skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, let me see if I understand what you're saying.

What you're saying is that when I write something, and want people to read it, it's not enough to use the law and put a copyright notice on it.

What you're saying is that if I publish it, even if I've done what the law requires and marked it as mine, anyone can copy it and publish it without my permission.

And will.

Further, there's a company that will do this wholesale. They'll take loads and loads of other people's stuff, put ads next to it, give no additional indication that they didn't produce it, and make money from other people's work.

Yup. Thus we have progress.
Not a big deal.

Just plug in a device, and press play in Eclipse.
Can't you just download a historical set and use that to test whatever algorithms you think you would use? Then when you are confident enough in their performance, you can take the risk? I wouldn't say it would be a complete waste of time because you would be sure to learn something. If you think you can realistically make money--well then, that's a different question that I wouldn't be fit to answer.
More suitable, sure. But I still doubt you'd get anywhere -- people who run hedge funds are very much aware of ML techniques, so I'd expect them to run circles around you.
IE 6 and 7 hit by hack attack code
Oh dear... time to get news.yc to render international URLs properly.
Its not Apple fault you believed its lies. Any company its looking for profit.
If you're interested in this, why not join a firm that does it? They will have a large capital base to start with and eventually start your own venture. Unfortunately 10k won't get you very far in this game
YC RFS5: An Accidental Case Study
for programmable bombs?
Being a "small fish" is actually an advantage since you have less capital you need to put to work and thus can more easily get fills and catch the bigger waves generated by the bigger fish institutions like mutual and hedge funds.

The institutions have to hold on for longer periods and can't really "scalp" trades per se given that the bid/ask volume would collapse if they didn't distribute and "average in" slowly overtime to accumulate a position vs. buying or dumping their entire position all at once.
The SO2 goes into the ocean and makes them more acidic.

Yep. But worldwide SO2 emissions are approximately 2.2 * 10^12 mol/year, which -- given the oceans' volume of approximately 1.3 billion cubic kilometers -- would translate to an annual increase in ocean (SO4)^{2-} concentration of 0.0000000017 mol/L, even if every molecule of SO2 released into the atmosphere ended up in the oceans in the form of (SO4)^{2-}.

Given that seawater already contains approximately 0.028 mol/L of (SO4)^{2-}, I don't think this is a rate of increase which we particularly need to worry about.
Whatever you think about the rationale behind this check (I don't buy the story about electronic systems being down on a holiday either), I encourage you to read Rolling Stone's irreverent take[1] on Goldman Sach's role in this whole saga, as a valuable counterpoint to the fawning "all-nighter swinging dick" worship[2] as can be seen from the excerpt of this guy's book in Vanity Fair.

1. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_grea...
2. http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2009/11/too-big-...
This is an important point and fact that needs to be looked into more. If she only received $167 for her portion of Sweden's 1 million plays, the article is way off. OR does Sweden;s STIM cut the check for the aggregate plays for all nation's since that's spotify's home base?
Illuminating the Lilliputian: 10 Bioscapes Photo Contest Winners Revealed
How do we know this is better than Quantcast? Does anyone know where the data comes from? Also, it seems to be missing some of the features.

People suspect it's coming from the Google Toolbar, but all Google wants to confirm is that it's some sort of "secret sauce":

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/24/is-google-ad-planner-ge...
An experiment to prove that a particular listener can detect the sleepiness of a violin:

Buy a couple of violins. Have several violinists play them until they're warm, and record multiple notes per violinist per violin. Then store half the violins away for a year, while the others are played daily. After that, record again a couple of notes per violinist per violin.

Have a listener listen to pairs of recordings, where the two recordings in the pair were recorded by the same violinst on the same instrument, but a year apart. Ask the listener for each pair if the instrument sounds like it's fallen asleep between the two recordings.

The null hypothesis is that the listener will get the sleepiness property right on 50% of the pairs.
I think the author didn't achieve his own goal: “Can you give me a simple, concrete explanation of how quantum computers work?”

The explanation, even though it doesn't involve any complicated math or technical stuff, is long, convoluted and full of excuses of why there can't be a simple explanation.
This fake conversation loads of fail.

"If someone is profitable (creating more value for the company than they’re costing you), then there’s only reason to ever let them go: Their “payback” period is longer than your cash resources will allow."

That's just wrong. A few (there are more!) reasons to let them go:
- There's an opportunity cost. If you can only manage or you only want to have 1 "startup point of contact for this platform" you should have the best person in the job.
- Bad people attract bad people (through both recruiting and the interviewing they do). I know nothing about Don other than his post-MSFT Google posts, but he presents himself in public like a tool. Do you really want to fill your shed with people like that?
- Poor performers demoralize the rest of the team. Even if an individual is net profitable - relative to cost of capital! - if they're allowed to coast, they will have a negative impact on the performance of the rest of the team.

