skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The calculated standard deviation from any finite sample size of a long tailed distribution (e.g. Pareto with alpha <= 2) will be off by a factor of infinity.The point is that, not only is the standard deviation irrecoverable in this case, but it's hardly the figure of merit if you do know it.
SSH Tunneling through web filters
In the U.S., we've effectively created segregated public university systems that preserve and extend the status quo even as HBCUs have trouble maintaining enrollments. In every major metropolitan area, there's at least one or two public four-year colleges that are predominantly African-American. Under the cover of "extending access", we've re-created separate but equal in our higher education system: a place where mandatory busing won't solve our issues.
How the Scientist Got His Ideas
Ask HN: Why didn't Ubuntu come up with the AppStore?
I'm sure I'm not the only Linux user whose first reaction to the Apple AppStore announcement was: "Commercial APT with ratings!" I've always believed that apt (and siblings) were a major unsung advantage of Linux. A browsable software catalog, remote software deployment, automatic update notifications, dependency resolution, etc. these were all things that are only now being integrated into other major OSes. Hell, even Cydia, the AppStore for jailbroken phones, runs on apt.

So why is it that Ubuntu( or even some other distro) never made that same connection before Apple? Will commercial Linux providers come to their senses and realize the potential here or will we be stuck with horrible attempts like the "Ubuntu Software Center"?

P.S. I'm only using Ubuntu as an example since it has commercial backing for running a centralized repository of verified software, and could be open to including commercial software. And I think including support for commercial software would attract more developers to this venture.
Interesting discussion in there, but I think the PHP guys are right on this one. You should never rely on undefined behavior of any API for mission critical code.

Always use what is documented so you don't have to cry later..
Brand? That makes it all sound rather soulless :-(

It's just a personal page. I use to keep contact with friends and share photos and random musings, like twitter with a few extras. Unless you're being ultra-cynical, I don't think everyone on twitter is trying to build a brand. Some people just like to talk.
Compojure is a good bet for clojure web applications.

To get you started, have a look at the source for clojars and briancarpers cow-blog.

http://github.com/ato/clojars-web
http://github.com/briancarper/cow-blog

Brian Carper has a load of information about using compojure on his site (http://briancarper.net). In particular interest are:

compojure to the rescue: http://briancarper.net/blog/clojure-and-compojure-to-the-res...

deploying clojure sites
http://briancarper.net/blog/deploying-clojure-websites
As an SAT tutor I can remark that wealthy families have a real advantage in the process in being able to pay the high fees for SAT training. I think the best way to eliminate such an advantage would be to ask students to report what sort of tutoring or classes they got.
Factor: C++ and Factor
Making an electronic clipboard may be the only way to get doctors to replace paper clipboards and start saving their notes electronically.
I wrote a website on Google App Engine using Clojure. I used compojure and some Java library for OpenID. My database was (naturally) Google Datastore for which I had a custom wrapper based on http://github.com/duelinmarkers/appengine-clj/tree/master. I'm not giving the link, because it's all in Czech, so it would be no use for you :)

It was a nice experience, functional programming fits well to website programming (the response is a function of the request and data in the database).

For debugging/development purposes I strongy recommend to reload the code on each request using load-file. Restarting the server every time a change is made is unbearable.
"Escalate? Oh how I wish I had someone to escalate to."

Classic.
With a bit of goodwill, you can read the ilkhd's comment as: If all participants are in there voluntarily, it can't be evil; and you are free to ignore it.

I do not like the `fairtrade' stuff for the same reasons as w00pla, but since nobody's forced to participate (as opposed to agricultural subsidies and tariffs), I do not mind other people engaging in this.

Fair trade is free trade where people in the developed world choose to pay the produces to pay them for certain strange things. E.g. as a fairtrade producer you can not employ day labourers. (At least that's what I heard. But I do not remember the source.) And genetically modified plants are banned, too. (http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/includes/documents/cm_docs/2008/...)

I can image myself paying more for stuff that gets produced in nice working conditions and does not damage the environment. But I'd actually prefer to see more GM and I do not mind day labourers. Perhaps one could create an alternative to `fairtrade' where you can combine your own building blocks of stuff you want to pay extra for?
I see viraptor has provided one of the two examples that readily come to mind. Harvard in 2004 may not generalize to most colleges today, and black people who are biracial is largely irrelevant, because a person with one white parent and one black parent has always been "black" for purposes of enforcing Black Codes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Codes_%28United_States%29

and other mechanisms of legally supported prejudice against black people.

"A counselor told me when my daughters were applying for college admission that the first thing I had to do was withdraw my application for financial aid. When I said that colleges professed to be 'need blind,' she laughed."

