skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, here's what this is about.

One-sentence summary: If you're monitoring something to look for problems, you shouldn't treat each observation independently; multiple somewhat-low or somewhat-high observations may be a sign of trouble even if each on its own isn't enough to worry about. In more detail:

Suppose you have some number you're monitoring. It might be network latency, number of customer signups, temperature, fraction of your email that's spam, whatever. You would like to be notified if it starts behaving unexpectedly -- maybe your network is down, someone just trashed your company in the media, a fan has failed, or your spam filter has gone nuts.

There's a technique called Holt-Winters forecasting, which looks at historical data and assumes it's made up of something constant, something periodic (e.g., daily variation), and noise; it generates predictions, which include a measure of uncertainty as well as a predicted value. Then some guy called Brutlag developed a way to compare observations with Holt-Winters predictions from the past, and determine whether each new observation is suspect.

However, Brutlag's analysis basically treats each new measurement independently. So, e.g., suppose you have a number that's always non-negative (number of customer signups, say), and suppose the H-W prediction says that a value of 0 isn't too improbable. Then Brutlag's approach will not complain even if from some point onward every single measurement is 0 -- because each one, on its own, is reasonably plausible.

Evan Miller has a more sophisticated way of looking for anomalies. Each time a new observation comes in, he looks at the plausibility of that observation, just like Brutlag does; but he also tries adding up the last N observations and comparing them with expectations for the sum of N consecutive observations, for N=2,3,...T (for some suitably chosen limit T). So if you get, say, a lot of zeros, they may not be very implausible on their own, but getting five zeros in a row might be enough to trigger a warning.

Miller gives an example where IMVU caught a network problem using this technique -- they were watching the number of customers who invited contacts to open an account -- which wouldn't have been caught by the Brutlag method, for exactly the reason given above: they had a run of quite-low measurements, but none of them on its own was low enough for the Brutlag method to complain, because Brutlag's lower confidence limit was zero.
Nokia Turns to Microsoft for New Chief
I wouldn't. At one job, the desks were arranged so that I sat at my computer with my back to my coworker (who talked to himself/no-one-in-particular/me throughout the day) and I could never tell when he was trying to talk to me or just vocalizing something. Also, I found it annoying. A small annoyance, sure, but if it bothers your other developer's, it's not a good idea.
Prepurchases? Pretty sure that could be the problem - - PayPal doesn't permit charging someone for goods that aren't going to ship immediately.
Except for the fact that they're still blaming Apple for lack of Flash in the browser.
> it's pretty clear where the money is coming from and this post alone will get paypal to sort it immediately.

I wouldn't bank on that. It's possible, but by no means sure.

> But why do you have to be a celeb to get decent support from paypal?

Consider the fact that he is a celebrity and does not get decent support, you can imagine how it is for the rest of the world.

Especially when you're not in the US.

> Freezing over half a million euros and they don't even assign him a dedicated support person? They don't call him? Disgraceful.

Business as usual for PayPal, see below.
I didn't bother to dig deeper into this, but, does someone know under what license the code has been released?
Great to have you here! If I may ask a question - I was trying to search online as to how search engines really use the nofollow tag but could not really find much information.

Would I be right to suggest that although Google publicly says the no follow tag passes no page rank or authority, in reality it does, albeit not to the same level as a follow tag?
Judge Reinstates eBay's 29.4% Craigslist Stake
It’s Time to Get Behind the Semantic Web
Caveat: I only skimmed the paper.

The combination of two things set off alarm bells: firstly, the problem observed is that a continuous sequence of zero readings is erroneously treated as an "ok". Second, the variance is modelled as a normal distribution (Section 3.1). Since the normal is symmetric, if the mean is sufficiently close to zero readings below zero will be within one standard deviation. You can't ever have readings below zero in the type of systems under consideration. It seems this is the flaw in the original work, and furthermore this assumption is carried through to the fix (with some ad-hoc modifications [remember, I only skimmed the paper]). It seems to me that a cleaner model would drop this assumption of normality and use an asymmetric distribution (say, the Poisson) in its place. I would be interested in any comments from those who read the paper in more depth.
There is also Moneybookers[1], though they aren't free of horror stories either.

