skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, you're picking up the last bit wrong..."and join a band" is actually the way the last bit of the message goes. But close enough.

In personals ads in Austin, "musician" is code for "unemployed", because everybody is a musician. You only mention it if you don't have anything better to say about your career.
I lived two years in suburban Japan with JET. The message I got is "You don't really understand Japanese, do you?" :/
funny how i never cared about the OS. i program and for personal use the OS really is whatever in my opinion.

for porfessional use maybe windows has issues but really what is wrong with vista or earlier windows for the average computeruser?
perhaps not exactly what you are looking for but:
nassim nicholas taleb:
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp...
http://www.amazon.com/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Chance-Market...
Weird. I lived three blocks from Furman. It was my playground, growing up. We played video games in the student center using change fished out of the fountain beside it, flirted embarrassingly with the college girls, skateboarded and biked all over, and regularly got kicked out after the campus closed for the day (for those unfamiliar with small Southern Baptist liberal arts schools, or at least Furman, they close all of the gates except the main gate at 10PM and only allow students in).

Speaking of Bob Jones, no one ever believes me when I explain that it has a "date room", wherein couples sit together in a chaperoned room, with a Bible-width space in between. Which explains why Bob Jones girls are such a terror when they do manage to escape the watchful eyes of the school.
Mathew Ingram: My verdict on Disqus: Two thumbs up
Cram this: A firsthand account of my recent cramming
Interesting that the path goes through "Islamic psychological thought", while the path to profit goes through Bertrand Russell and evil.
National Geographic mixes marketing with translation
For probability, "Introduction to Probability" (http://www.athenasc.com/probbook.html) is the best I've come across. I am not sure if this might be a bit basic for you, since you say you have a strong background in math, but do take a look at the TOC.

I still haven't come across an equivalent book on statistics. If anyone knows a good book, I'd be very grateful if they'd post the details
Esnips, Amazon and some porn
I liked the old design much better. The new design seems too much like Digg. It lacks the simple minimalism that made Reddit better than Digg. The minimalist niche seems really hard to hold on to. There is always this urge to add something because one can.
It depends on the point and the audience. If the point is complex enough, then you have to give up on conveying it to certain people. If the audience is smart enough, you reach past the lowest common denominator.

Indeed, the best way to write something that lasts for ages is to write something that ordinary people reject, bright people don't really understand, and the smart fall head over heels in love with. That's what keeps Plato in business. No one knows what he was saying exactly, but the really smart guys running the universe can't help but be charmed by it.
Design of Processed Tower Defense
1) MySQL isn't free either 2) I am sitting looking at a 25T partitioned Oracle database and that's by far from large as these things go and 3) I've been using MySQL since the late 90s and remember perfectly well when they told people to handle foreign keys and rollbacks in the app too. They ALWAYS say this about features they don't have.
Oxford University seeks 1.25 billion pounds in donations
Try Blog Oh Blog.
Sam Altman: "If I was even 10 years older, I would not be able to do my job."
I don't know exactly, but I've been to a lot of cities, and Cambridge is off the average.
The offline cost of an online life.
OK guys. I have to admit that I was planning on meeting the price and driving down to the customer site this morning to hand deliver it, but upon reconsideration with several advisors including the great ones here, I'm not going to do it. We do have the best product in the market at a very fair price by all measures, and our success shows that. The client in question has already admitted that he knows the funding people are making a mistake and they are probably going to eat it, so I'm going to emphasize the differences and let them stew in their own decision. We are all but guaranteed to win in three other sister entities to this one, and if we have to let one go to hold our line then that's life.

I owe you all some karma lollipops, they will arrive overnight tomorrow.
Dutch Gov releases Open Source tool that converts Microsoft docs to ODF
The way I understand it, the disastrous part is that we've been releasing millions of years worth of carbon all at once, by burning the fossil fuels that had sequestered it underground until now.

Of course, this still presents the difficulty of deciding when and where to buy a hundred acres in Siberia to retire on.
The spacing between comments on the comments page is my biggest concern. They're way too close together.
Correlation does not imply causation.

You're looking at it the wrong way, in the current world popular bands get signed to labels so pretty much all major touring bands will be signed to a major label. It doesn't however mean that an absence on labels will kill touring since the labels for the most part aren't into touring. It's another set of companies that handle that.
The Arctic Monkeys have a label because of Myspace, they signed to Domino after achieving success not before it. Myspace was their main source of promotion in making them famous and well known not Domino. I also didn't say they gave their music away free, I said they were a band that got popular from the internet only.
If there was one story I could vote down...
I am very familiar with how this works so I promise you I am not "looking at it the wrong way" but describing how things actually work. I am not making this up.

