skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Correlation is not causation" is still a valid comment to make, the original article says that deeper questions need to be asked.

However most of the time a news report just reports a single correlation. That's when those comments come out, its statistically insignificant to have one source/correlation and report it as news. Show me two correlations or more and I'll take more notice.

For example:

1, Smoking causes cancer
2, Smokers have a higher rate of lung cancer
3, Heavy smokers are more likely to develop lung cancer sooner than casual smokers
4, Smokers that quit lower their chances of cancer

As a set they make an valid argument, however individually they are weak.
I'm going to assume you understand the 'white male' aspect. 'Privileged' in the sense that they came from a middle-income home where they had access to things like a computer and books, were fortunate to attend schools that were reasonably well funded, had the opportunity to attend college and university, didn't live in fear of crime throughout their childhood, had outdoor space to play in, had good access to healthcare, etc.

That isn't that sort of background that everyone has, but it is the sort of background that 90% of people in the IT industry had. Consequently IT professionals tend to have somewhat skewed notions of what the world is like. Changing that would make it more likely that people build things that make a positive impact on society because you can't fix a problem if you don't know that it's a problem.
I would unfollow people on Twitter who constantly posted Foursquare checkins. Not because I wasn't interested in their whereabouts, but because clicking resulted in a boring, useless page.

Suppose wycats checks in at some interesting-sounding dive bar in the Mission. I want to click and see pics of the place and the menu and a map showing what's nearby.

(not implying wycats was a foursquare user just that he's a celebrity developer / trendsetter...)
At those scales, everything is zero. But the important thing is the potential to see an object. If the Rosetta Stone is sold to an anonymous private collector, I have practically zero chance of ever seeing it, no matter who I am, what I earn, or where I live. But if it's in a public museum, then my access is much greater.
> A racket is a service that is fraudulently offered to solve a problem, such as for a problem that does not actually exist, that will not be put into effect, or that would not otherwise exist if the racket did not exist. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_(crime))

Can someone explain to me how this description does not apply to Intuit?
My sister used to be a foursquare addict. She no longer uses it. They took out all the stuff she liked.
Fossil Fuels Just Lost the Race Against Renewables
Or go to a beautiful wee island and find 48 Scottish, 8 Norwegian and 4 Irish kings...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iona
Doesn't that assume that nobody uses both Swarm and Foursquare?
A Data Map of Every Global Index Ever (well, most of them)
Writing and Optimizing Parallel Programs – A Complete Example
I remember when I got going, I actually installed Dreamweaver just for the snippets and help files. I'd code in Notepad++, but dive into Dreamweaver for help with anything I didn't understand. It was nice.
Or you could just, you know, wear a suit jacket :)
Ask HN: Updating Mac OS X Office 2016 Preview Release
Is anyone else having trouble updating the newest Mac OS X Office Updates? I've managed to update Outlook, however, 2011 and the remainder of the 2016 apps are reporting back:

Sorry, there's a problem with the downloaded file, so you can't update now. Please try again later.
It was a large maintenance burden: "It’s holding us back. Dealing with all the corner cases associated with the encrypted SMS/MMS transport prevents us from dedicating focus and attention to make the overall product better." https://whispersystems.org/blog/goodbye-encrypted-sms/
Maybe tactile information could be useful. definetly worth a try.

As for small components - maybe wait for the apple watch teardowns ,they'll tell which components have they used for the taptic engine.
Hell yes please.
>his show follows one about muppets because he wants to make sure people don't mistake his comedy for general political activism.

That always bothered the shit out of me. He refused to accept responsibility for the influence of his message as he made fun of Fox News and right wing politicians for doing the same thing every night. He used the "I come on after puppets making crank phone calls" as an excuse to not have journalistic integrity. He was often accused of being one sided and basically a funny talking head for progressive politics and his answer was always "this is a comedy show. We should be mad at shows where people actually get their news"
Reddit as a Marketing Channel for Direct Traffic and Search Engine Rankings
There is support for IntelliSense through http://www.omnisharp.net/. I wrote a tiny blog post about how I got it set up with Emacs on Windows 7 [1].