[1]http://www.moneybookers.com
3 Lessons in 12 Months as a Non-Technical Founder
Paypal actually is a bank, just not in all jurisdictions.

As for the 'virtual money', it's not virtual, it's real. They run what is technically called a wallet system.

A real merchant account is of course an option, but the transaction fees can be quite high, there is the charge-back risk and a whole pile of regulatory hoops to go through before you can get that to work. Larger scale businesses have plenty of users for who credit card use is not an option. Large parts of the world are relatively free of the credit card plague and so can not pay you using your merchant account. For those situations paypal (or something like it that does not have paypals drawbacks) is a solution.
The article seems to be missing some very basic understanding of both markets in general and phone/featurephone/smartphone markets.

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/07/obituar...

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/08/why-iph...

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/07/underst...
Gensim – Python Framework for Vector Space Modelling
The Most Useful Objective-C Code I’ve Ever Written
It's a 3D rig with zero inter-axial separation (well zero as far as compositing concerns, not actual physical zero, of course). So shooting this stuff bears same problems as shooting 3D in general. DOF is easy to solve, as well as controlled lighting (stabilized voltages are the norm anyways). Tricky part is shooting outside, as evident by strong flickering in OP video. Though that can be solved in post.

And you are right, this video (and the other one on that vimeo account) is better mostly due to process/skill and not due to equipment used. One could argue about HDR though, since it's only a technique to widen the range of possibilities within compositing. How one utilizes those can be viewed as artistic direction. I also dislike masks with visible feathering, as shown in most HDR stuff out there.
Make sure that whatever method you use that you never ever build up a balance bigger than a few hundred bucks, that way if they go south, decide to freeze your account or do any one of a hundred other nasty things you don't have too many eggs in that basket.

Epassporte is in trouble by the way, best to stay away from them.
This is a good thing. I've got a few OpenSolaris boxes set up, and the biggest issue was that the distribution was totally at the mercy of Sun/Oracle's integration process for patch fixes, etc. It was a serious "Developer only" OS, as the only way to stay current with security was to either run the bleeding edge, compile your own stuff, or use an alternate source of binaries such as OpenCSW or Blastwave for net-facing daemons.

To get the differentiation here, Illumos focus is on the solaris core components (kernel and related binaries) which are used by others to make their own distros (Nextenta's "Ubunut/kSolaris" distro being the obvious case), whereas this appears to continue providing a Solaris-centric operating system to existing OpenSolaris users.
Maybe I was tired when I read it, or lack of technical background to understand it entirely, but I did not quite understand how any of those sites got inbound links from other sites outside the control of the person who is building the empire so that any of them can get pagerank to pass it onto the higher level sites to start with.
Do you mean that you can't register to checkout and amazon as a seller if you are not an US resident? Because as a buyer i've used checkout a lot of times from Italy, same thing should be possible in other european countries.
Ramit's got a bunch of books here: http://astore.amazon.com/iwillteachyou-20?_encoding=UTF8&...

Also, check out his delicious bookmarks.
How does Groupon succeed while doing everything "Wrong"?
I just used it to give an easy-to-remember name to a rackspace cloud server I spun up yesterday. This is a throw-away server I'll likely nuke within a month, but for now I will remember how to get back without needing to memorize the IP address.
Thanks for the feedback! I learned a thing or two :)

