skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, it's a bit like people taking "Internet Of Things" hype and declaiming that your toaster needs a wireless connection.
There have been multiple animation companies that have unionized and still done well.
Makes sense. Apple gets sued for charging more than a retailer that owned 90% of the market in an Anti-Trust case and is fined $450 million.

Verizon is a common carrier that manipulated the traffic in the service it provides from its government granted monopoly for 4 years and is fined 1.350M.

This is why people vote donald trump. It is the voting equivalent of YOLO. It's basically the civic equivalent of a weapon, and proving the point that he can get elected may draw into stark contrast that we might need to make a few tweaks here in there with how we operate going forward.
How to come up with startup ideas
Caffeine may be functionally useful for some people due to their schedule, but any biological benefits would be outweighed by negative side effects if consumed too much(hence limited). Someone who is getting a healthy amount of sleep, eating properly, exercising and also at a healthy weight wouldn't benefit much from a lot of caffeine anyway.
I'd classify this as standard pseudoscience.
A replacement for MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND, which uses MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND itself, shows a bit of the value of MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND.
But this can't track individual users, it just provides general usage statistics, like visitor retention.

I'd be interested in a viable example of this being used to identify users.
So, if it's not terrible for everyone, then it's not a problem---as long as it's not terrible for you. Maybe, perhaps, this would work if the terrible people kept to themselves, but this is rarely the case. I was a regular poster on /mu/ for several years, but once the /pol/ users started trashing the board up, it's been a shell of its former self. And, again, that's just within 4chan. The worst things are what 4chan's community have done outside of the site. See also: GamerGate.
A dozen misconceptions about p-values
Can someone explain why the courts do these type of minimal fines? Having a cup of coffee on the Bart could land me a $250 fine, which is 2x as much proportional of my personal yearly revenue. This seems more harmful than a cup of coffee.
Why not delete it altogether then? Given that it's also out of context now. For the rest, I'm not convinced my comment is insulting, for I do not consider to not be worthy of something a pejorative quality in itself. And I think that my original post is neither personal in scope nor an attack, on this basis.
ELI5...

In some sense it's a bug in client software, that allows information to be stored for eventual inclusion in future requests (i.e., like a regular browser cookie), but outside the ability of the user to monitor or delete (unlike a regular cookie). For some time people mostly blamed this on Flash, but there are probably other ways for old and/or strangely-configured clients to screw up like this.
I think that the issue is that people would rather have an Android device (with a healthy ecosystem), on specs that barely support it running Gingerbread than have a brand new Firefox OS device (which isn't bad, I had an early unit) with no history and a poor ecosystem.
I've talked to lower middle class people in India about this and my understanding is they are fine with feature phones if they're trying to save money or a cheap Android if they want a full smartphone. The middle ground of Firefox OS does not have a good enough value proposition.
We'll never get significant ridership on VTA light rail unless they find a way to speed it up. It's just so slow. That would require buried or elevated tracks separated from cars and pedestrians so that it can safely run at higher speeds. But building grade separated light rail tracks would take years and cost tens of billions, so politically it's a non-starter.
I'll always remember watching some talk about IPv6 details and how it was literally exactly the same as IPv4 except with a longer address. That still cracks me up. If that were true IPv6 would be everywhere by now, but it is oh so very not true.
OK, here's a throwaway account, for which I had to pick a different user name a few times because of the name restrictions (not to mention a password).

You, on the other hand, are not using a throwaway account, so I can tell that you seem to have a rather violent dislike of moot. If this were 4chan, I would have no idea that you made 3 separate posts trying to tear him down.
That's the position the Debian project is taking. They're planning to provide a package that builds locally on the users system.[1]

[1] http://blog.halon.org.uk/2016/01/on-zfs-in-debian/
So, you're saying that since there are major issues with the current system the best idea is just to burn it to the ground by electing a reckless maniac? That's just a way to make sure everyone is equally screwed.
Certainly if I was a lawyer I'd probably feel comfortable using an insult like "stupid" to describe a legal position but I'm not. You might be, I don't know. But it's still unnecessarily negative.
Banksy Identified by Scientists. Maybe
Thank you a lot!

I missed that part:

https://developer.github.com/v3/#conditional-requests

"Also note: making a conditional request and receiving a 304 response does not count against your Rate Limit, so we encourage you to use it whenever possible."
It’s Time Software People and Mechanical People Sat Down and Had a Talk
On the one hand, yeah, you're right, I tend to be too aggressive and rude and I really shouldn't do that, especially on a forum like HN. I genuinely appreciate you telling me that.

