skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm streaming from my home plexn box over my internet line even at 1080p the limit is more often than not the internet I have on my portable device at the moment.

Within Europe 1080p is mostly manageable sub 720 is doable even in Asia.

In have 40ish mbit upload capacity.

Never had complaints from my ISP.
I use QupZilla because this is its default configuration (every window is a separate multi-tab [incognito] session). Not so great last time I checked on the Mac but one of my favorites on the PC.

https://www.qupzilla.com/
Just a couple anecdotes:

1.) I had to get an ride into Manhattan on NYE. Uber was a $150 estimate. Lyft was $68 after a $10 credit.

2.) I used to just blindly use Uber, but now I check estimates on both.

3.) Multiple drivers have told me they'd prefer if I'd ordered them through Lyft since they get a bigger cut.
I dual booted Win 98 and various Debian flavors. Once I got OpenGL going, I would sometimes see the "last" frame of a Windows session flash as X started up.
>"Grokking some of X" doesn't mean that you have a patchy or "blurry" graph of the whole thing; it means you have a complete graph of some subcomponents, but not all.

I would say that's the difference between "I understand some of it" and "I somewhat understand it."

Ability to recreate and grasping intent appear to be proprietary connotations.

I would argue that all understanding is, to use your term, "graphical" due to the nature of thought and the structure of our synapses.
In an "Ask HN:" someone is calling for a ban on Forbes.

Forbes has indeed reached a new plateau in stupidity.

Anyone using a text-only browser has seen that Forbes' most recent design transfers all the content but prevents the page from even displaying in even the most accomodating browser. The word that comes to my mind for their approach to web development is "boneheaded".

Quick and dirty script to view Forbes articles, with no ads:

curl http://www.forbes.com/sites/... \
|sed '
1i\
<html>

s/\\n/\
/g;
s/\\r//g;
s/\\"/\"/g;
$a\
</html>

/./{2,/try {/d;
/} catch/,$d;}
' > 1.html

Then view 1.html in your browser.

Why did I call their web design "boneheaded"?

They include two full copies of the article.

And this is before all the ads and God knows what are injected into the page.
One thing I noticed that I haven't seen commented on yet:

The solution mentioned of running a two tailed test would not have solved the problem of a false result the author demonstrated through conducting an A/A test.

According to the image in the article:
http://blog.sumall.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/optimizely...

The A/A test had:
A1: Population: 3920
Conversion: 721
A2: Population: 3999
Conversion: 623

Z-Score: 3.3
2-tailed test signifiance: 99.92%

Looks like the one-tail vs. two tail test doesn't make huge difference in this case.

So, maybe a larger sample size would have seen a reversion to the mean, but given the size and high significance that would be unlikely (interesting exercise to try different assumptions to calculate how unlikely, with the most overly generous obviously just being the stated significance).

Yes, the test was only conducted over one day, but if it was the exact same thing being served for both, that shouldn't matter.

If there was a reversion to the mean due to an early spike, we would expect to see the % difference between the two cells narrow as the test kept running. You can see in the chart that the % difference (relative gap between the lines) stays about the same after 8pm on the 9th.

So if it's not the one-tailed test at fault, and it's not the short duration of the test at fault, what is?

Don't know.

I have seen in the past that setup problems are incredibly easy to make w/ a/b testing tools when implementing the tool on your site. I've seen in other tools things like automated traffic from Akamai only going to the default control, or subsets of traffic such as returning visitors excluded from some cells but not others.

Based on those results, I'd be suspicious of something in the tool setup being amiss.
Putting large numbers of people out of decent jobs is not something politically savvy people do in cities.
I've yet to see a project management tool that allowed for uncertainty (say, a normal distribution) in estimating task efforts. And I've yet to see a technical team know their own capabilities for a task of > 1 week within 50%, mostly because every task is unique, and (nearly) every project team has inexperienced members.

A project management tool should have the ability to Monte Carlo estimations.
If you really want to know the actual reason the title reads "new erdős paper" it is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number

obviously this is not an actual new erdos paper, but without these shenanigans everyone's erdos number would slowly but surely increase, as first nobody new could have co-published with him (too young) and soon the same applies to his co-authors.

while it might have been cute back in that era, today I think it should be treated as a historical thing.
>The first step is to make these algorithms public. Companies and governments both balk at this, fearing that people will deliberately try to game them, but the alternative is much worse.

This needs a lot more than the one sentence given to justify. How do we know that an open source security algorithm will be better? The justification isn't powerful enough for the claim.
If there is a new upper class today, their oppression doesn't seem all that severe. I don't recall the former nobility handing our free health care or education.