Not only is that an anecdote, that is an anecdote from a biased source. Professional college admission counselors use parental anxiety on the part of wealthier parents to generate their business. They are never going to refer to information that might suggest that large categories of applicants don't need their services.

There may indeed be some evidence that colleges favor wealthier rather than poorer students,

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_...

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0621.pdf

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ff0615S.pdf

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/carnrose.pdf

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/kahlenberg-affacti...

http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/05/a-thumb-on-the-scale.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/financial-aid-leveragi...

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=510012

http://www.equaleducation.org/commentary.asp?opedid=1240

http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....

http://www.reason.com/news/show/123910.html

http://www.ihep.org/publications/publications-detail.cfm?id=...

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/11...

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hkBGMsvJKR...

and I for one would like to know what the most recent and most carefully gathered data show on this issue, but I wouldn't take a professional college admission counselor as a competent, objective source on such an issue, and no journalist should either.

Your comment upvoted because you asked me to provide evidence for my statement in the grandparent comment.
Practical conditions not including routing networks and the stock market, you may wish to add...
Seconded. Imho the person at the top has to really understand their product, and understanding the capabilities and shortcomings your product includes understanding the competitive landscape. Even if he doesn't compare his phone to iPhone, his target market does.

The company is doomed if the guy doesn't understand their product - and the competitive landscape.

I think he's lying through his teeth (and a bad liar at it), or he is genuinely blind. I think it's the former.
So companies are finally realizing that gameplay trumps graphics?
I think its kinda cute, especially the kid getting mad excited about going from 11 subscribers to 300 odd "in a day".
I think it is a bit of a shame YouTube pulled the plug on it.

To me this highlights a very interesting conflict in today's society. There is a very strong "protect the children" argument. I constantly worry that this premise results in a caste system where being under 18 effectively renders you a second-rate citizen.

If you're under 18 the world is mainly full of STFU and GTFO. Much like the result of this kid's interactions with YouTube.
College is not just for signaling. The world is much richer in people competent in Electrical Engineering as a result, something which very few would be competent in if everyone cooperated in not getting a degree.
Near as I can tell from the video, that little white box is just a little white box. The Lexan box that guy is leaning on appears to have a much larger antenna in it, and that's what the cable plugged into the BlackBerry is plugged in to.

The guy even says "The _goal_ is to get it down to a box this size". That information seems to be missing from the blog post.
I like his humility. Many people in these situations would be like: "Do you know who I am?"
Angel Investor Term Sheet Evoution - HD video
And the US is still doing fine. They can waste a lot more resources before it's going to be as bad as in some other places.
"The PWYW scheme did a good job in helping us gather invaluable data on our customers, but may not be sustainable over a long run. This is due in part to the fact that although we ask people to be Fair, not everyone is."

When fair is defined as "pay what you want", how do you define unfair?
> Known in real life as Luke Taylor

I don't quite know why, but I was struck by this phrase when I read the article. It almost seems to be saying something the definitions of our 'real life' identities as opposed to, or in addition to, our online personas. It's almost assuredly unintentional, but it made me pause to reflect for a moment.
Thanks for giving a bit more background and some nuances. If you were fleshing this out a some more (and give more sources), this could get interesting.

By the way, how do you account for the number of people willing to emigrate to the US, if it's such a bad place?
what is the key difference, for you, between a repository accessible with a tool like aptitude, apt or yum, and the apple appstore? just commercial apps? Because there are other reasons why commercial apps on Linux is a fairly small market.
Spynet
I would have to say I am less excited about the topics promised in Volume 4 (supposedly Combinatorial Algorithms, but way too much time in the Facicles is spent on explicit enumeration) than those found in Volumes 1 (Fundamental Algorithms), Volume 2 (Seminumerical Algorithms) and Volume 3 (Search and and Sorting). I grew up with "The Art of Computer Programming," but I think not all of the volumes are equal or have aged similarly. For example Volume 2 now can be seen to fail to anticipate a lot of exciting results in pseudo-randomness, quasi-randomness and de-randomization. On the other hand Volume 3 is, due to our current obsession with search, possibly even more exciting than the day it was new.
The problem with saying 'there is no extraterrestrial life because we haven't observed it and it would probably be here by now' is that there is always the first wave of lifeforms who would come to the same conclusion.

You could make a good case that we are part of this first wave:
-The stars created after the big bang would not have had any heavy elements and therefore wouldn't have had the resources to create life.
-These stars lasted ~10Bn years before they started to go nova (which creates the heavy elements for the next generation of stars)
-Based on our experience, it takes ~4bn years for life to evolve in a planetary system.
-Therefore the first lifeforms wouldn't appear until roughly 14bn years after the big bang.
-The universe is currently 14bn years old.
Hi folks. The reason why this presentation was so long is that it was actually a multi-hour presentation. It's actually three presentations in one.

