skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went all the way back to your first post on HN the last time you flamed on this issue, and I get where you are coming from. But I don't think you get where I'm coming from. I simply think that everyone engaged in science, from the lofty Nobel Prize winner to the first-year graduate student grunt worker, has to be prepared to follow correct methodology, each day and every day.

It happens, among all subjects that are researched, that I am most familiar with the research on psychology of human abilities and education reform (especially the intersection of those subjects, education of gifted children). Most of what passes for "research" in those subjects is appallingly bad from a methodological point of view. I've seen very influential publications with recommendations on gifted education that consist entirely of "fudge"--made-up citations that can't be verified if you look at the cited journals, and "studies" with no description of how the data were observed at all.

When a press release writes "According to a 2003 study," I immediately look for a citation of the study. Scientific studies that get published all have citations. Serious scholars cite that which is published. My alarm bells went off when I didn't see any citation to any study to back up that extremely implausible point. If you want to talk about priors, my statement is that it is EXTREMELY implausible that "a mere 40 percent of gifted children will complete an undergraduate degree" by any reasonable definition of "gifted." There are severe economic limitations on college access for some learners (cited by me in another post in this thread). But my claim is that well over half of "gifted" learners in the United States in my generation or subsequent generations eventually complete a college degree, and that the "study" mentioned but not cited in the press release is bogus.

After edit: Whenever I think about the hard work that scientists do, I'm reminded of Richard Feynman's commencement speech "Cargo Cult Science"

http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/02/CargoCult.pdf

http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

in which the important statement occurs:

"But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves--of having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that."

Have you ever written to Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, with your comments on his article?

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Perhaps he could reflect your point of view the next time he revises that article, if you think there is something there in need of correction. On my part, I post the article a lot because my late father (a chemistry major who extensively studied the philosophy of science) alerted me to the issue of replicating research findings when I was quite young. Odd findings may be the next great discovery. They may also be flawed, mistaken observations.
Firefox already includes a lot of customization points that allow entities like Ubuntu to package a just-right version of Firefox without needing to go whole-hog and fork the entire system (remember Iceweasal?).
Defined "outperform." I love your writing, so I know you know better than that.

What if you get more signups for your email newsletter - but fewer conversions to customers down the line?

What if you make more sales, but they incur more support over the 12 mos? Or are simply more stupid/more annoying/more rude?

What if you make more sales, but they don't USE the product? Or use it effectively, to its fullest extent? (Whether or not they bug you about it.)

What if you just, flat out, get customers who don't support your values/the direction you want to take your business?

Science never stops.

More is not better, necessarily - call no man happy until he is dead, and call no additional customer good until the relationship is at its complete and utter end.

And just because people say they don't care about book design, doesn't mean that's actually how they behave. And just because they behave a certain way now, doesn't mean they wouldn't behave differently, offered a superior solution.

And just because they think they there's no difference, doesn't mean they don't actually experience the book better given (as another commentor said) a provably superior product in terms of readability.

Simplifying it as artsy fartsy prissiness, and wielding just-one-step "science" as a weapon, is doing everyone, and everything, a disfavor.
Sorry for the sluggish response, I completely missed your comment.

Any one of the answers you gave there would have sufficed to be used as the 'platform' for further discussion, if you had named those three with the 'Which of these is the most complicated and why?' I think if would have led to a very interesting discussion about your past work for a bit.

Let's take the video game AI as an example. My follow up question would have been something along the lines of 'That's an interesting one, what kind of behavior did your AI govern, and how did you go about implementing that?' or 'How did you protect your AI from getting stuck in a loop or becoming too predictable?', or any one of a bunch of questions about the sort of thing you run in to when you build a video game AI. I'd know pretty quickly if you actually did write a video game AI (I wrote a bunch of video games, and even though I wouldn't class the routines governing the bots as 'AI' I think I can relate enough to the problem domain to come up with some questions) or if you're making it up.

For myself, if someone would ask me that question I'd answer a fully integrated cad-cam system for lathes and mills. That one kept me busy for two years, ended up as about 50K lines of high level code and another 20K of assembler to make it fast. The hardest part there for me was the equidistant operation, it took me quite a while to get it right because I'm weak in the mathematical department, it's actually one of the few times in my programming career that I got so stuck on a problem that I hired a tutor to brush up on the required math.
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I have the Kindle DX also, and it's too low contrast and the type on most academic papers (that I read) is far too small.

I'm 25, so it's not as if it's my eyesight that's the problem.

