skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Particularly interesting should be the part about design by committee.

Remove Corba references, and it might apply to many other past and current pieces of technology:

"There are no entry qualifications to participate in the standardization process. Some contributors are experts in the field, but, to be blunt, a large number of members barely understand the technology they are voting on. This repeatedly has led to the adoption of specifications with serious technical flaws."

“Vendors respond to RFPs even when they have known technical flaws. This may seem surprising. After all, why would a vendor propose a standard for something that is known to suffer technical problems? The reason is that vendors compete with each other for customers and are continuously jostling for position. The promise to respond to an RFP, even when it is clear that it contains serious problems, is sometimes used to gain favor (and, hopefully, contracts) with users.”
"As I considered the number 600,000, the Fibonacci spiral came to mind."

Maybe I took this too literally, but 600,000 isn't a fibonacci number, and neither are 6, 60, or 600. Anyone have a better read on what he means by this?
Rapid Application Development: Go Native or Go Platform?
Interesting game, but I think, practically it's not as useful for memory training as, for example, chess. Because in case of chess, you're not only storing fixed combinations (debuts especially), but training your brain using and improving it.
I used Forth from 1983 to 1987, on the Atari 400. It was an awesome language.
Assume that you're sampling from a normal distribution with known standard deviation sigma (1 for simplicity) and unknown mean mu. To test if the mean is larger than (the null hypothesis) mu=0 you can check if the observed value is larger than 1.64 sigma (for the 95% confidence test). So if your observation is larger than 1.64 you reject the null hypothesis.

Your calculation would be correct only if the assumption "no false negatives" is approximately valid. This is the case when the true value is large in terms of sigma (say mu=6). Then for the 100 cases with mu=0 you'll reject the null 5 times on average, and for each one of the 100 cases with mu=100 you will reject the null (unless you're unlucky: there will be a false negative around once in 150000 trials).

But you're conditioning on p<0.05, not on p~0.05. It's easy to see that it's much easier to get p=0.05 if mu=0 (this is a 1.64 sigma event) than if mu=6 (it's a 4.36 sigma event). If mu=0, you will get on average 1 (out of 100) observation with 0.04<p<0.05 (i.e. 1.64<x<1.75). The probability of obtaining an observation on that range when mu=6 is very small (0.0004 out of 100). Almost 100% of the "discoveries" with p~0.05 will be false (when mu=6 you will get p-values around 1e-9).

When the true value of mu gets closer to 0, you cannot ignore the false negatives. For example if mu=0.1 the rejection rate will be quite similar to the mu=0 case (the probability of getting 0.4<p<0.5 is 1.2% and 1% respectively) and almost 50% of the "discoveries" with p~0.05 will be false.

Somewhere between the two extreme cases, there is a lower bound for this "false discovery rate".

See http://faculty.washington.edu/jonno/SISG-2011/lectures/sellk... and in particular figure 2.
I'd think the Google/Facebook/Netflix/etc. numbers is the market salary - it is somewhat known in the Valley that Netflix pays its engineers around $375k, mostly cash, for example.

What goes unsaid though is that there's a lot of silly hoops that have to be jumped through to get that salary at many of these companies (bad interview processes, companies realizing that actually wanted X skills for a position instead of Y, etc.).

It would all depend on your skills though. I once turned down a $350k-400k opportunity myself in the area and ended up taking a significantly less amount in favor of more vacation, flexible hours, and much less stress.
I had a long discussion with my old supervisor last week about the merit of a PhD (in Biology, Physiology, Pharmaceutics and that genre of field) and she mentioned to me that she doesn't recommend students pursue them anymore.

It was a sad conversation but not surprising. So many students, myself included, invest such significant portions of their lives pursuing a level of education that statistically won't be useful for them or society.

There are no jobs available, funding is drying up and specifically theres an over supply of PhD qualified researchers out there. Thats not to say doing a PhD isn't a bad idea, but from an academic persective there are better alternatives. Especially in the biology field.

