skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Dow is useless as a stock index. It's composed of only 30 stocks, so a big move in one of them (like when Caterpillar announced a restructuring charge and its stock tanked by 20%) will be reflected in the index even if it has nothing to do with the broader market. Also, the index tends to skew toward older blue-chips (hence the name "Dow Jones Industrial Average), so it doesn't reflect a lot of what's actually going on in the market. There's not a single Internet stock on it, for example: the "technology" sector is represented by Apple, IBM, Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft, and Amazon/Google/Facebook/even Ebay & Yahoo are conspicuously absent.

Anybody with any sort of financial literacy uses the S&P 500 as the proxy for the U.S. stock market. Even that has its problems, but it's a lot closer to meaningful than the Dow is.
It depends of the license.
I'm the founder of https://touchingbase.io which provides follow up and analysis for Gmail.

As part of our analysis, we count the number of emails that are deemed important (they have responded to).

Our top 3 customers in terms of email volume over the past year are:

* 22474 emails over 2717 contacts

* 21018 emails over 1299 contacts

* 18058 emails over 1800 contacts

That works out to 50-60 important emails received and sent PER DAY. Remember, this is email they have actually replied to. It doesn't include newsletters and other email they deemed not important enough to respond.

Keep in mind, these people have other things to do besides responding to email.

Can you post a sample email that you're not getting a reply to? Chances are, you're not making them self-interested enough.
> It's clear you have no understanding of markets.

There was no call for that. We ban accounts when people attack others personally, so please don't do this again.
To understand the medical profession point of view, you need to understand that the "material" used for their research is a rare and precious commodity: humans with a particular condition.

Gathering enough patients to do a study on some particular disease is often difficult and the result of a career long reputation. Doctors usually refer to it as their "recruitment", ie patients addressed to them because they are the reference in this field, something that these "parasite" researchers will get credit for without having to earn it

That's why I believe they are so protective with data.
> Why is it that for any given person the probability is 2^-93 but for Roy it's somehow different, even though he is a "given person"?

Because it isn't true that the probability of any given person being struck by lightning is 1/10000. For instance, the internet says that men are around 4 times as likely to be struck by lightning as women. Rather, what's true is that the likelihood of a randomly selected person being struck by lightning is 1/10000. Each individual person has a different likelihood to be struck. I don't know how to calculate it for Roy, but given that he's been struck 7 times I'm sure it's way higher than 1/10000.

> That also makes me think - is there even such a thing as the "true" or inherent probability of an event happening?

I love when people email me after reaching an enlightenment.

There was a probability question that drove me nuts until I figured out what was going on. The question is "A woman has two children. One of her children is a boy. What is the probability that she has two boys?".

The question isn't well defined, because it matters how you learned that one of her children is a boy.

If you asked her "what is the gender of your oldest child?", and she says it's a boy, then the probability that she has two boys is 1/2.

But if you asked her "do you have at least one boy?", and she says yes, then the probability that she has two boys is 1/3.

I don't know what the lesson here is. Probability is hard? Always ask about the experiment?

> is there even such a thing as the "true" or inherent probability of an event happening?

The probability of something depends on what you know. What's the chance that Roy will be struck by lightning tomorrow? If you don't know who Roy is, you might say 1/(10000 * 28000) (where 28000 days is the average human lifespan.). If you do know Roy's history, you'll probably bump that estimate up quite a bit. But if you look up the weather in his park tomorrow and see that it will be sunny all day, the probability will go back down close to zero.

Some things are so hard to know they might as well have an inherent probability, though. If you roll a die, no one's going to predict the outcome of the roll, so we might as well say it's inherently got a 1/6 chance of rolling a 5. And if you shine a photon at a half-silvered mirror, it's actually impossible to predict which way it will go, so I guess that really does have in inherent probability.

You've got to watch out for your probability estimates being wrong, though. I thought the probability of my friend flipping a coin and getting heads was 1/2, until he demonstrated that he could flip heads 10 times in a row.

> edit: Or maybe it's the law of large numbers - given enough "trials" or in this case lightning events with people around, even something with an absurdly small probability is bound to happen eventually. But then why do we never factor that in and always just call it a day with 10000^7?

Because even with 10 billion people, each living a billion days, and having a billion things happen to them in a day... well coincidentally that's exactly 10^28=10000^7, so never mind.
RIAA Certifications Will Now Count Streaming
Currently there's isn't an automated way to see the progress of the bug. The way it works is that when the developers or the support team mark it as closed/fixed, they can reply back to the reporter saying something like "We've fixed it and it will be in our update next week" and you get these replies inside your app with our in-app conversations.