On the other hand, let's not forget that this is a very, very strong accusation. It's easy to lose sight of that, since it sounds like the usual world-weary complaining on a forum, but the gist of the statement is that the American government is deliberately making up false pretexts for war and killing foreign citizens and American soldiers, not for national interest or even crude financial gain, but in order to "test" warfighting doctrine. That's something a cartoonishly evil movie villain would do. I'm hardly a fan of the US government's current management, to put it lightly, but if this behavior was true it would make Watergate look like jaywalking and justify mass impeachment at the very minimum. If someone's going to toss it out I'd like there to be something to back it up.
Personally, I like blogs where people are about 85% sure they know what they are doing. It tends to spawn better conversation (as long as the comments section ends up minimally moderated). "This is how you do [insert complex concept here]" is a lot less interesting than "This is how I fucked up trying to do [insert complex concept here]". Obviously though, it does take time from the side project. I write notes to myself constantly. For me, setting up the blog seems more time consuming than taking some time to edit my notes into something coherent.
It's not just p-values. Some people just don't understand even very basic statistics.

I remember talking to one person in marketing who ran surveys of the company's users. They would send out a survey to all registered users, get back responses from 1% of them or something, and then proceed to report findings based on the responses. They were really happy, since a 1% response rate is great for surveys like this.

I tried to explain to them that all of this statistical machinery relies on having a random sample, and a self-selected sample is not that. No effect whatsoever. Surveys like this are standard practice in the industry. Why are you making trouble, geek-boy?
IMO having variables be different colors is a little distracting.
No it's not.

It's the probability of you seeing your results due to chance if there is no effect.

This differs from the probability of the results being due to chance because it does not take into account the probability of your hypothesis being true or false.

If you observe something that would disprove e.g. General Relativity with a P of 0.001 it is much more likely to be due to chance than if you observe something that is consistent with known science with a P of 0.001, as the weight of all the evidence for General Relativity is very strong.
The idea is that you will decide when you've either expended as much energy as you are willing to, or when you're convinced that you won't make a different decision.

There is a simple symmetry argument that shows that the odds of a random walk reaching sqrt(N) in one direction and then getting to the opposite direction by N observations is exactly the same as the odds of a random walk reaching 2 sqrt(N) by the time you reach N observations. So the sqrt(N) rule is a simplified version of, "Call off the test when you've reached 95% certainty that we have our final answer."

You can easily make a million minor improvements. But I can't come up with a simpler rule meeting the business needs which is less likely to lead to dangerous misunderstandings.

"Decide when you pass this threshold, or when you've put out as much effort as you're willing to."

And the effort required to testing are easily understood as well.

"The cost of a bad A/B test is at most 100 lost sales and remembering it is there for 2 months." (This would be for an organization that expects 10,000 sales in 2 months, and is willing to leave tests up for that long.)

And if memory serves me (I'd have to redo the calculation) the rule of thumb in this case is that wins below 1% are called randomly, above 2% are usually called right, you're confident of getting the right answer above 5%, and even over many tests you are confident of never making a 10% mistake.

That last rule of thumb is important. Small organizations can't benefit from A/B tests. Large ones are stupid not to use it heavily. And very few people have a good sense of whether it makes sense for them.
Because you can't use WebSockets in the browser without Javascript.
I like Baumeister and Tice. They make interesting theories, especially the talk "Is there anything good about men?" But this is good too -- showing that science can be messy. Makes me think of Thom Hartmann's "farmer vs hunter" analogy for ADHD, and Bem's studies on precognition.

Science is a human endeavor and as such is subject to lots of economic and mass psychological effects, but at least there is some constraint on what can be claimed. The truth is out there, in physics and other hard sciences. In everything else, the models are much more handwavy approximations of underlying complexity and variation.
The distribution of substandard developers making a purchasing-power equivalent of $100K (allowing for free healthcare, college education, lower housing costs) is probably similar in most countries with a well-developed IT sector.
I built a static status page that you can host anywhere. I use it for various systems. Its ugly, but works as required. Uses bootstrap and jquery. so you can go crazy with it. Everything is self contained. No need to maintain it. Does need an endpoint for the status page to ping. YMMV.

https://github.com/bliti/status-page
You don't have to write it all over the codebase. If you have a specific need, defmacro yourself out of your problem.

Generally speaking, taking a secondary value alone feels like a bad use of MVR (it happens rarely with standard functions and most libraries).

MVR are not intended to be substitute to other data-structures.
As said elsewhere, you can and should use structs, classes, lists, hash-tables,...

After all, why do we use multiple values instead of a single struct for functions arguments? Because in CL and other languages, unlike in Haskell, you don't want to define an ADT for all your functions or rely on currying.
But if you start putting too many coupled parameters in your functions, it starts to smell fishy.

Extracting a single value is easy, by the way:

(nth-value 1 (foo bar baz))
Download Amiga Racer Version 2.9 for free
ArXiv Analytics
> Really? That's news to me. When did that happen?

