skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not a factual statement, it's a made-up one taking the form of one. But that doesn't matter. Scattering dramatic claims with no common element other than a generic colonialism-was-good guarantees a flamewar whether factual bits are in there or not.

Repeatedly moving the goalposts to keep the drama going is a sign of flame-fanning as well.
I lost a bunch of money on this.

The thing that galls me is that they massively exceeded their funding target, but still couldn't do anything.

What was their plan if they only hit their target?? They didn't have a product --- they had to do all this development. So if they only took in like 100k of the kickstarter, what were they going to do?

They totally misrepresented the status of the project. It's right and proper that Paypal and Indiegogo didn't immediately release all the funds to them. The project didn't say they needed those funds for development. Otherwise, how could the funding target have been 100k?
Yup some of them were fine. It was only certain capacity disks that had the issue. They solved the primary problem eventually. By then the reputation was already tarnished. "Death Star".
Kibana is in incredible heavy weight in comparision to other dashboards like e.g. Grafana. Kibana loads like 4MB+ of JS and data. It is designed for intranet usage where your Elastic Search cluster is near you.
This is a classic example of "consider the source". It is poorly researched and has some outright falsehoods:

1) "Even though smart guns are widely available overseas..." Really? I'm unable to find a single production centerfire handgun approved for import by Obama's ATF from anywhere in the world. For example, see the references in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_gun

The lone handgun of any kind with any such a claimed "smart" implementation is the iP1. But what the article conveniently omits (like the similar NYT article from last year omits) is that it is a .22 rimfire cartridge - totally unusable in a police context. There isn't a single law enforcement organization (LEO) in the nation that uses ,22 rimfire as its primary duty weapon.

2) "The palm-reading biometric gun that James Bond used in Skyfall represents the sexiest version..." that is a movie prop, not a production firearm.

MJ is seeking to mandate something that doesn't exist... which plays right into NRA claims that such a law is just disguised prohibition.

So, let's say such a handgun exists, in an appropriate caliber. What is the immediate, obvious market? Law enforcement organizations. After all, deaths due to perps gaining an officer's gun, or fear that such is imminent, results in numerous shootings and deaths:
e.g.:
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lapd-shooting-...
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/michael-brown-autopsy-...
http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2012/10/cops_gun_stolen_from_hoo...
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1997-01-08/news/9701070463_...
http://www.kgw.com/story/news/local/vancouver/2015/09/14/off...
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/police-kill-unarmed...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Kathryn_Steinle
etc.

Yet no LEOs, including Obama's own ATF, FBI, Secret Service, Border Patrol, nor any branch of the U.S. military has manifested any interest whatsoever in even testing such handguns.

LEOs are the obvious proving ground for such a technology, if it is in fact mature, safe, and reliable.
PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser Script
And when do you expect a NULL value? If you use an optional type, then you expect a NULL value if and only if the type in question is an optional. If you forget the check, or if you check a value that can't be NULL, the compiler will tell you.

Beware programming errors which reveal themselves as "in all likelihood," because that hides an entire universe of difficult-to-debug behavior, and sometimes behavior that can be subverted.

Optionals solve these problems, and solve them far better than the "be careful not to do that" approach you describe here.
The calibration cost is trivial compared to the coefficient learning cost. Very roughly, calibration is O(records) whereas coefficient learning is O(records * features). So the tiny add-on cost of calibration shouldn't affect anyone's evaluation of the relative merits of algorithms. NB still retains its computational advantage.

One thing that is often discounted in theoretical discussions is that NB takes much less I/O than something like LR, typically in the range of 5-100x (depending on how many iterations you want to do updating your LR coefficients). If you're doing, for example, a MapReduce implementation then NB has huge computational advantages. In LR each coefficient update costs you another map/reduce pass across your entire data set (whereas NB is always done in exactly one iteration).

So if NB + calibration gets you something close to LR for vastly less computation and I/O, why wouldn't you use it?

Having said that, if you're talking about small amounts of data that fit into RAM and you can "just load into R", then sure use LR over NB. For that matter use a Random Forest [0]. The reason NB is still around is because it offers a point in the design space where you spend almost no resources and still get something surprisingly useful (and recalibration narrows the utility gap between NB and better methods even more).

