jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
yes there are points under the curve out at 10X the mean but they are very, very rare. The normal distribution falls off a cliff. I don't have the reference in front of me but something like 99.6% of the population will fall within 2 standard deviations of the mean. This same issue comes up when people try and predict something like the daily fluctuation of the Dow Jones Industrial average using a normal curve. They think that there are random swings up and down but that large swings of 500 points are more are very unlikely. Then those large swings come along and show everybody that it isn't smart to use the normal distribution to try and model the absolute change in the closing price.

The main point here is that programmers who are 10X more productive than the average coder seem to be not so rare. Many people have stories about having worked with guys like this. Therefore I don't think you should use the normal distribution to model the distribution of productivity in programmers. I think there are many guys at the low end of the scale and it drops off slowly as you move into the higher productivity. And NO you can't include the negative x-axis to get a symmetric, "normal-like" distribution. In this model the negative values on the x-axis don't mean anything.
Team players go off and use Python?
Who would have thought!!!
OK, that seems reasonable as long as one is certain that it's 49.9999% rather than a loose standard of "pretty close". What you wouldn't want is to make possible for the clear loser in a 48% - 52% race to demand a coin toss. Or maybe you do:
by the precepts of your argument, maybe that would be fine.

I'm uneasy with the random approach suggested by the article for fear that a truly crazy candidate might win the lottery, but I'd be good with having all the candidates above some large baseline (say, 30% of the vote) get a proportional shot at the win. I think I'd probably want it to be proportional to the counted share even if there is a margin of error, though.
They already had shares that scheduled to sell but decided not to execute. It seems like the advice I always got from my company's legal department when I asked if it was ok to something: don't do it.
I've been flipping through. There's also a reference to a "Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who writes beautiful stories".
In other news, United and Orbitz are about to learn of the Streisand Effect[0]...

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
What are Uber and passengers going to do with the extra money? In both cases, we see the loss of specific jobs and (at least) short term pain for the people who were relying on them.
To me, it seems more like what's happening is a lot of people think it's less interesting to work on an existing, established product than to rewrite it altogether or make a new one and so we're seeing a steady procession of neat but immature frameworks instead of a mature one gaining steam. This, to me, is a problem because it means programmers waste a ton of time learning the incantations for a new framework instead of focusing on the actual problems they're trying to solve. It's like if you switched between similar programming languages for every new project you started without becoming very familiar with any of them.
Nuclear doesn't really have the ability to kill hundreds of thousands - even Chernobyl's verified deaths (Greenpeace estimates aside) are under 100, and Fukushima didn't kill a single person. It's never going to go off like a nuke.

Chernobyl did serve as a pretty decent area-denial weapon, but advances in both process and reactor design make such a thing extraordinarily unlikely today. The theoretical, worst-case scenarios for nuclear are still better than the every-day reality of coal and oil.
There's also "nazi Kurt", who hid above the arctic circle until 1981: http://www.strangehistory.net/2010/06/27/nazi-kurt-captured-....

(Mentioning this for the similarity to operation Zitronella and because StrangeHistory.net is an interesting site)
I'll second stronglifts. I used the app too. Super simple- three times a week, 35-45 minutes each time, and super gradual.
Indeed, once you end up pulling in most common Scala classes (collections, futures, etc.), adding new functionality to your app increases app size by very little. Our app has ~600KB gzipped js (attributable to Scala.js compiled code) + ~200KB of React and other libraries. The overall size has barely moved beyond +-100KB in last few years despite adding new functionality all the time.

Once Scala.js supports lazy loading of modules (hopefully soon after 1.0), the size issue will have significantly less practical impact.
> But the cost of housing, as measured by the median inflation-adjusted cost per square foot of a new house has actually fallen by 8% since 1992.

That's a relatively meaningless statistic given that new houses don't account for a significant subset of the housing supply.

A better measure of true housing costs is BLS's annual Consumer Expenditure Survey [1], which shows that just from 2013-2018, average annual housing expenditure has risen from $17148 to $20091, an increase of 17%.

1. https://www.bls.gov/cex/2018/standard/multiyr.pdf
> It's also a horrible business practice for his VC fund. As an entrepreneur there's no way I would want to work with Khosla ventures.

And therein lies the rub. Many entrepreneurs will not care about stuff like this because his money is still green. The Uber CEO just the other day referred to the Kashoggi killing as a "mistake". Adam Neumann grew up in Israel but is happy to take money from the same pot KSA uses to fund extremist groups, and publicly claims that MBS and Jared Kushner (!) will save the world.

For some people, Greed > everything.
I agree with you generally about property rights and "rich"people, though I'm not sure, based on this thread, if you know what is actually happening in this particular case. In California, you can't use private property to prevent people from reaching the ocean past the median tide line, which is public land by the state constitution.