After the 7-10 years it takes to pursue a PhD one could become a clinical specialist, employed with arguably better working conditions and research prospects.
firmware, boot loader, 1980's text editors.

As for libraries: Usually that boils to "No."

To quote: "The conventional approach, enforced to a greater or lesser extent, is that you shall use a standard subroutine. I say that you should write your own subroutines." (http://www.forth.com/resources/evolution/evolve_1.html)
Caviar Is Cavalier About Privacy
Also: http://fdareview.org/

"Medical drugs and devices cannot be marketed in the United States unless the U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) grants specific approval. We argue that FDA control over drugs and devices has large and often overlooked costs that almost certainly exceed the benefits. We believe that FDA regulation of the medical industry has suppressed and delayed new drugs and devices, and has increased costs, with a net result of more morbidity and mortality. A large body of academic research has investigated the FDA and with unusual consensus has reached the same conclusion. Drawing on this body of research, we evaluate the costs and benefits of FDA policy. We also present a detailed history of the FDA, a review of the major plans for FDA reform, a glossary of terms, a collection of quotes from economists who have studied the FDA, and a reference section with many webbed links. A more detailed table of contents follows. We are happy to receive comments and criticisms."
IMHO, it is more so that one can see multiple windows without messing around with tabbing.

When dealing with desktop publishing as a technical writer, I frequently need multiple application windows, a terminal window or two, a client window for the app, my editing program and it's attendant windows, and several misc application to support my work (eyedropper, wireshark, screen cap, gimp, a text editor).

Three monitors would be ideal, but I just don't have the space on my desk. I'm considering a triple wall-mount, another monitor, and rearranging my space so the desk is pushed up to the wall.
It's really stupid to argument on fundamental issues based on the elocution skills of famous people but that sounds like the video discussed here

http://evolutionwiki.org/wiki/Dawkins_could_not_give_an_exam...

Creationists are an extreme example of the psychological finding that brains are excellent at amplifying the currently held beliefs no matter which data it is fed by cherry picking just the notions that support the belief system.

The corollary of this is that it is pointless to argument with creationists.

Once I understood this cherry picking done automatically by brains I realized that lots of popular religious material is probably not created by malicious omission of facts but by just simply ... processing information in academically non-rigorous manner.

Like editing video to convey the message the original authors wish to convey, for example.
The article was looking for multihost too which is why I mentioned it.

There are some non kernel sockets implementations, but it is less of an issue as every kernel implements them, but kdbus is not implemented anywhere yet. It is also not possible to implement correctly in userspace as the security guarantees rely on a kernel, which is inconvenient. It is unlikely eg FreeBSD will ever implement it.
patch cables
Not to digress from the point of the blog post, but that is one truly fantastic logo that Boundary has.
What are you thinking of as modern systems? In my experience, Palmer or Zaner-Bloser fails much worse at speed than chancery italic -- tending towards very similar loops :)

After college, my handwriting (Zaner-Bloser, as taught in elementary school) had deteriorated into a completely illegible scrawl. I taught myself to write again, using Arrighi's Operina and Briem's commentary. If I were homeschooling my children, I'd probably use either Getty-Dubay or Barchowsky.
>Science cannot nor does it claim to be something one can use to acquire certainty about anything

I have heard this too. Although I still fail to grasp how one can hold that view, which shows thought, critical thinking and analysis, then argue that a book written / made up / dictated too by God / added to / amended / edited over the last few thousand years is held up to be something that can gives us certain. Which is the complete opposite of the thinking they put forward with regards to science.
I think he was just thinking about numbers in general to get ideas, and Fibonacci was one that he knew by name, so it came to mind.
Maybe he's looking at the number 6 and seeing a spiral?
The 1401 wasn't a mainframe. It was a smaller computer designed to replace unit-record systems and was, in fact, sometimes used as a mainframe peripheral.

The mainframe of the era was something in the 7000 or 700 series, I think.
Valid points.