Labels create band demand. Concert promoters do not. I promise you this is causation and not correlation. People go see shows because they have the record and know the band. I am sure you have never gone (willingly) to see a show from a band whose music you didnt already have and/or or know pretty well. The band marketing (the label) created the market environment for you to know and like their music. People do not go see artists because they saw some add in a local paper advertising an artist. It doesnt happen. Promoters only provide awareness so that if you are a fan you will know that this band you like is in town.
Hi, great question. One of our members has just recently told us he has a commitment conflict and we're seeking a replacement. Out of respect to him and the work he has contributed, I'd rather share the idea privately.
You're basically saying that "it hasn't worked before, it won't work in the future". This actually reminds me of startups.

1) What other options you had in the past sharing and selling your music than joining a record company?

2) If you're successful artist, why wouldn't you have a label? Labels would pay millions upfront and help you with everything. It's easy money, like an exit, even it hurts you in the long run. Probably most artists are not interested in building a business.

We usually forget that artists actually get their fame without labels, but labels are pretty good and quick luring these potential artists in. Who knows what would happen if so many artists didn't take their exists.

I would say that many DJ:s are quite successful and touring artists, even they don't usually have labels behind them. Ofc they are not mainstream. You really cannot be the next Rolling Stones, since internet and other options has been around just for few years. You have to remember that copyrights and labels history is aswell relatively short.

In Finland, Poets of the Fall are still independent, and got their fame over internet and/from there playing a title song in Max Payne. I think Jonathan Coulton has build his music over internet and got featured in Portal.
The Monetization of Twitter Demographics
Can you be more specific what you mean by web hacking?
The new reddit is completely broken in Opera mini. Spacing is messed up. For some reason there is a huge gap between the headline and the first. Even worse, the comments are truncated. So basically, since OM's my main browser, I hate it.
If the product and price are reasonable, he should stick to his original pricing. People who need the service will come around as long as it is not terribly expensive, and you avoid perception problems if you change your price wildly.

The reason to be concerned about the competitor offering a cheaper product is if: (1) it will turn into a better product, or (2) it works differently enough to make your business model or product obsolete. Unless either of those conditions are met, this guy should focus on growing his own business rather than trying to crush someone else.
And why free music doesn't count as advertising for the band and creating the demand?
Zecter Offers ‘No E-Mail Regrets’
Since it was released before MS' offering, Spotlight was probably inspirational to Vista's search.
Social Networking/Ecommerce Driving Growth In Mobile Web Browsing
"In part due to social networking and internet commerce, smartphone users are spending an average of more than 4.6 hours per month browsing the mobile web in the US and nearly 2.5 hours per month in Britain."
The Odd Couples, or, Loose Coupling vs the LAMP stack
My ruminations on Wordpress, LAMP, and how they aren't very loosely coupled at all.
Be honest with this potential client. Don't act or sound bitter or jealous at all. Totally accept their decision but just point out that if they need you at all in the future, you're just at the end of the phone.

If your competitor is as inferior as you say, those agencies might come back to you for advice on how to "fix" the problem caused by the competitor. Then you can charge more and still look helpful.

This happens a lot in other industries and I have personally benefited from it myself. You get to look good, charge more, and providing service to a customer that was previously shafted is easier than one demanding perfection from day one.
Why do nearly all of this guy's blog posts end up on the front page of HN? Sure, a couple have been good, but it strikes me as a little "odd" that he seems to be on here all the time. Group voting, or do random people really dig opinionated blog posts that much? Honest question.
and you assume all who are accessing your web application from n number of places over the world have such fast internet access. I doubt
The all time classic at the level your looking for is William Feller's two volume set "Introduction to probability theory and its applications"- if you can find a copy. A good university library should have a copy. On wikipedia, it claims that Persi Diaconis (of the seven shuffles theorem fame) was motivated to finish high school after dropping out so that he could understand the contents of this book. 'nuff said.

Karatzas and Shreve "Brownian Motion and Stochastic Calculus" is also a popular book among quants.
It is good, but still low-bandwidth. Perhaps the reason for compulsively refreshing the homepage is that we just can't get enough.

Any suggestions about how to make better online environments for people who care about similar things?
JavaScript libraries. now hosted & delivered through Google
Developers: Will you ditch Amazon Web services for Google AppEngine?
For statistics, maybe you can start from:

http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/stathome.html
Garberville, CA: Hey, man, you should give to the community and help me get some weed.

Wolfeboro, NH (smalltown New England summer resort): You should pretend it's 1962 like all the retirees do.

Waltham, MA (Brandeis University): Go back to NYC when you graduate.

Cambridge, MA: You should be more educated.

