skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anic: Faster than C, safer than Java, simpler than *sh
That means you took the linkbait. Why reward articles like this with free views?
Nine out of ten people learned Statistics from teachers who knew jack of Statistics. The difference between Statistics and Math is that Statistics is data-oriented and somewhat "experimental". Yeah, I hated Statistics in high-school, but when I learned Information Theory and Statistical Signal Processing, then I understood what one could do with knowledge of Statistics, and what the field is all about.

If you can't see the beauty in it, you've probably been taught pseudo-Statistics. Don't feel bad. All the Math that engineering students learn is kind of pseudo-Math. All one learns in high-school is BS. If you want to learn something, here's my advice:

i) Don't use modern, over-designed textbooks.. you know... the thick expensive ones with many colors and boxes highlighting the formulas one must memorize.

ii) Instead read the classic books from the 1960s, many of which are published by Dover. They look boring at 1st sight, but their content is rich. Another option is to get the old Soviet books from the 1960s, which tend to be forgotten gems. The Russians are the best at marrying theory with application.
Ahh I misread your first post. So you went on a 900 calorie diet that wasn't necessarily a protein modified sparing fast. Now, at a macronutrient level you just eat higher protein and fat whilst avoiding carbs.

Are you certain that you didn't have pre-diabetes or some form of insulin resistance before starting your diet? It might be the reason why you feel like crap when having carbs. At a healthy weight, reasonable levels of carbs shouldn't cause you to feel like crap unless you have some underlying condition that's affected by them.

UPDATE:
Another thing that can be going on here is that when you lose weight, you don't necessarily get a reduction in fat cells. Normally, fat cells contain 90% triglycerides. When you lose weight, some fat cells release their triglycerides. But they can fill up with water instead (e.g., perhaps the body's adaptation to famine conditions... where there's no food there's likely no water). Your carb intake may have simply been causing you to bloat with water, and some of your fat cells may have been storing this water too. How long did this 10-20 lbs weight gain last? It's not abnormal to gain 10-20 lbs after losing such a substantial amount of weight because some of that weight lost will have been water-weight.
Look, I dont want to get into a protracted argument... but.

It seems your definition of "expert" is a lot higher than mine; which is fine. Lets use a different word: experienced.

However with that said what Zed wrote in that post stood up to extra research by myself and I actually understood what he had to say.

If you wish to claim it is wrong and he has no clue, fine; but can you please - for our benefit - explain why and specifically where he is wrong?
> I strongly disagree with Zed on this one...

I'm unsurprised.

Programmers have a remarkable belief that they are experts in every subject, and if you tell them that there is something wrong with the way they argue, they will argue with you about it.
Google patent application for ranking news
Fair point - awards like Turing or SIGMOD are different, where both the nominees and voters are high level experts in their fields. What I wrote applies to mainstream awards & lists.
I think there is definitely something to this. In the show Top Gear, we see celebrities competing for the fastest (or maybe most entertaining) lap time in their reasonably priced car. I love seeing how they will compare, even if, as an American, I don't quite know who all of them are.

But what if Top Gear created a service where people could show up and pay to drive this car around the track to see how they would compare with these celebrities? How fun would that be? Look...I've got the exact same time as Mark Wahlberg! I'm as fast as he is!

So, well, this example wouldn't happen. But, as an avid gamer, whether it's Call of Duty, or Desktop Tower Defesne, or any iPhone game, it would be quite fun to see what celebrity I am on par with.

I love this idea and could totally see it work, whether as an independent business idea or folded into Xanga or any game development studio.
They forgot readability.
I disagree completely, at least for young entrepreneurs.

I started a hosted email company in high-school, and while it never really went anywhere, it was the single greatest thing on my resume.

It made me stand far above most other applicants, proved that I could start and complete something interesting, and gave me a lot of real-world experiences to talk about in an interview, as opposed to the standard "In this database class I took..."
I was actually looking for a description of how Google News "clusters" stories about the same topic, when I ran into this. The first illustration shows, well, a computer network. The next one, a standard pc architecture. Then... a table.

