skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Uh, yeah. That's somewhat obvious. How else would I have gained the weight? Magic?

Now comes the million dollar question: Why was I so hungry that I ate 470,000 extra calories? Could carbohydrate driving insulin driving fat explain it?

Homeostasis in the human body doesn't just fail without a reason.
"To put this into better context, the total current population of Europe and the United States is estimated to be 831m and 308m respectively." ? Say what ?
EU is maybe 450-500m - you can't accuse the EU of doing bad things in countries outside the EU.
I don't think this ridiculous self-referential trolling has any place on HN.
Except that the sampling distribution of the standard deviation is a scaled chi-square, not a normal. The central limit theorem is only for the mean, not any statistic that you might dream up. It's trivial to think of many that would not converge even with a windsorised response time.
Visualizing Your Commit History
It has nothing to do with supernaturalism; it's a parable of suicide by stupidity, made more explicit to make it clearer, at least to those without an ideological axe to grind.
Although these are useful tips and perhaps quite accurate, I don't know if you can truly hack status. I'm not sure what causes status - something reptilian, I guess - and I think that there's only so long that you can micromanage it before its true nature manifests. (Whether you are low-status and pretending to be high status, or high status and pretending to be low-status.)

How to fundamentally change your status identity is a more difficult question and one that I don't have the answer to.
Capoeira ? Or something else ?
Agree with Alex that heroism needs to be valued in the right way. When looking for a programming job, figuring out whether the manager values heroism in the right way is a great way of figuring whether they understand and value quality people and quality work. Many managers can't tell a good programmer from a bad one.
better beware or we'll have a re-run of this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1004592
I like how #8 and #10 seemingly contradict each other.
The mean is asymptotically normal and the standard deviation is asymptotically scaled chi-square; the distribution of every "meta"-statistic will be different.
The guy puts himself out there, so I respect him for that. His vibe also put me off, but he's got some seriously good points if you read past it. Besides, he's chilled out a lot since the earlier posts.

In this and a few other cases, the angry tone is a lightning rod that got more attention than a quiet "please guys, will you learn some stats?" If you have a better way to do it, then do it.
The Startup Visa proposals seem to be "Let's anoint a group of VCs or angels with the ability to decide who gets to come to the US", which I think opens the possibility for ahem corruption and gives a governmental or semi-governmental group the authority to pick winners in the market. If you just sold visas, it would just be another capital-raising barrier to hop over. No nonsense about "Must create 10 jobs" or "Must win the favor of a particular bureaucrat", just "Convince someone -- anyone -- that you're a good enough risk to put #{PRICE_OF_VISA} on the line."

You could also let the market price the visas for you if you want, via an auction mechanic or something similar.
I don't necessarily disagree with everything you said. What you describe is part of that complex indirection I mentioned. But at the end of the day it's not definitions of "customer" that matter so much as what kinds of incentives this triangle structure comprising service provider, user and advertiser actually provides to each party. (As far as definitions go you could just as well say that users are merchandise in this case)

There is clearly a vested interest on the part of service providers to make users hand over control of as much data as possible, no matter if it's good or bad for them. How convenient that all of a sudden society has changed its attitude towards privacy, and users now _want_ service providers to help them share share share everything with everyone else.

I wonder where Mr. Zuckerberg's sociological studies may lead us next. Maybe society changes again and users want Facebook to send product recommendations in their name? It's such a hassle to maintain all those friendships manually. Clearly, we need help in feeding our friends with fresh, valuable information every day! How about an automated Friendfeed? ;-)
The internet is filled with trolls. Period. Sadly, even in "intelligent" circles.
I'd second the recommendation. But avoid the manga guide to statistics - it's nowhere near as good.
I'd like to see borders disappear.

I'd like to see visas disappear.
Sorry, that's rubbish. It's the "advanced" statistical techniques that help you discover and control for these problems. Sure, a lot of people apply them incorrectly and without really thinking about what they're doing and what their results mean (Sod's law: 99% of everything is crap), but that doesn't invalidate their use.
But, in my humble opinion, fighting with lower price isn't good option (for anyone, in the long run). You should fight with features and/or better quality.
I want:

Many more examples contrasted with the equivalent imperative code.

Examples with elaborate data structures.

Implementation overview (current & objectives).

Benchmarks on a multicore.
> First off, prison labor hasn't been phased-out in the United States, quite the contrary; it's at an all-time high.