[1] http://blog.zolomon.com/development,emacs/2015/03/25/emacs-o...
I dislike the post title as it makes this appear a bigger deal than it is. It should read "bug found in Rust scoped threads". The general principle has not been found unsound.
European commission announces antitrust charges against Google
The leadership of Foursquare failed. They had a very popular product but couldn't make anything out of it; hence the pivot. They should have sold the company while the valuations were good. Now, the company is the Mayor of crushed expectations.
In most countries, the law will not punish citizens for owning artifacts, just force a surrender of such material to authorities (with various degrees of compensation, depending on the country). This is done exactly to avoid the risk of destruction.

Buying and selling outright are banned only in order to guarantee preservation of artifacts; and if you ban an economic transaction, you have to make sure that there is an economic punishment that is greater than the expected profit, of course, in order to align incentives -- that is inevitable.
Of course I would, since they already do. Whatever I submit is checked by them anyway, and it's generally too expensive and painful to challenge them. So…why do I have to pay the Intuit tax every year?
Now they just collect "protection money" from business to remove / prevent bad reviews

I hope you have some kind of evidence for that, because it's a pretty serious accusation to throw around.
Math Meets Football: The Transitive Property Is Real
Check-ins didn't bring any new customers into a business, so foursquare couldn't make any money on that feature.

I personally loved the check-in feature. With hundreds of millions in VC $, foursquare had to find another way to make money. They're on the way to building a really nice business with their reviews and ad-tech business.

I hope they didn't raise too much money before figuring it out.
No. Not at all. Substitute all the words "black" with "white" and see all the "You're a racist!" comments come out if I had written it.
The answer you aren't looking for is that Intuit doesn't actually control the US government.
I am so happy about this, I've been waiting for some news on the subject for a while. I LOVED checking in to foursquare, the main reason was so I could, one day, use their API to visualise where I'd been the most/what time etc. I was GUTTED when they removed check-ins.
How to Unlock Your Phone with UnlockUnit
Starting with shunning conventional capitalization....
As an non-american this baffles me.

Why is there so much distrust towards the government, police, and military in US ? Isn't the US the oldest democracy ?

Society is built on trust - once that doesn't exist then nothing gets done.
Aaah okay, makes sense. I would like to see new stats though. It wasn't until Python 3.3 we started switching, before to many 3rd party libraries where missing.

Still I don't see much reason to not switch at this point. I don't believe that most developers would be missing anything.

Small note: We run our own pypi server for a large number of packages, so our Python 3 installations aren't counted for everything, but the same should be true for many Python 2 setups.
Hotels.
> I'm not aware of any major service, website or application that relies on a OTP via email for primary authentication.

https://cash.me/account
Here here. Let people find the things they want to learn, support and employ them when they do. Don't patronise people, or worse, discriminate, especially not that horrible pc "positive discrimination" crap, and treat people equally.

A lot of the comment-tards on HN take a terribly patronising view that they should go on outreach knocking of doors of every gender race and religion and try to coerce them into working in tech. How horrible for a person to realise they were targeted and hired specifically because they meet an arbitrary tick box minority category.
@foursquare: We told you so.
When do programmers work for free
If it's as easy as you believe they wouldn't have pivoted.

I don't think that follows. People and organisations make mistakes all the time; it's equally possible that Foursquare made a bad decision here.
In other countries it's the employers that pay pretty much all of your taxes. They just keep the taxes from your salary and then when they pay their own taxes they also pay yours.

I do think there's a slight disadvantage in having the taxes essentially "hidden away from you". This could be somewhat alleviated if instead of 10 different taxes there are just 2 or 3 at most, to make the whole thing more understandable.

