skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Traffic:

I don't know that the traffic would be much worse, because if you assume that a significant number of cars are self driving, then you eliminate many of the problems in terms of traffic flow that come from a human driver: maintaining a constant speed and distance from the car in front, aggressive driving, counter-productive driving habits, tragedy of the commons issues. It is possible to use the roads far more efficiently than we currently are capable of as humans.

There's also the point that it doesn't really matter how bad the traffic on the roads is if the only majority of the things suffering that bad traffic don't have any people in them.

Gas and polution:

If you can tell your car to go somewhere else when you are not in it, then electric cars and out of city parking lots - things like that - become a lot more feasible. You no longer need the infrastructure to be right next to your office to make effective use of it.
How to do this? Do you have any link explaining? Thanks for the great article!
Free ebook only today: Manage your life like Google
Wow, so you are staying the state should allow its actors to rape children. I'd rather just not have undercover cops.
Homejoy says goodbye
Machine learning is a pretty big field. The Coursera course is very good. It uses Octave not Python, but what you learn will be easy to transfer. It is mostly focused on neural networks. If you don't already know linear algebra you should probably learn that first.

These are three very good O'Reilly books that all use Python:

- Programming Collective Intelligence: A broad and shallow survey of automated machine learning techniques.

- Data Analysis with Open Source Tools: Also a survey. More focused on manual data exploration.

- Python for Data Analysis: A pandas tutorial (and more). Very helpful to learn the ML tools in the python ecosystem.

Fitting all that into two months sounds challenging.
Go Behind the Scenes at Google with Nat and Lo's 20% Project
That is annoying
The trouble with that diagram is that it implies that everything after that initial boundary traversal is a completely new and original contribution to human knowledge. Sadly this is not the case.
Crap... really liked this service.
Happy Birthday GPS
Do you think there's a limit on how much we can understand in physics/any field?

My reasoning on this is that since everyone has a finite lifespan, understanding/work will be lost as the researcher retire, move to a different field, or die, unless this information is transmitted to someone else during their life time. However, as we understand more, we have to teach people more. This brings in two problems that I see:

- It takes longer for people to learn up to the frontier of science, which means they might be in their 30s, 40s, and that number may keep getting larger.
- We might be able to teach these things in the same amount of time, but the understand of these topics by the younger generation might be less overall, which makes it difficult for them to make certain connections, as they might not have the deep enough understanding to see a connection.

My worry is the eventually we will reach a stage where the amount of knowledge we have is so much that no one can feasibly master a field. We can subdivide the fields, but no one will know enough general knowledge to make insightful connections that simplifies our models, or something to that effect.

As an example: my fluid dynamics professor said that the fluids mechanics I course we take in second year undergrad is what people worked on as their masters/phd thesis 100 years ago, whereas we don't even derive the formulas anymore now simply because we do not have the time to do so.
Who Is Waldo Hiding From?
whiteboarding helps me think. Such a click-baity title ;)
they demonstrably do what they want, when they want, regardless of the law. personally think this ruling is irrelevant and nothing will change.
"Technological and financial giants, but moral pygmies" (as HN edited the title) is better than the original which has an error. Heads up.

EDIT: Now HN has edited the title again to something completely unlike the original title.
I found this a useful quick read: we all know interviewing is often "broken" (for some value of broken); this is some good, constructive ideas and examples of how to do better.

In particular, asking questions without a predefined narrative seems to be a winning strategy in these stories. There simply is no way to ask how to e.g. reverse a string and turn that into a critical thinking problem. By giving up control of the destination instead and asking questions that explore a new, un-predetermined topic, the interviewer can create a much richer and meaningful exploration for both sides.

Giving up control as a means to empower appears to be the order of the day again. It's quite the metameme.
Hey,
Thank you for the feedback :)
I am Ludovic, Cofounder and CTO of Afrostream.

Netflix is big, that's sure, but as said in the thread, Netflix is like the big Three (ABC, NBC, CBS), and target the largest audience possible. And I am an avid client of Netflix too. They have an offer of African-American contents, even some African contents for sure. It's not complete.
We have curated for one year some of the best and unseen African or African-descendant contents. Not only the Festival-sanctioned movies and series but also, the contents which are popular in local markets and that we are bringing to our customers.
Seems to me that is more a segment than a niche, but I like to play a little with the words :)

Our vision here is double :
to propose a large selection of african, african-american movies and tv series, first in France (I am French), and french spoken countries, in Europe and Africa, first. Netflix is not yet in Africa, so we have some technical challenges there, but we will be basically the first.

To propose the new african and african american positive characters to all : on that regards, our customers will not only be black

Do you know Drama Fever : the core of the Drama Fever is Asian contents, they have 3,5 millions active users. 80% of these users are non-Asian.

