skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "maximum number" is a statistic both of a population and of a sample drawn from said population. As the sample size goes up, the sample statistic will converge to the population statistic, due to the Law of Large Numbers. Because serial numbers are natural numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) they are uniformly distributed from 1 through N-hat (the population maximum), and the convergence of the sample statistic to the population statistic will scale inversely to the sample size.

Let's take the example in the order it was given in the article: 117, 232, 122, 173, 167, 12, 168, 204, 4, 229

First step we would project the maximum to be 117 + 117 / 1 - 1 = 233. Or, if we drew 1 sample from the population, we would expect the "maximum" to be the average case -- the population mean. We take a minus 1 because there's a degree of freedom lost in using the maximum twice in the same formula (handwaving a bit, but that's a straightforward enough answer for now).

With the second case, we have 232 + 232 / 2 - 1, or 347. We would intuitively expect two cases to effectively be distributed evenly across the population, or at 1/3 and 2/3. (The statistics is a bit different due to the MAX operator here, but I won't go into that).

With the third case, we have 232 + 232 / 3 -1 = 309. Note that while this statistic is still higher than the actual population statistic, it is still converging due to the additional case that helps us counterbalance the weight of the previous unusually-high sample case we observed.

Does that help?
Date 2008.
No thanks for, kudos to, or mention of sama... curious.
I knew a guy that grew his own opium to manage his pain. He went to work every day, was never late, did his job, was good to his family. He managed his doses well. Was he addicted?

What do you mean exactly when you say "the actual substance is addictive"? Does it contain addictaniolol? What you are saying makes no sense. People are either prone to be addicted to a substance or they aren't. Blaming the substance doesn't help anyone and it means nothing.

If "the actual substance" were actually addictive, as you seem to believe, then every person without exception would be addicted to it after one try. Clearly that isn't the case, therefore there is nothing inherent in opium, nor any other drug, that makes itself addictive.
And the article linked with evidence uses the term SJW.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/202080/origin-of...

Might want to cut on the Flavor-Aid.
The antennas nominal gain applies only in the direction of the main lobe, ie. not towards your head.
A typical Yagis strongest sidelobe will be well into the negative dB.

Also, both the consumer hardware 100mW limit and the 4W PTP limit are EIRP (in the US; apparently; I'm from Germany), so the gains don't matter.
And you achieve them with very directional antennas (which are hard to aim by hand), not with a strong transmitter.

Radio range is not the problem at all when aiming by eye - because your target is small, it's line of sight, and the pilot is likely not using a very strong transmitter and a very directional antenna.
I'm not sure you're allowed to call that a pivot.
How to use software engineer salary data to boost your career
Well I am going to a hack-a-thon competition tomorrow which is similar to a meetup in my opinion.
I am actually stepping away. You can think most clearly when unattached.
Ask HN: Node.js for complex and long living software?
Every once in a while I've been wondering is Node and JavaScript feasible to create complex and long living applications?

Not only SAP and other behemoths, but complex web applications like online banking and other similar business-critical system. I'm sure the tech can do it, and the asynchrony pays off in performance in some applications.

ES6 is adding classes that will make JavaScript more familiar to developers from other languages. But the field moves so fast that I think even the most skilled JS developers of today are writing something that will be horrid legacy in 2020.

Most "Success with Node" case studies emphasise performance and the applications themselves tend to be rather limited in functionality. All technologies move forward, but the JavaScript world seems very unstable at this point.

Is there some unique advantage that Node can offer over the more traditional languages like Java, ASP and PHP that are more mature?

Or is it just better to leave JS for integrations and other simpler tasks. For now, that is.
Binge Surfing – generate surfing activity
"I'm ad tolerant, but the ads Twitter show me are always useless. The ads have zero relevance to me, my profile, my twitter stream, the people I follow, etc etc. I have no idea where Twitter gets information about me, but it doesn't seem to come from Twitter."

I am very interested in this ...

We did a (roughly) 6 month long experiment here (rsync.net) in advertising on twitter - on paper it seemed like a very good idea:

- Target very specific linux/unix/backup/ZFS keywords - really low volume, hyper specific stuff - and show our rsync.net sponsored tweet.

Two things happened:

1. Zero actual results - nothing at all that could be quantified.

2. TONS of garbage/fake followers/retweets/favorites.

We tried. We couldn't make it work at all. Not for real, targeted customer acquisition. If you're pepsi and you just need people to see the word "pepsi" I'm sure it's great, but if you need to pay X and get Y customers ... difficult to see how you make that work.
Thank you, Garry Tan.

Garry is one of the nicest, most helpful people I know. 5 years ago, he took a meeting with us, even though we had a barely functioning prototype, and helped us prep for our YC interview. After our first meeting, he even offered to meet up again. I was blown away by how generous he was with his time. We got into YC and he’s been an incredible advisor ever since.

