skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Power laws come up because they're the limiting distribution for a (common) class of processes. You can generate power law tailed distributions easily without dependence.

The class of distributions that both power law tails and the Normal distribution fall under are called "Levy-stable distributions" [1]. Given the sum of independent, identically distributed (I.I.D.) random variables that converge to a stable distribution, the limiting distribution is Levy-stable (read, power law tails). If you the sum of the I.I.D. random variables has finite variance, the Gaussian distribution is the limiting distribution, which is a special case of the Levy-stable distributions. If each of the I.I.D. random variables has infinite second moment (e.g. infinite variance) and converges, then it converges to something with power law tails.

We've been spoiled to think that the Gaussian's are the only or most common limiting distribution (thus the name "Normal") but Levy-stable distributions are another class of "common" distributions for the same reason: a common limiting distribution of sums of (independent) random variables have a limiting distribution that has power law tails. This was one of Mandelbrot's work horses in that power laws show up in nature, are self similar and represent a kind of "statistical" fractal [2].

There are other ways to generate power law tailed distributions as well, including having a random variable that has an exponentially increasing value with an exponentially decreasing probability of occurring, where each go at a different rate, say [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_distribution

[2] http://www.webofstories.com/play/benoit.mandelbrot/32;jsessi...

[3] https://www.math.uvic.ca/faculty/reed/PREpowerlaws.pdf
I didn't write my book on how to break into consulting until I validated demand. Here were my step:

1. Write up a table of contents

2. Throw up a quick landing page on unbounce. This was the page I used http://unbouncepages.com/become-a-freelance-software-consult... (but I did a 1month trial of Unbounce premium so I could cname it to codeforcash.zackburt.com)

3. Bought traffic on Reddit ads (/r/programming) and Facebook (programmers in USA). BTW, two young kids (a college student and a recent graduate) commented on my Facebook ad to bash me. The ad performed better after their comments.

I got email signups from Reddit at $4.50 net Cost Per Lead and from Facebook at $6.50 net Cost Per Lead. I spent a total of $100 buying traffic before I sat down to write the book. Although there was no way that 100% of the emails would convert to sales, (ultimately, about 35%+ of them did so far), it was clear to me that there was a potentially scaleable marketing channel (once I optimized the ads to drive down cost and improved conversion rate on email -> sale). That, and people on HN constantly ask how to break into consulting, so I also intuitively believed in the market.

But these days I am reluctant to dive into anything unless I know there is a repeatable sales process. I qualify potential startups as employers or clients based on this belief – I don't want to waste my time and I don't want them to waste theirs. I've been burned WAY too many times by startups with products or services that haven't been proven to have economic demand. Let people vote with their wallet not their mouth.
Going to check out the opencourseware (https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-950-differential-...)

Thanks for the pointer
Denying something does not make it not real.

What's not real is our perception of reality - the mental model. VR only helps us realize that this is the case because it completely fucks with that model.

Now, the reality that we have an inaccurate model of is, imho, actually there, so there no need to worry - the problem is with you not with the reality (is that comforting?).

Anyhow, I really don't want to see VR banned because some people find it hard to acknowledge bugs in their brains.
spot on, as usual for Greenwald
> lots of big States with diverging political views.

The thing is, political views don't diverge quite as much as it is being made to seem. Gerrymandering scrambles the signal[0] quite a bit and the Electoral College then magnifies[1] the apparent differences.

[0] http://theweek.com/speedreads/541955/howgerrymandering-works...

[1] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2016/
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I'd like to see this expanded to show the full text, the representative's summary, and constituent comments for the bills, codes, policies, docket, whatever they are actually going to be voting on.

Then, show how they voted.
It is true that my lisp 1.5, maclisp, lisp360, VMLisp, Interlisp, and Symbolics code need rewrites to run but that code predates the Common Lisp standard. There are things I'd like to see in Common Lisp but not enough to require a new standard. If there is ever a new standards effort it should start by absolutely, positively REQUIRING that ALL code compliant with the prior standard MUST work unchanged under the new standard.

The new C++ features like 'auto' simplify life in new code, which should not have been complicated in the first place. Where life gets ugly is with existing code written years ago. My C++ legacy code regularly breaks. gcc seems to default to C++11 but g++ uses C++14 by default. Breaking 'inline' behavior is just wrong. It seems that the Boost library is partially broken, apparently due to compiler implementation issues. Stop-gap measures, like compiler flags, just make the pain all that more intense.

I'd be quite happy if the standards committee decided to create new languages (e.g. C11, C14, C17, etc) so it would be possible to say "I use C11". As it now stands I don't believe ANYONE who says they "know" C++. Are you up to speed on "concepts"? Even Stroustrop described the last "standard" as "a totally new language".
> all clients
or to all interested clients.