On the other hand, reading them on my iPad with a tool like iAnnotate, I can not only make the text bigger, but mark the PDFs up with highlights, boxes, and notes (which are PDF format standards -- not special to the app itself). And transfer them over wifi.
`add-apt-repository ppa:canonical-dx-team/une` will add both the apt sources and the signing key in a single command.
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2:54 "... even though he is sick at home he is working on this new task ..."
Symantec study misses the point over Linux spam
i don't quite understand the miscommunication here. i'm asking you to consider a statement.

edit: maybe you overlooked ^"to consider" and just read "i want to ask you ^ something".
As Shirky writes, abundance breaks more things than scarcity. Books included.

In the age of constant, uninterrupted information, quality filters will be king. That's why people want news readers that automatically bubble up good shit (badly). That's why people follow others on Twitter who give good link. That's why, in theory, we use HN.
I know of at least one S3 customer that uses a small (but significant) number of S3's total published object count. I would assume that there are more customers like this one.
"And I think that's what we're talking about when we talk about Facebook and privacy. I think we are talking about massive incompetence. I am planning to leave Facebook because I believe their management is incompetent."

Other commentators think avarice is the issue. I have no opinion on why Facebook is muffing privacy, but note that my friends are mostly dialing down their use of Facebook recently, which makes Facebook less fun for me and for them.
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I don't know specifically about this, but we've researched neurodevelopmental delay therapy (which asserts that many issues are caused by the delay of the proper development of certain brain functions).

http://www.neurodevelopmentaltherapy.ie/whatisdevelopmentald...

The therapist we talked to noted that many very smart kids who have delay issues (which may manifest themselves as "simple" eye tracking or gross motor skills issues) will eventually struggle academically because they reach a point where their brains can no longer compensate, and generally this manifests itself with writing issues.
I was really looking forward to college, where I heard that many professors make homework totally optional and the vast majority of one's grade comes from tests.

You would probably like majoring in math at the University of Minnesota then. The reason to do (self-chosen) homework between the tests is just to be ready for the tests. (Well, really the reason to learn anything should be to learn it, irrespective of grades, but you know what I mean.)
I disagree. Derivative traders provide financial instruments to hedge risk. What do angels and VCs do? Finance companies that scam online users. http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/07/horrible-things-slink-back-...
UI development is not a democratic process.
About 10 years ago the journal Science had a cover story review article called "The soft science of dietary fat". It's likely still behind a paywall, but that was the single best summary on this topic I have ever seen. I remember it went on at length about how the original research had been simplified by governments and policy groups because it was impractical to tell people which fats were OK.
The failure begins in most cases with appallingly bad reading instruction in school. See

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-Invent...

and the earlier sources it cites for research on what to do about that.
It might have been you that put me onto this - I did get the idea from HN, but haven't had time to track down the original suggestion.

This is a brief reply - I don't have time for more detail now, I am intending to write this up, but it's about 50th on a very long "To Do" list.

People have this concept that infinity is kind of, well, "out there", as far as you can go. You can't go any further, it's all there is. People talk about parallel lines "meeting at infinity" and "there is no last point on the line" sort of thing.

And that's what their intuition is telling them. There's nothing beyond infinity.

Then when we talk about the cardinals we tend to reinforce that by showing that the odds, evens, squares and primes all have the same cardinality. That's a bit weird for people, but they're getting the idea that infinity is odd, but they can cope with odd.

Then we show that N^2 and Q are both countable, can be put in one-one correspondence with N. They're getting cool with that too. We continue to reinforce the idea that there's infinity, and every time we do something we get the same infinity.

But that's now what they expect. Infinity is kind of as far as you can go. We're matching the set-theoretic cardinals to their geometrical intuition of "out there."

No wonder they get confused, upset, and occasionally angry when we then introduce 2^N as being "bigger."

I'm finding that talking about geometry and the concept of infinity, then talking about sets and the concept of intinity as a different thing, despite the same name is helping people to create different models in their minds. These different models then help them not use the same intuition, and they don't get confused in the same way.

Then, as the final modification, I don't start by showing that loads and loads of things are all countable. I talk about "same size" as being 1-1 matching, and discuss the idea that there could be something "bigger than N."

I do that first, and then go hunting, pointing out from the beginning that historically people found this difficult.

Now they get excited when I show them that 2^N is uncountable. They've been primed to want to find it, and their intuition about "infinity" isn't challenged.

