skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is that "display advertising impressions" that Google is new to?
The role that psychology and social dynamics plays in science ought to be more studied. To ignore it is foolish. One person I knew in commutative algebra said that he always adds references to the famous people in the field in his papers for ass kissing purposes. It's just one anecdote but this sort of stuff, I suspect, is much more common than it is thought.
Anyone who's feeling like they can't handle the physics here should probably just leave now ...
Online Episode
watch tv series, tv season, new episode, full episode online
Ask HN: Best magazine to tablet process?
I work at a university and am curious what the best and most cost effective way is to go from print magazine to an interactive iPad (and possibly Android) tablet magazine. Costs would ideally be under 5000 a year, since there is no actual sales involved to recoup the cost.
The value is that you have a feed of relevant posts and can easily discover new interesting people.
The secret to my success in a field of men? All my friends. My guy friends.
There are several inaccuracies in this article,

* "Mozilla is tinkering with a SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine that supports Google’s V8 core and is currently developed as “V8Monkey”" - I assume they mean the side project some people are doing, to let SpiderMonkey support the V8 API, which would let it be used say in node.js. The article implies that that is the latest "buzz" in JS engines, but there are plenty of actual recent stories in that area, and all major JS engines are constantly improving.

* "Mozilla Firefox 5 Beta Build 1" - No such thing exists. Firefox 5 is in Aurora, which is pre-beta, and there is no Firefox Beta at the moment (just nightly, aurora, and stable).

* They use Chromium nightly, but not a Firefox nightly (Firefox 6), which is odd. For the other browsers - Opera and IE - I don't know if nightly builds are available, but for Firefox they are.

As to the content, I agree with Google that it is interesting to see 'steady-state' results, of running a benchmark many times. For some web pages, that clearly matters. However, the normal SunSpider is still very interesting - it says something about the speed of smaller web pages that try to load quickly, but still need some amount of JavaScript. Quick loading and responsiveness are very important there, and in fact that is exactly the sort of thing Google usually stresses in its own websites, and ironic that Chrome is the slowest there. But in any case, both benchmarks are interesting.
You seem to be implying that modern GUIs have reached a level of maturity that approximates perfection. I really think that's a bit of a stretch.

Why would there be so much effort among technical people to avoid using GUIs, either by using programs that run in a terminal or by memorizing hotkeys, if our current GUIs are perfect for the tasks we want them to perform? I doubt you'd get non-technical people to agree that today's GUIs are perfect, either; in my experience, they find them frustrating at best.
Visualizing geographic data with the WebGL Globe
Sony was running unpatched Apache with no firewall for months before breach
I see a big problems in web testing caused trying to test drive from outside of the browser. I'm currently working on a solution that has tests written in javascript that run inside the browser. The test runner puts your web app into an iframe, so the test code can use jQuery, for example, to easily automate and assert over the UI.

JavaScript also makes creating a very clean testing-focused DSL easy.

I'm hoping to open source the project soon. If anyone would like to know more give me a shout (@andrewdavey).
Let's say the cables that WikiLeaks got hold of were sent to WSJ through this method, would they be willing to publish them and face the rath of the US Government?

(Alternatively, if they were to publish them, would the US Government be forced to respond differently to how they did with WikiLeaks, so as to not be seen as hindering free press? I'm sure in the public's eyes, going after WikiLeaks is a much smaller thing than going after a paper as big as WSJ.)
Great -- I'm hoping L1-regularized logistic regression will become the standard first thing to try in these quick-n-dirty "predict response variable from text" experiments. That's our approach too. (I assume this is L1 or similar since you mention regularization causing feature selection.)

[[ Edit: deleted question about what 'k' is for the discretized 1{ rank <= k } response. It's mentioned in the article ]]
Its also worth it to decide if you need user email addresses at all, chances are you don't. For most services the only function of having the email address is to spam the user. Yes, there are password resets but you don't have to force it on them, let the user decide if they want to make that fallback available to them.
I was referring to the place. Did they really say something about sleep in the video?
My argument is that the startup community is loosing good developers to a specific part of the banking industry which I fail to see provide much value other than to their bosses.