We use a 'monorepo', so everytime we update any gem dependency, all of our apps get rebuilt entirely. So, updating all of our packages or not isn't a problem.

And I like the duplication, believe it or not. After having debugged environmental problems with dependencies in various languages over the years, I'm happiest knowing the dependencies in question are in vendor/bundle; end of story. Sometimes, in case of a nasty bug, I have a one-liner fix and I can go to vender/bundle, tweak the gem, and know I only affected the app using it. Those are things I prefer over some lost hard drive space.

Build times are a little long for us, though. That is true. I do a fresh bundle install on every build. That is the second longest part of the build, behind running our dog slow web tests.
That's really amazing. I never cease to stumble upon or be shown something awesome each day. This is far more elaborate than anything I would have ever imagined but wow. What a brilliant playground for makers and players. Should introduce this to our local geek club. Pretty sure they'd enjoy this thoroughly.
Religious "fact"

;-)
Is that really new ? The Biology teachers when I was at school were much better than those for other science subjects, the Biology ones had all done research but had gone into teaching as there were few other jobs available.
Agreed. Maybe I didn't make my self clear. I'm saying that we have example of successful startups under any condition imaginable.

I never said it was easy or that *chances are on your side, if this [...] and that [...]. If that was the case everyone would be building Apple-like companies from their garages but we have only one, Apple.
I've read that the best way to rewire your brain at an old age is to always learn new things. This keeps brain cell activity high and stimulates the creation of new synapsis
I've heard good things about Factor - another stack-based language, which is more high-level than Forth, but I've never used it.
اللجوء+من+الموت+الى+الموت
The Freeware WMI Tools for Sysadmins and Network Pros
The results of a blind test would be very interesting.
China and Russia are cross-indexing hacked data to target U.S. spies
But don't you generate the test input from what your test ends up accepting? I don't see the point.
Automatic filtering of ghost (spam) traffic.
How does the cost of Mac Pro's compare with more traditional servers?
It feels good to know that great people like Mark Twain also happened to create unpopular games, no matter how well thought out it was.
I used to use sqitch. It drive me mad, it wants to do too much. I have got for version control, I don't need sqitch to do it as well. And it doesn't play nice with other developers. If you add migration a in one branch, and someone adds migration b in another, then they merge theirs before yours, you're in for a world of pain whne you try to delpoy yours.

In the end I wrote a replacement that did was I needed in under 100 lines of perl. DB management should be simple. No point over complicating it

Not forgetting the guy who writes it is not that friendly, we sent a patch to change the default answer to revert to no, instead of yes. First off he said it was useless, then after some prodding over several months he copied it in and committed it in his name, no mention of where it came from. Real classy
The duplication is less of an issue in the corporate, one application per VM environment. However, my focus isn't solely on that. Web applications are really hard for most people to self-host. They are made a bit easier by things like OmniBus packages that bundle absolutely everything, which makes the user dependent on each application author to ship security fixes to software they didn't write.

There's also the issue of stateful package managers that can break in the middle of a package install and you're screwed. Most of the time that doesn't happen, but I've been bitten before. So the fpm approach is a great short-term win and I want to roll it out to the production systems at work soon, but in the long term I think we need functional package management to make our systems more resilient to failure.
Using cgit
Why I Switched to Cloudways After DigitalOcean
“If you didn’t give the soldiers your Facebook password, they would beat you, destroy your phone or worse,” Mr. Aljasem said.

xkcd was right https://xkcd.com/538/
Benchmarking MongoDB, RethinkDB and Virtuoso
Yes, and bureaucracy never petitions for less bureaucracy. Only more. And we see this in multiple areas, and not just the FDA.

FDA bureaucracy equals more people dying because of slowness.

FCC bureaucracy equals regressive rules on radio transmitters and receivers, contrary to what the people in the field actually use/do.

FAA bureaucracy leads to idiotic laws on quadcopters/drones/personal UAVS that affect the landscape of the technology to the point where uploading a video to youtube is "against the law".