However, ultimately the benefit of having the taxes automatically done for you, not having to "get into trouble with IRS" or other such issues, is a much bigger benefit than the drawback of having the taxes somewhat hidden from you.
Jobandtalent hiring throught GitHub Jobs
It's clear they have significant influence on this matter.
I'm streaming realtime events and then running statistical models on the datastream in order to manipulate user behavior.

Having a more diverse team that includes someone with a more emotionally-driven perspective could lead to someone asking the question "Is the way we're manipulating user behavior actually ethical?"

This isn't about finding different technical solutions to problems; it's about finding different problems.
that's very minor (albeit quite vocal) part of the job market.
Most of developers worldwide work on specific projects, with specific goals, budgeting etc. Those who pay want stuff delivered and routinely frown upon too-creative approaches. Having women/minorities on the team? Of course! If they bring expected skillset on the table, good. If they bring anything else on top of it, it's a nice little addition.

But hiring just for the sake of filling some imaginary quota some confused people have in their heads is a bit ridiculous. Want to change it? Start at the point when young people decide which school to pursue, rest will follow
> What if you have binaries compiled from proprietary code bases…

Then don't do that. Seriously, RMS, ESR and others have written a plethora of well-reasoned essays indicating why proprietary software is a poor choice.
If it came with some sort of indemnity from audit penalties, and as long as I could amend or re-file with my own calculated return, yes.
I agree with the gist of the article, and the figures are mostly right; but the opening comparison is a bit disingenuous [1]. The figure of 13000 kWh per year is indeed ridiculous, but apparently the U.S. and Canada are quite the outliers in this regard: every other OECD country consumes on average at most half of that --in Germany, for instance, it's less than a third of that (around 3500 kWh per year).

It's still an orders-of-magnitude difference of course, but a less gargantuan gap nonetheless.

[1] http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-household-electricity...
They are not making any money, just like before.
Winning New Business with Viral Marketing and Big Data Analytics
Facebook checkins that I see on my wall are usually limited to "I want to brag about the good food I'm eating without Instagramming a picture of it, so I'll just check in at the restaurant". I don't think people trust Facebook enough to overtly give it access to more important location data, or I could just have too much faith in the average FB user.
Not elearning, but if you need a basic intro to electronics I would recommend the Forrest Mims books.
>So…why do I have to pay the Intuit tax every year?

Because you choose to?
It's hard for many people. There's plenty of theories out there that state that much of what we do and much of what we by are motivated by our fear of death and our desire to ignore it.
The best way to face death, however, is head on. Look at yourself in the mirror and firmly remind yourself you will die. Find some way to remind yourself of this every day. St. Thomas Aquinas is said to have kept a skull on his desk to remind himself of his morality. At first, you will feel many emotions, fear, anxiety, depression, anger. You may rush around for a bit, trying to get things done. But the more you think about your death, the more you meditate on it, eventually, things will settle down, and you'll ask yourself the right questions: "What do I want to be remembered for? What do I want to achieve before I die?"
That's really fun to watch. Thanks for the link!
GNU make: One weird trick that will give you makefile X-ray vision
Exploring the Latest Trends in Mobile Development with Wayne Chang
Wouldn't overfitting be a huge issue? You'd probably have to put a large penalty on size/running time vs correctness.

Getting trivial solutions is really easy and doesn't "connect" much to the "space" of good algorithms. That's the primary reason for the development of neural networks: with continuous differentiable elements you can do a nicer "hill climbing" toward small representations through back-propagation. With hard-value logic you'd be more stumbling in the dark until you get lucky, but that's O(exp(N)) on the program size.
StrongLoop Process Manager
> If you’re a typical American and you get this packet from the I.R.S. that says, ‘Here’s what we’ve determined your liability is,’ no one is going to challenge it

That's the biggest load I have ever heard. I have anecdotal evidence that the theory is incorrect (in South Africa we get filled-returns): all my friends validate, or pay someone to validate, their returns. Mr. Ellis has absolutely no evidence what-so-ever in support of his theory.
Was the Alienware Laptop a Good Purchase
Not really—one could use processes and some form of IPC (shared memory, pipes, whatever). The efficiency could be pretty bad, but the safety and reliability could be better.
That's true, but if we change industry as well as changing education then we can get better quicker. It's absolutely not one or the other. It's both.
If you could convince legislators that their constituents cared about the issue (in meaningful numbers), the lobbying would be irrelevant.