Every bit of this was in place and well understood when Khosla purchased this land. The easement already existed. This isn't as situation where the government is coming in and seizing someone's private land, it's simply enforcing the easement that has existed for the last 100 years.

I apologize if you are aware of all this and are making a narrower point, that property rights shouldn't stop mattering because the person who owns it falls within the category of "rich people". However, there are all kinds of land use laws (another is "freedom to roam"[1]) that predate and preclude certain types of ownership. In other words, you can own property, and you have broad rights to do "what [you] want with it", but if you purchased it under conditions that were reasonably knowable at the time you made the purchase, it doesn't make sense to complain about it later.

Lastly, yeah, there is a problem here with rich. We're talking about a Silicon Valley billionaire showing up and denying access to a beach that the surrounding community had access to - as guaranteed by the California constitution - for the last 100 years. I'd say Khosla created his own popular perception of "rich" people in this case. It's the sort of thing were I can image other "rich" people cringing, like, dude, Americans still don't resent the wealthy, what are you doing here.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam
This isnt "free speech", this is unfettered capitalism and greed.

Free speech is about the Govt limiting what you can and cannot say. This is about how you can pay to manipulate the truth by leveraging a false sense of trust inherent in media.

More akin to "Truth in Advertising" than free speech. People should not be allowed to misrepresent themselves or the facts without some blowback, either criminally (fraud) or civil (libel).

[Digital] advertising is responsible for destroying trust.
Unsure about other places, but how it works in my country: http://www.mondaq.com/india/x/784302/Copyright/Mathmatical+E...

> In a legal sense also, you can copyright the content of a math book (such as diagrams, word problems, and illustrations) but the formula, problems, proofs, theorems themselves cannot be copyrighted. You cannot copyright a fact which is established and natural i.e., 1+1=2.
I usually unsubscribe first, but often these newsletters, which I'm automatically placed on when I order something, or do anything on the site that includes giving out my email, don't respect the request. At that point, "mark as spam" is the appropriate option, but even that doesn't always work and I end up making a filter to delete the messages immediately.
Yeah, I scrolled down hoping it would say. Remarkable none the less. Makes me very glad (scrap that, thank god) I live in the UK where carrying deadly weapons isn't seen as a right.
I think that the distinction isn't so much the language in use as the "quality" of the developer, and I think this distinction already exists - developers who live and breathe this stuff already are way more productive and way more in demand than your average 9-to-5er.

What does interest me is that it seems to me that there is already a two-tier system separated more along the type of work. I've met a few people recently who are consultants in quite esoteric things (compared to "standard") development - often things like IT consulting to companies working on more hard science problems like physics or chemistry/biochem, maybe machine learning these days, and they're frequently using functional or otherwise fringe languages. Similarly, I'm guessing people like Peter Siebel don't have any trouble finding work in lisp. I get the feeling there's sort of a subculture of really interesting work, often in interesting languages, that is just not accessible unless you're exposed to it somehow. Certainly I've never seen job ads for this sort of work.

Any ideas about this? Is anyone out there actually consulting using Scala or Clojure? How did you get into it? How does it work - do you set the terms of the contract, such as which language you use? Any other experiences or opinions?
According to the popular vote Mark is ranked #10 where as Julian Assange is ranked #1: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...

Even if it wasn't Julian Assange... any of the other individuals in the top 10 list except for Mark Zuckerberg would of made a much better "Person of the Year."
Time's Man of the year no longer matters. Clearly it should've been Assange.
On an unrelated note, that whiteboard graph disturbed me a bit. Does every YC startup hope to get bought out? Why would that even be a goal or something to aspire to?
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified/tags
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified/atom-tags
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified/rss-tags

And here's my lua script that uses notify-send to notify me of new releases: https://gist.github.com/folknor/32f703b270c6ad72bc12d98feb2f... I modified it slightly before posting it here, but it's mostly useless unless you're me :-D Because when I write shell scripts (which I always do in lua), I always use my fork of luash (from my github), and I don't imagine anyone else has it. It's easy enough to rewrite the script to not require it, though. Also, the other obscure dependency it uses is lua2xml, which is notoriously unreliable, but I still use it in all my shell scripts that interact with XML.
> Every dollar returned to the House of Saud allows a regime that would've been considered repressive two centuries ago to continue repressing women, homosexuals, foreign workers, non-Muslims, etc.

Saying this make no justice to the fact that it's Saudi Sunni Arab Muslims, practicing, or not who suffer the most under the regime.

While Shia are the ones who suffer repressions by Saudi analogue of Stasi nearly all the time, the repression, domestic espionage, and political inquisition against Sunni populace is their primary activity.

Regular Saudis fear talking about Sauds even in their own homes.