If you are asking why two tabs 'home' and 'blog', so Sprred is not just a blog, its your blog + photostream + videostream. And we also plan to add updates from Sprred you follow under home tab
I've seen Paypal described as a fraud detection company monetized by a payment transfer front-end. With that core competency in mind, it astounds me how bad they are at recognizing communication from a customer that deserves attention and response.
Gym membership, books, GeekDesk, services that save me time (doggy daycare, gutter cleaner, etc.).
Sorry, if it sounds like a dumb question. What is 14?
When I asked, that was kind of my point: There are alternatives, but nothing that works internationally except places that we don't have any reason to expect to be more reliable than paypal is(n't).
Reading that mostly made me appreciate how much my Linux Distro does for me.
Gabriel Weinberg http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epi0Bauqu formerly of NamesDatabase and now of DuckDuckGo http://duckduckgo.com/ does some angel investing I believe. He's a regular on HN.
I've always used lengthy, quoted search phrases, but what's really interesting is that Google's autocomplete has slowly trained monkey-me to follow the well-worn path and use the search terms it suggests.

It's a great example of using the UI to encourage a desired behavior.
It's not exactly a prepurchase since for 13$ you get access to the alpha version.
I meant intensity resolution (or color depth, as you say). Dynamic range is something else - it is the interval [darkest, brightest], or their ratio if you prefer.
We've all likely seen startups come into HN asking for a review of their app when we thought "Hey, that was MY idea!", but we never shipped it, and these guys are.

Well, I thought this was a terrible idea when I first heard about it, and even if it folds after a single month, it was well worth the investment to build it.

ship it, ship it, ship it!
Perhaps they're just independent observations of real phenomena?
How to Take Your Startup Elevator Pitch to the Top
If you look at my Sprred - http://kuldeep.sprred.com, you'll get the brief idea and also see how its different than tumblr/blogger
(But it's still slower than iOS 3, so consider downgrading/not bothering upgrading in the first place unless you really need the 1 or 2 features of iOS 4 that they actually provide to your phone)
Blackberry, smart detective help solve murder
Heres my Sprred - http://kuldeep.sprred.com. you can also see how its different than tumblr/blogger
Looks Like Square Has Some Competition: iPadsturbate
ah, to be free from the rat race
s/lairs/liars and antidote/anecdote and it makes more sense.

touchscreen?
First, your linked page does have ads. You must have adblock on if you didn't see it. Second, traditional newspapers are struggling and it seems pretty mean to go out of your way to block their ads. The industry needs a new plan and a total overhaul but in the meantime, lets at least not direct people away from their only revenue source online.
Ask HN: Simple way for service to pay money out to users?
I'm considering building a service where users can collaborate on a work, and then share the revenue that it generates. I'm looking for options for handling the pay outs for such a service.

If I require users to have a paypal account, I could use that to make payments. But, rightly or wrongly, I've seen enough negative reports of paypal customer service to make me leery of not having at least one other option lined up.

Anyone else doing something similar, or have some suggestions for a service that could handle that sort of thing with a minimum of registration requirements for the user?

Thanks!
Coffee Mixology: A Primer
I am not sure how I feel about this. A domain name implies ownership of the site.

It's kind of like reverse domain hijacking.

See,
http://hackernews.ipq.co/

Am I missing something?
Zappos CEO on corporate culture and 'Happiness'
I don't understand why the golden parachute payout when combined with a non-compete doesn't take the form of continued "employment". Keep the guy on the payroll making $6million/year for 5 years.

The lump sum "thanks for all the fish" payout just seems like you are forcing yourself to sue, rather than just fire the guy.
The problem is that the vast majority of users are not capable of understanding that there is a trade-off of performance/battery-life when using Flash applications. For you, me, and pretty much everyone else on HN, this is fairly evident, and so it can seem frustrating that Apple doesn't allow Flash on their devices. But most people don't understand why these tradeoffs exist, they just have a phone whose battery mysteriously drains ridiculously fast, and sometimes web pages just become very slow to scroll.

Apple have made a choice - if they can't make these tradeoffs transparent to the user, then they won't allow the tradeoff to be made. I think that a vast majority of the population would agree with that as an idea, they don't want to have to deal with the complexity of modern gadgets, they just want them to work. If you're a user that figures that they can handle this complexity without shooting off your foot, then you're really not Apple's target market.

