skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, there are some related topics on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Randomness?q=random and http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-books-on-random-proc...

You can actually ask your question there as well in case this question gets unnoticed on HN; Quora people are very smart and pretty responsive

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_process, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk and do a search for Random Processes or Stochastic Processes on Amazon bookstore

Read about Entropy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
A good book on Information theory can help you put it in context: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_1_18?url=search-alias...

Check out GMP http://gmplib.org/

If you're philosophically inclined read some existentialists, they deal a lot with irrationality and chaos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism

If you're financially inclined read Random Walk Down Wall Street: http://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/039331 and the Black Swan: http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp... you may want to check out his other book as well, it is rather non-technical: http://www.amazon.com/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Chance-Market...

To learn more on how Wall Street deals with the stock market randomness read some books on Time Series analysis and forecasting, e.g the classic http://www.amazon.com/Time-Analysis-Forecasting-Probability-...

If you are a data scientist in heart read this great Q&A thread: http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-become-a-data-scientist

I wish I could help you with a link to a clear non-technical introductory article but this is all I've got. As random as it gets:)

Probably some good introductory book on science will fit the bill, science after all deals primarily with randomness.
You may want to check out http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/...
Maybe that's a necessary condition, but it's certainly not a sufficient condition.

I've disassembled (and reassembled) quite a few things that I didn't fully understand. I did have to take notes for some of the more complex devices, though, or I'd have never gotten the wires reconnected properly.
That's not always true.

Templating is a perfect case for reusing code on both sides of the connection. In the optimal scenario, the browser can render a template based on requests for JSON data. However, if the client doesn't support JavaScript, the same template can be rendered on the server-side and fed to the browser traditionally. Great for accessibility and SEO.

Input validation is another situation that's a great candidate for shared code.

Another nice benefit is that server-side JavaScript brings an assortment of mature DOM selection/manipulation engines with it. I believe there was an example of using jQuery on the server-side with node.js posted here recently.

Jaxer[0], which was ahead of its time, had a nice approach to sharing client/server logic with its runat="both". It's a shame that project never got much traction.

[0] http://www.jaxer.org/
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Have you seen DNode? http://substack.net/posts/85e1bd/DNode-Asynchronous-Remote-M...

Doesn't solve that problem (which is really, really hard) but it's a very interesting step.
I used to have over a hundred domains with them, but they canceled one of my favorite domains because THEY didn't charge my debit card. The domain was set to auto-renew, and there was money in the account... They lost me for good.
The company said it looked at other locations in the area, but none would work, either because the owners didn't want cell antennas on their buildings...

So either multiple owners are refusing to host antennas at any price, or AT&T just doesn't want to pay market rent in Harvard Square.
To be fair, Steve Jobs didn't actually take calligraphy--he ran out of money and dropped out of college by then. He just kind of bummed around Reed College for awhile and dropped in on classes that seemed cool, and calligraphy was one of them. He probably learned enough about calligraphy to impress upon him the idea that attention to detail--even down to how the written word is physically shaped and represented--is important. But he didn't necessarily pick up enough technique to be a great calligrapher.

Lots of classes don't have enough general interest content to be worth spending 3 hours a term on, but are still worth attending a lecture or two. Easier if you're a college town bum than if you're an actual student though.
Northwestern doesn't have finance or business undergrad. Or were you referring to the Kellogg certificate programs\a transfer student?
Well all I know is now that Jenny McCarthy has been proven smarter than all those PhDs and thereby invalidated post-secondary education.
The plant closed because of "a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014."

I'm going to have to stockpile incandescent bulbs I guess, because I want no part of CFLs. I tried them, and found that they are utterly inferior to incandescent bulbs in almost every way. I guess they use less electricity, but I noticed no significant change in my electric bill.

The light has an unpleasant color spectrum; they are dim for the first few minutes after you turn them on; they don't work well outside in the winter; they don't last much longer (despite claims to the contrary); they cost an order of magnitude more; and they contain toxic mercury which can contaminate your home if you drop one.
And not just materials either. Some of the longer life is due to tighter machining and better finish, largely thanks to CNC automation.
Tone of voice is just as important. I have an in-law who’s a cop, and most times if you're a jerk, he says you get the ticket you might otherwise not have. It’s very much an issue of power because someone needs to control the situation—you or them. Not to mention, being argumentative gives them a reason to suspect something else might be going on, and in turn, mess with you. Why give them that chance?

I wonder if he would try another experiment where he actually answers the questions as asked, but instead makes his tone sarcastic, etc. I bet he's pulled out of line just as quickly for cooling down, even though legally he’d have complied.
I was set to do a financial economics certificate program as part of Kellogg. Like I said, never went through with it. Not sure what business undergrad you're referring to. The closest thing we have is BIP (business institutions program), which I was going to do but settled with legal studies instead. Don't plan on going to law school either. Eventually I would like to pursue an MBA, but first it's in my best interest to garner some work experience. Do you go to NU?
> I am half way through my degree studying computer science, and feel as though I am learning nothing. I have self taught myself iPhone development and ruby on rails.