> (probably webRTC?).
It can also be done with SignalR.
How to do Pencil push ups
Please update structor npm module: npm uninstall -E -D structor && npm install -E -D structor

Sorry for the inconvenience.
Isn't murder survival of the fittest?

We as a society have decided that, generally, profiting from causing harm to others incentives bad things.

I don't want cough medicine that might stop my breathing, but heroin was regularly sold as just that before the FDA.

History has shown that without regulation the quality, efficacy, composition, safety and side-effect profile of drugs might stray from reality because of market incentives. The unfortunate truth is that sometimes it is more profitable if those five things are ignored and people get hurt or die. Hence, regulation.

> People even go further and knowingly partake of substances known to be harmful (cigarettes).

Tobacco products are heavily regulated. One could argue that because of lobbying and the amounts of wealth involved, that tobacco companies have been spared some of the stronger regulations they could have faced.
User experience is tangible, measurable and quantifiable
Please update structor npm module:

`npm uninstall -E -D structor && npm install -E -D structor`

Sorry for the inconvenience.
وظائف الاهرام الجمعة 30/12/2016
Nvkd
Not everyone agrees with your ethics.

I have no financial stake in Facebook (don't work there), but really don't see many moral problems with what it does. And I think their mission of connecting the world in a single easily discoverable network is absolutely world-changing and noteworthy. It's changed my world for sure.
Sorry, I meant stuff like <v-if="condition">.
"Just entering your zip code is sufficient to obtain a list."

This is not even, sadly, close to true.
In the US, there are types of political districts that split down the middle of apartment buildings, etc. The federal districts are pretty sane. At the state and local level, pretty much anything goes.

While it's true there are a few areas where you can use zipcode and get reasonable results for some types of representatives, it's simply not correct for the US writ large for most state level political positions.

We once started generating shape files for different types of political districts we had, but for some types in the US, they aren't closed polygons, or they require 3 dimensions (the apartment building split), or ...
In some cases they are self-intersecting, due to border disputes among states, etc. Or you can prove the data is wrong, or ... Heck, in some cases, the local and state authorities have official data that disagrees on the political districts and nobody has ever really noticed!

This is one of those things people think should be really easy, and in pretty much every country but the US it is. In the US, it just varies wildly in difficulty.

Doing representatives at least means people are willing to accept some error rate, which makes it a little easier, but not much.

(For reference: I started Google's politics and elections engineering team, and co-started the voter information project to try to open up some of this kind of political data for real )
At least you got to make a non-comment :-).
Look at Sago Mini games. When mine were one, their favourites included Sago Mini Babies, Boats, Space Explorer and Forest Flyer. My three year old still loves them, and my five year old still plays them occasionally too. Also Toca Boca, though those are mostly aimed at slightly older kids. Toca Pet Doctor was a particular favourite when they were younger, though it does require some fine motor control (and is excellent for teaching tap and drag control) . Let me know if you want any more suggestions. It's no coincidence that these are all paid apps. They have no ads or IAP. You can get a lot of them free on Android with Amazon Underground if you have Prime.
Am I dismissive of the catastrophic effects of being shot, because I never wear a bulletproof vest? Again, not every individual app has the same problems. I'm not working on WoW. My best guess as to the number of people trying to attack my games is honestly zero.
At the largest CS schools there was some use of a federated Zephyr system for a while from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s. While Zephyr the protocol isn't great, the culture was. And being based on an open protocol and Open Source codebase — since it came out of MIT Project Athena — lots of fun hacks were written atop it too.

Also, the primary client "zwgc" (Zephyr WindowGram Client) could run reasonably on a low end workstation like a DECstation 3100 or SPARCstation 1 (8MB RAM, 25MHz RISC CPU, thin Ethernet or SLIP/PPP via dialup). None of this megabytes-of-HTML-and-JavaScript, gigabytes-of-RAM nonsense.
> When was the last time you thought about the animals
> that were killed in order for you to eat them.

I don't think of them often but I grew on the farm so I could witness (and sometimes particpate) in the whole process.
I see nothing wrong with that. I could even see more wrong in the attitude where people become veg(etari)ans for "ethical reasons". That's some fucked-up ethics, if you ask me.
Tor Saves Lives
BSD users: what BSD(s) do you use and why?
There's nothing wrong with the concept of age gating. Why not let kids play slot machines on the bus? Why not let kids dose themselves with stimulants on their ride in?

Chemically it's all more or less the same. Dopamine releases are dopamine releases, and as a society we have pretty conclusively determined that kindergarten is not the right time for any brain to handle that. Especially once you descend into the level of outright psychological manipulation that is the freemium app market at present.
Okay, I've never worked with a designer that would touch code, so there is that. Macros seem a bit redundant with partial views in my opinion, except they take fixed parameters, but this is a interesting concept.
Isn't that kind of obvious to everyone at this point? It's just not out in the explicit open with the right kind of language. By giving such meager evidence of a "certainty", they're essentially giving away that they determined this via other means.