[0] And you should still consider calibrating your random forest's output.
The Gene Hackers
If this can be considered "self-critical", then that speaks to the trustworthiness of the "publication".
Well.. Why does it, then?!
Data Science Tutorials
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10437485
There is also interesting new module pg_stat_wait that enables LWLocks monitoring (as well as other types of locks), it is already used in mail.yandex.ru (the 2nd largest email service in Russia).
However the module requires Postgres be patched https://github.com/postgrespro/postgres/tree/waits_monitorin...
Related discussion in -hackers: http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/3F71DA37-A17B-4961...
I definitely agree that many of the proposed cures are worse than the disease.
Volkswagen's US sales go up in October, despite diesel emissions scandal
Thank you, I was thinking the same thing. I followed the graph twice and thought I was doing it wrong before I mentally divided 325 by 7 to find that it's not a multiple of 7
I agree with your analysis. I truly hope that people motivated to make a difference by enabling distributed resistance to censorship of centralized communications infrastructure can see the wisdom in investing time to develop the wifi mesh capability for FirefoxOS or Android. Once a major platform has this functionality, it will spread. I wrote a fairly long paper about ideas in this space over here: https://bug945047.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=840...
I think torture should be illegal and I think the "enhanced interrogation" techniques used at Guantanamo are abhorrent. But I also think there are real-world scenarios in which torture is not only moral, but where it would be immoral not to torture. This sounds absurd, but consider this real-life case given in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy[1]: A woman's car is stolen. Unknown to the thief, her child is sleeping in the back seat. The thief discovers the baby and ditches the car. The police soon catch him at a train station. CCTV footage shows him stealing the car. It's over 100ºF out. A police officer describes the incident:

> In the police truck on the way to the police station: “Where did you leave the Hyundai?” Denial instead of dissimulation: “It wasn't me.” It was—property stolen from the car was found in his pockets. In the detectives' office: “It's been twenty minutes since you took the car—little tin box like that car—It will heat up like an oven under this sun. Another twenty minutes and the child's dead or brain damaged. Where did you dump the car?” Again: “It wasn't me.”

> Appeals to decency, to reason, to self-interest: “It's not too late; tell us where you left the car and you will only be charged with Take-and-Use. That's just a six month extension of your recognizance.” Threats: “If the child dies I will charge you with Manslaughter!” Sneering, defiant and belligerent; he made no secret of his contempt for the police. Part-way through his umpteenth, “It wasn't me”, a questioner clipped him across the ear as if he were a child, an insult calculated to bring the Islander to his feet to fight, there a body-punch elicited a roar of pain, but he fought back until he lapsed into semi-consciousness under a rain of blows. He quite enjoyed handing out a bit of biffo, but now, kneeling on hands and knees in his own urine, in pain he had never known, he finally realised the beating would go on until he told the police where he had abandoned the child and the car.

> The police officers' statements in the prosecution brief made no mention of the beating; the location of the stolen vehicle and the infant inside it was portrayed as having been volunteered by the defendant. The defendant's counsel availed himself of this falsehood in his plea in mitigation. When found, the stolen child was dehydrated, too weak to cry; there were ice packs and dehydration in the casualty ward but no long-time prognosis on brain damage.

As much as we may wish otherwise, the answers to moral questions aren't always simple. Every time I've related this story, it has convinced my interlocutor that torture can sometimes be moral. Again, that doesn't mean it should be legal or systematized. To make an analogy with less emotional weight: theft and trespassing are illegal, but they're sometimes right. One might trespass to get someone to a hospital more quickly. Or one might steal something so it can be used for some life-saving measure. People accept these rare, one-off situations. So too it should be with torture.

1. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/torture/#CasStuBea
Humans can be easily fooled too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion

Anyway this issue has been explained and fixed somewhat in this paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6572

And karpathy has a post which explains it: https://karpathy.github.io/2015/03/30/breaking-convnets/
Here's a similar discussion from earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10245805
Whether torture is right/wrong good/bad boils down very simply.

First, let's assume that torture works (i.e. it gives us the answers we want). If we assume it doesn't work then there's no point in torture or this debate. There will always be people who claim that torture works, so let's just assume it does indeed work excellently and 100% of the time.

Second, assume that many innocent people are falsely accused and convicted, because that is true (if you don't believe that, just look at the Innocence Project).

Third, if we know that innocent people are sometimes falsely accused and convicted, then it means it could happen to you, your parents, your children.

So now the only question you have to answer is: Are you OK with the scenario where you, an innocent and falsely accused individual, are tortured, in the interest of public safety? If you are not OK with that happening to you or your children, then you cannot support torture for anyone else either. If you are OK with that, then you have two tasks: 1) when are you volunteering as a torture subject to prove you aren't just saying that, and 2) you must convince everyone else that they should be OK with that if it happens to them (or 51% of the population in a democracy). You might succeed on 1) (doubtful) but you will fail on 2) if all of those people also have to complete task 1).

The conclusion is that it's impossible to torture without introducing a double-standard. Sure, we can do that, but that has the same logic as a law like "I can do anything I want, and you can do nothing, because I'm me and you're not me"?
Oops. That makes more sense now that you point it out. I thought they were just little scrolling arrows, and never understood why they didn't work right. Sorry about that.