Yes, really. Between the year 2007 and 2012 in the US. See [1].

> Even if you got to 100% public transit across the globe that wouldn't make even a tiny dent.

I couldn't find the statistics for the US, but this Italian research paper[2] suggests 4% of CO2 emissions from Italy are from (low-occupancy) commuting. 100% public transit might lead to a 3% drop, which I consider much bigger than "a tiny dent". The US is likely to have a larger figure in absolute terms (greater average distances commuted, larger average engine bore, larger population).

> How are those going to reduce carbon emissions?

Nothing! I was answering a specific question you asked which was unrelated to carbon emissions. You question was quoted right before my answers, you couldn't have missed it.

My overarching point is simply reducing the population will not guarantee a decrease in CO2 emissions. Have a look at [3], which shows the amount of CO2 per country. Lets' take the top 2: China emits twice the CO2 (10Gt) as the US (5Gt) with 4 times the population. (Assuming a linear correlation) if we were to half China's population and at the same time 'industrializing' it to same level as the US, then China's CO2 emissions wouldn't change

> How exactly are you going to do "sustainable development" in the face of an exponentially increasing population?

Same as always? Exponential population growth isn't a new phenomenon - take a look at the US population graph (1790-present) some time.

1. https://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=90&...

2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281447764_Commuting...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
I started something similar recently, but figured a simpler target would be more usable.

Bug reports here, along with possible patches, for GNU Awk:

* https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=816277

* https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=816271

Writeup was pretty simple:

* https://blog.steve.org.uk/If_line_noise_is_a_program__all_fu...
One Guy with All the Talents (Must See, Only If You Wanna... but Check It Out)
One issue is that if you have a large effect that's consistently and easily reproduced, you don't actually need very accurate measurements or a statistical analysis at all. So any minimum standard would need to take into account.

Another issue is that science is expensive and we need to make decisions all the time whether there is any science backing them or not. So what do you do if there's no science that meets the minimum standards?
It's examples like this - particular to psychology - which always give me a chance to reflect and chuckle about how I believe the 'science' of psychology to be academically pointless. Not to be confused with psychiatry, which I find to be a worthwhile medical, scientific pursuit (adding subtances/drugs does change the equation quite a bit). But real, authentic psychology is pretty much an observational writing exercise that, in my opinion, can't be broadly applied any more than general dietary advice.

Each individual's physiological composition makes psychology nothing more than a practice bed for bored creative writers. Understanding the psyche is critically important to write convincing characters, absolutely, and that takes a lot of practice and thought to fashion into a functional perspective (or literary craft tool) that enables a person to write "believable" characters. Observation, not causation, as it were.

It's not really a stretch to share this belief, if one were to be familiar with the origins of psychology that trace back to an esteemed writer and philosopher(and turn-of-the-century physician...) by the name of William James, brother of noteworty Henry James.
Profiles in "leadership"...
Show HN: Knowably – build your personal learning network
What concepts from the book haven't stood the test of time?

If I recall correctly, the book was fairly general in its prescriptions.
Ted's my uncle, and has been doing amazing science photography since I was a little kid. He recently repaired an old scanning electron microscope and has been making images with that.

For Christmas this year he gave me a x-ray image of a pitcher plant (which he did in sections and stitched/colored with photoshop). The trick, he told me, was to grow it himself indoors so that it wouldn't eat any flies, which would show up as blobs in the x-ray and detract from the print.

You can see more of his stuff at http://www.sciencephotography.com/
Rules for small business mobile apps
Knowably is based on a Personal Learning Network concept (it includes peer-to-peer and role-based learning models). Basically you follow other people based on what do they learn and your interests. It helps your to discover and collect relevant to you resources (books, courses, links, notes) and by the way creating your public professional identity.
> In Uganda they arrest first and then they investigate later

Interestingly in the UK, US, Australia etc, when it comes to rape, they don't investigate at all, they have an official policy of assisting the accuser in framing their allegations.

It's quite interesting listening to "progressives" talk about the rights of suspects and due process in criminal investigations, and how little they care about those rights for certain crimes in their own backyards.
You left out the little bit about Apple and the publishers, who, as Adam Smith put it in The Wealth of Nations in 1776: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
No. I'm suggesting that arguing that you don't want to be surrounded exclusively by white males because "hey, I'm not gay" (implicitly, because you want to have sex with these people, or at least would not object to doing so) is somewhere between off-putting and troglodytic.
At our company, we renamed it #announcements and made it so only admins could post there.
Again, you're misunderstanding who the target of the anonymity is. Users on 4chan are highly anonymous to other users. Anonymity to the operators exists practically nowhere due to simple abuse prevention considerations.