I have no problem with them making more money. I think it's obvious why they make the choices they do.

The problem is that the part of the banking world they go to. That part of the banking industry that can pay the high salaries aren't benefitting society.
The plus isn't quite centered it is closer to the $.
Well, I guess they can ask for whatever they want.

IANAL, but I don't see how it could be illegal to violate a court order that is not directed at you.
New art project/app designed to recruit others into defying social conventions
Well for a start it's not about "ideology". Ideology is about the way the world should be, and it's a matter on which the reasonable people of the world can and should disagree.

The date of bin Laden's death (if indeed he is dead, if indeed he ever existed) is a fact-of-the-matter thing; it's either one way or it's another way, and there shouldn't be much room for reasonable people to disagree at all. Reasonable people may be uncertain on such matters, but they should all share similar degrees of uncertainty.
I'm thrilled that Mozilla didn't give in to their demands (yet).

I'm confused as why the HN headline says "MediaaFire" while the linked article and add-on are "MafiaaFire", though. UPDATE: It was a mistake and was fixed.

Oh, and it's completely ridiculous that DHS is enforcing IP. I mean, what a completely inappropriate and wasteful use of that department.

Edit: Did a Google search for "MediaaFire" which brought up nothing relevant. It DID show this posting, though, which I find to be amazing (It's only existed for 15 minutes.)
How do you articulate actual business value of your UX designs?
Google and Oracle Case Reduced
I assumed that they would until I read this:
"If you upload or submit any Content, you represent to Dow Jones that you have all the necessary legal rights to upload or submit such Content and it will not violate any law or the rights of any person."
https://www.wsjsafehouse.com/terms.html
Fusion != Fission, and in this case there isn't even any radioactive material in the equation

Fusion reactors spew neutrons which can create a variety of radioactive isotopes. Most of these are very short-lived, fortunately -- but they do exist, and reactor designs need to take these into account.

(Also, some reactor designs use tritium as fuel, which is of course radioactive to begin with.)
Some pretty amazing leaks they're going to be getting, then!
Why Microsoft should buy RIM: to take on Apple
"Dow Jones retains sole discretion in deciding what to do, if anything, with the information received through SafeHouse. Dow Jones does not make any representations that the information provided through SafeHouse will be used or published in any form."

I don't imagine much fun information coming out of this.
I wonder if a valid business model in this case would be to get someone involved via profit sharing. I wouldn't find $Xk/month worth while to devote the time needed to improve the product (otherwise I'd be doing freelance), but if I was offered 50% of the profit above what the current profit levels are, then that might be a fun project to take on on the side that would incentivize me to make the product as profitable as possible.
The best signup flow is no flow at all. I liked a lot what Posterous did.
Hmm, that's not really a considered review.

Straight off, no on at Sauce Labs hates browser testing, that's just a stupid thing to posit.

Test::Right is a really cool mental model of testing, and it's going to make people's lives better. Robust tests, parallelism, immediate cross-browser compatibility (this is an issue people without a lot of experience don't really understand), a lot of cool shit.

I love the promise that if I write my tests in this pattern/framework, my tests will always be good. It's not there yet, but it's still damned cool.

We also have several volunteers who're excited to port this to other languages, but we started with ruby because it's a fertile playground, and the important piece here is the pattern, not the language/framework itself. It'll end up being the flagship browser testing framework de facto, but that's not the goal here.

I played a big part in putting some pieces of Test::Right together, full disclosure.
Is it just me, or does DHS really seem like a rogue organization that thinks they're above things like due process?
Its a step in the right direction. Traditional responses to the market failures, corruption, fraud and general seediness of those in power has been more regulation. And that hasn't really worked too well has it..

What we need is transparency, while protecting privacy. Shining a bright light into the dark corners of wrong-doing should serve as a better deterrent than any ambiguous, unenforceable regulation.