I studied in Vancouver along tons of Saudi students picked among children of state employees, and ones given the "loyalty exam" to score their passport. Even among such hand-picked selection, people said nobody in the kingdom can speak about the king without chills running their spine. Were they having an option, they would've stayed in Canada.
A market is extremelly inneficient at managing a pwer grid, unless you install HFT computers at each power plant.
I am not looking forward to the rehabilitation of MBS's image that will take place over the next couple of years.

After Khashoggi was killed, some prominent people took a bit of stand and pulled out of the Future Investment Conference. The narrative there was clear: we don't do business with people who murder journalists.

So now, the US has essentially confirmed it: yeah, MBS did in fact have that journalist killed. So what comes next?

What should happen is all of those people who boycotted the conference a couple years ago come out and say "we will not do business with MBS connected businesses, investment funds, etc moving forward!"

What will actually happen? Probably the something worse than what seems to be the official US government stance: "Yeah, he did it, but we aren't going to punish him or allow what he did to impact business as usual." Business leaders can't even afford to take a position that weak. They have considerably less leverage, so they have to kowtow. I expect for the most part they will refuse to discuss their relationship with MBS as they move forward with partnerships and investments. The real question is when his tours of US tech campuses will resume.
I read off grid in general as being off terrestrial utility connections of any sort. So (maybe cell), satellite TV, and satellite Internet. But no power grid, water, sewage, or wired broadband.
I guess you can try to face both with courage, and it seems like that’s what is needed and that is what you try to do already. The type of courage that arises indicates the type of anxiety you’re dealing with.

“I am going to be ok, I just have to face this” will arise when you’re dealing with the less specific, apparently unhelpful anxiety.

“This is going to be a difficult project, and I have a lot to learn but I am up for it” will arise when dealing with the more specific, attuned-to-a-real-world-complexity anxiety.

Does that make sense? Anxiety is always best met with courage; sometimes it’s a blunt courage and sometimes it’s a pointed courage, just as anxiety can be blunt or pointed.
I think a few things are happening here.

1. Reddit and HN are not mutual exclusive. There could be stuff that could be cross posted. Also, Reddit is a startup, is a YC company, and the founders are very active in the startup community. All these things together make Reddit a popular item to discuss.

2. I think the HN community is starting to change. That doesn't mean decline, just change. I can program, but I'm not a programmer. I'd rather read about unique business models, human interest stories, etc than the latest and greatest clojure article.

3. That said, re-reading the guidelines isn't a bad idea!
Germany has some of the strongest privacy protection laws, which is part of the reason I use Joker as my registrar. It doesn't get you out of reach of the TLD masters, but for everything else it's good peace of mind.
I think Michael Moore said it best.

"I ask you to imagine how much different our world would be if WikiLeaks had existed 10 years ago. Take a look at this photo. That's Mr. Bush about to be handed a "secret" document on August 6th, 2001. Its heading read: "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." And on those pages it said the FBI had discovered "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings." Mr. Bush decided to ignore it and went fishing for the next four weeks.

But if that document had been leaked, how would you or I have reacted? What would Congress or the FAA have done? Was there not a greater chance that someone, somewhere would have done something if all of us knew about bin Laden's impending attack using hijacked planes?"

read more at http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/why-im-p...
Yea. We are working on UI for next iteration!
And comments Rose made defending the design after the fact are going to try and spin a positive light. That's not "misinterpreting the results". Internal discussions may have been very different.
And it only started a few weeks ago win wikileaks. Turns out it's not a slippery slope, it's frictionless.
>Apple has had GPU switching for quite a while (my 2010 MacBook Pro has it, and I don't think it was the first). So clearly MS didn't invent that .

Adding to this: Nvidia has also been advertising GPU switching for quite a while now, under the Optimus brand. I don't think it's a coincidence that MS went with Nvidia over AMD for the SB.
Partially, regulation is one thing but being able to kick someone out of your establishment is also part of the law that has been upheld by the Supreme Court and in the constitution. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of communication platforms on the Internet. If Twitter was the only communication platform, then I would be very upset about this decision.

There are some companies that I do not think should be allowed to ban people, like ISPs.. since many times people don't have choices between multiple high-speed ISPs. However, Twitter is not in that same category.
Get out of your bubble. The cop's name was Brian D. Sicknick, and he died from injuries sustained fighting the rioters.

https://www.npr.org/sections/congress-electoral-college-tall...

According to Capitol police, the rioters "actively attacked United States Capitol Police Officers and other uniformed law enforcement officers with metal pipes, discharged chemical irritants, and took up other weapons against our officers."

https://www.uscp.gov/media-center/press-releases/statement-s...
How about clojure and jruby? Adding these will be pretty awesome.
I'd pay money to listen to you speak at a conference / convention.
I have done stack-based development integrating C and Lua.