It's a bit sad that you haven't learned that CS isn't about learning RoR and Obj-C. :-/

When you say half way, I'm guessing you mean two years, which isn't really half way at a lot of schools because you can only take 1-2 CS classes a semester your first couple years. Imagine if you were going to major in English, but you started illiterate and had to spend the first 1.5 years learning to read and write. And then you announced, "Guys, I want to quit my English degree...I've already taught myself to type and post messages on Twitter." Quitting a CS major after 3-5 intro classes would be equally misguided.
I much prefer this version, combined with Readability or some other tool (Safari Reader here). I would like to see the original URL changed to this (not sure if that’s possible).
The book "Thinking Forth" contains a quote from Charles Moore: "In my accounting system [...]"; the example shows two significant places after the decimal point for the dollar amount - whether the type is floating point or fixed decimal is naturally implicit (and uninferable from the example).

Nothing in that vignette contradicts the observations of the article.
I don't know about Jeeps specifically, but they started putting embedded systems into cars in the mid-1970s and into pickup trucks in the early-1980s.
Here's my Forth version of the quadratic equation from elsewhere in this thread; it ends up being six lines instead of three, but I don't think that's excessive:

variable a variable b variable c fvariable discriminant
: b^2 b @ dup * ; : 4ac 4 a @ c @ * * ; : s>f s>d d>f ;
: -b b @ negate s>f ; : /2a a @ 2* s>f f/ ; : f. f>d d. ;
: quadeq c ! b ! a ! b^2 4ac - s>f fsqrt discriminant f!
-b discriminant f@ f+ /2a
-b discriminant f@ f- /2a ;

I agree that the Python version is a lot clearer and less bug-prone, but I don't agree that this is extremely difficult to do without local variables. Forth-style global variables work fine, because the function isn't recursive. They're just bug-prone, that's all.

But they're much less bug-prone in Forth than in, say, C. I'm too sleepy to write in any detail about the aspects of Forth that lead me to this conclusion right now; they have to do with what Forth does with multiple definitions with the same name, with wordlists, and with layout. Suffice it to say that I'm no Forth advocate, but I do find it fascinating.
I think a lot of the discussion here is boiling down to this statement in particular. Maybe you don't interpret "None of your business" as impolite, but when I hear it, it's usually a snippy reply to someone being too nosy. It's actually difficult for me to imagine this line being delivered in such a way that I _wouldn't_ interpret as being rude or aggressive.
I'm fairly sure it was fixed-point. Floating-point accounting is widely considered a bad idea, even in places that are otherwise positive about floating-point.
I'm a fan of parts of the BSD kernel myself.

I hope you don't mean that. The bits of original BSD which are still in the FreeBSD tree are pretty ugly -- recent FreeBSD code is much better.
Assuming the business is ongoing and profitable beyond just paying managers' salaries -- that cash balance accumulated from something, no? -- the value of the future earnings may dwarf the current assets you're focusing on.

Or not -- depends on a lot of things including risk, margins, and so on. But the value of a profitable business is a lot more than its book value.
Extending Java Classes Using proxy (Clojure article)
Like that background fiasco?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20007366-265.html

Or maybe you were being facetious. Tough to tell.
You're not stuck with your government, you could move elsewhere, probably about as easily as a border patrol employee could find another job.

I don't know where the line is, but it's pretty clear that the customs agent is on the other side if it from the Nazi guard. It's certainly somewhere in between those two.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Nano
Good question! The simple answer is that our cofounders are immigrants and we need to support their H1B visa for them to be full-time. Unfortunately, we cannot support their visa without funding.
Furthermore, investment is a way to accelerate growth. We're now able to hire additional team members and pay ourselves salaries (I had $250 left in my bank account and $3K in credit card debt when we raised money, so we were nearly broke).

Hope this helps!
- Gagan, Cofounder of Udemy
I wonder though if the 700 subscribers figure is legit. Would be easy to fake that. Perhaps a good chunk of the subscribers are all curious internet marketers and developers wondering how they can spin off their own variation/twist on the concept.
I come here after I finish what is in my google reader. I then look at the top few pages for cool stuff, and read it. If there are lots of comments or I want to talk about what I read, I go to the comments.
Ironic he chose the quote from A Few Good Men since Nicholson in that movie was arguing in favor of the forces for security, not the forces for freedom. His character would have been on the opposite side of this debate.
When I started programming I was using Visual Basic and Pascal. I miss those days because I was focused only on building things and was not aware about "Which is the best language" blog posts.