So, right now, let's assume it was a Russian spy agency that hacked the DNC. They're sitting there, thinking, "wow, these FBI folks somehow figured out it was us.". Then after reading this paper, "hmm, that's not a whole lot of evidence, they must have some proof that they're hiding. They must have a mole in our office. Find him, now."
This is a good read.

One popular misconception it misses to hit on is that we do not know if quantum computing "gives your computer a huge speed boost!". The answer in the comic is only: "Well, we only know how to do that for a few special problems."

I expected it to go on and say that even for them we are not sure because this seems to be a recurring topic in Scott Aaronson's writing.[1]

Besides that my favorite part is:

Son: "Then why did the popular articles lie to me about that?!"

Mom: "For generations physicists had a custom when discussing these matters with outsiders they wanted to avoid being too... graphic"

Mom:"Too explicit."

Mom: "Gulp"

Mom: "Mathematically precise."

[1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=124
Bit of an aside, but this is the first I've seen an article published on telegra.ph, Telegram's Medium-like article hosting service.

See: https://telegram.org/blog/instant-view
> Gerrymandering probably still matters

It matters everywhere in the US, down to the school district level (or whatever municipal granularity you like). This is orthogonal to tampering.
Rambo Launches Real Money Casino Mobile App in Kenya
Did more celebrities die in 2016 than normal?
Probably being compared to languages like Python, Ruby, and Perl. It should be pretty close to statically typed languages on the JVM like Scala. I think a real REPL is worth a little bit of performance.
> Anyway, it sounds like I stepped on a FUD landmine.

That's the problem with FUD, it gets everywhere and takes forever to clean up. :)

> I got the impression that it is not trivial to backport packages from the nightly tree to the stable tree

Let's be clear: stable is a strict subset of nightly. And I mean strict. All stable code runs on nightly, and if it didn't, that would mean that we broke backwards compatibility somehow. And even if you're on the nightly compiler, you have to be very explicit if you want to use unstable features (they're all opt-in). Furthermore, there's no ironclad reason that any given library must be on nightly, in that boring old every-language-is-Turing-complete way; people use unstable features because they either make their code faster or because they make their APIs nicer to use. You can "backport" them by removing those optimizations or changing your API, and though that seems harsh, note that people tend to clamor for stable solutions to their problems, so if you don't want to do it then somebody else will fork your library and do it and steal your users. There are strong incentives to being on stable: since stable code works on both nightly and stable releases, stable libraries have strictly larger markets and therefore mindshare/userbase; and since stable code doesn't break, library maintainers have much less work to do. At the same time, the Rust developers actively monitor the community to find the places where relatively large numbers of people are biting the bullet and accepting a nightly lib for speed or ergonomics, and the Rust developers then actively prioritize those unstable features (hence why deriving will be stable in the February release, which will get Serde and Diesel exclusively on stable, which together represent the clear plurality of reasons-to-be-on-nightly in the wild).

> What's missing?

I've already typed enough, but yes, cross-platform support is a colossal reason for developers favoring language-specific package managers. Another is rapid iteration: it's way, way easier to push a new version of a lib to Rubygems.org than it is to upstream it into Debian. Another is recency: if you want to use the most recent version of a given package rather than whatever Debian's got in stock, then you have to throw away a lot of the niceties of the system package manager anyway. But these are all things users don't want; they don't want to be bleeding-edge, they don't want code that hasn't seen any vetting, and they really don't care if the code they're running isn't portable to other operating systems.
I think CAH does tread into the TryHard zone, but that's personal taste. They're similar in method but different in feel.
> The cognitive dissonance that comes from having to interact with Java when using Clojure is very damaging and it can't be abstracted away. Just look at Clojure stack traces.

This is what has kept me from really feeling comfortable getting into Clojure. Unfortunately there are so many downsides in the Functional programming world :( It's either:

1. Have a strange interrop (Clojure with Java, and even though Elixir with Erlang isn't as bad, it still bothers me)

2. Lack of mainstream adoption (e.g. Haskell, yes FB uses it for their spam filters.. but mostly working developers predominantly use other languages)

3. Lack of clear tooling choices or implementations (Haskell's stack vs. platform, or Scheme is great but no one popular implementation)

(I know I'm being quite pessimistic)
To me, Rust's &str seems a lot more like const char* (with a size tacked on for bounds checking). But you're the expert, so if I did agree they were the same, then C++ adopting it in the STL is practically proof it's a mistake in Rust.