He’s one of the few people I like to think of when I think of Silicon Valley at its best. He genuinely loves product and the creation process. He’s hugely helpful and he’s a great person, through and through.

Look forward to seeing what he does next!
>It's been a great time and I wanted to thank everyone for being awesome. PG, Jessica, Trevor, and RTM have built an enduring organization and I can't wait to see where my friends and partners take it.

Based on that line, I'd say he is stepping away from YC. The " I can't wait to see where my friends and partners take it"- He excluded himself.
> So Google is officially making its stand as Dart being the future of Android (the Swift of Android?).

It's almost never accurate to use "Google" as a singular noun. We are a very large company, and teams are given much wider latitude than at most other companies, so there is rarely a single official "voice" representing what Google is doing.

Instead, you have a lot of teams each working to make the best thing they can. Some of these projects overlap, sometimes they coordinate, occasionally they even compete with each other. Google is big, and the world is even bigger. There's a lot of room for different solutions to problems.
Stop Sleeping on SMS Marketing – or 2 very good reasons to text customers
Here is one comment from Reddit to get you started:

"Express is the most popular web framework, but the repo is stale. Koa.js, the successor praising itself as "next gen" is a fucking mess as soon as you have anything more complex than rendering a template. Callback hell has better error handling than promises and generators, but it's next gen so we use try/catch for control flow now." -- https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3rrh9z/javascr...
Birdshot is mostly harmless outside its effective range.
Maybe security is not something you can just solve so easily, even for a kernel developer, it requires a lot of efforts in many many areas. I don't think it's his job, and I don't think he could have a big effect on linux security. It's up to people writing software that use the kernel to have good security practices.
You have to sacrifice a cat to find out.
It better be awesome for $24,000 per year per terminal (last I checked) ;)
Note to self: when manufacturing tanks, use UUIDs as identifiers, not sequential integers.
They are identifiable, I believe they say "promoted tweet" in close proximity to said promoted tweet
That doesn't appear to be the case. From the second paragraph of the linked article:

>In an interview with Wired magazine, Snowden said the elite NSA hacking unit, called Tailored Access Operations, accidentally cut off Syria’s internet while attempting to infiltrate it.

This [1] appears to be the interview the article is referencing.

Either way, Snowden is 100% responsible for everything that is revealed regardless of whether it was revealed by himself directly or a journalist with which he shared the information. You can't just pipe secret information through a journalist to absolve yourself of leaking that info.

[1] - http://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden/
I remember reading a LISP book from the 80's that gently bragged about how all the legacy C code would have to be rewritten after upcoming operating systems moved beyond identifying files by a tree of folders, but that your LISP code would be future proof.
So? Nobody says that you're supposed to claim they're breaking the law. You're just pointing out a company abusing the law.
"micro-app", a landing page you have to download from an app store. What a stupid idea.
As per my other comment above/below - I think he's basically handled it as well as he could under the circumstances. Most of what's come out is pretty much targeting nefarious and/or potentially illegal practices. I think his actions have been - and hopefully will continue to be - a positive force for change.

But - yes, he chose to release that material. If, for instance, the journalists released something irresponsible that, say, led to deaths of people, that's still part of a chain of events that leads to him and his decision.

I'm glad he did what he did, and so far things seem to have gone ok, and I can't imagine the stress and pressure he's under.
the prosecutors must prove to a very high standard that you do actually know the key, and haven't really forgotten. For instance if you typed in the password the day before you were arrested, that's probably a good sign you know it.

I've had a few occasions where, after 2+ months of using a password at least 5 times a day, I roll into work and just can't login. I still know the password I used when I was 9 and dialing into AOL, but my work password rotation policy is so strict I just don't have long term storage for them anymore. I mostly rely on muscle memory the current password too.

So, all that was to say I don't think that standard is "very high" at all.
Garry, what about Quora? Will you still be active there? I am a bit of your fan on there..
Wow, that's a pair of shoes that will be very hard to fill. Enjoy your rest and I'm really curious what you'll be doing next.
This is one of those cases where what you are saying, exactly isn't quite what the other person hears. Sort of like how if you speak of a "real american" most people assume you are a racist regardless of your actual intent.

Maybe it's not what you are saying, but what I hear (and I think this is likely commonly heard) is "formal education makes you better" in the same way that a British person of 100 years ago might have said that being of good birth makes you better.

At that point, it sounds to me mostly like a class division, e.g. your parents had the time and money to educate you in ways that won't provide returns in terms of your own income.

I mean, I'm not saying that's what you are saying or even what you meant to say. I'm just pointing out what it sounds like to a group you probably have little contact with.