My suggestion is to not pay too much attention to those blogs and focus more on building things.

I'm sure PHP is a good language to build very good websites.
I have complete trust that Google is doing their damnedest to maximize Adwords revenues, and I highly doubt that they would have made a change like this without knowing for sure that it would increase impressions and clicks.
Yet "I'd prefer not to discuss my affairs" conveys the same message with a much different connotation.
Crew of simulated flight to Mars completed 100 days of isolation
>Immediately dropped the Finance major and switched paths.

Just saying, this makes it seem like you were in a Finance major in a business school and switched to liberal arts to everyone not familiar with NU. Whereas you were always in the liberal arts curriculum.

>Do you go to NU?

Transferred to Urbana Champaign for CS.
No your correct, but that is something we are going to have to work out during the process. Current assets are a known quantity right now.
It is definitely not negligible. Slow playing is a valid strategy even against great players. If all but the top 5 hands or so fold every time you slow play, you're not playing against good players (experienced != good when it comes to poker) and you should just start slow playing and stealing every pot. Then when they figure it out, don't do it again until you get a monster. Most of abusing amateurs is simply doing this, exploiting a weakness until they realize it, then doing the opposite. By the time it stops working you're ready to go.

Regardless, presumably you'd have to memorize this order of the deck in order to stack it that way, thus you could look at your hand and determine the opponent's hand and what the board would be. You could play accordingly. It's easy to make a lot of money at poker when you know what all the cards are.

On the other hand, I've never seen a game for significant stakes where the players were dealt, and I've sure never known anyone good enough to take a deck and sort it into a specific 52 card pattern without being noticed.
reddit even linked to an analog today: http://i.imgur.com/TvOip.jpg
git-feature: agile git workflow in code
Oh, if you only knew...

I work in Search, the same department that was primarily responsible for Instant. We're explicitly told not to worry about revenue. For a launch of this scale, Ads is involved if only to make sure that it doesn't bankrupt the company (it wouldn't look very good on the 10-Q to have revenue suddenly drop to zero). But we can and have launched things that decrease revenue if doing so is the right thing for users.
It's a mobile optimized version. The online version of this paper is very badly designed. Sorry, but yes, the article is definitely worth it.
At first glance I thought for sure that his critics are probably just jealous bitter old anti-youth types who think young people need to be kept in line.

But upon checking out his website, it is very hard to figure out what he actually does, and what his business is all about. He seems to be trying to sell himself and his achievements rather than a product, and while this can be a type of "lifestyle" business, people still need a reason for why they ought to listen to him.
Another option is to resize browser window width, to get about 10-13 words per line; and crtl-+ for larger text.
University was great for intellectual stimulation, because there were always interesting people around, and interesting discussions.

I haven't seen anything similar in the real world (which excepts online.)
Thank you very much! You are extremely helpful and supplied me with a lot of material to look over! Some of these books or topics are only covered by big textbooks, which is not exactly what I was looking for (I think it was unclear in my original post), but you did help introduce me to some new topics and fields where randomness takes place.

Also, it's nice to be reminded about Quora. I've heard of it before, but hadn't thought about it in a while. I might try it and give it a go!
I don't think you intended this, but this is a mix of strawman and slippery slope fallacies. It's not "the exact same logic." To begin with, in the OP's story he himself is the "suspect", and he knows he's innocent. There's no moral dilemma over whether to reply to the questions, only one of practical concerns versus abstract ideals.

I don't think the world was in danger of people taking the OP's argument to the witness situation you describe, and thus I don't need that caveat was necessary.
Do you try to optimize for user satisfaction, user productivity, or somewhere in-between? A more "interactive" search—like one where you're constantly looking down at the morphing result list as you type—can, at the same time, increase satisfaction while being slower to use. I guess this is almost an ethical question—do you give people what they want, or what is good for them?—but I'm mainly wondering whether there's an established Google policy on the matter.
Also, since it looks like you're like you've been on HN for a while, do you know how I can add this to the questions section? Some posts start with "Ask HN:"

[I'll delete this comment once the issue's been resolved]
Clickable. http://phponpie.com
I think they just have different definitions of what the "strength" of a country is: security or freedom.
Arrington is completely inconsistent when it comes to the right to free speech. For instance, when it comes to another unsavory free-speech issue, Holocaust denial, he writes:

"Sure, we can’t shut down the dark places on the Internet where people are free to hate Jews [...] But Facebook can take a stand and say it won’t happen in their back yard. Holocaust denial is hate speech, and it cannot be given a place to take root." (from http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/facebook-remains-stubbornly...)