And yes, we've thought about gamification and rewarding users but didn't get a chance to experiment it. We had a few interesting discussions with some of our users and their main concerns was that they're already getting nearly 5x more feedback when using Instabug in their beta apps which is enough, and that it'll add an extra step in the process which is validating that the bug is actually a bug for the reporter to claim the reward. But I'm personally excited about it and I believe we're experiment it soon.
Also, the very exam could be the same (unlikely), but the grading standards could be much higher at one school compared to another. The class discussions could also be very different, even if they're on the same material technically. The nature of the interactions in student study groups could be completely different. At one school, the student sitting next to you just got named a Putnam Fellow for the second time. At another school, no student has ever, in all history, been named a Putnam Fellow.

It's quite hard to get a sense for what a course is truly like just from glancing at the syllabus.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008879 and marked it off-topic.
Full decomposition ends up putting the same minerals into the soil that your ash contains. So the ash is already just as "biodegraded" as the body ends up, just mixed it in to soil.
"Apple Was 90 Days From Going Bankrupt"

-- http://thenextweb.com/apple/2010/06/02/steve-jobs-90-days/#gref

"At an executive Session of the board in June, with Amelio out of the room, Woolard described to current directors how he calculated their odds. "If we stay with Gil as CEO, think there's only 10% chance we will avoid bankruptcy," he said. "If we fire him and convince Steve to come take over, we have 60% chance of surviving. If we fire Gil, don't get Steve back, and have to search for new CEO, then we have a 40% chance of surviving. "The board gave him authority to ask Jobs to return."

-- "Steve Jobs", Isaacson, pg 314

> What no one here or anywhere else seems to have an answer for is "What is Yahoo's core business".

That's probably indicative that we are not CEO material :-)
AKA which of these languages has tail call optimisation support.
My point was more that even unfit parents tend to recognize the role of parents. They're just not good at it. (eg "I'm a good parent! I take care of my kids just fine!")
Look at traditional Hindu communities - they have all the answers.)
C# Predict the Output Challenge (6)
We've been playing this as a family, my wife and I, with our kids, 7, 11, and 13. It's amazing to see how each of our brains think a bit differently -- each of us specializing in different kinds of puzzles.

We all celebrate together when we get to the end of a puzzle sequence, which has a world event happen. We try to let our youngest do the final step to put the event into action :-)

Edit: I should also add we enjoy having to play the game outside of the game. We've gotten out blocks and tetranimos from the shelf, as well as paper and pencil. We might need add a mirror to out tools...
Self-driving cars market can probably double Google's value when it takes off.
By the logic in this thread, Microsoft also needs to die. IBM, HP and Dell too. All companies who haven't been innovative, but rather coming in second to existing markets and doing a mediocre job.

Turns out second place still pays the bills, and takes much less risk than trying something new. That's Yahoo's core strategy.
Thanks for sharing a professional insider perspective. But wouldn't any other researcher who obtains the data from doctors who recruited the patients have to give credit to the doctors who shared their data? Isn't that a much better professional reputation to have than the reputation of doctors who refuse to share data?

Just in the last two weeks, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors proposed new rules[1] about sharing clinical trial data. Commentators think that kind of data sharing is a very good idea.[2] As a reader of medical research who has heard a lot of "war stories" about the medical research process from family members who have observed that process at first hand, it seems to me that having more eyes on each data set is nearly always a good idea.

[1] http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2482115

[2] http://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2016/01/27/proposal-data-s...
I found the one that described removing the "backup battery" under the wristrest. Once I removed that, and replaced it... everything came back together, and the laptop booted (with generic factory settings).

Difficulty in getting to the battery aside, he just did a regular CMOS reset, the standard technique for getting otherwise unusable systems back to a good state.
Paradromics | https://paradromics.com | San Jose, CA | Onsite/remote | Software engineer

At Paradromics, we are developing the next generation of brain-machine interfaces. Our BMI grants the brain a massively parallel channel to digital devices, enabling life-changing therapies for Parkinson's and essential tremor, and serving as the data backbone to a new generation of neuroprostheses.

We're looking for a software engineer to help us develop the software and algorithms underpinning our first product, a groundbreaking instrument for neuroscience research. The instrument is based on a commodity PC, running Linux, and we are looking for help at all levels of the stack, from the GUI that scientists will use to interact with the instrument, and the analytical visualizations that will present meaningful experimental feedback to the user, to the engine that stores, indexes, and manages recorded data to disk.

Email us at hn@paradromics.com, we'll be happy to hear from you.
Are you considering candidates outside of US. ?
Anassina, Inc. | Senior JavaScript Engineer | Calgary, AB/Canada (REMOTE CONTRACT) |

I'm part of a small team of remote developers in Calgary and we're building out a video syndication platform for a large well-funded media company. I'm looking for a talented JavaScript engineer that could help out with our video player technology. The contract is 3 - 6 months with a likely extension. If you think you might be interested, I'd love to chat with you.