Further, as someone who is a fan of things like history and philosophy, aside from, well, being more entertaining to me, I don't think you can form a coherent argument that a person like me who knows a lot about the history of philosophy is "better" than a person who knows a lot about the history of, say, American Football or ice hockey.

I mean, it's a cultural marker, that's for sure; I'm much more likely to want to be around the philosopher than the sports fan, but is the philosophy fan better in any meaningful sense? I'm going to say no.
I don't think it's just the patent system, the network effects many startups are chasing are just "natural" monopolies.

Zero-to-One is essentially Thiel setting down the fact that everyone should be on the hunt for rent seeking monopolies, since these are the only things that make enough money to be worthwhile from a VC standpoint.
That's the problem: price and availability. It only challenges Xeon in raw numbers, but $/performance matters a lot especially at scale. If I were building a data center I'd choose more slightly slower CPUs if the total power per $ were higher. Energy use maters a lot too.

The only niche I can see for a platform that offers maximum performance per-machine at a huge price premium is hard-to-parallelize and legacy applications that need reliable maximum performance in a single box. That's not really that big of a niche these days.

If IBM wants to launch this they're going to have to take a loss to prime the pump: sell the chip at cost or even slightly below cost to get it out there into the market and get people using it. Otherwise it's going nowhere.
Obligatory Jared Dunn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1vfXoUNDYA
Mancy version 2 released.
Feature documentation: https://github.com/princejwesley/Mancy/wiki/Version-II
I don't know Garry super well but in our few conversations I found him to be one of the smartest and most generous founders I've come across.

Enjoy the time away, Garry!
Unfortunately it does sound an easier sell, I hear the frustrated screams of future developers being birthed.
They are useful if you're resampling them or editing them, but I doubt that's something consumer music services are overly concerned with.
IN that case the police didn't need any special surveillance powers. They were being approached by children who said "I am being repeatedly gang raped by men who have groomed me with money and drugs, and who are now selling me as a child prostitute"; and by sexual health clinics who were providing abortions and STI services to children; and by teachers; and by social workers.

Those police did nothing with that information.

It's a reasonable point: Why do they want these extra powers when they've failed to protect so many vulnerable children?
"I'm a tech worker in Glenwood Springs, CO. This is their muni option (50Mb/100Mb/250Mb symmetrical for $70/$105/$175 respectively)"

Does Aspen have a similar service ?
I've used Twitter to meet like minded people, however, I think the main distinction is that I don't use Twitter (in general) for interactions with people I met outside of the Twitterverse
The messiah complex is certainly something astounding to witness. Their jabs at Gentoo users are ongoing, I see.

networkd not supporting 802.11 is actually reassuring to hear, though.
The fact that flutter exists doesn't really change my view that I don't believe that Google is pushing it. Flutter to me seems much more of a "Hey, let's get some brilliant people at Google on a fun, hard project" than something Google sees as the future.

I agree, though, that Google has somewhat more of an incentive to build stuff cross platform than Apple does. Google wants you to access their services from any device, while Apple makes almost all their money from the devices themselves.
That right there is your bad assumption: That self-declared Christians have anything remotely resembling "shared values".

Take two random self-described Christians and have them write down, "what would define a 'true Christian'" and you'll get two completely different sets of answers.

All religious beliefs are personal. Every member of every religion will pick & choose which tenets, sacred verses, etc that they want to believe and only believe in those things. No one agrees 100% on every little detail and only "extremists" follow their religions to the letter.
The author's condescending tone is not sufficient to disguise this long advertisement for Josephine, another app whose business model asks us to pretend that laws don't exist.
Administrate – Create beautiful admin dashboards in Rails apps by thoughtbot
It's fairly easy to obfuscate the source of coins. There are "laundering" services where you can send a bunch of coins and they will redistribute them randomly mixed with others who use the service.

Even if you could reliably follow them all, what agency would keep track of which coins are "tainted"?

For an amount of money this small, it's just not practical. Even for the many thousands of coins stolen from MtGox, tracking them is not practical.
Obama rejects Keystone XL project, citing climate concerns
It would be lovely to have a POWER8 board with ATX form factor.
This also matters for user visible ids in applications, like user ids, etc. It's really easy to say your competitor has only 2000 users if you sign up to their service and your id is 1992.
From the OP:

> (Incidentally, I think that representing all these different concepts as a single string type is a mistake. Human-readable text, file paths, SQL statements, and others are all conceptually different, and this should be represented as different types at the language level. I think that having different conceptual kinds of strings be distinct types would eliminate a lot of bugs. I'm not aware of any language or standard library that does this, though.)

There are many sub types which can be constructed from strings. Most languages treat at least following as special types that can be constructed from/to strings:

* numeric types (integer, float, etc)
* regular expressions
* file paths
* dates
* XML
* JSON

The real absence is SQL. It is shocking how such an apparently old standard has no stdlib parsing support.