The lobbying just looks like a lot of influence because it is more noticeable than all the not caring.
Yes (and toggleClass too), but they were only added in 1.3.
Because Intuit bribes, er contributes to, Congress.
Did not compare in speed/pretty animations, collection of "apps", and marketing.

So you're saying it was slow, kind of ugly, had no apps and the brand was so tainted that nobody wanted it.

Don't you think those are good reasons for abandoning Symbian?
I'm generally not a very patriotic American, but boy did I feel a certain amount of pride looking at all of these sandwiches that have been crafted in America.
fpm: package manager for building deb, rpm, pkg, and other packages
A nightmare on malware street
I'm also former Nokia Networks: I would not say the "whole" thing was a big mistake. I could understand the business sense. Some parts of merger worked better and some were worse. Myself, I got a new boss from Siemens who was a good guy. Got laid off later on, though. Overall, the execution of that merger seems to have been better than the Alcatel-Lucent merger a year earlier. Nokia Networks is actually alive, which is much better than what I thought back in 2006. And not only alive, but actually doing rather well (at least until this).

The bad feeling I have about this is that in the picture, Suri shakes hands with Hollande. That tells how political the deal is, and how wrong it can go (with all that protectionism etc).

On the other hand JTB says this is not good, so I have the instinct reaction that it must be good.
How hackers used Facebook's mobile SDK to DDOS us
People saying "Intuit controls the government" are missing the forest for the trees. The IRS doesn't compute your taxes and send you a bill because then you'll forget you ever had the money in the first place. Lots of people want to make paying taxes painful, so once a year you have to spend hours facing the reality of how much money the government is taking from your paycheck.[1] Intuit just jumped on the bandwagon. It's a probably the most common lobbying tactic: support a position that politicians want to do anyway.

[1] It works too. We love paying our taxes, but my wife and I have been stewing for a week about the patriarchal bullsht that is the marriage penalty. The problem is that the rage subsides by Election Day--they should move tax season to October.
Come on, they're doing it for business reasons, not ideology.
I have done taxes using the free way historically, on TurboTax. This year, I again opted for 'no charge' option, went though, and at the very end had to pay $104.00 without any explanation. I tried going back but I couldn't find if I had mistakingly selected something because they throw in payed options as you go. But I couldn't find or change anything, so decided to file instead of doing taxes the old fashioned paper way. I still have a bitter feeling, like I got scammed. I talked to a few friends and they had similar experiences, especially their older parents ending up paying more then a hundred dollars. I really hope IRS filing will happen, but with the amount of money they are skimming off poor folks and insider lobbying, I can't imagine it will.
Hey, guys! We still don't have any answer. Is that suppose to mean refuse? We are barbudo.net and we are developing easy-to-use SaaS platform for making web sites more secured, we focus on startups and SMBs.
I would argue that the trend of Americans never challenging phone/cable bills suggests that his theory might hold some water, at least in the US. If the IRS shows a really good track record of not screwing them up in any way, people will just accept it as free money, only challenging when they owe money.
Isn't the US the oldest democracy?

No. Not by about 2500 years in ancient Greece.
For those in the UK:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.b...
Do you mean indemnity against errors in the return, or would you also include indemnity against missed information?

(The latter could conceivably include information that a taxpayer intentionally sought to hide from the IRS)
Our whole friend group once switched to TextSecure we were all fed up with Facebook. Sadly, Facebook is a lot better than TextSecure and we switched back again.