AFAIK, all labour in USA prisons is voluntary and paid (i.e. it is not part of punishment).

Most countries (including the USA AFAIK) also ban the use of prison labour for non-governmental work. If this requirement is removed, the government can recuperate much more money from prisoners (that they lose due to the cost of their incarceration).

> Secondly, three-strikes laws have proven to be completely effete at combating non-violent crime. Drug possession charges, which have seen the widest adoption of three-strike laws, have tripled since 1982. Meanwhile, violent crime has dropped steadily

All types of crime are related. A reason for the drop in violent crime may be an increase in incarceration of the number of drug users.
Don’t know about Singapore. It’s just a city state and a unique one at that. I’m not sure whether I would want to compare Singapore to anything.
This is not true. Fannie Mae has outperformed the rest of the private sector in terms of loan performance (non-delinquencies). The organization also lost market share throughout the bubble to private sector lenders, not the other way around.

http://real-estate-and-urban.blogspot.com/2008/09/charles-ca...
What he's saying is incredibly beneficial to himself. How convenient for him to say that no one cares about privacy after he took away that option from his users.
I know zsh has extremely good manpages, even for things like control structures (try zshmisc(1)), and it describes a lot of the differences between itself and bash or restricted sh syntax.
An answer of Why do you ask? is a common symptom of asking the wrong questions or not giving enough information.

Q: What's the best type of elephant to ride to work? African or Indian?
A: Why do you ask?
Q: My car's broken down. I need an alternate mode of transport.
A: Maybe you should try riding the bus?

I get this a lot with technical questions. Someone wants to use the wrong tool for the job, pose their question with the assumption that it's the right tool, and then get defensive when I ask for more information.
A Democracy of Netbooks
Users aren't the customers, they're the bait; they're what's used to hook paying customers, the advertisers. The only respect Facebook has for their bait is only as much is necessary to keep them on the hook; they aren't worthy of trust and they most certainly tolerate tons of scams on their users as long as they're getting their proper revenue from it.
There was a lot of good material there, but there has to be a better way to share this content than a 350-slide deck.
I don't know about anyone else, but when the homepage screams "portable" and I still need to add header includes to get it to compile (and the tests fail even then), I get worried.
Poll: Should there be guidelines against sensationalist titles?
I feel that this is a recurring issue on HN. For instance, I feel that the title for this article is pretty sensationalist: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1042793

Although this is largely subjective, I see two problems:

1. It rewards the organizations who use sensationalism rather than content to generate pageviews.

2. The quality of comments in such postings seems to be below the usual HN standards.

Does anyone else agree with me, or am I the only one who feels this way?
So the "one time" you have kids causes an immediate intense amount of pain, but for every moment thereafter, it's worth it?

No. Having kids is a strenuous process that takes 18+ years.
Oh - I did think of one: de-duping. So many news feeds have duplicate titles/syndicated content and it would be helpful to remove those except from a "trusted" source.
An update from VentureBeat - Apple tablet reps spotted at LA hospital

http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/01/09/apple-tablet-reps-s...
[2004]
>All types of crime are related. A reason for the drop in violent crime may be an increase in incarceration of the number of drug users.

Then please explain this relationship. I understand the connection between the drug trade and the violent crime, pertaining to the criminal element of the black market; but the notion that I'm buying weed today, raping/murdering tomorrow, is nonsense.

I'm not entirely certain these 3-strike laws even work for violent crime, when you consider they weren't widely used by prosecutors until the late 90s, at which point we had already seen steep drops in our violent crime rate. Regardless of whether or not a state has a 3-strike statute, you see a downward trend starting in or around '93.
This all seems laughably silly. Someone writes a blog post about statistics; there's lots of commentary about the author's grasp of statistics; someone points out two errors in the statistics; but now in actual fact they weren't errors, they were deliberate errors. So either the author doesn't have a good grasp of statistics, as evidenced by the mistakes; or the author does have a good knowledge of statistics and inserts mistakes into his articles so he can criticize the people criticizing his article. What a lovely mess.
Is it? I see "Mark only shares some of his Profile information with everyone." and the rest looks pretty locked down to me. Who are his friends? Where pics?
Doctors typically have to consider how likely a patient will be to follow through with their instructions. A recommendation of popping a fairly cheap pill each morning is more likely to be followed than 30 minutes of sun. This is the same reason doctors hand out pills for high blood pressure instead of insisting that patients lose weight and cut down on Sodium. It's sad that they have to rely on pills for everything, but human nature being what it is, the pills tend to be more effective.
It is a little odd that Schmidt seems to be channeling Andrew Jackson, who refused to renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States (emphasis mine):