As a Senior JavaScript Developer you will be focused on developing online Video Player technologies. Your work is in front of many millions of end users every month. We are serving hundreds of millions of streams every month and sending thousands of events per second downstream to our web applications and data systems. You are passionate about serving up great web video experience at scale and obsessive about performance and quality. You live and breathe the fundamentals of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and related web technologies and open-source ecosystems. You care deeply about modern engineering practices including test-driven development, continuous integration, and application monitoring. Your work is technically rock solid and visually appealing. It will be embedded in many different sites with different web page structures and styles, and viewed in many different browsers on many devices including mobile and tablets. And you are committed to working in high-performance teams that are greater than the sum of their individual parts.

Please contact arustad@anassina.com for more information.
Thanks!
Aaron.
Iowa Caucus: Cruz Victory Deals Humbling Setback to Donald Trump
And bip.io sits in between the two. I wonder why 2013 was the year for this sort of project.

https://github.com/bipio-server/bipio/graphs/contributors
I am reminded of how the stoics believed that imagining the worst outcome made you a happier individual.

http://www.philosophizethis.org/10-things-the-stoics-can-tea...
BlueNRGY / Draker Energy - Fort Lauderdale, FL - ONSITE, REMOTE (for the right candidate)

Come work with a small knit group of engineers in a rapidly expanding market - renewable energy. We're primarily looking for a senior Ruby on Rails developer to work on our flagship SaaS product, but would love for you to also be open to hacking on other technologies (NodeJS, Go, Aurelia, etc) as we build out new and exciting products for our industry. We would prefer on-site, but for the the right candidate we will allow remote. Also a plus if you can geek out on data as we are moving towards analytics and machine learning on our rapidly growing dataset.

If you want to find out more or meet for up for a coffee, email me: eugene_alfonso@bluenrgy.com with the subject HN.
Nava | Washington DC & San Francisco | Experienced full-stack developers/devops/product manager/operations | On-site - Full-time

We're a small team of engineers and designers from Silicon Valley that came out to DC last year to help fix Healthcare.gov. It turns out there’s a lot more to fix, and it’s surprising how much can be fixed by a small group of resourceful people with a Silicon Valley mindset, deep technical experience, working closely with dedicated civil servants in government.

Our revamped Healthcare.gov application is used by millions, converts 35% better, and halves the completion time. The login system we rebuilt is about two orders of magnitude more reliable and two orders of magnitude less expensive; for example, it’s about $70M less per year to operate.

People die because the Veteran's Administration is months behind in processing claims. The Social Security Administration pays benefits to millions of deceased Americans. $80 billion is spent every year on federal IT contracting, and 96% of projects are deemed failures. [0]

That’s not because there’s some conspiracy or because government is inherently incapable of doing it right. These are complicated legacy systems and processes, and there are very few people with modern tech industry experience who are aware of these problems and willing to help fix them. You can help change that.

Our team is about fifteen people (Stanford, Google, Khan Academy, Dropbox, YC alums) in DC and SF, and we plan to grow significantly in 2016.

We’re looking for:
* experienced full-stack engineers
* experienced devops engineers
* a product manager with a technical background (DC only)
* a technical project manager (DC only)
* a hyper-resourceful operations person

We have a social mission (we incorporated as a public benefit corporation), but we pay market compensation (above market, for DC) and equity.

If you'd like to build software and infrastructure that radically improves how our government serves people, we’d love to hear from you at jobs@navahq.com.

Learn more about us: http://navahq.com

Job descriptions: http://jobs.lever.co/nava

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/22/t...
Would you consider Mizzou a flagship state school? If so, I transferred from there to an "elite" school, and the difference for me was pretty huge.

Then again, I was a math major, and I've traditionally believed that math is one of the subjects where the school can make the biggest difference. There's a cultural aspect to math where being surrounded by a ton of extremely passionate and talented mathematicians is just impossibly valuable. At Mizzou, even the math majors didn't seem to care. I stood out like a sore thumb just for being truly passionate about the subject.
The Illusion of Competence
You don't need to run your own infrastructure---you just need to use services that are compatible with free software.

This highlights the difference between "open source" and free software: by using and recommending Slack, you make a statement that the freedoms of those who would collaborate with your project are not important. In general, projects that identify with the free software philosophy or the "open source" development methodology can collaborate with either community just fine---there are shared interests and goals. But if you use a freedom-denying service, then you cripple a community of contributors.

It does not matter if RMS personally says that he is okay with a particular project---the four freedoms are clear and basic; we don't need his personal endorsement. Further, just because you use Slack, that doesn't mean that your project is less free than another---if it's free software, then it's free software. But the community surrounding your project is shaped by your actions. And if the pressure is great enough, there may be no choice but for free software users to fork the project, and perhaps hope for better collaboration in the future.
mplayer should be able to use your video acceleration.
I'm going to apply to like...Missouri Institute of Technology and start telling people I went to MIT.