Also note that anonymity is a sliding scale, not a binary switch.

Yes, throwaway accounts offer some anonymity. But they are decidedly less so than posting on most 4chan boards in default operation mode, since the default way of posting on those leaves no way for one user to identify another user. Meanwhile throwaway accounts require a non-trivial amount of effort for every single post made; which is much more than the zero amount of effort required on 4chan to have the same benefit.
Tiny Troopers Alliance Hack 2016 No Survey
> Canonical had their lawyers review the licenses and deemed their use of Linux and OpenZFS to be in compliance.

So Canonical, a tiny desktop-focused Linux company, have discovered something that Red Hat's well paid lawyers have missed?
15 Open-source DevOps tools for the private cloud
Show HN: AreWeLinked?
I can confirm that btrfs has major problems with tons of snapshots. The entire system will hang for minutes on random intervals and go completely unresponsive for hours when using admin commands. The many snapshots use case is pretty common when dealing with containers, even it everything works fine for simple setups.
Further segmenting the existing system probably means a huge amount of changes to the existing system — more expensive than replacing the whole lot.

The old system will be based on detecting trains in "blocks", sections of track insulated from each other where the train's wheels make the circuit. I was about to say this would use relays, but Wikipedia says the first all-relay system was installed in 1929. So it's at least partly mechanical (levers moving in the way of other levers). The logic implemented in this will prevent the signalman from sending trains on a collision path, but only if drivers obey all red lights.

The new system will either be something similar, except implemented in electronics and stopping the train if the driver doesn't. But for a metro system, in order to get higher capacity, it will probably do away with the "blocks" altogether, instead ensuring that every train has a safe distance ahead of it. Maybe they will also automate the trains, so the train drives itself.

Either way, they'll probably upgrade the trains to support the new system, then install the new system in whatever sections allow it, then remove the old system once the new system is working correctly. I'd expect there's a huge amount of sunk cost once the project starts (design, modifications to trains, staff training etc) so it doesn't make any sense to stop halfway and keep the costs of both systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking
3.09B!!! That is insane. I would think after the big dig disaster they would have learned their lesson.

In Zürich they just finished a huge expansion with a complex 10km tunnel und a 3rd underground 4 track station. Project cost was 2.0B up from 1.8B. At one point a drill got stuck and they had to abandon it.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durchmesserlinie_Altstetten–Zü...
This could be the food of the future–if you can handle it
Usually when I need to make a WIP commit it is when I need to switch to master to fix or change something else. When I'm done in master I'll switch back and just do a `git reset --soft HEAD` or I'll just do a git stash.
hmm, what you are discussing above is typically called the formulation of the prior, not the calculation of it. And I agree that this formulation can be problematic. It is almost certainly the most contentious element in Bayesian inference.

However, I will note that your examples are largely overstating the problem. The prior is not typically as subjective as you are implying. Furthermore, the Bayesian prediction converges to the frequential result in the limit of 'large' data. If your results are so highly sensitive to your prior that the results drastically change, then you either have:

1) insufficient data, at which point the frequentist results would also certainly have been as bad or worse (the prior acts as a regularization)
2) a misspecified prior

Either way, it is absolutely required that you perform tests to ensure your results are not greatly sensitive to your choice of prior, or if so that this is clearly noted as a modeling assumption. And bayes naturally has many means to test precisely this, such as cross-validation, bayes-factors, hierarchical, etc.

I also note that this is why I typically prefer Jeffreys Priors in my work. I mention this so that one can see that not all priors are 'subjective'. These are difficult to use in some fields, admittedly.
No, really, it's not.

There are very similar problems in most of the social AND natural sciences. In 2012, Amgen reported that they could only replicate 6/53 "landmark" cancer studies. Bayer had a similarly hard time replicating papers suggesting new drug targets in a smattering of fields including cardiology and oncology (14/67 successfully replicated).
>"Statistical significance has NOTHING to do with magnitude of difference!"

Here is the equation for a t-statistic (used for the common t-test):

d=mean(a)-mean(b)

s=sqrt(var(a) + var(b))/sqrt(n)

t=d/s

I see the magnitude of difference (d) right in the numerator. The t-value is then compared to the t-distribution to get the tail probability.
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Ray Tomlinson, creator of modern email, dies
Here is our introduction - https://blog.knowably.com/introducing-knowably-your-personal...

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Research shines light into darker side of gaming industry
I can not believe such a huge company did not consult lawyers and that the guy who was forced to write the code didn't speak to their managers about potential implications (whether it went up the chain is another matter).

Besides that, ignorantia iuris nocet. Governments don't have problems with fining individuals unaware of arcane and complex laws. Why would we feel sorry for unscrupulous corporations?