Of course, I can't help noting that you can always just jailbreak an iPhone, or get a dev certificate, and you can modify things to your heart's content - it is only "power users" - those comfortable with technology, but not good enough to be able to modify things themselves that find the iPhone platform frustrating...
Minecraft games sales.

Unless the whole minecraft thing is a cunningly disguised money laundering scheme for the illegal sale of fjords to rich American businessmen...

We've heard this one before, a surge in sales triggers Paypal's fraud systems.
I have to agree with the author. When you sign a confidentiality agreement you have to expect to keep what you know about your job confidential.
I'm getting "The change you wanted was rejected. Maybe you tried to change something you didn't have access to." for every IP address I try: my current Comcast address, and the addresses of a few servers I work on. I also put in 66.220.147.22 (www.facebook.com) just to see what it would do, and got the same message. I'm leaving the optional name and e-mail fields blank.
Disgraceful...
you dont go to college to get a job. you go there to get an education.
Huh, interesting. I was wondering why all the hate/down-votes.

OK, I won't edit the original because that's what I wrote, and that's what's being down-voted - fair enough. Even so, it's still single page and much faster loading. I don't even really mind the ads, I just get annoyed at having to click through, click through, click through, ...

Thanks for leaving the comment and helping me (and possibly others) learn, and not just down-voting and moving on.
This is somewhat tangential, but might help if other people are attempting to do similar things in the future...

A relation of mine is a pharmacist at a hospital. At his workplace, they have automated drug dispensing machines that can be used by employees to obtain medication for patients - saves a lot of time and work for dispensing normal stuff like painkillers, etc.

These machines use a statistical method to flag when an employee is pulling out more than the usual amount of medicine, as there are infrequent cases of employees selling/using it themselves.

The machines were programmed to use standard deviation for this - if what you draw is within 2 standard deviations of the mean of all users, you're fine.

The problem is that, on one occasion, an employee in a small section was a junkie and pulled out so much of a certain drug that the mean was skewed to the point that they were still within 2 std dev of it, and it wasn't noticed for a few months.

So, to wrap up the story, you probably don't want to purely use statistics to test for failure. You want some basic sanity checks in there.
So what? In my case it was a bunch of newspaper articles about our website that made us grow quite a bit in a short time. A surge is not always fraud related and in the case of an account with long history of being 'in good standing' it is not entirely unexpected to do a bit of follow up after you've frozen the account 'just in case'.

Unfortunately paypal and courtesy only appear in the same sentence when there is a negative in there somewhere.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1678251
This piece is probably right, but in a purely sociopathic sort of way, Hurd did the rational thing: take the $23m for signing the confidentiality agreement, then worry about actually keeping that money later. A bird in the hand...
I just graduated and started a full-time job, so I've been dealing with this because I want to save as much as possible. Here's what I've spent money on:

Technology - phone, iPad. Bed, desk chair, food.

On the flip side, I've also been getting rid of everything I don't need or haven't used in the last 6 months (100 Things Challenge). My motto: own less and only things you need, but for those, buy the best quality.
Advanced CSS Prettifier - ProCSSor
Advanced CSS prettifier with some unique formatting styles and several customizable options to format CSS the way you like.
One of them is even an extension of Mustache: http://github.com/leeoniya/handlebar.js

Naming projects is the worst.
What is my IP address - show my IP and location -All About Site
If the phenomena are real, then it becomes very likely more than one author will comment.
Bring solar power back to the White House
This seems to have changed so much in the 20+ years since I graduated. When I started in my first job I was more or less told that I wouldn't add any value to my employer for at least six months - the CS course I did was fairly theory heavy. However, they were happy with that, I more or less accepted that they were investing in me and I was fairly naive about the world of business - painfully true in retrospect.
Sadly, no. Defeated by spell-check. :(
Scary how similar to a cult the process runs.
These are my complaints too. I spent three seconds on the page before going back because I already know about a lot of "autoblogging" service and have no interest in them, and from what I read, that's all I think your product does.