I chose "educated" over "intelligent" largely because I lived closer to Harvard. When I go to the MIT side of Cambridge I would switch the two. In and around Harvard you see a strong vein of people who aim for the prestige of higher education over the knowledge it brings.

The middle-aged people dream of sitting in a musky study debating high-falutin mish-mash over a nice port. The college-aged kids dream of sitting in a coffee shop debating their PHIL101 papers. They seek _established_ education.

I know this doesn't speak for every aspect of Cambridge, which I did love living in for a few years, but the too-strong emphasis on the appearance of education as opposed to the knowledge you gain helped me move to take a job in San Mateo (shameless plug: RockYou.com).

Disclaimer: I am not your average anything. My move to San Mateo from Cambridge is via Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. I speak Mandarin but I'm English/German. Take what I said with a healthy grain of wacky salt.
I am not sure exactly why, but it just doesnt work. The numbers are very clear. With very young artists, free music can get them exposed enough to get a record deal, but not enough to sell performance tickets. You can of course always fall back on the "well it hasnt worked but it will" argument, but as of today, it has not worked. There is no argument at all about this. The statistics are very clear. Of course I cannot see the future, but there is little reason after quite a few years of the internet, for me to believe the economics and behavioral dynamics are going to change. Of course anything can happen but it doesn't seem like a good bet.
The Rich Get Hungrier
The print-only link:
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1726534212;fp;4...
You'll never win with a price buyer. You can cotton to his needs, but they won't stop until the price is free.

It sounds like you are selling to enterprise and/or government. The normal rules about being the low cost provider don't apply like they would in the consumer market. Joe Spolsky has some interesting tidbits on that one. Every time they increased Fogbuz's, their sales went up as well. There's an aura of price==quality in enterprise software. Instead of offering a product with less features for a cut-rate price, introduce a deluxe version with a couple extra features and double the price. You might be surprised.
If a program causes Windows to crash, where it wouldn't have without that program, it could be said to be the program's fault.

The job of a good operating system is to protect itself and other processes from themselves and each other. It's only after years of Windows use (or os 9) that people have grown accustomed to OS crashes caused by rogue processes.
I'll play the game, too, but with only two observations:

Orlando, FL: Subprime.

Space Coast, FL: God's Waiting Room
> Of course nobody is going to walk 3 miles, that's stupid.

What is stupid about that? Every day at lunch a group of 4 of us go on a three mile walk. Most days we stroll and it takes an hour.

If I had my own cart I could certainly do that once a week.

OK, so no more meat every day, but I could still have eggs every day and milk some days. And I still wouldn't need to use any refrigeration. And since I live within 3 miles of several farms and have a bike, I could make a few milk/meat trips a week. I would probably be drinking sheep's milk and eating mutton more, because that is what is close, but that still sounds fine.
In a Letter to His Kids, Wired's Founding Editor Recalls the Dawn of the Digital Revolution
Myspace is indeed effective in getting artists signed. The internet is a primary tool today for labels to find artists to sign. It is the primary A&R mechanism. That said, the definition of success here is "getting signed". They did not sell much of anything until they were signed. After they were signed they went to #1 in UK. I can tell you I never heard of the Arctic Monkeys in 2004 for example.

Also you may not have said the arctic monkeys give away their music, but you were refuting my article, and my point is about giving away music on the internet. So if we are not discussing giving away music, then you are not really being responsive to the subject of the article and your disagreement is seemingly misguided.

specifically, the relevant paragraph is as follows:

"Second, there is no evidence at all that free music on the Internet is an effective (i.e. successful career building) marketing tool. There have been no blockbuster successes that have come from, for example Garageband availability. I don't think you could even count more than a handful – if that – Internet-based artists making a living from music."

The arctic monkeys are not "internet based" and they certainly are not giving away their music.
While they seem to be down at the moment (they were working this morning), Andrew Moore's introductory probability lectures are really good if you're involved in any kind of machine learning.

http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/
Matt sounds like he has never encountered usable desktop search before. Has he really not been exposed to Google Desktop Search or seen Mac OS X since around 2005?

I think that my basic criticism of Vista is that it's just not worth it. It adds too much to read (I really need to do a formal study of this), too many choices to make, too many new UI paradigms (on top of the XP/2000/98/3.1 pieces still kicking around), too many things to authorize, too high hardware requirements, etc. ...

And what benefit comes from taking on all of these burdens? Nothing that I have seen yet that wasn't already implemented and more refined in other operating systems years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll

"An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion."

I think quite a few of his blog posts fall into this category.
http://www.isical.ac.in/academicprogramme.php
Peer to Peer (P2P) in Flash Player 10 beta
Interesting! How did the housing surplus come about?
This is an interesting take on cities. What do you think New Orleans says? I haven't been there post-Katrina, but it definitely has a very powerful vibe (the "show us your tits for beads" stupidity is actually just a very small section of the city, not at all characteristic of the rest of the place...)