He could just as easily swap out prostitution for Holocaust denial and Craigslist for Facebook, and make the exact same argument, no? After all, I'm pretty sure sex traffickers are doing more damage to society today than a handful of anti-semitic cranks.
Here is my version of YouTube Instant.

http://travisbeauvais.com/yt
I've used the internal beta of Minty and it's really nice. I'm not a Yahoo! Mail user but it's drastically faster then the current version (Candygram). It's also loads much faster than GMail (something the GMail team really needs to work on). It's heavy JavaScript but uses some progressive loading that makes it much snappier than it's predecessor.

Not sure if it's too late for Yahoo! Mail though. This update is long overdue.
> Take this as a warning: do not go to Russia

Fixed

But seriously, does Russia have ANY redeeming features right now besides possible tourist spots and pretty countryside?
Counter examples:

I fly in and out of the country all the time (I believe I've returned the the US five times this year alone). I only ever have a backpack and it's not huge and I never check any luggage. I'm not dressed in business clothes, nor do I look particularly affluent. My passport is fully of "dangerous" countries (Colombia, Guatemala, China, Russia...) and is as beat up an scruffy looking as I am.

I have never once has trouble returning to the US.

In fact, I flew back from Mexico (several years ago, but post 9/11) without anything but a driver's license and even then didn't have any problems other than answering some reasonable questions.

I've heard anecdotally that it's more difficult for foreigners entering the US, but that's to be expected. Pretty much every country on the planet is harder for non-citizens to enter.

Oh, and for the record, I'm in Japan right now (for the first time) and their CBP was far more serious than anywhere else I've been and took longer to process everyone than anywhere I've been except Dulles (fuck that airport). I was finger printed and photographed (yes, yes, I know the US does this for non-citizens too) and this is highly atypical.
Elizabeth Olsen | wiki | Peace, Love and Misunderstanding
"In other words, the only thing that will change about computing is the shape of the tail fins."

This article seems geared toward older people, explaining things that frighten and confuse them in terms they can easily understand.

Nothing new or interesting here.
Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo. No wait; that's something else.
A degree is overrated. Learn from life.
To make it a little less meta, one thing to keep in mind is that most people who use Google don't touch-type, so this is really intended for them to have a "oh, it knew what I wanted before I typed it" moment. Because there really was such a moment, internally, it was called Psychic Search, a name deemed too risqué for public release.
Jerusalem was ranked in the World’s Best Cities
Interestingly, that's about the exact experience I had as an American flying into London City. The UK is one of the most obnoxious border I've ever crossed (Nicaragua was worse, but that was a lot more complicated because I was bringing in a vehicle).

In my experience it depends largely on the airport you're flying into in the US. Dulles, Philly, and any of the NYC airports all see to be the worst. Seatac, SFO, Houston, and LAX aren't really that bad in my experience.
InDinero (YC S10) makes small business finances a snap
I suggest the http://www.readability.com/ bookmarklet. There's still some missing punctuation (source issues) but it's quite a bit better
>Just saying, this makes it seem like you were in a Finance major in a business school and switched to liberal arts to everyone not familiar with NU. Whereas you were always in the liberal arts curriculum.

English has never been my strong point.
How did you get access to the "internal" beta? :O
21st Century Revolutionaries
I'm pretty sure I saw a guy lift out a large vertical rectangular object from in front of the engine, fairly early in the video. When it was put back in, he reached way down in between it and the engine, like maybe he was re-attaching the bottom hose (presumably without a hose clamp, or any fluids). But I could be wrong, I only watched that part twice, and I wasn't concentrating on the radiator.
Here's a hierarchy of programming languages (meant to be tongue-in-cheek): http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/steverowe/WindowsLiveWriter/...
The two and three player decks have indeed been optimised to increase the opponents' hand values. The decks for higher number of players are too sparse for me to bother yet.
-Ben Joffe
Disagreeing with your opinion of pragmatism would be the wrong reason to vote your comment down. I voted it down because it only tries to derail the discussion to the topic of language.

I would understand a clarification on the lines of "ah, but I was actually meaning this" to clarify a misunderstanding.
Hi I'm the author of that page. I also recently put up similar decks for Omaha: http://www.benjoffe.com/omaha Feel free to ask questions.
I think that most implementations should pay more attention to why choosing GA as Defacto method. It is a interesting observation that in many places, the problem can be reduced to convex optimization (for continuous case) or a specialized heuristic search (for discrete case). On my hand currently, I has a problem that could potentially convert the original GA implementation to float search.

However, let's not diminish the fact that GA is a damn good tool to get hand dirty first on most problems.
Seattle or Portland?
I'm a Drupal guy and my girlfriend is a Belly Dancer. We live in Idaho Falls, ID right now and find it... well... lacking culture and opportunity. We definitely want to stay in the Pacific Northwest, or find an area like it. What do you all recommend? Personal experiences similar will definitely be appreciated over opinions with no basis.
I'm an internal :). Employee.