Patent law/USPTO bureaucracy leads to inane patents like XOR patent, "Slide to Unlock", fillet and round design patents (patent a 1/4 circle), One-click, and other patents that are glaringly obvious to anyone in the field. Yet, these enact heavy transaction fees; that is if the companies play along.
Business Lessons You Can Learn from Steve Jobs
Nice thanks. I've read the first chapter on online learning - that's close to a problem I have - I think it's very well written, but what happens when assumptions fall (e.g. convexity) is left for the reader to guess (which is ok, it's just my obsession)
They are more expensive, if you look at mac mini hosting services and compare then to linux you'll see that. But it says that they used them for the graphics processing only. And used "traditional servers" for the other services.
KeyRaider: iOS Malware targets over 225,000 Apple accounts
Its sad to see that the piano is dying culturally. If i believe a dealer I met just 6 months ago, Steinway makes less than 500 a year. Its a dying form and its going the way of the dodo bird.
Since then, XML webservices have Risen and Fallen; JSON seems to have just peaked, with the complex, XS-like JSON schema seeming to finally gain traction.

The cynical common wisdom was that people happily adopt a new simpler technology, until they finally understand the problem... and to address it, the new technology must become just as complex as the old one.

The article's main point, about non-competitive standards-setting is a good one, but can only work for non-competitive technology. This is happening to some extent, as infrastructure is commoditized as a complement.
The reason is more men are leaking. Unless you think this a good thing then this is not progress. We would not think we are making progress in equalising gender differences in life expectancy by bumping off little old ladies.
I will call your digression and raise with a further digression: there really seems to be an abundance of these cloud metric startups now. It's quiet bewildering to think the trivial python scripts I wrote in '09 to gather server and application stats (tomcat) could've been the basis for one of these. If only I'd had the vision.
You seem to be confusing the degree of critical thinking that goes into making the original claims about science and the Bible with the critical thinking required to report what claims are made for each. The former differs between science and the Bible, the latter does not.
For a related article concerning this sort of market microstructure and the behavior of its participants, see this post by Matt Levine: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-01/apple-had-a...

I especially liked this quote: "The equity market is set up to dampen small movements (market makers tend to buy when others are selling), to exacerbate mid-size movements (as market makers capitulate and stops get triggered), and to dampen large movements (as circuit breakers cut off trading and let algorithms catch their breath)."

From my layman's point of view, it seems like this sort of "system behavior" is a peculiar emergent property that derives from the rules of the system and the individual actions of the actors working under those rules.
You should do a "Show HN" submission to let people
know that you want feedback on your project or startup. The "Show HN"
submissions get listed under the "show" link in the top menu and the
rules for doing a "Show HN" submissions are here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
right. But since I can lever anything, leverage as a factor is irrelevant. I could also lever this portfolio and get 100%. The point is you need to compare apples to apples, not apples to oranges.
Does playing chess improving memory unrelated to chess gameplay?
Concepts to Simplify and Gratify Engagement on Social Media
My new favourite password generator is now http://fent.github.io/randexp.js/#r=%5B%5E%5Cs%5D%7B16%7D&i
An Open Letter to Notch: Building a Non-Asshole Tech Culture
That's not my question. My question is, if it would happen at a detailed scale (i.e., anything more than can be communicated in ad-hoc conversations), how likely is it that this could be kept under wraps?

My point being, of course, that I think that's highly unlikely, given how apparently even a US president can't stop the world from finding out that he fingerbanged a single intern. Therefore, the most logical conclusion would be that it doesn't happen. To all those saying it does: why isn't there proof of it? (please no 'the landing on the moon didn't happen' tinfoil hattery)
Persistent (a Haskell database library) does something like this, in a highly declarative way. You just declare your tables and their columns as Haskell data types, and when it compiles your application it automatically migrates your database if it can do so non-destructively. If your change would destroy data or requires a default value for a new non-null column or something, it will give you an error message that tells you what you need to do.