I think if a competitor showed up that is seriously better than Facebook, every person switching could have a huge Ripple Effect. People already use a multitude of Apps/Services for communication, using one more isn't a big enough cost to invoke the network effect in my opinion.
The author is doing good work and I commend him. It's a million more times easy to complain about a problem or prescribe a solution than it is to roll up your sleeves and do the hard work. We need more people like him.
I'm surprised foursquare didn't go into payments, they have the venue data, merchant relationships, they could do what Reserve (from expa) is doing and radically improve the experience of dealing with any local business.

Booking a haircut, paying for your meal all taken care of by foursquare.
If you're talking specifically about Foursquare, I dunno, but pretty much any news story about Yelp in the past decade covers it, e.g. http://consumerist.com/2014/04/04/yelps-controversial-busine...

"The number of complaints might not come as a surprise to those who have followed the numerous lawsuits and allegations of extorting money from businesses to remove negative reviews."

"For years, businesses have claimed that negative reviews pop-up on their Yelp pages after they’ve declined to purchase advertising with the company."
I just listened to that yesterday! I'm loving Reply All, and also the other podcast by the same company, StartUp [1], which documents the creation of Gimlet Media, itself.

[1] http://gimletmedia.com/show/startup/
Yes, of course.

There's nothing wrong with refusing to interoperate with competitors. The market often works to take care of that to some extent.

However, when you have one player which is manifestly more powerful than the competition, you don't have a fair market. The whole reason we have anti-trust legislation is the recognition that this isn't desirable, and that businesses with too much pressure can exert influence which is harmful to the market in the long term.
There were images? Must be loaded with some weird JavaScript—all I saw were chunks of white space.
When I worked with a lot of MySQL users, they tended to say "s-q-l". These days I'm in SQL server and they say "sequel".
From the article:

> In attempt to placate frustrated users, Foursquare launched "Swarm," a separate check-in app with minimal features, removing most of what made the original Foursquare app great. "

This sentence is provably incorrect. FourSquare launched Swarm before their pivot, there were no 'frustrated users' at that time because their main app still did checkins. The article makes it sound like FourSquare were reacting to pissed of customers. They weren't - they foresee people who liked checkins and always accommodated them.

Not a frequent 4sq user but for me the app is more relevant now - it pops up useful nearby stuff that I might like as I wander around London, so far its suggestions are pretty good.
IMHO - Dens is a romantic dude. He has just as many conceptual aspirations as he does commercial ones. Power users of 4sq. turn their worlds into farmville - mindlessly checking in everywhere they go (i.e. "home", "gym", "home" etc.). He wanted to disassociate the brand from that activity, and emphasize the utility of check ins (i.e. who else is here, how popular is that etc.).

Could he have done this in a more elegant way? Maybe. But either way, the data he has compiled to entice advertisers is already quite substantial. If he successfully rebrands 4sq. as a resource and swarm as a tool, he's done exactly what he wanted to do.. as opposed to something close/safer.
My wife and I too.. We had a record of our of travels from about 2010 until Swarm happened. All over the word, even desert outposts in Mongolia. We loved it. I used to use it to find places in off the beaten path towns. It was fun being the mayor of a little tea house in the middle of nowhere and it was fun stealing NYC mayoralships when much of the hipsters headed to South-by. Now, I just use Tripadvisor which isn't as fun. I'll still see faded Foursquare stickers on businesses (next to their LevelUp stickers..) Maybe if 4sq hadn't spent huge amounts of money on prime Soho office space and instead opened regional sales offices to get small businesses to do self-serve ads and promos, the perhaps that company would have had a chance.
Genetic algorithms are more general than that. They don't have to generate code.

Using GAs to specifically generate code is genetic programming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming
What does gun violence really cost?
Some people in US think the IRS has no legitimacy

> Society is built on trust

Well in US there are like 2 levels of government, the state gvt and the federal one. Some people think the federal gvt is despotic and abuses the powers granted by the constitution.
I dumped TurboTax years ago... very happy customer of TaxAct.