skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I have a hard time seeing who else would be interested in this opportunity

Really? SF is one of the most expensive cities in the world, and we're pretty much at the apex of interest in "comp sci" in 2015. My guess is that their inbox will have hundreds of thousands of applications in short order.
I usually try to make my passwords obscene if I suspect that they're being stored in something that can be reverted back to plain text, or if I suspect that someone may force me to give it to them (e.g., clueless IT team).
Google Chrome Canary Displays HTTP as Non Secure
If we had perpetual copyright, Shakespeare would have been sued out of existence.
There are still a couple of ANSI and ASCII art groups with quite an active membership. Perhaps the most notable is Blocktronics:
http://blocktronics.org
> I don't understand why jobs and curiosity have to be so starkly opposed.

One word: money.

> I studied mechanical engineering, and I consider that a degree for anyone who's curious about the world. If you want to have a strong foundation to peel back the layers of existence, you really can't do much better.

Certainly. But to do that, you need to spend four years or more being a financial liability rather than an asset. The standard justification these days is that you'll be more of an asset when you're done, because you're going to get a job as a mechanical engineer.

Or we could fall back to an older way of thinking, and say that everyone ought to spend four years being intellectually challenged. And by "everyone" we mean rich guys, because they're the ones that can afford it, and, really, we don't much care about anyone else.

But in a truly egalitarian society, we care about everyone. So that kind of reasoning won't do. Which leaves us with the question of who is going to pay for that foundation to peel back the layers of existence, and what motivation they have to cough up the money.
I'm worried about AI too; I'm worried it won't work soon enough, and that fearmongering will slow it down.

Yes, unfriendly AI is a serious threat. On the other hand, friendly AI will be one of the most significant developments since the original evolution of sentient thought.
> If I were to follow the logic of your argument then we should expect western countries where teenagers mingle freely to have people marrying early... that is clearly not the case.

That is not a logical extension of my position.

Logic:

if the government does not allow commingling of the sexes, then people will get married at an older age (if p, then q)

You are extending that to:

The US government does not prohibit commingling of sexes, therefore we should expect people getting married earlier (not P, therefore not q)

That is a logical fallacy.

I think we can both agree the US average age of marriage is increasing, and certainly it can be for different reasons. To follow my argument is very easy, there can be other explanations for decreased birthrates and increased average age of marriage, than a sexual revolution, especially if the government is prohibiting men and women from socializing (something I don't think other western countries ever did)
Ask HN: CSV/Excel Spreadsheet Upload Service
I'm feeling a bit inspired from the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8961149 so I figured we should have a new thread.

I'm thinking about tackling this problem, that is, making the end user experience for structured data uploads really, really, good.

But like the previous discussion, it's a bit of a tough problem.

You have to deal with different spread sheet formats, malformed files, bad input, etc.

One possible solution that was offered was giving the users a template file to download and match their data to it. But do you really want to give your users more friction to using your software? Especially if it's something they have to do off of your web application, they're likely to just leave and never come back.

Thoughts? Anybody interested in using an external service to handle and validate CSV uploads?
Weekly Innovation Update – Your ultimate innovation summary
I feel similarly reading climbing articles.
It always amazes me how the people in the content creation industries keep their jobs. Even though comprehensive studies have shown that the public responds randomly to entertainment products, they still skate by claiming to 'know what the public wants.' Analysis of the decisions of past executives at movie companies showed that executives who were said to be "on a hot streak" were mostly benefitting from the results of projects started by their predecessors, and then when their "streak" ended and they left, their replacement got the same benefit from the projects they left in the pipeline.

The book 'A Drunkard's Walk' analyses various different industries and situations and shows where randomness shows up. The success of media is one of the strongest ones. No factor correllates with success. Not budget, star-power, genre, directors, nothing. For every runaway hit there are exactly as many abyssmal failures. Before Titanic hit theaters, film critics and industry insiders were dead certain that it would prove to be the most monumental theatrical failure in history, making Kevin Costner's Waterworld look like a walk in the park. Of course, they were wrong. They will always be wrong as often as they are correct. Their entire careers are built on, quite literally, absolutely nothing. These executives choose what gets produced, and they are incompetent at it. Yet they are paid millions of dollars. It's astonishing that they get so far with unmitigated bullshit.

This is why large movie production houses will die. Their performance has always been random in terms of producing successful content. But they always made up for it by having total control of the distribution. Now, distribution is worthless. Any 12 year old with an Internet connection can distribute media better than large corporations can. Take away that control and profit from distribution, and those companies will end up simply fading into bankruptcy after enough failed projects pile up.
According to calculations, they need approximately 70k people to screen every minute of video uploaded onto Youtube.