If it does something else or if it does something better, you should be explicit about it. I want to know right away, I don't want to be met with marketing-speak about how easy it is to "share my entire content", which is a very amorphous task. A better thing to say in that prime real estate would be "Email your content, see it on web page", or whatever it is you do, and then have the line about ease in a tertiary position somewhere, like a tagline instead of the main point of the thing.
Here's what I don't get. If the agreement he violated only required him to protect HP's trade secrets and such, how can merely taking a job violate it? Even if it's likely that he would reveal these secrets at some point in the future, is that enough to constitute violating this agreement? Wouldn't they need proof that he has already released sensitive information to Oracle?
Sounds like a cynical old guy (I'm one of those). But probably, delayed gratification is a sign of maturity not naivete.

So how to tell the difference between legitimate delayed reward, and smoke? Trust I guess
Ah, sorry, misunderstanding what you meant, you meant paypal sorting it out, I thought you were talking about where the sales were coming from.
Yes, in Germany you could probably get away with just a normal bank account and accepting direct bank transfers.
I really like the look of your Sprred, however it's not loading very quickly. What language and hosting setup are you running?
This is a great description of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Although I haven't seen something define the mechanics of the relationship so well. The real question is, why would you want to keep people trapped in a failing system? It has to do with the the aggressors own fears of inadequacy.

Also, if you find yourself a victim of this type of relationship, usually there is something that you need to fix about yourself. Seek good professional help. Otherwise you risk "escaping" into an identical situation. A healthy person would probably run at the first signs.
Bonus systems start out great, get delayed/forgotten/neglected or become haphazard -they take real work to do right!

And then people get disillusioned and surly. Annual review is hard enough already - I'd say do that right, pay everybody as well as you can afford, and leave it at that.
There are two basic fallacy’s in this article. One, all colleges cost 200k, and second the assumption that most degrees are equivalent. In many ways a college education is much like a car because a Honda civic will get you around the country but a Bugatti Vayron can get you there much faster. So it comes down to how much a more prestigious education is worth? If you are going down the street or becoming a social worker then Harvard is probably a waste of time.

PS: I have a BS from small and inexpensive college and at 28 I got promoted to the same job as the 27 year old with a BS and MS from MIT I sit next to. Now we both went to college, but if you compare the sticker price of his education he got a much worse deal then I did. Granted, 10 years from now he will probably make more than I will because he works ridiculously harder than I do.
Who's got the "Mail-a-Letter" app? That one's pretty simple and I think it was doing a few thousand a month.
You are funny. Tweets are only a line long or so, so you might as well have copied the thing (with attribution).
Manage Mail Server Connections
Cults can last for centuries, and ensnare millions.
I think the bonus system can be very effective at preventing turn-over for the better part of the year. If you just hang on a few more months you get that big bonus!
Yeah, but unlike most other subscriptions that people tend to forget about, they'll be reminded of this one each and every day.
We use PayPal to pay the freelance transcribers who work for us using the MassPay API. Till now, no complaints. We have a requirement that our transcribers should have verified PayPal account.

Also, have a look at PayPal Adaptive Payments API.
nginx-php-mysql-ec2-s3
The word you're looking for is "college."
Painfully slow here too - Firefox 3.6.9 (Firebug installed).

[The pages seem OK-ish but the images are very slow]
i switched from this:
http://imgur.com/QBQNt.jpg

to this:
http://imgur.com/No4os.jpg

and them to this:
http://imgur.com/JVqRa.jpg
It's up to the web site owner to check HTTP Host.

You could equally have registered hakernews.com and CNAME'd it
This assumes that the only marker of comparison is your job/salary at a given age.
education on shotgunning beer and bong hits
Shock – celebrity fails to show-off her post-baby body.