I have zero experience with patents, so I'm wondering: is this the typical standard of quality? You have an algorithm that you don't really want to describe, you want it to look like it's not a software patent, so you just show some images of pc hardware?
Can you recommend any sources for more details about this 'beef broth' fix for induction discomfort? (Would other sodium replenishment options be just as good?)
I like "Poopy". A while back I wrote a mass mailing app for a fund management company. They were sending out frequent updates to the ~12000 investors of their funds which had to be very HTMLy and professional.

Well, it turns out that leaving setSignature("sausage") in your code can really get you into some trouble. Especially when you consider that European companies are legally bound to include certain company information in their signatures.

OTOH it turned out that this was the mailing that received the most replies ever, most of them pretty cheerful.
Look at it this way. There could still be an overall high-score leaderboard. This could simply be a filter applied to that leaderboard. On most leaderboards, I could really care less about who anyone is, as I have no clue who they are, and only care about where I stand in it. But if I could apply this filter to the leaderboard where I would then be able to recognize almost everyone, then I would find it much more interesting to scan. Additional filters could be applied on top of this, such as movie stars, athletes, or like Compete.com, have the ability to compare specific celebrities, on individual games, or on multiple games.
Gruber had an article about iSuppli a while back: http://daringfireball.net/2007/07/isuppli

I wouldn't put too much into this.
Pinboard is correct, pvg was there.

Who is Pete Freitas? Where did you get that impression?
Florida? Are you serious?
I am not saying Zed is wrong, I am merely saying his post is not really that insightful... at least when compared to other essays on Statistics one could read instead. For example, what Cosma Shalizi writes on Statistics is much deeper than what Zed did. Another example: Andrew Gelman has a great blog on Statistics, and he's a true expert.

For me an "expert" is someone who has at least 10 years of experience in one field. An expert on Statistics must have carried out extensive data-analysis work, or must have published original papers. Reading books gives one some understanding, but only when one must solve a problem, does one realize that one's knowledge is utterly superficial.

Zed is no superman. His area of expertise is not Statistics, it's something else. I am not saying he's stupid. All I am saying is that he has not invested the many years of effort into studying Statistics to earn the title of "expert". By calling him an expert, one insults all the true experts out there, the one who do not write blog posts using juvenile language because, you know, they have better things to do... like spending time with their friends and family...
China Blocks Wired.com With ‘Great Firewall’
But what also goes far for them is exposure. You know: fame, money, sex. Money is not their only driving motivator.
After shunning Linux desktops for years, I find myself surprisingly positive about Ubuntu.

I'm trying Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix, on a Lenovo S10. There were a few bumps getting it started, but all in all I'm starting to enjoy using it as much as my Mac laptop, maybe more.

It may have the best GUI shell available for a small screen. Stuff that used to be tricky, like mounting devices or connecting to networks, is now quite elegant. Workhorse open source apps like Firefox and Thunderbird are now very mature and usable. I can get (some) decent fonts and they look about as good as any other OS on-screen.

So I can customize it more, and I have the reliability of apt-get, a lot of very good apps, and for the most part it is slick, attractive, and Just Works. Perfect for a hacker who hates system administration.

That said, Linux probably won't conquer on the desktop, ever. They missed their chance, because the desktop is now obsolete. Network-oriented devices like phones and the forthcoming Chrome netbook are the future. Ironically they will run Linux, but only for the most basic OS functions; all this desktop stuff will wither away.
So how is one to ever know that stats is beautiful if all they see is impenetrable jargon? Where is a good, free, up-to-date resource for doing what Zed covers?