Even if ML could cut this down by 85%, that is still 10k people. Not a brilliant idea when Google only employs 50k people worldwide.
>What I've noticed is American thieves seem to use a brute force approach

i think it is important that in US people with mid-education/IQ/life skills/from working class family/etc... have much more opportunities and thus the path of traditional crime (like robberies, etc...) is much less appealing.
Disingenuous use of a different use of the words public/private.

I meant that they are not necessarily expected to treat Youtube as we would expect, say, the US Government to treat a piece of public land like a park (ignoring of course the recent phenomenon of "free speech zones" and such.) You are referring to the fact that fractional ownership of the company is available to nearly any member of the public, as opposed to a company held by a small set of owners.
Wouldn't a simple solution simply be a vent? Constantly vent out all the air in the machine. Seems a lot more effective than trying to build bomb proof hardware...
And don't forget Break (http://breakascii.org/) & Impure! :)
Maybe it wasn't even on. I can't see the screen.
By contrast, Chrome OS (which intentionally avoided this whole problem by taking OEMs and hardware vendors out of the update process) doesn't have this problem.

That said, it's not obvious that Android would have been able to spread as widely as it did if it had cut out the handset vendors and carriers sooner. An Android that solved that problem might not have become the Android on the majority of phones and tablets everywhere.
Show HN: Fixturies – The speed of fixtures and the maintainability of factories
Jefferson Starship - they built it out of rock and roll, as I understand it.
Haskell in the Large [pdf]
Tyranny? Why not become a tradesman? Those are still a thing.
do we really want to live in a world where software is subject to export controls (again)?
How about just using a fan? Make the whole machine positive pressure and I don't think you could get enough mix into the chamber for long enough to get a blast.
Also, planes can fly upside down. Flaps probably have to be used to maintain flight, but flaps don't seem to significantly change the surface area of either side of the wing.
Mohammed – in pictures
Great idea guys. I hope you get a chance to host some brilliant people from all over the world.

What's been the rate of visitors/job offers since you began hosting?
I tried it. Customers pretty frequently made their own spreadsheets that looked mostly like the template, but not quite. I was constantly fixing their uploads.

I built a system to validate their uploads and let them fix their errors on a website, and all that hassle went away.

(I still gave them the template so they'd know what it was supposed to look like, I just didn't rely on that alone.)
I've been a user of Rackspace E-mail. It's one of the last services I still have with Rackspace and it's been a good platform for my company. I can't tell you the last time I had an issue. Looks like this is on the road to making Rackspace irrelevant on yet another level.
Good to see Redis delivering the same performances of the other system in a benchmark conceived by the other systems creators. The benchmark is limited to GETs and SETs without pipelining, and the amount of data is not clear (or I missed it). However what's cool is that with pipelining in Redis you get 5x this at least, and the fact that at the same speed you can't just run GETs and SETs, but all the O(1) and O(log_N) operations.
Does anyone here really believe this is limited to Canada? I think it safe to say that the NSA/GCHQ/MIB have similar/identical programs of their own.
Fascinating read!

Also I'm really liking the use of different media that decorates/enhances the article, whether it be the animated GIFs of footage, or interactive timelines etc.

Was nice to see the credits at the end there too, with the developers and designers getting a shout out for their contribution in putting the piece together.
I don't see how the article addresses this point at all. The owner_name is simply text in a field, and could represent a subsidiary of another entity, a front company or an LLC established simply to own that piece of property (common in California business real estate).

Even a simple typo or difference in conventions at the time of data entry will obfuscate that multiple parcels are owned by the same entity.

The article's method simply performs exact matches on owner_name, which is a place to start. It makes no attempt to delve deeper to piece together the true ownership structures that this data represents, an admittedly far harder problem.
Next, music. "I'm in a band" - big deal. There were how many million Myspace bands?
I see you quote that Iranian government is against Israel, that is indisputable. pluma started the subject of Saudis being even worse than Iran but covered completely differently by the US media, which I think is also indisputable.

Saudis beatings and beheadings news are easy to find and they are the very clear examples of religious oppression they enslave their people under. Can you quote the same acts of Iranians to their people?
ohh i wonder if theres any PETSCII in there :)
No, if you support a terrorist organization, then you support terrorists.

I said nothing about Islam. Supporting terrorists has nothing to do with Islam. Iran supporting Hezbollah has to do with Iran supporting terrorists.

I never said Saudi or Iran were worse. That has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. This isn't an argument over what the worst country on earth is.

My point was: Iran is an oppressive theocracy that directly finances terrorism. They are, very blatantly. And if Saudi is worse, that does not mean Iran isn't still an oppressive theocracy.
One common approach is to look for the elbow in the curve <metric> vs K (number of clusters). This is essentially finding the number of clusters after which the rate of information gained/variance explained/<metric> slows. I believe it's possible to binary search for this point if you can assume the curve is convex.
Lisp and the Jedi Masters
I recommend checking out his autobiography, he's led an interesting life.