That's one of our goal : to let know that there is a diversity in movies, and that everybody could watch them with same pleasure
Internet Protocol Journal: Volume 18 Number 2 [pdf]
Bitcoin is the real disruptor
No surprise there. Tone-deaf marketing and there was a horror story a few years ago about the culture.
Many stories about their problems, but here's one: http://fusion.net/story/142578/homejoy-uber-for-x-startups-m...

And maybe the main one: http://recode.net/2015/07/17/cleaning-services-startup-homej...
"Batteries Not Included" in this article refers to the fact that PostgreSQL doesn't offer any built-in solution yet to do HA (automatic fail-over) and you have to depend of 3rd party solution.
They failed because their service was overpriced, easily replicable, and inconsistent in quality. Housecleaning quality control matters a lot more than ridesharing.
I can't think of any modern non-monopoly companies that have obtained global domination without a need to perpetually acquire niche competitors along the way. That's especially so as several companies (Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, and non-US players at large) vie for limited attention.
No. This is the whole point of promises.
Sometimes they get access to your connections because they shared their inbox, intentionally or otherwise. I get suggested contacts to all sorts of people that once sent me an email.
I love games that teach math concepts. Dragon Box was mind blowing.

However, this seems less accessible.
"It's unclear how the change will be enforced."

Here we go again. The UK Government keep saying we want more high skilled jobs/technology/'digital' but we criminalise a huge percentage of the population that engage in basically harmless format shifting and render hardware start-ups[1] marginal.

Can we not frame a law that allows format shifting?

[1] http://www.brennan.co.uk/
Precisely no one will ever be charged for ripping a CD or DVD in the UK. What a waste of everyone's time.
Your belief about economics indicates that you are part of a minority paradigm that has produced interesting data but not managed to transform economics yet. If it does succeed, then your hope for it will be perfectly justified. But most such movements do not succeed.

The problem is that success has to be so compelling that people who are working within different paradigms (economics have many) generally figure out that they are thinking about it wrong and need to restructure everything in terms of behavioral economics, rather than looking at behavioral economics as a low order correction term to their own way of understanding them.
This is similar to a talk that Tim Sweeney (Epic Games) gave about creating a new language for games, that I thought was interesting. In particular, he talks about the tradeoffs of using C# over C++ for game development, and then talks about ways that ideas from Haskell or purely functional languages can be brought over that might improve performance and productivity for developers.

"The Next Mainstream
Programming Language"

(https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced...)
I'm assuming it's related to the legal minefield of trying to avoid compensating their workers as employees:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/startup-workers-s...
> The point I was making upthread had less to do with Auernheimer's case than it did with the silly notion that the case turned on "incrementing a URL".

Your rebuttal seemed to be based on the premise that the conviction turned on more than action, but substantive evidence of intent.

My response addressed the fact that, while the conviction was dismissed for procedural reasons, the appeals court also appeared skeptical of the substantive result the same reasons that the critics here are -- that the evidence did not appear sufficient to show the intent.
Mike Jones to Launch Science India Fund
I used Homejoy and I liked it's ease of use. But after the cleaning lady they sent me was done, she offered me her direct phone # and told me I could contact her directly for any future cleaning needs.

I always wondered how this business model was going to work if Homejoy's contractors could just give out their phone # at the end of their first service and the customer could just contact them directly for any future needs, instead of going back through Homejoy for any future bookings.
Destiny: XUR WEEKEND JULY 17 and 18
Hey, I am Ludovic, Cofounder and CTO of Afrostream,
You are right, there are some technical challenges here. I don't know where you live exactly. We will not launch in all the continents now, there is no sense here. We are working with some Internet and mobile providers to facilitate access to Afrostream. Mobile is the key word here : people have access to cheap android smartphones, and there will be a lot of deployment of 3G and 4G Networks in the months to come.

Where do you live in Africa exactly ?
You should really be allowed to click on a completely separate circle to start a new chain.

I was initially unsure about how the blockers worked, that should be made more clear. For others, if you create a chain out of a prime count of numbers, you may clear blockers. If you create a chain out of a composite count of numbers, you may create blockers.

Interesting game, but it doesn't have that same "I know I can do better" feel that 2048 grabbed everyone with :)
I really loved the idea, and maybe I'm just being cheap, but no way I was going to pay $250+ a month to have my 1296 sq ft house cleaned. That's a $150/month value at market rates in my area. $100/month for a bit of convenience was not worth it at all to me.
This is a pretty big company going under right, a billion + ?
Also, lying down all day is not good for you either.