While I might agree with Julien that Lua has a few quirks that can reduce your productivity, I have never had any problem finding helpful resources to help solve my specific problems.

I think that avoiding Lua because of these limitations is quitting too soon, or throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I think Lua is a very useful tool with wide applicability.

The IRC channel #lua on Freenode is a friendly and welcoming place.

The official Lua mailing list is also a great place to explore the particulars of a problem and receive the benefit of many expert eyes on your code. [0]

There is example code in various places on the Internet showing good ways to do careful stack management with C/Lua. I found these to be the most helpful. [1]

If you are used to stack-based programming in languages like Forth or PostScript, you will probably feel at home.

If you are not, you will have a learning curve before you start to feel productive.

0: http://vlists.pepperfish.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lua-l-...

1: http://lua-users.org/wiki/SampleCode (see "Lua C API samples")

1: http://cc.byexamples.com/2008/11/19/lua-stack-dump-for-c/

1: http://docclox.blogspot.com/2011/01/about-lua-stack.html

Edit: clarity, tone, links, more links, typo
I'm sorry but how is this similar? I'm probably missing something but I don't see the connection.
the page itself is a demo of inuit.css (view source!).
If you have less time than money and getting more time gives you more money (even in indirect ways such as more/better sleep, exercise and food =better work), it just becomes a business decision.
Someone should buy Groupon/Livingsocial.
This is where I defer to the "almost" :)
Just quick off the cuff thoughts:

1) I'm not sure this is a scalable idea.
2) Isn't this what Craigslist does?
An interesting argument. That so much physical real-estate was once dedicated to video rentals suggests that a single physical media unit produced rental revenue which was a high multiple of its cost -- at least at Blockbuster's height. This also implies that the studios (to be more correct, the intellectual property owners) only received a small fraction of the value their IP provided to consumers. One would think that this state of affairs would have led the cable operators and the IP owners toward an agreement of some sort. Every dollar wasted on a strip mall lease could be a dollar in a combination of their pockets.
Looks interesting, I'd love to check it out.

adrian -at- factore.ca

http://factore.ca/portfolio
That's one way of looking at it. Some assert that Taleb's work is a tautology, as you seem to, while others, especially in academia, have been trying to disprove/discredit/find flaw in it. I won't try to argue that, but will just point out a few things, in no particular order:

- FBR and TBS are both for lay audiences. Taleb has hashed out his ideas in numerous academic papers posted on http://SSRN.com as well.

- Taleb's ideas have not yet been refuted by academia either, as confirmed by the late, renowned statistician David Freedman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Freedman_(statistician...) b/f he died recently.

- Can it be both flawed and a tautology?

- In investing and trading, knowing what not to do is often easier and more valuable than knowing what to do. All three books I referenced are all about that, though Taleb's are more on a philosophical level than What I Learned.

- You get more out of Taleb's books if you also read the stuff he references in his bibliographies, from What I Learned..., to Mandelbrot's (Mis)behavior of Markets (understanding Black Swans in terms of fractal randomness gives it a whole new meaning), to Taleb's first book on trading Dynamic Hedging (where he basically explains his extremely technical trading strategy to hedge and exploit the shit that happens in markets), to the stuff on SSRN.

- Most books on trading (or any other kind of advice these days) can be said to overdevelop a single topic or idea. Partly to pad pages, but also partly to drive home the message to the lowest common denominator of their audience. If you're the type that can speed read through the whole thing in a few hours, try not to hold that against them if the content is good.

- If his ideas are relatively simple, why does the whole world keep fucking them up? Both the financial crisis and the BP oil spill can be examined from Taleb's framework. Why have governments not realized how fundamental these ideas are and 'robustified' society against 'shit happening'? (these are all rhetorical questions, I know the answers) Someone needs to keep driving them home till we all grok that robustness + redundancy > optimization in many areas.

- Nobody in academia, government, or media took him seriously for a long time, even with a Wharton MBA and 99th percentile track record in trading. He said he had to get a PhD to help get his message across. That his ideas may now seem obvious is probably a 'hindsight is 20/20' thing.

While I'm at it, I'll just throw in a link for the OP to his good Edge article - The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb08/taleb08_index.html

PS - Do you really find his writing 'impenetrable'? I think it's perfectly clear. Or did you mean something else?
My roommate and I are both algorithmic traders. He LOVES that book with deep sophisticated passion. I haven't read it yet, but he described it to me as a high level discussion of why and how people trade. It's not necessarily going to help you be an awesome trader, but it will help you interpret the markets in a way you've never imagined before.
Using https just means that your connection to the server is encrypted. Your email will still be sent between mail servers unencrypted unless you encrypt it separately.
A publicly-held corporation could (in theory) be sued by its shareholders if it just gave away profits like that.