I'm not sure if any professional athlete has ever dominated a sport like Rodney dominated freestyle skateboarding. At the height of his dominance when he'd show up at a competition it was never a question of who would win, it was a question of who would come in 2nd place behind Rodney.
Stack overflow is down
This stuff has teeth. If you get identified by the FCC, they send you a cease and desist order. If you ignore that, they follow it up with a fine, $10,000 being common in some radio services. Marriott had to pay $600,000.
The Annotated Erdnase? http://www.mcmagicwords.com/books_erdnase.html
Five Things I've Learned as Head of Product Design at a Startup
ScriptRock's Experience with Go, After Porting 30KLOC
We can make a comparison with stand-up comedians. The majority don't make anything from it and a very large number don't even have any professional aspirations.

Yet, professional comedians make good money. The best are multimillionaires.

The developments the author points out aren't exactly new or exclusive to this century. You can trace them back to the Industrial Revolution. The 19th century English novelists I read seemed to populate their novels with characters who did nothing but drink tea, read books, make smart quips and over the summer, play a game or two of cricket (hallmarks of the quintessential Victorian gentleman, I was told). You had people who read as a hobby, and people who 'read' (and write about their reading) as a vocation (Matthew Arnold comes to mind, as do an unending list of independent lexicographers, researchers, and scientists).
2007: I took Amtrak on a round trip from the Seattle area to Beaumont, Texas and back [1]. Part of that involves taking the Sunset Limited between Los Angeles and Beaumont. That's a scheduled [2] 40 hour trip from Los Angeles to Beaumont, and 36 hours from Beaumont to Los Angeles.

There was no wifi on the train then (or now, I believe), and I did not have a phone with cellular internet.

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for the Nintendo DS came out in North America just 3 weeks before my trip started, so I saved that for the train trip. I also brought Mario Kart and some other Mario game that I had not finished. Oh, and Brain Age was very helpful--it includes a bunch of Sudoku puzzles. I also had a bunch of podcasts and some audiobooks on my iPod.

I did not bring, if I recall correctly, any physical books on the train. I wanted to travel light, and the books I was currently reading or wanting to read were all heavy hardbacks. (Kindle was not out yet...it was released while I was I was in Texas, a few days before the trip home started).

All I brought on the train was my PowerBook, the entertainment stuff listed above, my phone, a TomTom GPS, a couple charges to keep the aforementioned stuff running, toothbrush and toothpaste, a comb, a swiss army knife, and enough clothes to cover the time on the train.

Everything else I'd need or want for the 3+ weeks I'd actually be in Texas, including several hardback books, I shipped via UPS or FedEx ahead to the hotel.

I don't understand why more people don't do that, at least for stays where they are bringing a lot of stuff. You've already got enough to deal with on boarding day...why add wrangling two or three big pieces of checked luggage to that? And FedEx and UPS lose luggage at a lower rate than airlines (I could not find data on Amtrak lost luggage rates). [3]

[1] for the usual reason one would go to Beaumont, Texas if one has no relatives there. A patent I was involved in ended up owned by someone who sued someone else, and I had to go be a witness.

[2] Most of the route is over track owner by freight rail companies, and their trains have priority. That means AmTrak spends a lot of time sitting on passing sidings waiting for a freight train to pass. Add several hours to scheduled times for any long trip.

[3] I suppose it might depend on how things are getting paid for. Since I was going in order to be a witness in civil litigation, someone else was paying for my travel expenses, and they had a pretty loose wallet. If you are paying for your own trip and your fare includes a certain amount of luggage it might be hard to justify letting that freebie go to waste and paying for FedEx.
Rotten Tomatoes' rating, mentioned in the article as scoring THE BRONZE as 10% (though the RT now says 18%), is also a collection of professional reviewers' ratings.
Actually, as for the case in Austria, he was found guilty as an accomplice for distributing child porn (which was carried out on his exit node.)
Yes, especially as one of the key advantages of using a projection is that you don't have to worry about this stuff. You can just work with a Cartesian coordinate system and the results will probably be right.
I would love it if most liberal arts institutions "fostered a broad set of knowledge and skills whose value is not always immediately apparent." But they generally don't, at least not anymore.

The erosion of standards in the humanities and the promotion of grievance/identity "studies" have led to academic environments based on groupthink and insulation from unapproved ideas. And that's among the "intellectuals"! Many of the rest of the students are just getting wasted every night and taking "gut" courses with open-book multiple-choice exams.

It's mostly "hard science" programs like engineering and math that have avoided this fate. Probably because it doesn't matter what you "feel" if your code won't compile.