"I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the Bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the Bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out and, by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out."
IU. Amazing how I don't look at the bottle.
Tex Source Code
The USD is functionally the reserve currency of the world; perhaps that is what he is referring to?
Customer Development and the Lean Startup
Ask HN: Any reason dead links can still be flagged?
It seems kind of pointless to be able to flag dead links to me, is there a reason why they can still be flagged? For example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1043082
Are you kidding? Facebook search sucks, they don't have monitors/alerts, or any kind of complex searching like Google. Google still owns search and plenty of us still use Google when looking for people because believe it or not, not everyone uses Facebook.
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Ask HN: Is there a A/B- or multivariate testing solution for Google Adwords ads?
I'm trying to optimize some Adwords campaigns, but with ads I don't really know how to tackle it. I love Google Website Optimizer and similar tools, so I was wondering if there are any solutions for Google Adwords ads?
The interesting thing with Y-Combinator is that it is by techies and entrepreneurs for techies and entrepreneurs. My experience in the European funding market is that there are not enough techies and entrepreneurs that have made good money, and therefor don't/can't invest themselves.

The funds in the UK and Sweden (where I have direct experience, as well as San Francisco) are handled by people who are one step away from entrepreneurship/tech stuff, which IMO means that the people handling the startup funds don't connect as well with the entrepreneurs.

In Stockholm, Sweden, we are seeing a lot more activity in the last couple of years, with investors/entrepreneurship support like STING <http://www.stockholminnovation.com/>; and Venture Cup <http://www.venturecup.se/>, but it is nothing like in California, or even Massachusetts.

The investors in Sweden are also too small to be able to handle investments at the scale the US investors do. And the investment market is fragmented over several European geographical locations. UK investors don't have good representation in Stockholm, for example.

It is harder for entrepreneurs to move to a different location in the EU where the suitable money is, than it is in the US. Y-Combinator used to make everyone come over to Cambridge/Boston for a while when working on the startup (maybe they still do). This is harder in Stockholm, than in Cambridge, Mass., where the cultural barriers for someone from say Portugal or Ireland, are higher. There seem to be no investment movement between the UK/Scandinavian market and Germany for example.

Furthermore, there are less available "exits" in European market, as most successful "exits" in the IT industry happens in the US. Which again makes things harder.

It is clear to me that the talent in the UK/Swedish market is there, but the infrastructure around the investments and the cultural barriers are higher, which makes it harder.
NRK collapsed due to buying US sub-prime mortgage deals. Buying them was a bad idea, and putting all its eggs in one basket was worse, but I think Schmidt is getting at the fact that these deals were available in the first place and no-one thought they were a bad idea. NRK is also small fry compared to Mae and Mac.

As for leverage/deregulation,

"So the banks are busy creating money and making a lot of money on that creation of money and the regulators were either, depending on your point of view, asleep at the wheel or did not have the tools to understand what was going on"
The regulated monopolies are on the distribution end, not on the generation end. The generation end is hour- (and day-) ahead markets. The data in question -- metering data in this discussion, is enough to do price fixing. Those utilities with distribution divisions gain enough of an edge over those who don't to gouge consumers and go all monopolistic competition on thier competitors at the same time. Both of which are actions that break market efficiency.

As for other commodity markets, im not super familiar with them, but I know in general price fixing and insider trading is illegal -- for good reason.

Also an interesting observation on electricity is that it is far more "ideal" than a lot of commodities, in that there is absolutely no way to distinguish between generator A electricity and generator B electricity (unlike say... corn). There is also not nearly the consideration about movement involved -- Put it on the wire and the whole system adjusts accordingly (this is a physics thing more than a "good system" thing (mostly, but the system is good too)).
You should have done A/B testing and also submitted this poll under the title: "Sensationalist titles killing hacker news". I bet you would learn a lot there... :P
But Zuckerburg says "if we were starting [FaceBook] now and we decided that [the default sharing of information now] would be the social norms now and we just went for it." wouldn't really get the message across..

Anyway, there's already a guideline:

You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it.

So editors are already rewriting headlines, and I've seen it done. Perhaps a compromise would be to extend that guideline to suggesting editors may edit actual headlines, although I'd be sad to see it since writing punchy headlines is an art. If the story were false or overly sensational, should we be voting it up?