"You should live more soulfully?"
No usermode program should cause windows to crash.

This is such an irritating point of view. In a previous job we had a boss like this, who said our code must have bugs in it because the JVM was crashing with a segfault.
A very neat hack. Now it could be used for other purposes, for example, I could ignore social sites and look at other major sites (e.g. I could see who goes to CNN.com vs. FoxNews.com). Or a company could see which of its competitors a visitor has visited.

Also, it would probably be possible to recurse on a site and figure out what pages they are visiting. For example, suppose a top-level detect shows that I visit reddit.com, the system could then load up a reddit specific page and discover that I also visit reddit.com/r/funny. I would imagine that for some sites that could be very revealing.
> Edit: What was worth downmodding here?

I don't think many people believe that "business customers' slowness to upgrade" is the cause, and Vista's poor reputation is the effect. Most people believe it to be the other way around.
Which is an important point.

Steve Jobs was able to make it very clear that the most notable features of Vista were in OS X first. I was at the WWDC where Tiger was introduced and the posters said things like "Redmond, start your photocopiers", and "Introducing Longhorn" (Vista's previous code name).

The brilliance of the Mac vs. PC adds is that it has been pounded into the subconscious of the consuming public that innovation happens on the Mac first and is eventually picked up by Windows sometime in the future. This means that the PR burden has now shifted to Microsoft to demonstrate that they actually can offer functionality that's not already available on a Mac.

Which is not to say that PR can exist in a vacuum. If Apple didn't have some legitimate claim to being ahead of Microsoft in technology, the ads mocking PC would not be effective.

(ps The long version of PC's country western song is brilliant. I especially like how they were able to work a rhyme of "Control-Alt-Delete" into the lyrics.)
Just make sure you walk away graciously and make it clear you'll still be there when you're needed. Keep sending them your newsletter or other promo material with details of your latest features, case studies of other satisfied customers, testimonials, etc. If these people are digging a hole for themselves, make sure you're the guy who has the rope ready when it starts filling with water ;) These guys could end up being one of your most loyal customers ever, if you save their asses later. Good luck.
I actually grew up in the burbs of Raleigh and then Dallas, I didn't come to Columbus until college.

The thought of moving to SV is scary exactly because of the expense, especially when I have a decent paying job here that I love. It would be foolish to abandon that, right? (I guess this illustrates the differences again between the two areas: Columbus would answer "Yes!" and SV would answer "No!")

I should mention that Columbus does have industries other than Buckeye Football. If you're passionate about insurance, this is the place to be. Of course, who is really passionate about insurance?

As far as deciding a city's worth based on personal experiences, it's always going to be just that: personal. But I can't deny the influences of cities on my individual life.
What Problem is Silverlight Trying to Solve?
I agree with Feller as the classical book on probability; it is beautifully written and full of insight and deserves to be read over and over again.

For theoretical statistics, justifying why you'd use one method versus another, the graduate level classic is Cassela and Berger, Statistical Inference. This teaches you to design your own tests and compare Bayesian vs. frequentist methods and interpret the paradoxes - and is full of beautiful explanations - but it's not a bag of tricks.

Applied statistics book tend to be more specialized. There's plenty of cookbooks with statements like "and then you should do this regression and compare the p-value to 5%," but that's not what you want. Any of several books with titles like Applied Regression Analysis or Multivariate Statistical Analysis will be at a more substantial level. After that there are specialist topics - experiment design, survival analysis, heavy tailed distributions, robust statistics, multi-level modeling, asymptotics. Statisticians get involved in a lot of areas, from quality control in manufacturing to clinical trial design to economic forecasting to genetics, so there's a lot of overlap with other fields in the academic literature.

Econometric Analysis by Greene is the economists' favorite stats book, and is very self-contained, covering everything from computational tricks for Monte Carlo simulations top some very modern multivariate methods.

As a computer scientist/hacker, your natural starting point is Bishop. Pattern recognition and Machine Learning or perhaps http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.867-f03/lectures.html

I've heard machine learning defined as the application of statistical methods to engineering; people with statistics degrees grumble that CS/machine learning types learn to do what's computationally feasible and not properly justify their methods, doing the sort of analysis you'd see in Casella and Berger.

In terms of software, a lot of statistical computing in the open source world now gets done on R platform. For modern computationally intensive methods like MCMC (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) the program BUGS/WinBUGS is a standard.

Also, http://videolectures.net/ has a whole lot of lectures (mostly from the Machine Learning perspective), starting with intro to probability and going right up to modern research.
"Keep gasonline prices high, forever"
Taking Risk and Mitigating Risk