That's an incomplete summary - I hope it helps. Ask for more, or email me if it's not clear.
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How much of an academic difference do you think is WORTH a difference in out-of-pocket cost? Some people take out loans to study at a particular college, viewing attending that college as an "investment." (My oldest son, having just had that choice, chose to attend our state flagship university. He essentially will be paid to study at State U.) Is it reasonable to suppose that some brand names of colleges (even if not all) might be worth more up-front expense?
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Incredibly low-priced private schools
Linux does play Flash, so this argument makes no sense.
You don't own a watch? =)
woot, thanks
Ah, ok, I get it now. Ok, I've 'considered' it, now what?

It's a bit too philosophical for me, you could ask anybody to 'consider' that and they would most likely land on 'but that isn't how it happened'.

Asking someone to consider some alternate reality and what their position would have been in that alternate reality is difficult stuff, at a minimum you'd have to concede that you can't really consider any 'alternative universes' simply because this is the one we've got.

So, in this universe, I exist, I'm happy I do and my parents, even though they probably made a wrong decision or two did have two kids.

The line of reasoning you are pursuing leads to either a very empty planet or to a planet with different people, two random specimens of which could be having this exact same conversation on a nodesloc called latest.zjoiner.com.
The State of the Copyright Debate
Well, it's a thought experiment so you don't have to worry about constraints of time and space.
The references are in that document. They found that giving water and pellet feed increased body mass more than pellet feed alone.
Couldn't fit the word functionally in. 80 letter character limit. If you go through life assuming that someone isn't being dense or facetious, but that there's a mitigating circumstance, you'll find people are more responsive, and that you're more right more of the time.
Epub, arguably the universal ebook format, is really just a fancy zip-based Package of html resources. IBM has a nice guide for hackers about creating an epub file: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/tutorials/x-epubtut/in...
Oh, perfectly reasonable but rather tough question. My thinking about teaching infinity is now at odds both with everything I've read, and how I was taught. It also depends on your own inclinations, strengths and background.

Brian Clegg's book on infinity gets good reviews, but I haven't read it. I'm thinking of starting a blog series on it, but with everything else I have on I may never really get to it.

But as I say, in your specific case it really depends on your background. If you're really interested perhaps you could email me more details on what you've studied and what you've read, and I can write some brief articles by way of reply.
Whilst we'd both love to see the former done, as someone who's not yet in a position to influence government education policy yet, that's not a particularly useful answer.
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I am leading a team working on an AI-based learning game that should help with literacy issues. The software implements several cognitive science principles including those in lionhearted's comment:

> (1) at the edge of their current capabilities, which is to say doable but slightly challenging, (2) interesting, stimulating, and relevant to them.

We are pretty close to launching. If you're interested, please just get in touch. (My email is in my HN profile).
I agree with you. That's why I co-founded Fifobooks, a new DRM-free ebook marketplace, where authors:

- retain all the rights to their work

- maintain full editorial control

- set the price at which their ebooks are sold, and keep the majority of the revenue

- there is no fee to publish

- nonexclusive
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You're not alone in this department. Repetition is the key.

More: http://www.supermemo.com/english/princip.htm (the whole site is pretty decent at explaining the process of learning)
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I recently launched topytalk.com, a twitter talk-oriented timeline.

I'm interested in any and all feedback.
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Feel free to grab the list of ycombinator start-ups from my blog (http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-combinator...) if it'll help.
Rider has set me straight, but here's my original beef:

I said, quite clearly, "I understand that mathematics isn't simply about physical phenomenon. I understand the beauty of i, for example."

You mention 3 and the square root of 2. You plug both of those in to: (x == x+1) and you'll get an inequality. Not so with infinity.

Again, Rider has set me straight that I need to learn more. I can believe that, but when I see how often in the physical world we creep up on infinity only to have it not exist, I'm definitely skeptical about plugging in infinity into equations like x == x + 1. It seems it doesn't make any sense at all.
Not to express an endorsement in either direction, but you may be interested in the finitist school of thought: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finitism

or its even stricter cousin, which not only denies the meaningful existence of infinity, but also the meaningful existence of technically finite but infeasibly large numbers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrafinitism
Ah, the void of non-existence is certainly filled with emptiness. It's what happens to the living that matters, though. Put another way, is Schrödinger's cat alive or dead? Does it matter if you don't intend to open the box?
I think there are many books out there that aren't exactly masterpieces, put out there by big publishers. Conversely, works that are big commercial successes were for a long time shunned by publishers (JK Rowling).

Perhaps user reviews & ratings, and previewing books would be a good enough filter? I mean people can already publish anything they want for free online, and non-techies seem perfectly capable in filtering out.
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Is the military really that rigid on not questioning your superiors orders?