We're going to split them apart when we get a chance and upload them in bits on slideshare.

Thanks for the interest!
if you work for long hours on a laptop without an external monitor and keyboard, you are asking for ergonomic trouble.

But buying an external keyboard and monitor, and making sure both are an appropriate height solves that problem.

To answer your question, I personally prefer a separate desktop system. It's marginally faster to set up, and more importantly, it means that I've got a backup when my laptop is out of commission.
I've been working with three different laptops for the last few months, and my conclusion is that it really depends on what you're doing. If you have a lot of license keys to juggle or finicky software that wants a very specific install environment, it's just plain easier to use one computer. And if you have tons of media sitting on Dropbox, it can take ages to do the initial sync after a reinstall, even if you're only using the 2GB free account. And my EEE 900's flash drive doesn't play well with Dropbox and turns the whole desktop into a nightmarish stop-start experience...so it's been relegated to being almost purely a web machine.

But apart from those things, my cross-computer experience has been pretty good.
Oops.. I really thought the article was going to suggest programmers to be nice to their cube neighbors !

You know, sometimes, personal hygiene gets ranked not to high on the to-do list :)
And Gandhi should have gotten the Nobel peace price. He wasn't without flaws --- but he showed how non-violent protest can work.
General population does not have this problem. They do not care about feature lists, MHzs of CPU, they do not count watts and do not carry replaceable batteries. They do not give a damn how open or how closed the ecosystem is.
Either device works for them or it does not.
I guess very few geeks get that, and Jeff is sure not one of them.
And it would be a mistake to think that Apple is going to release something along the lines of the slate MS presented at CES. The rumor goes, that Jobs has asked, what good the the new tablet device could do besides browsing internet in the restroom. I guess they are not going to release one if it does not have an answer to this question.
Except that in real life there are no distributions with support outside of a finite interval in space or time; there's always some point when you stop running the system...if some packets don't arrive by that point, you generally don't care how much longer they would have taken.
A through D are false even with respect to the US

Your statement is correct. My questions were asking for general information, and were not meant to imply anything about policy in the United States.

Having said this, I still think the US has one of the best visa policies in the world.

That's what I wanted to get a reality check about by asking my questions in the grandparent comment. I appreciate seeing your point of view.
Agreed; I've been doing pro bono SAT teaching in inner city schools since 2000, but nothing can replace one-on-one SAT tutoring, which I've never seen a grant for.
Which questions above were you linking to Canada by your reply?

I know for sure that Canada has a different immigration policy from the United States. Here I would be curious to know whether most hackers think that Canada's policies are easier on, harder on, or about the same as United States policies for would-be hacker immigrants.
Look Into My Eyes...
I did a lot of transatlantic flying this past year. I bought an acer aspire one, gave it 2gb of ram, bought a 9 cell extra battery, installed windows 7 ultimate and never looked back. Between both my batteries, I have 16 hours of constant laptop usage. It's enought to get me from barcelona to san francisco without a plug in.

I really couldn't be happier. I just never think about running out of power any more. And, I have a full dev box at my disposal that's lighter and smaller than most of the books I carry around with me to read.
The interface of cable TV is what makes me shy away from it. I've been bothered with it for years for several reasons.

First, how long does it take to find something you actually want to watch? I've seen many instances of flipping through a set of ~100 channels in search of something interesting. However, with frequent ads and no indication of what is on any given channel, it's easy to miss something worthwhile.

Second, channel numbers hold no significance. Channel #Z means station Y only through company X in region V. Figuring out the layout when I'm away from home is not worth my time.

Third, the provided "cable boxes" you can fork out extra money for each month are a poor excuse to improve the cable tv experience. Yes, they show what's on each channel, but paging only ten out of hundreds (including those you don't receive). What about a decent search feature? Some have a search, but input with a standard remote is awful. Include something with a QWERTY. Finally,they're slow. Waiting multiple seconds for every action should not be a common occurrence in this decade.

When the average Joe starts realizing these issues they've put up with for years, I have no doubt they'll follow the techies.
Real life situations have finite cutoffs in behavior that remove many pathological problems with certain statistical models.
A few months ago MIT's Technology Review (http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/22764/) said this could be in the market in 3-5 years, so it makes sense to see a product testing the waters and reaching out for early adopters at this point.
For E, I'd say around half, unless the distribution is very concentrated.
When I first read it quickly I thought it sounded a fair complaint, then I saw this comment and figured I should think again. On 2nd read I picked up the subtleties re: undocumented behaviour, reason behind the change & effect reverting it would have and yes, I think I agree after all.