Sure, the people in power today believe they deserve what they have, but so did the people in power before. If you're worried about that sort of arrogance, at least we don't have kings believing they rule by divine right and nobility believing they're carrying out God's will through their king.
I think part of it is that Erdos worked with an unusually large number of people, at an unusually large number of places. Another reason is that he was quite eccentric, even by the standard of mathematicians. There are so many stories about him, which led to a sort of legend, and that led to all the books and documentaries. Finally he was around at a time when discrete math was gaining traction as a de facto area of mathematics, and he made a great number of contributions in that area. For example the probabilistic method he popularized is a cornerstone of the subject nowadays.

Whether or not he was disproportionately popular depends on what you feel it should be proportionate to. I reckon he is more famous than similarly important figures in other subfields of math. But few mathematicians have worked with and influenced so many people.
Language support for functions that return multiple values
WebGL always seemed too low-level for reasons like this - same way Gmaps crashes my Firefox browser all the time.
This article is mainly about algorithms used by the government for surveillance and control. Bad stuff, of course.

But in general, I think algorithms are something to embrace rather than fear:

Even very simple algorithms reliably outperform experts by a large margin, in certain domains: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gv/statistical_prediction_rules_out...

Despite this, humans are heavily biased against algorithms. Even when we know they perform much better than humans. We also tend to vastly overestimate human performance: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lsc/link_algorithm_aversion/

This has a lot of consequences. Humans are terribly biased, and often aren't even aware of our biases. Not just stuff like race, but even people that are ugly are heavily discriminated against: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lj/the_halo_effect/ We discriminate against people of different political parties even more than we do based on race: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything... Or just random factors we can't predict. Nothing about being judged by a human is "fair".

And beyond fairness, they just give better predictions. Humans just aren't very good at prediction, even when we think we are. And in some domains that's extremely important, like in medicine. The first link referenced several places where statistical methods did better at diagnosis than doctors who specialized in it. Yet there has always been massive resistance to using algorithms in diagnosis.
"One study based on the large SELECT trial suggested that supplements such as vitamin E and selenium actually increased prostate cancer in some men. And last year massive analyses combining 27 studies on half a million people concluded that taking vitamin and mineral supplements regularly failed to prevent cancer or heart disease. Not only are they a waste of money for the majority of us – but if taken in excessive quantities they can actually hasten an early death, increasing your risk of heart disease and cancer.

Virtually no vitamins or supplements have actually been shown to have any benefit in proper randomised trials in normal people without severe deficiencies. Rare exceptions have been lutein nutrients for macular degeneration, a common cause of blindness – and vitamin D, the golden boy of vitamins."
I wish it was all inside of Git and had an Emacs mode. The trackpad on my Linux computer is so terrible and if I can use the keyboard I'm way likelier to manage projects properly in the thing. Please don't make me aim for little X icons to delete stuff!
Could do it with a Browser extension though, I use one for FF that allows you double click one and sent it where I want.
"Throw it over the wall" isn't the half of it. Last year, when a major snowstorm was forecast to hit NYC, Cuomo announced that the subways would be shutting down - without notifying or consulting the MTA or city government. This threw a wrench into existing plans for inclement weather, with the ultimate result being that trains ran empty along their normal routes until the storm had passed.
CS postdocs in the US are certainly not paid $30k.

Source: I've been a postdoc in CS, and I currently employ postdocs.
> "as for your statement that "meritocracy doesn't really value merit" you'll have to explain that one."

I explained it before, but hopefully I'll do a better job this time...

How do you measure merit? You cannot measure merit without measuring success.

Success can be achieved by more than just merit alone, privilege is another key factor in success, yet there are no mechanisms to distinguish between success based on merit and success based on privilege. In most cases it'll be a mixture of the two anyway, it's hard to find successful people who were born into completely hostile circumstances, or find successful people who had every possible external advantage but didn't have some ability to convert this into success.

In short, meritocracies measure success, they don't measure merit, as merit cannot be measured directly, it can only be inferred by success, and success has multiple contributing factors, of which merit is only one.

Furthermore, meritocracies tend to favour certain types of success. For example, in school, the abilities of an academically gifted kid are more likely to be recognised compared to a kid that's good at telling jokes, even though they're both valuable traits.
I see these posts all the time and wonder what i missing. Email works perfectly well, and fits many of my needs to a high level. I have no issues with it, and it's not like i don't get much email, given the number of mailing lists i subscribe to, i probably get significantly more than most 'normal' people do.
1. Practice with new programming language and database.

2. Turn unstructured, difficult to parse data adorned with HTML, and other window dressing into structured data that is easier to parse.
This is a free Hotspot wireless internet Service (the “Service”) provided by Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) for use by customers of MTA. All users are required to log-in individually as an independent user.

1. Our agreement

1.1 This agreement applies from when we accept your request for Service. Please read the terms carefully before activating Service with us.