To summarize: spending the entire day in one position is bad for you. Human beings are animals. Animals are meant to move about.
Sort of on-topic, and about the Iran deal: It basically green-lights Iran's continuing atomic weapons program. I have read the agreement, and there is nothing in there that actually will impede Iran's progress towards creating nuclear weapons. Also, it lets them keep their centrifuges (!) and ballistic missiles (!). I really am at a complete loss to explain what the purpose of the "deal" was, considering it does absolutely nothing towards our goal of stopping Iranian atomic weapons development.
Great site! I'm going to add it to my car fixing workflow. Ie, thing breaks -> read relevant article so I understand how the system works -> find a good tutorial -> source parts -> fix.

If you are looking for article suggestions:

- Article about different fluids and their properties. I'm betting that you've covered oil weights already, but how about coolants? Regular coolant has a lower freezing temp than water, but does it have a higher boiling point as well? Exactly how poisonous is it and what things will it damage when spilled? Same for trans fluid.

- Possibly out of scope, but an article about how to source parts for older cars. This has always been a tough problem for me! I go with something like: look up parts schematic from manufacturer's website -> search for part by part number -> try to find the cheapest generic part (though sometimes it's worth it to pay for quality) -> find that generic parts don't exist -> go on a merry hunt for used parts on ebay and at scrapyards.
OP clearly has not even googled this. "python machine learning" pulls up many easily-accessible articles meant for beginners with no background in machine learning. The scikit-learn website is chock full of tutorials meant for beginners, with code examples!

How is someone with this little motivation going to learn something so complex? I want to allocate my time helping people who at least try first.
Easy Image Processing on iOS with Toucan
thanks, I had missed this
First hotel completely staffed by robots in Japan
Ah, thanks. Looks like it doesn't parse the US English language out of the box (we're Canadian). We'll have a fix up shortly.

Edit: Should work now :)
It would be nice to know which startup you already have in thoses cities !
Iran was targeted by British and U.S. imperialism to rip off their oil. When they elected Mossadegh, he put a stop to it. The CIA was sent in to overthrow him with the plan being hatched at the U.S. embassy. Twenty years of oppression under the pro-US Shah led to a revolution led by Khomeni and they unsurprisingly hit the embassy where it all started. From there, it was decades of U.S. and partners getting back at them for their intolerance of oil-stealing dictatorships with sanctions that hurt civilians, media BS, funding for Iraq's side of their war, Stuxnet, etc.

CIA didn't admit what they did for decades. Just recently admitted it and the real reason why ("resources"). Not crazy Arabs and their religious agenda: just a result of America doing horrible stuff to innocent people for decades for evil reasons. Admitted it, but no apologies or end to sanctions. Most Americans still read lies in history books. Politicians still screwing with them.

And that's just Iran. I'm sure you can only imagine that the truth behind situation in other Middle Eastern countries is similarly dark and with Western influence. phaedryx's link at least will get you started on this one. Next look up all that funding Bush Sr and CIA gave Saddam and bin Laden while docs warned that it could have "blowback." Can't blame them for later wars or terrorist attacks involving same names, though, can we?
If your company cannot afford to stay in the black with real employees (as opposed to contractors), you need to re-evaluate your business model.

Edit: and the downvotes are rolling in! Would anyone who has downvoted this comment care to share why?
This is exactly their problem. I wonder if LawnLove will have the same problem?
Criminal Law 2.0 [pdf]
Well, my experience with LinkedIn has been very different. To start, I don't have my mom in my LinkedIn! Not only I have found my current job from LinkedIn, I also regularly received interview invitation for positions from other companies (from large scale ones like Google, FB, Amazon, etc. to smaller companies).

But to me the best advantage of LinkedIn is it helps separate professional relationships/conversation separate from my personal life. My contact network at LinkedIn showing my professional connections is very different than my contact network in Facebook, and while I use both, I don't want them to be mixed.

Plus, it keeps my CV and I don't have to always look for my CV in bunch of doc files if I have to send it to someone.

Maybe you would have a different experience if you would spend more time on setting it up? (writing the CV, adding the right people. etc)
The service was getting increasingly terrible in my market. I am not surprised at all to see it go the way of the dinosaur. Too bad, this type of service has a lot of value to busy professionals and people with families.
"Batteries Not Included" is a phrase found on the box of children's toys, so that parents know they will need to buy batteries before giving it to their kids. It has become an expression for something being incomplete and will require effort before it will work properly.

In this case the author is stating that Postgres doesn't come with a high availability capability. He then goes on to explain the high availability setup he put together.
From TFA (although I realize he's not advocating for this):

“Two of my colleagues will be joining us in a few minutes but I think we can get started. I’d like you to whiteboard an answer to the following prompt: given a string, write a program in any language you want that reverses the string.”

I have not, and will never, do such a thing on an interview. It'd be the shortest interview in history if I were ever asked to.