Different 'bug', similar theme: I'd be v. interested to hear what HN folks think about http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=47494. I explained the problem here: http://insomanic.me.uk/post/191397106/php-htmlspecialchars-h...

Summary: PHP 5.3 introduces a scenario where:

display_errors=off, log_errors=on => warning msg is logged (but not displayed, of course..)
display_errors=on => NO warning is logged OR displayed(?!)

Took me ages to figure out, that one did..
I'd take the other side... but I can understand them choosing either way.

My vote for the other side is because php guys didn't document the change. Other pages show exactly what happens in strange cases - like in "If delimiter is an empty string (""), explode() will return FALSE." There's no mention about the change on http://php.net/manual/en/function.number-format.php and they list the result as "string" without any other notes. Making the function backwards compatible wouldn't hurt anyone either, because it would restore the behaviour for people using "" and would change nothing for ones using normal values all the time and ones who started casting to a number because of this change. But yes - it's pretty much php guys' call.
This is something I wrote that I just wanted to share with the folks here. It's my first attempt at longer, more descriptive/engaging writing. I hope you enjoy it (even if it might not be strictly "hacker news").
thank you all! More reading to do :)
It was a lie, a lie that came off the top of his head, to do the standard thing of belittling/dismissing the competition. If anyone really believes he's never touched an iPhone, I have floating mountains in Pandora I'll let you mine for unobtanium. (Just cause I've run out of bridges to sell.)

Yes, we all want Palm's webOS to work. Google's Android system is great for carriers - but it's already become painful for developers who can't just write once any more. webOS is the only other mobile platform that provides the certainty of user experience that iPhone OS does.

We all want Palm to make a goddamn touchscreen device that just works. An iPod Touch type device would be great, as Dan Frommer pointed out. It's not hard for Palm to do what they need to do; their first pass at the OS actually was up to par. They just need to fucking execute on making some goddamn devices.
Mexico did it.
A lie that may very well compromise his credibility, and that of his company. But i'll take some of that produce of yours ;-)
Google will dominate because we don't care. It's written in the text and I see it everyday with people moving to Chrome and all that.

That only works if we don't care and they're better than the alternative. If we don't care who handles our email, Google and Yahoo have to fight based on something other than brand name.

I think that the author makes a mistake when he talks about Google as being one thing. It's much more likely that it will brand itself with different names just like Pepsi having hundreds of brand without us knowing it.

Have they ever done that? What Google service do I use without knowing it's run by Google?
Ridiculous Yoda quotes aside...

Which "we" are you referring to? Your idealized American conservationist, Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians? Tibetans? Chinese? North Koreans? Australians? Indians? Nigerians?

There are many human cultures on our planet which haven't created bureaucracy preventing them from taking advantage of natural resources, and some of them are as technologically advanced as any other culture on our planet.
A bit unrelated to the discussion... but will anyone be surprised if they get a couple of cents more (or less) on their retirement?

From the report: "Each of those changes will have to be coded, tested, written-off, released, tested by the clients since this is tax data and has to be precise for tax planning and retirement planning."

From the documentation: "string number_format ( float $number [, int $decimals ] )"
Yeah, I think I should've made it more clear in the post.

Mainly I was thinking commercial app support (ie payment API) and user reviews/ratings. It bothers me that, AFAIK, for the longest time no one had thought of including some sort of user feedback or ratings for software in an apt repository.

I mean of course there are difficulties with getting consistency when you have many distributed repositories, but I don't think it's an insurmountable goal.

I love the fact that I don't really need to hunt through shareware sites for downloading various apps on Linux. But I still find myself going back to Google every time I try to gauge the quality of the app I'm about to download.
The UK, Canada and Australia all have skill-based criteria for immigration, as opposed to the US's focus on family reunification. The UK also offers permanent residence to anyone who's been in the country for five years legally, even of you were just studying.

Features like these are pretty appealing to hacker types.
Military Is Deluged in Intelligence From Drones
because we don't care.

Combining it with the adage "the best way to predict the future is to make it", the only way to stop Google from overgrowing is, then, to start caring. That is, however, quite hard to do considering they do mostly everything right and useful :(

C'est ca ou les gouvernements vont interdire telle dominance.
Wireless power from WiFi
It's probably leftover from some stage of human evolution where it minimized physical violence. Most people are vulnerable (including hackers); exploiting it can be a direct or indirect reproductive advantage, and so it may never evolve away. "good" vs "bad" is irrelevant if it's successful.
What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google
Full Spec Web Design
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Amazing Grace coined the term "bug"