We're all busy, accessibility and immediate relevance are common and useful heuristics for deciding what to investigate.
Barring a major change in government, likely not. China allows citizens to build up wealth, while North Korea tries to prevent it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/03/north-korea-won-...
"I dream of a 'Linux Apple' - a company that sells a small but smart range of laptops (even at a premium) with a selection of hardware that guarantees that a major linux distro will run on it without paper cuts."

You mean like this?

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/linux_3x?c=...

If it comes with Ubuntu preinstalled it "probably" guarantees hardware compatibility.
Interesting. CEA has a contract with the hotels that says the hotel can't rent space as meeting rooms. People renting the room from the hotel have a contract (backed up by state law) that says they can. CEA's contract is bigger, so the hotel is willing to violate the small contract and the state law because presumably it is more cost-effective.

Violating the law is more profitable than abiding by it.

Too bad I can't just boycott all products advertised at CES.
I find MIT OCW courses on Statistics a good source of references. Reading books takes time, but you can find some lecture slides and lecture notes there.

I, too, found Statistics impenetrable. One solution I found was to learn Statistics from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science perspective. Instead of weird abstractions, in EE and CS one thinks of more concrete things, like random signals, or data sets. The best way to learn Statistics is to apply it.

One problem, though, is that knowing only a little Statistics might be worse than knowing nothing.
Interesting ... hadn't seen much of that before.

Once again I have to wonder why such articles ignore Lilienfield's work (from 20 years before)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Edgar_Lilienfeld

and how he profited (if at all) from his patents.
lol, yeah I've been experimenting with @font-face... going to change it soon :-)
2010 will be like 2009.

The year of the desktop for Linux will keep on not arriving, but the Linux desktop offering will keep improving incrementally.

Windows will continue to stagnate. Mac OS X will continue to innovate and the Linux desktop community will be better at copying the good bits than Microsoft, partly because of less cruft and partly because Microsoft is still trying to get a sense of itself in a changed world.

Personally, I write code on all three, have basically the same environment on all three (Vim, Vimperator, bash, GCC, CMake, OpenGL, Cg) and find all three usable for most purposes.
Reading "Hemingway's hack", I thought it has something to do with alcohol.
Is this a joke? The URL spells "panic".
> I feel horribly restricted

In what way? I don't use Linux on the desktop (just on the server) but really everyone has done a great job of ensuring most of the open source software you need is on pretty much every platform in one way or the other.
What are the use-cases for multiple sound cards?
Ask HN: Are we too lenient on Google and Apple?
It seems to me that the geek hoi polloi would be up in arms over the shenanigans that Apple and Google have been pulling over the last year if they were Microsoft. Apple's monopolistic practices over iPhone applications and clone makers for example. Also Google's privacy invasions including Eric Schmidt's dismissal of the notion that people have a right to privacy.

Do we cut Apple and Google far too much slack just because they have cooler products than and are not Microsoft?
This advise carries over to software development. To give yourself focus the next morning, leave yourself with a breaking test.
anic is the reference implementation compiler for the experimental, high-performance, statically-safe, fully implicitly parallel, object-oriented, general-purpose dataflow programming language ANI.

I really hope its a joke.
Much as the internet evolved from anti-social to ultra-social, I have to believe that one day, with the invention of the right tools, it will come to promote wisdom rather than exacerbate an existing form of ignorance, as it does today.
if email is one of the parents of twitter and is now parenting a child with it, aren't we looking at a live case of....INCEST here?
I was there. I would much prefer to have Hsieh as a leader than Pincus. The fact that Hsieh runs a company that I have no interest in joining is a different matter.
Cheers, Ill look those guys up.

I do think 2 things are happening here though. I think firstly Zed's style doesn't really appeal to you - which is fine, I can see how he wouldn't gel with lots of people. As a result the second thing happens, his content seems irrelevant.

As someone who quite enjoys his approach :) I found quite a bit of useful content. I dont think the point is really to infuse a deep understanding of statistics - it's to correct some common mistakes hackers like us make when playing with stats :)

For example I scanned the blogs of those 2 names you mention and their stuff certainly seems interesting; but frankly I didnt notice anything massively relevant to things I might need to use day to day in my "startup". Zed's stuff I've already taken to heart and corrected some of my "work practices" when dealing with stats.