It's called MUST.[1]

[1] Well, all right, they prefer the term "Missouri S&T," which abbreviates "Missouri University of Science and Technology." Oddly, the Institute of Technology, one division of the University of Minnesota, is no longer called that, because in this part of the Midwest, "Institute of Technology" sounded too much like a for-profit vocational school, so now the same unit of Minnesota is called the College of Science and Engineering, or C.S.E. for short. When I heard about the name change proposal, I thought, "Hasn't anyone heard of the California Institute of Technology [now Caltech is the preferred name] or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [which is usually called MIT by anyone who knows of it]?"
I am not a doctor. But I come from a family of doctors.

Patient privacy aside, I do agree with you and with the critics of the New England. Science is about reproducable experiments, and in medecine, because of the constraints on the "research material", most studies are on the edges of statistical significance, and with professionals that aren't trained statisticians.

The only mitigant to that is data sharing.
You can self-host Kiwi IRC,[0] which is also a web-based IRC client.

Disclosure: I'm one of the Kiwi devs.

[0] https://kiwiirc.com
For an idea of what some of the backlash about the NEJM editorial looks like, simply check Twitter for #researchparasites: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23researchparasites -- and for a quicker version, some of the most influential voices are summarized here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidshaywitz/2016/01/21/data-sc...

The paragraph from NEJM's piece that drew the brunt of the scorn was the following:

A second concern held by some is that a new class of research person will emerge — people who had nothing to do with the design and execution of the study but use another group’s data for their own ends, possibly stealing from the research productivity planned by the data gatherers, or even use the data to try to disprove what the original investigators had posited. There is concern among some front-line researchers that the system will be taken over by what some researchers have characterized as “research parasites.”

The meme has already given birth to at least one parody account: https://twitter.com/dataparasite and one rather tongue-in-cheek domain purchase: http://researchparasites.com
So one could get hired in biotech, finance, law or corporate IT without an ivy league degree?

OK, very few people are smarter than an average (but not the best) ivy league students, without having that exceptionally good training places like MIT or Yale offer, but these people are outsiders, marginalized by modern practices and social institutions.

They end up making good sandwiches, like that character from Atlas Shrugged, because they habitually striving for an optimum, no matter what they are doing.

In the field of OSS we have a few well-known names - recall a project with uncommonly good theoretical understanding and exceptional attention to details and you will find one (LuaJIT, nginx, redis, OpenBSD, good parts of Haskell base libraries, etc, etc).

All I am trying to say is that elite colleges phenomena is a social construction that works for society which believe in it. One has to conform if one wishes to be a part of such a society.

Less traveled pathways are much harder and usually are leading to unexpected and yet unknown.
Whatsapp just hit a billion users. Here's why it matters
Are avatars really that big of a feature of slack?

Emojis work just fine over IRC, https://i.imgur.com/2EeZYpP.png

Not sure what you mean with "auto expandable URLs", but there probably already exists a script for that.
Free, easy, automated HTTPS for Node.js
The tiling concept is similar, but the overall algorithm is a bit different, in that with REYES micropolygons are shaded first before being visibility tested: that's why REYES is so amazing at doing displacement.

It does means however that REYES can suffer from huge overdrawing issues when objects are small on screen however (unless shading rate is set appropriately).

You can still cull objects that aren't on screen ahead of time though, so you make a saving here.

Pretty much all rasterisers can suffer from this issue to some degree, which is why using raytracing for initial visibility testing scales far better (assuming acceleration structures are used) with bigger scenes (hundreds of millions of triangles). And it's one of the reasons why almost all offline renders used for VFX have moved to raytracing.
As an American I find it actually very disappointing. We have the wealthiest, most powerful companies, and a government that threatens to shutdown every year. Many citizens can't afford healthcare and basic necessities, and yet we have companies with billions of dollars tucked away over seas.
I actually used this for a good while and I like when Huginn shows up. Andrew Cantino is a great dev and has put a lot of hours into this project. As well as many other contributors.
Of course the creator of D wants to eat liquefied dead people.

Hey, you're way smarter than me, so if you are on board with the idea I'll give it a go! Lets eat our dead! xD
Way to be on the ball! I was coming here to post this for today (even thought it's late in the day). Well done, @alexzoltano!
15 Years Ago, Hackers Attacked Davos in One of the First Acts of ‘Hacktivism'
I don't think it's tangentially related at all. The cognitive load of trying to program for the first time is quite high.

If the student doesn't have to focus on remembering whether or not you need a semicolon or a colon on switch statement cases, they can focus more on actually grokking the process of translating thoughts and algorithms to code.