Edit: Sorry, to be clear this is coming from an American perspective. I have no idea what liberal education is like in other countries, but I have to imagine it can't be nearly as bad.
Yes, there is a fair amount of drive-by-downvoting. I sometimes comment on the political topics so I expect some down voting. Lord knows I have enough internet points as it is. :)

But it bugs me a lot when someone writes a detailed comment in a thread about a programming language (e.g Erlang) about its flaws (eg. poor Windows support) and its get down voted to light gray even if the content of the post is completely factual.

Such comments takes a long time to write (much longer than just writing your opinion on some political topic), so when people are down voted for that they become less likely to write such informative, technical comments.

Which is a problem for me because I read them with interest and I don't want people to stop writing them because of to much down voting.
Generally the calculations tend to be based on an increased tax on consumption (people who are better off spend more money, so they end up paying more into the system) and/or the reduction of expenses in a lot of the social welfare system (which can largely be rolled into the basic income).

Some designs assert that the basic income should simply be paid to every citizen regardless of other sources of income. Other models propose a model with a soft cut-off point (so for every dollar beyond a certain baseline of income you get some fraction of a dollar less basic income, up to a level where you -- again depending on the model -- either start paying it back or simply don't get any basic income at all). In any case the idea is that (unlike with welfare models like the one we have in Germany[0]) for every dollar you earn you actually end up with extra cash in your pocket.

Ideally the basic income should be high enough to provide a frugal but sustainable standard of living with access to everything necessary to participate in the market. But arguments can be made for lower amounts as well.

[0]: One problem with the German welfare system (and similar ones) is that if you receive welfare benefits and earn money, that money is subtracted from the benefits you receive at a rate of pretty much one-to-one. So if you (hypothetically) get 400 euros in benefits and then find a job that pays you less than 400 euros, you effectively end up with the same money you'd have without the job. This creates an unintentional incentive for welfare recipients not to take on low-paying jobs (frequently the only ones they qualify for) which is then clumsily counteracted with various legal constructs (like forcing people to take job interviews or accept job offers for jobs they are not a good fit for at all). It's not a terrible system, but the design flaws are obvious.
I recall seeing this on tor-talk or tor-relays within the past year or so. Someone started running an exit, and their hosting provider nuked their account, claiming that other customers were being affected by bans. I'll see if I can find it.

Edit: Here's one example, posted by Zack Weinberg on the tor-relays list.[0]

CMU network operations has decided to move the Tor exit node that my
group operates (tor-exit.cylab.cmu.edu) to an isolated subnet in order
to minimize consequences for the rest of the campus network. For
instance, apparently there have been several cases where third parties
blacklisted the entire CMU IP space in response to malicious traffic
from the exit node. This is currently scheduled to happen Tuesday (Nov.
4). The new IP address will be 204.194.29.4.

[0] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2014-Novem...
If they build some bridges to the *AA it will cost net negative resources to care about piracy.
As long as the person was paid more for every time they aborted the mission, that sounds perfect.
Is.js – micro checking library
Fascinating article. I'm no GIS wonk, but I've moved in real estate circles for a while and understand how messy (truly truly messy) property data can be. If Rob wants parcel data across the country, he can pay for it, otherwise its a standartization nightmare.

I also love that this is a subtle pitch for a chief database architect (with 3-5 years of experience(?)).
Eh, from the phrasing, it seems that it's entirely concerned with HTTP file-sharing sites, while completely avoiding e.g. BitTorrent search engines. Living in Vancouver BC, I've never encountered anyone using a file-sharing site for anything other than to create an ephemeral URL for oversized email attachments.
The rate regulation doesn't look that bad at first glance. It would require ISPs to publicly disclose their actual prices and peering agreements, both of which I think would be a wonderful improvement. It would authorize but does not appear to require the FCC to intervene in rate changes. It does not seem to unconditionally require pre-approval for rate changes, and it empowers the FCC to provisionally allow rate changes that are under dispute. The only scary bit is where the FCC is allowed to set minumum and maximum prices if they think ISP are or will be setting prices that in some way violate any part of the act; and that's only scary because I don't know everything that's in the act.
It's located in a pretty decent neighborhood.
When a service provider's cooperation is required, it can:

- Turn away informal requests and say, "come back with a court order"

- Appeal subpoenas it feels are unreasonable

- Return exactly as much data as required by court order (search warrants are supposed to be narrow; overly broad search warrants are vulnerable to defense lawyers)

- Fall on its sword if it feels it has been required to do something extremely unethical and legal channels for objection have been exhausted (Lavabit)

While a service provider cannot legally resist government writ large, it can limit its disclosures to what the judiciary actually requires, rather than what police want. (At least in criminal law, these are actually meaningfully different.)

A service provider that has been backdoored is giving every cop/analyst/whatever far more than they are legally entitled to.