As to the rest I think it is just a case of differing definitions of expert :) as I said "experienced" is a better word to use - assuming our definitions match :P.
Apple TV does this while listening to music. Its great seeing 20 random pictures flying around on the screen at once.
> Google appears to be only accepting e-mail customer queries, to which it pledges to reply in one to two days -- far too long, say most people who are complaining online.

This is the classic sign of bad service.

You can see this with any bad company (such as ISP) - they want non-telephonic complaints so that it takes an extensive time to respond and most people just give up.
> ANI is an attempt to fuse the intuitive feel of shell scripting

Am I the only one who still has to google most of 'sh's predicates and syntax?
No amount of technocracy will change how people solve problems.

The are basically two ways:

1. Apply predefined solutions to solve a problem (i.e. Use gadgets and applications someone else programmed).

2. Develop a custom solution to a problem (i.e. Put together your own program that solves your problem).

Arguably the next generation will learn to apply more complex predefined solutions to problems, but they won't magically start to migrate to the second mindset.
Well iSupply is being dishonest in forgetting to mention manufacturing costs and all that other over head that goes into making the device but from a purely materials perceptive they may be correct.
Mark Pincus on CEO Training (Video)
I read his "Just make sure that no more than 1% [...] of requests" as actual requests. If it meant whole-page-load-time then fair enough.

"stating a minimum accepted value is not the same as ignoring the rest" - then what is it if you don't care about mean and stddev? If you do care about other requests you care about the mean (or stddev, or median, or whatever other parameter) but just don't put it in a scientific way. If you say reasonable, it might mean - it doesn't time-out. That means it's below X seconds. That means with the other maximum load time constraints, you expect a mean time for Y requests to be less than Z. Saying "Assuming that 1% of your requests taking long enough the user might notice" you just put a constraint on that parameter.

(just to explain why I keep arguing this point - because that's what the post is about (kind-of), people say "reasonable time", but don't want to set the actual mean/stddev - which is what they do care about)
The world changed faster than Statistics. These days, anyone with a computer can analyze data sets, which is awesome. The problem is that the Statistics books are not designed for the masses, and the experts are concerned with technicalities that programmers, for instance, couldn't care less. If Zed helps brings Statistics to the programmers community, I guess that can only be a good thing...

The good news is that there seems to be an opportunity here: write Statistics for the non-statistician. Not everyone who needs Statistics can take 2 years off to learn it. Back in the 1970s, Digital Signal Processing was an advanced grad course... now it's a basic undergrad course. Maybe Statistics will go the same way, becoming more and more prevalent, and less and less ivory tower.
This recalled to mind recently meeting a physicist who had some experience of programming at a party.

The physicist repeatedly insisted (and explained to me with an authoritative tone) that Python 'has no VM as it is a scripting language'.
Oops, indeed, it was meant the other way around. Past the edit window now though. Thanks for pointing it out.
I noticed a similar, but exactly opposite trend with Paul Blart: Mall Cop.
The iSuppli press release is titled 'Google Nexus One Carries $174.15 Materials Cost.'

The third sentence reads "This total comprises only hardware and component costs for the Nexus One itself and does not take into consideration other expenses such as manufacturing, software, box contents, accessories and royalties."

Your accusation seems spurious at best. Some might call it dishonest.
That's probably because most people only sporadically have to write shellscripts. If you had to write it every day, I bet you wouldn't have that problem.

Having said that, I personally don't feel shellscripting is all that intuitive either.
No it isn't IMO for the following reasons:

- Windows 7 is actually pretty good. Those who were put off by Vista are, I think, being sold on 7 a lot easier

- The Linux UI experience still, IMO, isn't up the the level of a non-technical user. Microsoft and Apple have invested a LOT of time and money into UI and Linux needs to learn from some of their ideas.