And let's be a little thoughtful here about where he went. VicG made the "swift hire," but is the guy who was in charge of developer platform evangelism during the Longhorn/Vista and then Windows Live timeframe. Given their track records, do you think MSFT made the wrong decision in their termination or that Google/VicG made a poor decision hiring someone whom they likely didn't even send through a full interview loop? How do you think Don's new team feels about the way he was hired?
The Perfect Server - OpenSUSE 11.2 x86_64 [ISPConfig 3]
Works for me :)

The funny thing is that I think that 99%+ of the listeners will not even be able to tell apart two violins, let alone whether or not one has not been played for a while.
Ebooks are easier to modify and censor post publication.

Ebooks require recharging and some forms require net access.

Ebooks are more vulnerable to some forms of damage than paper books - and fire and wet damage ebooks as well as paper books.

Ebooks are searchable - this is the biggest advantage they have for scholarship.
Related: I'm still not satisfied with the answer as to why quantum cryptography's eavesdropper detection -- not possible with a Turing machine -- can't be embedded in a model of computation that goes beyond Turing-completeness:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=955079
I am currently using Balsamiq Mocksups. I can't see how is it different from Balsamiq Mockups. Why should I switch to another product which has nothing different to offer. In my opinion it looks a little worse.
You're complaining that they should have compared to only shiny new cars, rather than actually existing cars, because then the comparison would have fared better for the cars?
A strange game. The only way to win is not to play.
My first impression is that the author is on treacherous philosophical ground. He seems distrustful of "group morality" (incidentally, I would argue that morality is inherently a function of groups) yet claims more sociopaths is a "good" thing. But in what sense does he mean "good"? As defined by the group morality he finds questionable elsewhere?

This sort of argument leads to a sort of self contradiction similar to "everything is relative" (in what frame do you evaluate "everything is relative"? Surely not a global, objective one.) If, more charitably, we assume it's not morality, per se, that he questions so much as a sheeplike adherence to it, that's fine, but it's also a bit of a false dichotomy (you're either slavish and unthinking, or a sociopath).

Further, the notion that sociopaths "take responsibility" for their subjective morality seems dubious. It seems just as likely to me that the moral thought of this group is mostly limited to post hoc rationalization.
Dune in particular was so dominated by mysticism and
politics that I think it would have worked better as
fantasy set in ancient Egypt.

I've never thought of this. Strongly agree. I've grown a distaste for science fiction because often it's a lot more elaborate than it needs to be to communicate a point. It trades away the benefit of a completely fictional setting in that

Scifi requires you to invest a lot of energy in the read, yet a lot of it is rubbish so the ratios are wrong.

Part of the reason I like Philip K Dick is that for the sort of fiction he writes, science fiction often is the best medium for communicating. And, he doesn't mind producing books where part of the story doesn't even make sense in a rational sense, so long as it's progressing the message.

In _Time Out of Joint_ the game world is implausible. The messages on paper doesn't make sense. The brainwashed characters seems like a big thing to be taken for granted. The edge of the world doesn't add up. However, the protagonist's attempts to come to terms with the world he's in is believable.

Dick writes fiction as I seek to hack. "Am I solving the problem I care about?"

The benefit of the lack of context is that scifi can serve as a literary equivalent of a rapid development environment. The author is able to summon technology or magic in order to create settings that exercise the characters. _Ubik_ uses not-subtle examples of this in order to explore the ideas it cares about - precognition and a variation of brain-in-the-vat.

Unfortunately, the mainstream culture of fiction and fantasy epic (Lord of the Rings, Dune) actively fights this flexibility. They try to construct castles in the air - worlds that take significant energy to build and comprehend, and which thereby become limited by the same barriers that affect tales set in real settings. Having done all this work, many then tell stories about princesses, knights and dragons. Dune managed to rise some way out of that.
Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization
> I used to have thousands of books. I eventually got rid of them all for health reasons

Interesting. Would you expand on this?
intraday NN is irrelevant because NN are prone to overlearning, so the stuff becomes even more horrible - actually in reality you don't care which way it moves, as long as it moves: this is why the "big fish". It is like owning the place in Vegas: you don't care about the bets (much less about their substance or "direction"), as long as there are bets.

if you really want intraday, think about news.google.com and http://rs2007.limsi.fr/index.php/TLP:Page_12 to automatically tweak the few k base parameters (SVM, associative memory etc).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/1999/midas.shtml

Options, Futures and Other Derivatives, J. C. Hull, Prentice Hall Int’l

Financial Calculus, M. Baxter and A. Rennie, Cambridge University Press

but the ML part is almost irrelevant: it is not the lever in the leverage (think CDO trade).
Zynga also said that they stopped doing offers, when in reality they just turned them off for the SV area. When you have a record of lying, why should people believe you
Practice some with historical data, get a job with a firm that does this, and eventually strike out on your own. If you prove yourself, people will hand you millions to manage. Starting with your own money seems like a bit of a fools game.
I was composing this while limmeau replied, so some overlap.