It's by far the best experience I've had working with a database in a programming language. Only problem is that it's Haskell specific, not portable to other languages.
It's worth noting that people applying the Bible have claimed certainty about things and then reversed their position quote a lot, too (certain dates for the end of creation are the most dramatically obvious case, though there are certainly cases of other factual and moral beliefs drawn with supposed certainty from the Bible that have evolved over time, as well as examples of such beliefs where people claiming certainty based on the Bible have offered different answers to the same question at the same time.)

So the lack of consistent certainty is not a differentiator between science and the Bible.
I have used it for several projects.

I have written a Chrome extension[1] using it which has a thousand or so users.

I use it to make in house visualizations / web based user interfaces for commodities trading. In this use case being able to have statically checked rpcs (via autowire + some modifications) and share domain objects / business logic between client and server really helps keep things DRY & statically checked.

Currently, as a hobby project, I am using it to work on a video game built on top of phaser.js.

As a long time Scala programmer I would strongly recommend it. It's amazing being able to re-use all your domain objects between server and client, and get great performance on both sides.

1: https://github.com/benjaminjackman/looty
Poor U.S. If only it wasn't perfectly okay with insecure systems as long as they also benefited from spying on them.
PyDev of the Week: Kenneth Love
Yeah, even the original quote is "The plural of anecdote is data"

http://evidence-based-science.blogspot.ie/2009/11/plural-of-...

If it wasn't, where would data come from?
I'm guessing: 1's and 0's. Remember a plane was a bitslice through a word.
Tips and Tricks of JavaScript
I often wonder if I'm idiot too or experiencing the DK effect.
> Sure, and abductive reasoning can be formalized in certain modal logics with Kripke semantics.

No, it can't. Abductive reasoning is probabilistic modelling, and notably, there's a line of research by Cristian Calude showing that you can soundly, non-paradoxically place probabilities on Halting questions.

(Computational tractability is still an obstacle with his current approach, but it has been shown not to generate paradoxes, which is already a major step forward.)

>you might want to take a look at Gödel, Escher, Bach, where Hofstadter discusses how the second incompleteness theorem applies to Turing machines.

This is backwards: halting problems and Kolmogorov complexity for Turing machines give us the two Incompleteness Theorems for proof systems, via Chaitin's Incompleteness Theorem.

Which also neatly gives a way around the Second Incompleteness Theorem: a hierarchical-probabilistic reasoner can create an abstract, compressed model of themselves which consists of small-enough amounts of information that they can reason about its behavior without becoming subject to Chaitin Incompleteness.
Our Accelerating Future
Hey Belle. I'm following your content marketing posts at Ghost blog. It's inspiring. Tks
Your current investment will be doubled (at least) in value if you use scala-js, and the extra effort is minuscule compared with learning Scala.

I have used it in closed-source production and its awesome!
What's wrong with Facebook?
Can guix be used somewhat like virtualenv?

I'm not sure I want to install guix on my main Archlinux box, as I don't want conflicts with the existing libraries and applications, but I would very much play with it if it were possible to do something like this:

guix virtualenv myapp
cd myapp
guix activate
guix install postgres # installs a local postgres installation available only on this "environment"
guix environment -l myapp.scm # install app dependencies
<do work>
guix deactivate

This would be a killer feature for me and I would ditch virtualenv, pip, npm, perhaps Docker in a heartbeat.
Directly clicking worked for me (I have no subscription).
`say` reminds me of the *SAY command that came with Superior Software's Speech! program for the BBC Micro. Software-only speech synthesis on an 8 bit micro with limited sound hardware was very impressive!
This only proves your Java developers were stupid and arrogant; using RollingFileAppender or something even smarter would be the norm in any sufficiently functional organization, regardless of whether developers anticipate the need or sysadmins need to ask.
Having those what-ifs is a sign you're got some good ideas - we'll see the right ones at the right times.
Coinbase expands to Canada
If anyone misses a demo:
http://jsfiddle.net/n3dgjLo5/