- Apart from the UI things still aren't "slick" enough for non-techy users. Example; People make a big thing of package managers as being something awesome - however in my experience people dont find the Ubuntu one particularly intuitive.

- There is still too much techno-jargon within easy reach of users

I love Linux but it isnt yet a viable desktop for the consumer market.

Someone needs to charge for it; and push the funds into developing the UI. I think the uptake will be MUCH higher if people are paying, say, $30 for it (crazy huh?)
PushButton Tutorial Series - Animation
A pricing model that is not cost-plus pricing?
This is pretty cool. The compiler figures out the order of execution and parallelization of your code for you, based on a dependency graph that is generated from the code. So, you simply describe the behavior of your data and every description is assumed parallel.

Once you read the basic tutorial, the language is not hard to read.
I disagree. The language is readable, if not intuitive. Once you read the tutorial, the examples all make sense. The intial example given is like a minified version of the code, and is probably not a good first impression.
But software that reminds you of things for senimental life-lookback type stuff definitely has its niche.

Absolutely. I'm sad this won't be productized soon (or ever.)

Discussions about Microsoft tend to go a particular direction. I simply wanted to temper any Microsoft-will-by-default-show-my-kids-the-porn-I've-watched witch burning.
By all means start a company instead of playing World of Warcraft, hanging out at Denny's, and going to Fall Out Boy concerts. You're right. Starting a company is basically risk-free when you're in high school (though note that it's not risk free when you're in college; getting a degree would be an incredible pain in the ass for me now, and I traded that opportunity for a startup win in the '90s).
Nope, that's not me. AlphaMonkey is definitely not me.
Oh thanks! I thought the dupe finder would have caught it.
As soon as my shellscripts need control structures, I jump to a "real" language like Perl or Python.
Where U.S. Health Care Ranks Number One
I'm actually surprised at how well it's all held up (particularly the "rainforest" area. Anyone know if they are doing any maintenance to it at all?
By the way, this is the page they are talking about:
http://www.korea-dpr.com/exports.htm

I remember looking at this and laughing a few years ago. Ah, if only!
imdb was just blocked as well. I don't know of anyone who can figure out their logic for how they determine why and what sites get blocked and when. It's a fool's errand to try. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/technolo...

That they blocked Wired though (irrespective of people's views of the magazine), is doubly silly for what people can learn and speaks to the ever present threat censorship plays in innovation/web development in China.
Alright, let's see you do better. I see in the comments you've come around to realizing that what statistics needs is more explanations that work for regular folks who have to apply them. Why not write your own blog post that's better than mine?

Also, just FYI: I studied statistics in business school both BS and MS, so most of my background is in applied simplified stats. This includes several graduate courses in stats in the sociology department. In addition I have extensive experience since about 2000 (so 10 years) applying statistics to problems using the R language.

Now, when you write this blog post, I'll expect to see your full Ph.D. level CV laying out all of your experience, publications, and applications of statistics just to be fair.
Well, a gene can spread in a small group through drift (even if detrimental). If it allows that group to out-compete the next tribe over, it will spread farther.

Of course, no one has ever seen this in action, so it's pretty unlikely that group selection is very important in evolutionary history.
Well, a couple of years ago, many people thought that Linux would take over the desktop as soon as it could match windows' and Mac OS's ease of use/installation, because it is much stabler, safer and free.

Now the time has come that Linux has (almost?) caught up with those other OS's in terms of usability. Unfortunately, Windows has become a lot safer and stabler in the mean time; and we have come to realize that the security of Linux is not just because of technical reasons -- for a large part it is because it is simple a less interesting target. Also, the price is not really that important.

So, no, Linux will not quickly beat Windows on the desktop. On the other hand, it might become easier to switch, also as more and more software becomes available on Linux, and this could make Linux's growth at least pretty stable for a couple of years to come.