Assuming that a higher placed always knows better seems to be a pretty weird position, at some point domain specific knowledge starts to apply and you would expect a more bi-directional flow of information.

You might explain the 'why' of something without being asked and follow up with a 'do you foresee any issues with that?' to avoid mistakes like that one in the story.
That's why you should purchase an ebook reader based on epub, instead of proprietary formats.
It felt amazing to leave work with a clear head, not thinking about whatever unfinished business I had left which could prove to be a problem in meeting the deadline.

My story is quite the reverse. I grew up on a dryland wheat farm in Montana. Nature has a way of enforcing its own deadlines. There, you are never not aware of the issue facing you, hail, no rain, early fall, short crops. Software deadlines seemed to pale in comparison.
> I'm not trying to be innovative, because frankly all you guys

If that what it is, so be it. Personally I am not taker of this idea
Watch the Startups - 52 Weeks of UX
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HoverAttribute is a jQuery plugin that allows us to make link elements more dynamic by making an attribute of that element show up on hovering. This is foremost intended for <a> tags residing within full-width elements, such as headings or list entries.
Dear Facebook
A few points I can confirm from talking with Jud about this over the last few weeks:

- Billions is the correct magnitude. It's the result of Gnip's aggregation of multiple Twitter-firehose-scale feeds over a year. They are massive users of S3 storage.

- I'm unsure why he's using an XL instance in this case, but I know he's been experimenting heavily with different configs to improve performance

- How do you get sustained 700 deletes a second? I'm not being facetious, I see much slower performance using commercial and open-source interfaces to S3 like s3cmd or Bucket Explorer. I'd love to find some faster approaches.
I checked to see how many files we have on our main CDN (not S3 hosted, but just to get an idea), about 500 million files, there are 6 of those boxes so that's 3 billion files.

We keep three copies of each, but since S3 does that for you I think we shouldn't multiply by 3.

3 billion files is a lot of files, but it isn't that extreme, he could very well be telling the truth.
I think you are correct with your assumptions. But I think he needs to explain himself in this department. I didn't think it added any value to his post since it is unsupported. Maybe he could have quoted his GPA, or IQ[still dubious]. I think most people don't put their trust in numbers either way, they go for what did you accomplished[especially VC, they want to know the numbers behind your financial efforts]. I was quite surprised at how hard some of the other posters judged his "big picture" evaluation. I think maybe he has a problem with acting not thinking. I think he knows what to do, but just simply not doing it.
I saw it on Slashdot a year ago: http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/06/26/1342215/Doctors-B...
Apple vs. Flash: The InfoWorld peace plan
Make Mine a Billion: Avoiding the Financial Mistake Avalanche
The application of mathematics is a practical matter; I am not entirely sure what "high philosophy" is, but mathematics is also a conceptual, abstract discipline which can be investigated with no concern whatsoever for practical applications.

The reliance of analysis on Cauchy sequences is not "philosophical gook". zemaj may be naïve in her conclusions (or at least unaware of just how much mathematics one must give up when one takes a constructivist view), but she is hardly alone in her hesitancy about infinity. I wouldn't be sure what to make of the claim that Brouwer, Markov or Martin-Löf didn't know mathematics.
Interesting. I wonder if it doesn't make sense then for an authhor and editor, when they work on an ebook together, share the revenue, instead of an upfront split? That way, both are incentivized to put the best work out there.
Interesting Case of Mismatched Parentheses
Rethinking Forms in HTML5
I'm still not convinced, I've run mail servers for over 10 years, one of the lessons you quickly learn is that if you leave one open you soon find your normal mail choked off by getting on a blacklist and if you're on a supposed domestic IP range, that's a hassle too.

Is the prevalence of fat pipe + linux +clueless admin > fat pipe + windows + clueless admin ?
I have no first-hand experience, but a surprising amount of second-hand experience, and the answer seems to be yes, the military really is that rigid on not questioning your superiors orders.

It depends a bit on the country, the service, the field and the ranks involved, but the answer basically boils down to yes - don't question your orders.

Some subordinates do get away with more, and some superiors do allow more, and there are ways of asking questions that are more tolerated, but most people with the knowledge to realise that the orders should be questioned don't ahve the ability to ask questions the right way for the context.
School was painfully slow for me. Especially with math.

I never used the textbooks for my math classes, and never did my homework. I would never show up for the classes, except for chapter tests and finals. I used cliffs notes. I only looked over the material for the test during the break before the class, and I always scored highly.

This school system really wore down on me. I just didn't give a crap at all, and my GPA suffered.