We have hired plenty of great people just by talking through the relevant technology and asking open ended questions. My thing was usually to talk through HTTP in detail, and I would loosely time how long it would take to get through chunked encoding. Then I'd ask "how would you solve this problem" question, to see how they attack a problem and how they stand up to me poking (sometimes unreasonable) holes in their plan. You don't need panels, committees, quizzes or any of that bs--just ask questions you know the answer to until you're comfortable that they're competent and pleasant to be around.

(I may or may not have gotten Entity Framework tech support for free from an interviewee once in the past, but we don't speak of such things.)
True, I send the wrong link anyway. I meant https://github.com/arunoda/meteor-ddp-analyzer
I was mildly put off at being made to watch a video to find out what something is when it could be adequately explained in the description of the video itself.

I clicked out after about 30 seconds, at which point I still didn't have an explanation as to what I was watching. I'm sure I'll hear about Beme again if it's worthwhile. If not - no great loss.
It's fairly easy to do with a little bit of additional d3 code. It'd be nice for the lib to support it, however.

https://vida.io/documents/jspBB83bm6EvEYE3n
While progress may seem slower, we have a lot more people working on these unsolved problems. Also there is the fusion of abstract math and physics, which creates thousands of 'physicists' out of unwitting mathematicians. Due to the physical limitations of experiments, most forthcoming progress in physics will be purely abstract. But just because we can't test some of these theories doesn't mean we should disregard though, provided there are as few logical inconsistencies as possible.
Err, they did. They is why they are shutting down.
Going through Homejoy instead of direct offers you Homejoy's bonded protection and insurance, plus refund platform. This is worth something.
Casey Neistat Creates Beme: A new way to share video
I get the sense that many of the people involved in Homejoy are well-intentioned and hardworking. But I can't say that I think it's a bad thing that tech startups are finding it difficult to monetize unskilled labor.

The technology that most companies like these offer (with the possible exception of Uber) is a commodity. The real asset they have is the network effect. Which makes the balance of power between the tech company and the "1099 contractors" deeply suspicious. What are these companies doing for the laborers that makes them valuable enough to be skimming returns from the work?
Yeah, as per some of the discussion of another recent post, one of the big things that has happened over the past 20-30 years in computing is that we discovered a technology for use in digital logic circuits that has been amenable to incredible process shrinks. Certainly there's been extraordinary engineering that's gone into that shrinkage coupled with no small amount of semiconductor physics. But, for whatever other advances have been made in computing since 1980 or so, an awful lot comes back to CMOS.
And I am surprised there wasn't a link to this in the article.

So as I understand it, their system allows one to disconnect volume and pressure of the fluid coming out of the pump, with the actual speed at which the pump is operating. That lets you vary the work done by the hydraulic motor independently of the speed of the pump without resorting to a transmission.

Given that they have it running on a 7MW turbine that is pretty cool. (ok a 7MW wind turbine is pretty cool all by itself)

It would seem like maintaining the valve system and controller would be easier than maintaining a gearbox (they say as much in their overview) but I didn't find any good operational metrics (is it 100 hrs a month of maintenance vs 10 hrs? Or 60hr of maintenence for every kWh vs 6hr? something like that)
I've been working with it and it's not bad - won't tear my hair out if it's what I use in the end. But a couple pain points for me are the need to rewrite my code to grab 'session variables', needing to understand how images are returned, especially if you need to return more than one, and so on - versus Shiny, which allows me to more or less drop in the code I've already been working with. Oh, and parallel requests are just not possible.

Of course, most of these issues are understandable and possibly by design, especially since OpenCPU was designed for embedded systems. That's fine - it just makes creating webapps or dashboards around R a more complicated usecase.
If the PostgreSQL leader doesn't reset the leader key, it's no longer leader.
I did an Ask HN over 500 days ago wondering why there weren't any specialized Netflix sites. It didn't get a lot of traction though there were a few answers.

I'm still waiting for a foreign film 'Netflix'...one day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6972071
Lets be real here. Given how obviously unsustainable this is given the other comments in here, this company exists in the YC portfolio so they can say, 'hey look how much diversity we have!'

Aftrostream creators, I'm sure you're all great people and doing something great, but you've gotten funding to be the diversity pawn.

Good luck on your ventures and enslavement mates.
The mechanism used to justify seizing Lavabit's SSL keys and this is the same, despite your sarcastic comment.
I realize that. I'm simply pointing out that this is not the last time we'll see this kind of news.
I feel this way about AirBnB as well.
Don't mean to take away from the thread (I love what Tonjé and Ludovic are doing here and they're great guys!) but I also wondered about that last parenthetical question as well with some of my friends from France.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but in France, it is common, but not necessary, to write your last name before your first name in many situations. And secondly, many people also have last names that are also first names so to avoid confusion and awkwardness it's denoted in all caps.
The relative sizes of various parts of your body correlate closely to health for the majority of people.