We would initially need to calibrate the mechanism and microphones against expert violin players to ensure they pick up all the same nuances of sound. This is because experts hear more than non-experts.

"Two groups of expert instrumentalists (violinists and flutists) listened to matched musical excerpts played on the two instruments (J.S. Bach Partitas for solo violin and flute) while their cerebral hemodynamic responses were measured using fMRI. ... We found an extensive cerebral network of expertise, which implicates increased sensitivity to musical syntax (BA 44), timbre (auditory association cortex), and sound-motor interactions (precentral gyrus) when listening to music played on the instrument of expertise ..."
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=20951540

So if the experts could demonstrate any statistically significant ability to hear certain aspects of the sound, such as being able to distinguish between different instruments, this would have to be replicated by the mechanism and microphone technique. We would have to try to test a fair range of aspects of the sound.

We would then need a reasonably large sample of similar violins, of a quality for which we might expect the effect to occur, half of which would be put away and the other half played for our test period.

The mechanism could then be rerun and get a fairly good result.
Anyone consider that the difference might have to do with the strings? For example, perhaps the strings gain slack while not in use and the linear density or string stiffness changes as a result.
I have friends who do this, and they told me, anecdotally, that for every 10 trades they do, 8 or 9 lose money.

While they do make it up on the rest, you have to ask yourself if you can afford the costs (brokerage commissions and fees) of executing your strategy in that context (they all work for banks and hedge funds).

If you really want to get into this, you might be better off applying to a quant-based hedge fund.

A firm like that will have the capital and brokerage connections to make the game profitable.

Also, take a look at Ed Thorp's web site (http://edwardothorp.com/index.html).

He was one of the original quants and has many interesting articles on the industry.
I interpreted the word "natural" to mean the monopoly was achieved and exists without government subsidy or special privileged. Capitalism says that the only time monopolies are ever "destructive" or have a "snowball" effect where they can't be stopped, is when the government gives them special privileges (i.e. no one else can build a railroad, no one else can set up a telecom company).

If the government puts up road blocks for new companies to enter a line of business, the market isn't truly free and the mega corporations are free to charge whatever they want and do whatever they want. It would be impossible for there to be a "startup" telecom company or "startup" railroad company.

Interestingly enough, the the railroad companies are the most often cited example what happens when the government messes with the free market. The idea is that because the government has already messed up the railroad market it has to continually subsidize the railroad companies or, you're right, "good people wouldn't be able to get to work". Regulation and subsidies beget more regulation and subsidies.
A strategy: run a LOT of simulations, keep running them every day. When they are too good to ignore, go raise some capital.
Does octane rating even mean anything for jet fuels? Octane rating is related to knock in piston engines, is there a similar problem in jets? Jet fuel is basically kerosene, not gasoline. And even in piston engines, is there any relation between sulphur and knock?
It seems that copyright when used by big corporations is evil and restrictions are good, but when the GPL gets weakened by them it's suddenly a bad thing.

Keep in mind that the GPL is not an end in and of itself; it's a cute little legal hack to create a self-contained domain that simulates a world without copyright, with a one-way boundary to ensure that things stay inside that domain (there's a fairly straightforward game theory analysis of why this gives GPL-style licenses a competitive advantage over BSD-style licenses, but that's getting off topic).

So, in that context, it actually makes sense to simultaneously support strict enforcement of the GPL and oppose copyright.

Of course, most people don't think copyright is intrinsically immoral and thus won't find the above perspective persuasive, but I'm pretty sure that's roughly where people like RMS are coming from.
I was wondering few times after encountering concept of artificial neural networks why people use them as they do.

One or two layered perceptron taught with back-propagation has just as much to do with how brain works as anything.

Why don't people just build network of simplest possible silicon based components with bounds that remember whether they were recently active, and strengthened if a moment later it occurs that reaction of a network to a given stimuli was proper but weakened if it was improper.

I bet you could teach this kind of network anything if it consists of enough elements and density of connections is sufficient and you can counter in period of random component discharges to simulate sleep and thus avoid overlearning.

Brain architecture, chemistry of synapses are just implementation detail of this general idea if your have to build it out of biological cells.
Setting up Amazon RDS for Heroku and Rails
Why experts are morons: a recipe for academic success
You'll need at least 25k in order to be a day trader in stocks. You can get around that by trading futures. http://www.finra.org/Investors/SmartInvesting/AdvancedInvest...
This same thing is happening to video game stores, too. They all sell a product which is, inherently, interchangeable -- as soon as you get out of the store with Final Fantasy XIII it doesn't matter what store you bought it. They offer little, if any, value over purchasing it online. The game companies would love to recover the 50% of the MSRP that they leak to the store, and are getting into the online distribution act.