(While it's a good general practice not to question downvotes, there are some cases that just leave you wondering what the other person was thinking. This is one of the explanations I've imagined, although usually I just assume big fingers on a tiny touchscreen.)
One other thing to remember in discussions around torture is that the "ticking bomb" situation simply doesn't happen, as reported by professional interrogators. This means that "ticking bomb" is an outlier scenario and the base moral discussions should not start from there.
The argument that low margins are an indicator of inability to charge higher prices or declining brand strength doesn't hold water. Sony had had crappy margins for a long time and the reasons relate more to competition (they don't enjoy barriers to entry like Apple and have to pay up for marketing and R&D to maintain their brand perception) and poor corporate governance (lack of impetus to run the company efficiently) than an ability to charge high prices and/or a decline in brand quality.
Funny story: a customer porting from an OS that didn't leave NULL unmapped to an OS that did, asked us to tell them how to map the zero page, as their program had spurious NULL pointer accesses that they didn't want to fix.
But not having something when you think you do is by far the most common class of errors.

In all the things I've debugged that's almost never been the actual error, but rather a symptom of something else (running out of memory, failed file opening, etc.) that needs further investigation. In my experience the "check for null, skip processing and continue if a value is null" way is a far worse option since it causes errors to propagate further, whereas a crash is an unmistakable call to action.
:) I don't come across a lot of ppl that know that one. Googler? Fan/user

Anyway, yeah, I've actually had that thought in the back of my head. I've actually reloaded this laptop 3 times due to the exact situation you mention. (The HDD is too small to leave CrOS on there).

It's been several months since I've let CrOS do it's thing and reflash the firmware... I should give it a shot.

Many moths ago, I was reinstalling CrOS it to try to get it to reflash the adapter so that MST on DP1.2 would work. But it never worked and furthermore, the Dell monitors I have stop working when you enable DP1.2 so all around... it was disappointing.

I wanted my Pixel to be my sole development machine... but when I'm sitting at my desk... I expect dual monitors... So I continue to sync my git repos between 3+ computers at a time. Woohoo.

Whoever wants to make a laptop with 16GB RAM, HiDPI screen (and not the shitty Lenovo panels), and 2x mini-DP out.... boy, I'd sure love to see it. (And the Surface Pro 4 actually falls in that category, but is not Linux friendly)

----

edit: Checked the dingdong history... not seeing too much relevant but I might give it a shot when I have a slow weekend. Thanks again!
It is horrible what happened to the author's father. But it is also inevitable. Like a morbid million monkeys mashing away on keyboards, operating at scale in meatspace all but guarantees that someone will die whilst using the service.

In America we have become accustomed to guard rails everywhere, and signs announcing the smallest hazards. This is OK so far as it goes, but perhaps it makes us a bit soft. Here we read about a tree swing that fell down when a full grown man used it. At least 90% [1] of tree swings in America are built without professional engineering or even inspection.

I'm not apologizing for the host in this case, but I do think that some people are open to living in a world where not every conceivable danger has been mitigated. The hard part is finding anyone so willing once a freak accident happens to them.

[1] I'm lowballing this estimate so much that it should be obviously true to anyone who grew up in the non-urban US.
Comcast memo admits data caps are not about improving network performance
Similarly, it can be difficult to recognize when you may come across as snarky and passive-aggressive. Perhaps it will be useful for you to reflect on this comment later.
Rust FFI Omnibus – examples of using code written in Rust from other languages
could i have resumed your post with "shit happens, sad though." ?
already posted twice over past 3 days, e.g.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10523455
Your argument doesn't work because the evidence pointing to the suspect could be false. Check out the Innocence Project.
Not yet, possibly not soon:

https://github.com/lumail/lumail2/issues/14
Not necessarily. But you could easily add a few images with English descriptions next to them. That would be enough linguists to decipher the rest.
Glorifying melancholy does not automatically make it a sensible state to be in.

It seems that as the self-help mania withers down, the pendulum swings right back to embracing suffering as normal state of affairs. Is there no creativity in the realm of human happiness (we keep trying the same old same old for centuries)?
Thanks for your thoughts Gregory!