You never addressed my other "too clever" items in Rust. Does that mean, other than strings, we agree?
I wish more people in science and medicine used open source solutions like Matrix (even the riot.im Matrix instance would be nice).
Google cloud jobs api
I agree!
Thanks for the links.
My "functional programming epiphany" came in a talk by Martin Odersky, who remarked that imperative programming is like thinking in terms of time, whereas functional programming is like thinking in terms of space. Don't think about the sequence of how to achieve things, but the building blocks needed to do so. That nailed it and made me a Scala convert ever since.
MakeTypes from JSON samples
Stop buying / create content that outcompetes them / lobby Apple / lobby Congress / hack the games
I really tried SBCL, but even knowing a little Lisp (own about 6 books I've read most of), I couldn't get past the tooling. SLIME+emacs is powerful, but the tutorials are awful and very lacking. Sadly, Clojure isn't much better here. Racket is pretty good here, but I can't get past the fact that I'm essentially playing with an educational product and not a real industrial language.
You would not believe how fast speciation become under stress. And right now humanity has power to create new species quite literally. Question is, will it use these tools to speed up its own evolution or not?
I'm constantly amazed by professionals who complain about their email inbox. Do they not bother to learn their tools, and set up simple mail filters?

Mailing lists are actually one of the best collaboration tools available because:

(1) They can be, but don't have to be, nearly real-time;

(2) The content comes to you, you don't have to check it;

(3) They allow a full suite of content to be exchanged, if participants are willing to accept the overhead; and

(4) They're straightforward to build tools atop, including archives, autoresponders, and various kinds of automation.

Realtime tools like IRC & Zephyr and their awful browser-based clones like HipChat and Slack can be useful too, but should be treated as supplements, not primary.

Web forums aren't quite as awful as browser-based chat, but they're generally better treated as a front-end to a mailing list for people who don't otherwise have access to a good mail client.

(Really, all of this would be even better served by NNTP instead of mailing lists, but almost nobody runs organizational NNTP servers and mail clients long ago dropped support for it.)
Got a link to the archive?
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the shitstorm that followed the release of Nintendo's Super Mario Run on iOS.

The game comes for free with 3 levels. To unlock the full version, you need to make a one-off in-app purchase that costs around $10 depending on your local currency. But other than that, it has a pretty traditional pricing.

So after release, this otherwise awesome, deep game was getting tons and tons of negative reviews because of the fact that the in-app purchase was, according to many, way too expensive. I followed this topic a little bit on Twitter, and what I saw (I know, very unscientific) was that most of the people complaining where youngsters that most probably spend their most time playing games that require you to pay in order to progress faster in the game. Of course, they usually pay a fraction of the $10 that Nintendo wants, but they do it many times over the lifecycle of a game.

Just compare the $10 that you have to spend in order to play Super Mario Run (assuming that you already have an iOS device) to what you would need to pay to play a Mario game on Nintendo hardware: the cheapest you could do is to pay ~$200 for a Nintendo 3DS + ~$40 for the game. Of course, once you get the hardware, you can play more games on it, but the games are still 4x more expensive than the one release on iOS.

To wrap this up: I think that in-app purchases are really, really bad for the gaming industry and should not be abused the way they are now. Especially Apple should intervene here and maybe put a limit on the items to be sold and ban completely "pay to level up quicker" IAPs.

Also, Apple should offer a demo option for their apps already, instead of forcing developers to abuse in-app purchases for that.
Default Patterns Can Destroy Your Trading (And How You Can Prevent Them
Probably a hidden Markov process[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Markov_model
You just stressed my point. In your described scheme the poor guy in Indonesia still got no chicken.
Why not think both in terms of space and time?
In the 90ies, Pascal had a lot of traction here in Europe. Turbo Pascal was the default language to use for DOS programming. I remember from my physics department that any computer-controlled devices came with Turbo Pascal units for controlling them. And later on, Delphi had its success, I guess it was more killed by bad management then anything else.

Interestingly, Go picks up a lot of Pascal (and of course Modula) tradition, as Robert Griesemer worked with Wirth before. A lot of the Wirth language family's ideas made it into Go clothed into a C syntax.
The strip mining of the public good that drug companies would do if all sales were allowed boggles the mind.

Such an open policy would only work if all information (including internal information proprietary to the maker) was available to inform buyers, and while I think a fully informed market w would be great, I don't see any real chance of that happening.
How is browser-based chat like Slack "the latest innovative technology?" It's just IRC or Zephyr, but accessed via a browser. It's not something people didn't have in the early 1990s. Hell, it's not substantially different than AOL or Yahoo chat rooms either, except that it's so heavyweight you couldn't even think about accessing it from systems that accessed those just fine.
My car's headunit just has a GPS input in the back, my GPS sits under the windshield.
I dunno about NZ and the UK, but from what I've seen of farms in Australia and Sweden, I can believe it. In Australia, I see cattle in absolutely massive fields where they eat whatever is growing there. In Sweden, I see small fields that can't sustain the livestock (especially not in winter) and they need to feed them farmed food, which takes a lot of energy to grow, store and harvest.