Until one realizes there is no such thing as "Standard SQL". Any sufficiently visible "SQL Parser" project eventually will be buried in a sea of vendor-specific edge cases.
This reminds me of a popular German graduation prank. Three goats are set loose in a school building. However, before the goats are released, the students paint the numbers 1, 2 and 3 on them to facilitate an orderly recapture procedure.
base 57
so let's say I am being attacked by the first wave of tanks the Germans have fielded. The wave consists of 10 tanks, but from the first batch of tanks produced.

1,5,6,9,12,15,18,20,21,25

how did the allies double check that their sample was not skewed as I described?
Square’s valuation takes a $2bn hit in IPO – but investors don’t care
Hype to usefulness ratio of 1000:1
Twitter Rooms: a product design proposal for Twitter
Yeah, I'm baffled as to how this is legal. Surely there's no way to ensure food safety.
The one thing I did to boost my productivity
> ...before the yanking takes place.

I take it that you are advocating for typed strings in addition to fully-formed types for things like URLs and SQL, but I think all that will lead to is a lot of gratuitous casting of strings just so they can be passed to the fully-formed types. Furthermore, few of these casts could be statically checked for validity.
or a platform for 3D-rendering of motivational posters driven by the information in the CMS
Haha, I love Quora too. Yes, will do my best to help there.
It's not "add a tenth":

> For example, let’s say 10 tanks were captured

It's "add 1/n" where n is the number you collected.

Think of this related problem. Numbers are randomly chosen from 1 of 2 ranges. One range is from 0-10, the other is 0-100. The numbers are:

4 3 1 8 5 2 7

Which range were the numbers chosen from? It could be either, but statistically the answer would be from 0-10, since if they were chosen from 0-100 the chances of all of the numbers being lower than 10 is very low.

Now, say you didn't know the ranges ahead of time, and the numbers were:

117, 232, 122, 173, 167, 12, 168, 204, 4, 229

Now, the upper bound can't be 100 or 200, since there is a 232. So it is at LEAST 232.

Which is more likely, that the upper bound is 256, 500 or 1000 ?

Intuitively you can assume that if it was 500+, you would expect at least one number in the 300-500 range.

The highest number should be 232 + some amount that is inline with all the other numbers. It could be exactly 232, but the chances that you happened to pick the highest number itself is also low.

Basically you are solving this problem:

If you were going to select 10 numbers at random from a range of 0 to N, how high should N be so that there is a high probability that the highest number you select is only 232.

Since a uniform distribution is assumed, you are basically just adding one more uniformly distributed data point.
Would like to hear your feedback!
I think you mean 1,2 and 4.
Perhaps they're doing both?
"de305d54-75b4-431b-adb2-eb6b9e546014" is simply an encoding of a 128 bit number. This standard hex UUID representation requires 8 bits/character * 36 characters == 288 bytes == 2304 bits. This encoding only requires 22 characters or 1408 bytes, almost half the size.
I really don't understand why anyone thinks that anonymous money is a good idea. I'm as big a fan of freedom as the next person, but it seems to me that the primary purpose of anonymous money is to do an end-run around the law.

[UPDATE] Let me try to make this a little more precise: I don't understand the appeal of anonymous digital money. Physical cash is very useful, and I would not want it to go away. But even physical cash is not completely anonymous because you have to be physically present to exchange it, which entails a certain amount of risk, and that puts some checks-and-balances on potential abuses. Anonymous digital money does away with those checks-and-balances and makes a lot of activities with questionable societal value like crypto-extortion much more lucrative than they were before. For example, malware that encrypts your hard drive for ransom was unheard of before the advent of Bitcoin.
A Qt IDE would be fine. Sure it is rather large - something like 30 MB unzipped for a "Hello world" using QML, though 20 MB of that is Unicode data which can be cut down, and non-QML apps are smaller. But it's much nicer than Qt.

The IDE doesn't have to be written in Python (e.g. PyCharm isn't and that is probably the best Python IDE available at the moment).
It also kind of sucks how grsec has remained out of tree for a decade. Its pretty much the most comprehensive security kernel there is, and all its features are kflags tweakable, but it remains a third party patchset despite providing a laundry list of extremely useful security features, most of which have no performance impact.

Its kind of silly that Apparmor is in tree but PAX is not.
"who believe it is in their best interests to cultivate a populace with unquestioning deference to authority"

The populace doesn't ask questions. They simply parrot what a few outspoken people with a mouthpiece tell them to do or think. Most people are lemmings they don't have your brain (I looked at your resume). Not that every conclusion that you would come to would be correct. But in the everyday world (away from NYC, SV and HN) the mediocrity and low level thinking of everyday people is stunning. A large amount of lawn signs is enough to get you elected to local office.
You may have missed the joke...