We're also in the process now of finding a good storage solution for time series data at my dayjob. We're not storing any server metrics, but more personal user health data and related metrics. So we want the flexibility of being able to write new metrics on your personal timeline without altering a schema. Most reads would be querying single users timeline to fetch their data and deliver through APIs for rendering in clients. Also of course to do analysis on all users timelines, find correlations etc. but those queries are less frequent and not so time critical. I'm starting working on a prototype now with MongoDB. Other DBs that have come up has been InfluxDB, Riak TS, Amazon DynamoDB and probably some others I don't remember. Haven't actually thought that much about Postgres, but thanks for your links to your blog posts I will read up on how Postgres might work. Most other non-time series data would still be in our MySQL setup.
You mean for open source time series database systems run entirely by volunteers in their spare (personal) time? I know, right? What jerks.
I'm not okay with innocent family members being imprisoned.

Therefore, no one should be imprisoned ever.
The same reason a dumb watch has to have a display? I think most people will agree that a watch, smart or otherwise, must be able to tell you the time.
I really like

An astronomer looking at the stars, and falling into an abyss (1789-92) (via French Revolution Digital Archive)
http://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/frenchre...

As it reminds us that the pursuit of scientific knowledge can often distract brilliant people from addressing social problems. I wonder if the glut of research scientists is one of the mechanisms by which the status quo is preserved.
http://www.9bis.net/kitty/ Is pretty nice and has updates
The FitBit seems like the right product in the right category. The Chronos much less so and it seems like the same product with a different form factor -- with restricted battery life as you point out. It's only a matter of time before other form factors emerge as this space saturates--a ring, a watch bracelet add-on, ankle bracelets and so forth.

The only winner in my mind is the FitBit or similar. I have owned the Apple Watch since launch and I absolutely hate it's battery issues. Not to mention that I consider the product slightly flawed. I don't need or use it's calendaring, stocks, weather or most other apps that have much better UX right on my phone, which is always with me and the Apple Watch needs to be connected to in any case. It just seems so coerced.

> The big problem, one that afflicts pretty much every smartwatch, is one of battery life

I have always wondered if a FitBit or similar device can operate in low power mode and manage to charge itself during running or similar vigorous activities. Or if wireless charging will ever get to the stage that if I am in close proximity to my laptop, my watch and phone can start charging themselves wirelessly. Or even some kind of a magnetic latch that can do away with charging cables so I can just tack my phone onto my Macbook and have it charge. Fun times ahead.
Not sure what kind of queries you want to do, but Elasticsearch has a fairly extensive Query DSL that'll let you do all sorts of aggregations:

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...

There is a Python implementation that makes creating complex queries pretty easy:

https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-dsl-py

I agree with the criticisms of Kibana, but I have had no problems querying Elasticsearch directly. It also supports scripted queries if the built-in aggregations aren't enough.

Of course, then you have to build your own visualizations with the results...
I'm on Mountain Lion, and my Firefox (42.0) doesn't do anything like that.
I'd be terrified to entrust my money to a startup 'disrupting' the financial industry with a slick UI or Android app. Financial companies have their value in minimizing risk, not in the UI or frontend[1].

Actually transferring money is dead simple: I can sign a piece of paper(even electronically) agreeing to pay someone $500 in the future. That paper carries the same weight as money, but its value is reduced by the risk of default or the hassle of going through the court system to collect. People who correctly guess who will actually deliver on their word can make money by buying that $500 at a discount(say $480). It's too easy to make a bunch of deals showing $20 profits on the books that are really $480 losses that show up years after.

Financial companies will often play a big financial risk shell-game where they'll take on a certain risk to make money, but defer other risks to a different company in a big chain. ACH transfers and credit card merchant accounts are two examples(a chain of banks taking risk transferring money, or a chain of merchant->sales agent->bank->visa/mastercard for chargeback risk). The only reason US mortgages are so cheap in the first place is because they get immediately sold to a government-sponsored company.

My local bank actually has a lot of value because I've had an account with them for 8 years: They can easily see I'm not a big risk to them, so they can deal with me without worrying too much. They can give references to other financial institutions.

It's too easy to get eaten by fraud as a tech company. The tech is really the least important part of being in finance. The hard part is in trusting your customers. The loan officer takes weeks to pore through documents because these increase the banks' ability to trust you on the deal. They spend hundreds of dollars contracting appraisal companies to physically inspect the property again and again because it slightly reduces the chance of a bad deal. If a tech company can do this cheaper, then they can sell this service directly to the banks and make billions. Any data that you would collect on your web app, the banks could probably demand documentation for as part of the loan process.

[1] Okay, Paypal makes it easy for me to transfer money internationally, so that's something of a UI issue with being able to interface with N countries' different banks. But I bet their internal meetings talk about how to gather enough information on merchants/people in Greece so as to minimize the risk of default, rather than the technical issues of interfacing with Greek banks.
Exactly. You should also raise your guard whenever someone is trying to convince you that reality never presents you with hard choices: "So I never have to weigh my aversion to torture against my aversion to the loss of thousands of lives? Hooray!"