We've lost three video game stores in my town (of 150,000) in the last year alone. Its almost annoying how often I have to switch shops. But well, not that annoying. I spent probably $2,000 at the first one to go under over the years and it barely rated a "Shucks, that one was conveniently located next to my gym." Which is part of the problem.

(Speaking of bookstores: I spend quite a bit on books, mostly through Amazon, and every year at Christmas I go into Barnes and Noble with an empty duffel bag and leave with a full one. This year I bought a Kindle. I doubt I will ever enter an English bookstore again. Sorry guys... but, well, not too sorry. I like books -- I have no particular attachment to you.)
There's a saying in the industry: your strategy will go south as soon as you put real money on it -- you can't raise capital without a track record of real money success.
hi ... if you are a developer you will agree to the most of them for sure :)
The original novella was better than the novel, which I don't often say, I like all the extra little details that work their way into longer works. Card just got worse and worse as he went along.
Fascinating. If the varnish crystallizes, though, how would playing the instrument again reverse the process?
Back to Nature With AlestRukov’s Wooden PC Mouse
If nothing else, you should listen to the recordings at the bottom of the page. Ranks among the best analog sounds I've heard.
Another teenage perspective.

Readability: Read real round figures, not aliased fonts.

Convenience: Ebooks win, hands down. But going to a good bookstore is a nice experience.

Annotation: Nothing beats proper writing for notes (quick diagrams, drawings, underlining, switching position etc.) A pencil does just fine.

Cost: More than ebooks, which aren't all free.

Social flags: Bookshelves are something very physical, touchable, smellable. Also, printed book covers are great to look at.

Aesthetic: Books are beautiful. Dunno about what you read, but novels often have great packaging design.

Sentimental value: Compare a device, like Kindle, that had lots of books on (sort of like old hardware) vs. books, that each seperately hold a tale (sort of like old games). Old games definitely evoke more sentimentality, imho.

Rarity: Some texts do exist only offline. I assume it won't stay like this though. But rare physical copies make things valuable.

Single Mindedness: Books are for reading. This keeps things easy. Or would you read a book on teletext?

Religion: Not a factor for me.

I may live in the digital age and enjoy, but I just really couldn't let books go.
Ask HN: Getting started with geospatial data?
I have a startup idea I really want to pursue. Without going into great depth, it would require guessing based on submitted GPS data a user's proximity to certain landmarks. Say, for example, if the data indicates they're within a mile radius of the Whitehouse, my software should be able to determine that...assuming I'd loaded the Whitehouse's latitude and longitude ahead of time.

I'd like to use Rails for the application, and possibly PostGIS, since PostgreSQL is already my database of choice.

Problem is, I'm a geospatial noob, and haven't done any significant math in a decade. In fact, even then, my math background was weak at best compared to most software engineers...I followed a non-traditional path.

So, what's the best way to get started on learning how to implement a system like this? I'm less interested in theory (though welcome it as well) and more interested in practical, make-it-work advice.

Thank you so much!
Well I'd looked it up and apparently international royalty payments for performing rights are collected by the collection society of the composer's home country. So if you reside in the UK and someone listens to your music in Sweden, ultimately you will get your cheque from PRS UK. As far as I know Stefani Germanotta (known as Lady GaGa) resides in the United States which means she must be a member of ASCAP, so I don't really understand how could she get a cheque from STIM at all.
You might like Hal Clement's work, especially "Mission of Gravity", "Close to Critical", and "Cycle of Fire". "Iceworld" and his next to last "Half Life" are interesting but not as well written as some of his others. "The Nitrogen Fix" isn't paritcularly well written either, but is an interesting near future, post-unexpected-apocalypse novel. Note Clement was a high school science teacher, and tried to make all his science at least plausible though sometimes he goofed, like the shape of Mesklin.
Notification of replies to comments you make.
Q: What is the difference between a viola and a violin ?

A: The viola burns longer...

If Hermann Helmholtz could be wrong about some of this stuff then I have no doubt that people are capable of deluding themselves in to having the ability to hear things that aren't there.

From "The Acoustical Foundations of Music" by John Backus, page 207:

For example, the excellent quality of Stradivarius violins has been attributed to a varnish of almost magical properties used by the old instrument makers, whose secret has been lost. However, resonance curves made on instruments in the varnished and unvarnished condition show that as normally used, the varnish itself has rather little effect on the tone.

What effect it has is more likely than not to make the instrument worse.
Linkedin pulls down avatars
You might want to start our by reading "Drunkards Walk", and then walk away and find something a bit less chaotic to throw your money at.
I haven't read "Halting State" yet, but Stross's "Accelerando" is pretty good. You might also try Vinge's "Rainbows End".