

I looked briefly at the polls you linked to. People think that the current economic system profits unfairly to a small minority? Is that being far left now? A third thinking capitalism is not the way forward becomes "the population polls left of Cuba"?
disclaimer: I work in this space and have done so for a while, including previously on CUDA and on Titan.

GPUs for general purpose computation were never 100x faster than CPUs like people claimed in 2008 or so. They're just not. That was basically NV marketing mixed with a lot of people publishing some pretty bad early work on GPUs.

Lots of early papers that fanned GPU hype followed the same basic form: "We have this standard algorithm, we tested it on a single CPU core with minimal optimizations and no SIMD (or maybe some terrible MATLAB code with zero optimization), we tested a heavily optimized GPU version, and look the GPU version is faster! By the way, we didn't port any of those optimizations back to the CPU version or measure PCIe transfer time to/from the GPU." It was utterly trivial to get any paper into a conference by porting anything to the GPU and reporting a speedup. Most of the GPU related papers from this time were awful. I remember one in particular that claimed a 1000x speedup by timing just the amount of time it took for the kernel launch to the GPU instead of the actual kernel runtime, and somehow nobody (either the authors or the reviewers) realized that this was utterly impossible.

GPUs have more FLOPs and more memory bandwidth in exchange for requiring PCIe and lots of parallel work. if your algorithm needs those more than anything else (like cache), can minimize PCIe transfer time, and handles the whole massive parallelism thing well, then GPUs are a pretty good bet. If you can't, then they're not going to work particularly well.

(now, if you need to do 2D interpolation and can use the texture fetch hardware on the GPU to do it instead of a bunch of arbitrary math... yeah, that's a _huge_ performance increase because you get that interpolation for free from special-purpose hardware. but that's incredibly rare in practice)
google cached it just in time:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7SWNucH...
Hashtags as Social Networks
LiquidHaskell: Refinement Types via SMT and Predicate Abstraction
Nice!. Thank you for that.
Project Orion nuclear propulsion 1950's tests
Ha, wordpress seems so anti ars u_u;
This would be more accurately titled “Emacs Major Mode for Web Service for creating Sequence Diagrams”, since all it does is be a client for www.websequencediagrams.com and is completely dependent on that Software-as-a-Service.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8699422
How? Like the display burning out or something? Maybe something battery related?
I found it obvious, which pg admits, until this quote: "The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life."

A nice analogy, as others have pointed out, and that is the thirteen-word summary I'll remember from this essay. Not bad, considering most thousand-page books will be compressed down to a page of take-away memories.
The commentary is truly amazing. This is the best speed runing video I've ever seen.
Yes, I have another one here - http://gini.io/customerwall
This is really interesting technically, a couple tidbits I dug up looking in the mac app bundle:

1. There are a couple of OpenGL shaders in the bundle for converting the screen image to HDTV color space/format (420v.fgsh) and some kind of passthrough.

2. They appear to be using x264 to encode the screen with defaults of 1280x720, 1000kbit, superfast preset. (Defaults.plist)

So on the mac side, they're definitely capturing the screen and sending a streaming video. Not surprising, but the curious part is how they manage to get the iPad to stream in that data over USB. I suppose something like HTTP Live Streaming[1] could work. Place small files into the device's Documents area, and they get streamed. It would be awesome if something else was going on here - like a named pipe.

1. https://developer.apple.com/streaming/
You can now control your Nest thermostat with your voice
Google Now Nest Thermostat Integration
The article seems to be discussing the median. The money went to the top of the curve.
The story of Apollo 17, and why we haven't been back to the Moon
Using Day One App as a Coffee Journal
My kids recently caught me claiming the world population is 6 billion people. Having learned the number more recently, they had the more accurate value.
Uber can charge what they want, they're free to do so. Other people can say what they like about Uber, they're free to do so. Other people don't owe Uber a kid-glove handling.
Sketch Tutorial_01
1. search a flight.

2. search it again.

3. the price has surged.

they don't track individual users, they track the search queries, this makes me wonder if flight search services are just rising the entire market prices, instead of a user only searching once, they constantly search the same query.
https://weworkremotely.com/ lists a couple of companies
Asus ZenWatch Review
Please reduce the number of people with downvote power. Far too many people abuse them now. The site has become very hostile and it's caused entire communities to move away from HN, e.g. to producthunt. This trend will only continue if the hostility isn't improved.
The Nest Thermostat Can Now Be Controlled by Voice
Internet of Trees – Connected decorations
There's a thread on this paper on the computer go mailing list. It's a quiet list, but features authors of several of the best programs.

http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/2014-December/0...
Jacking up prices in response to a humanitarian problem is called 'profiteering'. It is economically sound, but it's not ethical.

If they want to show it worked, they should release numbers - proportionately how many uber drivers were 'enticed' back onto the roads? Show people that it actually works, rather than wave hands around saying 'mutter mutter logic mutter mutter save lives'.