1.2 By using and/or activating Service with us and/or clicking the accept button on the login/registration page you agree to be bound by this agreement. If you do not agree to the terms of the agreement, do not use the Service.

1.3 We may modify the agreement at any time. In accordance with clause 1.2, use of the Service constitutes acceptance of the agreement current at that point in time.

1.4 These Terms and Conditions do not alter in any way the terms or conditions of any other agreement you may have with MTA for products, services or otherwise. This agreement contains disclaimers and other provisions that limit our liability to you.

... blah blah blah blah blah and on and on.
Mozilla hires Vladislav Surkov? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM
Likewise almost everywhere on Boston's subway -- though it's worth noting that the Boston subway as a whole is smaller and carries less people than New York's Lexington Avenue line.
Replacing judgment with algorithms has always been part of bureaucracy.

Once encoded as programs, though, they have a chance -- however unlikely, and still not without flaws -- of being audited either by the public or at least by independent auditors.
That's neat. But did that only work then with games that had writable storage media in the cartridge? I know that was rare on NES games.

Or was there secondary memory besides the RAM and disk that allowed for data to be passed between resets?
I'm relying on https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/KMS-Cryptographic-Detai.... There are HSMs, I guess, but they'r only used to back up the keys when they're stored offline for durable backups. I hadn't seen the claim on the main page, but I'd consider it to be misleading, presuming that the cryptographic details whitepaper didn't totally misstate the design.
I'm not sure _how_ they are going to do this, when most of the lines don't have this technology (it's literally turn the the century switching technology):

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-do...
What is the default GC for the 1.8 JVM?
Jira: Complexity.

Basecamp: Not enough complexity.

Both: Pricing that isn't sensitive to smaller orgs.
> there is no workable solution

Forgive my ignorance (not a graphics programmer), but why can't the drivers simply clear the buffer before handing it off to another application?
Most of the time I've had "Oh shit, my framework can't do what I need" moments, it has been pretty far into a project and switching to something else isn't a viable option.
I started traveling to Moscow regularly before I moved to New York and when I did, I was shocked that not only was wifi not as ubiquitous as in Moscow but the subway in NYC didn't even have cell phone service. Felt very strange for Moscow to be so far ahead of New York.
ESP8266 Basic Interpreter Targeted to IoT
You can generally allocated GPU buffers without the window manager. So to be effective this would have to be in the kernel driver. Opengl/GPGPU is generally done in the user space driver so it'd still be separate.
Good. Your patent system is broken anyway, because

> awarded for inventions that are nontrivial advances in the state of the art

is not true for a long time in US.
"Still another curve constant, quietly provided by the NSA and required for some federal certification"

Wait... what? Is this suggesting Juniper blindly used a constant supplied by the government without any justification?
How does the GPL prevent those costs from being recovered?
The more accurately merit is measured, the more stable people's positions in society are likely to be. Which kinda sucks for people at the bottom.

I'd be concerned about problems from having a sharper divide between "employable" and "not employable", and instead of people who struggle to find/keep a job you'd have (slightly fewer) people who can't get jobs at all. That seems likely to cause more social problems.
Ask HN: Strategy for “winning” powerball (and passing stats)
Everyone is calculating the expected winnings of powerball incorrectly because no one includes that you'll probably have to share the prize since people pick the roughly the same numbers (birthdays, odd, prime numbers) making a collision likely.

So:

- what is the expected value of a random ticket, given that certain combinations are likely to be shared?

- Given deep pockets, what are the numbers to play and when is the time to play them?
Show HN: Enveloupe: Send snail mail from a browser
"The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth"

Is a humorous non-mathematical book about him. Erdos was a funny and strange man. He was the most prolific co-writer of math papers.

He didn't have a home, but would just pack his bags and sleep over at other mathematicians couches around the world. He would ask about their math interests and problems. Erdos often had some great insights and unusual perspectives about it. He would talk about math with them non stop, until they could take no more. The other mathematician would often write a paper about what they had discussed, and Erdos would be sent on his way to the next mathematician.

When he discovered or heard about some very beautiful proof. He would say this proof was "from The book". As in the book that God wrote. He also called God the supreme fascist.

Erdos dint sleep much and didnt care about things that where not math. He couldn't tie his shoes, liked to tell silly jokes, and was a virgin. He was also on amphetamines most of the time.
And it isn't even close. Just the other day Google released a bit of PR that indicates their current cars will pull over and stop if it starts to rain. That basically means their cars aren't usable in all but the driest locales. And handling the rain is exponentially harder than handling good weather driving.
In such case I'm not interested, thanks. It's enough that my mobile provider tracks me, why would I need MTA to track me in addition?
Shares them across all incognito tabs for me.
Interested in details about this; where were Doom's major security issues? I love reading about Carmack/Doom development in general, maybe I've missed the part where caution was thrown to the wind and security was ignored.
While I agree that Jira is a nightmare, having used Phabricator in production for almost 2 years I loathe that software.