So I vote no; let the votes gauge quality, not guidelines. But I'd have no big beef with HN moderators editing the headlines where they were over the top.
Metaprotocols: minimize restrictions on communication network evolution
Apple tablet reps spotted at LA hospital
Check out our service, 80legs, for help with your back-end web-crawling.

(My goal this weekend, and ongoing, is to get more users for 80legs!! :)
I feel there should be a rule against posters creating sensationalist titles when submitting, but titles reproduced from an article should only be edited in egregious cases. The Zuckerberg one is debatable since it’s not an actual quote.

While linkbait titles are increasingly popular on the web, we needn’t embrace the least common denominator.
How did you communicate the price increase to your customers? Do you think it's better to start with a price you consider high and then lower it if you don't get enough customers, or start with a low price and increase it?
Not too many people look at the site with 'showdead' on and I would hope that the flag link even when clicked would not lead to someone having to look at the item again.

It is an imperfection though, but by far not the largest.

My favorite gripe is that when your vote won't be counted you can still vote.
I posted this as I was reading Coders at Work.

Many of the people interviewed cite this as a great example of clean code. In addition, it is written in the Literate Programming style so I wanted to take a look and see what it was all about.
Has your attorney been an investor or successful business person other than just being an attorney? Whilst being an attorney can often give you great perspective and great vicarious experience, that doesn't necessarily translate to real-world experience as an entrepreneur. There are parables about listening to attorneys who offer business advice, you know...
The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun [video]
I would say it is common practice for large corporations but is it really that way for small startups? That hasn't been my experience; generally there aren't any attorneys at a small startup's board meeting unless the attorney is a member of the board.
Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate 1 Officially Available for Download
The Dictated Blog Post
The college admissions scam
Multicultural Critical Theory. At B-School?
this was on the homepage today:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1042336
Each of these 8 principles could also be applied to being a founder and building a startup. Take 5 minutes and check the video out.

1. Get Focused: Stop hiding who you are and turn up the volume

2. Get Focused: Start being intensely selfish

3. Be Creative: Stop following the rules

4. Be Creative: Start scaring yourself

5. Use Your Wisdom: Stop taking it all so seriously

6. Use Your Wisdom: Start getting rid of the crap

7. Take Action: Stop being busy

8. Take Action: Start something
I can't boil this down to three words, but "Make something that people who can spend money either want, or think is wanted by people--or pets, or perhaps robots--about whom they care."
Ask HN: Which tools you use to develop your webapp?
Which tools like IDE, editor do you use to develop your webapp? Paid ones as well as free ones. I am particularly interested in applications using frameworks like Ruby on Rails, DJango or CakePHP.
Even more important, they want to make sure the commercial pages on Facebook get traffic. The more public profiles there are with "I'm a fan of X" links on them, the more Google juice and traffic those pages get, and the more important they become to brands.

I'm happy to exploit their openness with my http://fanpageanalytics.com site, but I do think most people are unaware of how much is visible to web crawlers.
Emacs and firebug.
I don't know about highly skilled americans, but Europe's immigration policies seem to be no better for highly skilled asians.

P.S. - I'm an Indian.
I work for a company that has been trying to do something like this for at least a decade. Nurses and doctors are extremely reluctant to change - especially when it comes to something as important as ptient records. This is for various reasons (#1 being that no vendor has really tried to do it correctly), but by now the healthcare market is so set in their ways that it's going to take more than Obama's money and some Apple engineering to pull off the change.

The problem is that no one offers a complete system that "just works" from end to end. Think of how easy it is to sit down at a Mac and figure out how you get on the web and print a document. That same ease of use needs to apply to the entire patient monitoring chain: data acquisition, patient records, ICU visits, etc. Right now the market is saturated with companies too lazy to do it all themselves so they buy smaller companies that have done each piece well and spend billions and years trying to integrate it all. There is huge money spent, but only because the system has no other choice.

It would be a great sector for startups if you knew how to deal with the FDA.
Oh yes, that still looks like line noise and I still think it's about the worst possible first example I can imagine.
Ask HN: Clojure best practice for web applications?
Does anybody here have experience building a web application using Clojure?

I would like to be able to set up a mysql driven web application using clojure as the language to build it in, but I don't know where to begin to look for the 'best of breed' components to do this with.

This is my first foray in to the big and scary world of functional programming, a trial project to be followed by a much larger one.

Any pointers in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.