Each of its applications was 70% as good as what else is out there (especially UX-wise) and the integrations compared with Github were pitiful.
Sounds like 2nd Ave Sagas thinks a world class city should have a world class public transit system. That is my main thought, having been a user of Chicago and New York public transport: Why is this so much worse than e.g. Hong Kong? WiFi isn't the right scale of $ investment to get there.
I believe it was present in Windows NT from the start because it was present in DEC's VMS operating system, which Dave Cutler was also a key developer. It may date to before VMS for all I know. It's not at all new.
The point of the comment was saying that those immigrants don't benefit the country taking them. If having them is such a benefit, then sending them back should benefit their home country, which it obviously doesn't.

The immigrants would of course benefit economically, no one ever disputed that. But at the expense of the native population. Good luck earning a living wage when you are competing against the whole third world's population of laborers.

That's not even covering the immigrants using social services. You can't have any social programs at all, or every sick person who needs free health care can just move to your country. Or welfare benefits or whatever. Those programs can't work if the entire world's population can show up and take them.
Make Your Own “USB Condom” for Added Security When Charging from Untrusted Ports
Sorry about that, I quickly copied a link from my wishlist and didn't look to clean it up. No referral link intended.
Nah you're good :)
When Product Adoption Is Lite
While more tunnels and trails will be convenient for a lot of people, it won't necessarily generate significantly more revenue for MTA. On the other hand if MTA invests in wifi, they will make tons more money through all the new business opportunities that arise (Imagine instead of those paper banner ads where it says "download on the appstore", or "sign up with the code 'subway'" which are basically useless since you can't really download it on the spot nor effectively trackable, you could actually download, purchase, sign up for things. Currently most people just waste their time playing candy crush and temple run but that will all change. Their ad revenue will shoot straight up). When they make more money, they can invest in other useful features you mentioned. They're not stupid. They're doing a good job.
Twitter Unverifies Writer Amid Speech Wars
Perhaps they same way they do it on buses?
The Lark-Owl Scale: When Couples’ Sleep Patterns Diverge
When graphics card vendors want to protect their competitive edge and not do OS integration beyond dropping horrible and opaque binary blobs every now and then, they'll also have to mop up the security issues such as this on their own.

Technically this should be a OS responsibility, but practically the vendors have made that all but impossible.
Where is my fancy self driving car supposed to park? Cause until that's a solved problem there will always be a place for Lyft.
ITT people downvoting anyone saying positive things about lyft.
I'm shuddering at the thought of training our customer service team on using a news reader. There's more to a good tool than features.
They completely punted on snow as well IIRC.
I'm not sure I agree that VC's not investing in Lyft is a bad sign for Lyft's long-term success. Those who have invested in Lyft recently make good sense as investors. Carl Icahn isn't exactly dumb money, and can probably add a unique perspective. GM makes sense because it is a very good long-term partner: Autonomous vehicles will be a big part of the future, and when that time comes, Lyft will have a highly-qualified partner to bring a fleet to market.
FogBugz, from Fog Creek Software, uses Monte Carlo simulation in its evidence-based scheduling tool:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html
I always ask drivers which one they prefer to drive for. The answer is always Lyft.
FWIW, I didn't mean to imply that they were, just that startups are the usual barometer for good benefits. My wording wasn't clear -- sorry about that.
Yours? Or the one you use with a ridesharing service?

If its yours, your own garage. If you're in an urban area, I'd assume ridesharing services would use lights out parking garages when they're overcapacity.

A car sits idle 95% of the time. That's why GM invested in Lyft. They see a future where there's a need for drastically fewer vehicles to service mobility needs. Yes, yes, rush hour handwaving. You use economic incentives to solve that.
No, you can't reliably receive GPS signals in a subway tunnel.
A/B Testing is a way to conduct an experiment. Instrumentation and talking to users is another good way to gain insights, but it not an experiment. They are two different (and often complementary) activities.

Many, many people have successfully used A/B Testing. I've personally used it to great effect several times. I certainly don't make decisions purely based on the statistical results, but I find it to be an extremely useful input to the decision making process. All models are flawed; some are useful.
The point of VLIW is to eliminate the hazard detection and scheduling logic required by normal superscalar, but SMT would require much of that logic to be added back. So VLIW can't really use SMT. VLIW could use FGMT (e.g. barrel processor) or SoEMT, but those can't fill the empty issue slots caused by bad instruction mix.
One probalem is that driverless cars don't have to be better than humans. They have to be better than human drivers with computer assist. Or at least cheap enough to jsutify the extra carnage.