Lets hope the safehouse gets some competition (nytimes are you listening?)
At the very least, this would change the design constraints of the problem. Right now it's easy to push off communication-security questions because "generally, mostly, kinda" the network can be trusted to deliver your information without snooping or tampering. In an environment where there was no pretense of this trust, it seems that good design would call for more robust security in order to transit over a wholly untrusted network.

That said, this network looks mighty inefficient. It looks like the terrible early days of decentralized P2P filesharing where all nodes were equal and routing barely worked. That didn't clear up until they backpedaled a bit with superpeer-type setups, which brought things back more like the Internet diagram in this article.
Alright - how do we go about this, then? Is there anyone driving anything like this already, or are we just waiting for some one to step in and just do this?

This sounds valuable enough that I'd be willing to plunk down some of my company's time to make this happen. That said, I suspect we'd be a rather poor choice to drive this as we're running pretty independent of the rest of the Seattle startup scene.

Given our community, though, there's gotta be someone whose a decent fit for this.

Anyone?
Bollywood karaoke site in Alpha looking for Flash expert
www.Antakshari.TV is in Alpha mode. We are looking for a Flash expert for consulting gig to go to the next phase. Send email admin at antakshari.tv
Last I heard it was called MafiaaFire as an irony to MPAA and ICE.
That's not exactly true. There's enough neutron flux in a hypothetical fusion reactor (assuming D-T) for neutron activation of structural materials to be a real concern. There are actually some hybrid fission-fusion designs which use a fusion reactor running at a loss as a neutron source for a subcritical assembly of fission fuel.

You're right that the fission products and high-mass-number alpha emitters have left the picture, though.
yeah pretty strong l1--most features were 0. we binarized rank on I_{rank<=20}. it turns out there are tons of articles beyond the first page that stay low forever. check out the interactive viz vad made: http://hn.metamx.com (warning 2.6MB compressed js ahead)
marketplace for rubygems is a good idea, never thought about it.

Plain old download a gem file and unpack it in vendor in rails app would work for older projects.

There would be some challenges, how will you install via bundler?, does it need some authentication for gem download?
Don't get me wrong, I didn't mean to downplay his achievements - The guy is a legend.

I'm British. I was being understated :)
Is Ubuntu 11.04 the best Linux desktop ever? Or just the most different?
"From Charles Darwin on, evolutionary biologists have struggled to explain self-sacrificing behavior."

I had trouble reading beyond that line, since it's simply false. A quick reading of "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins would correct that impression.
Ask HN: Can't get signups. Any advice? 
Hi there. I'm a female (not that it matters!) single-founder startup and I have created a site and system called Gallereo - www.gallereo.com. I am getting a good number of visitors to the site but really struggling to get people to sign up, even to the trial. I have tried various things but I'm not sure if I'm too close to this as a project and if there is something simple and stupid I am doing wrong. Any advice on how I could improve the visitor -> signup ratio would be wonderful! Thanks in advance. Emma
Strata Week: Will data make stock exchanges unnecessary?
The College Bubble and the Public Defunding of Colleges | Rortybomb
The problem with calling ourselves "software gardeners" is that gardeners do not earn as much money as engineers.
Big Data Architecture
Even that is unnecesary. Every shady "live chat with girls on Guadalajara" ad knows where I am located. Why is that the stupid registration form can't?
Now all you need is some charts, extrapolate some trends, and write some interesting blog posts.
They're not exactly in rank-space .. they discretize to the binary variable whether or not an article made it into the top-20, then use logistic regression to model that. so the coefficients are in log-odds space of that indicator
I like the definition of humility by Eliezer Yudkowsky on less wrong - "To be humble is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors."

Given Dr. Everitt's commitment to this experiment, I'd wager he was humble enough according to that definition ... though that assumption of mine would simply be a "halo effect" instance?
Which is bad enough when they are, you know, securing the homeland.

This kind of thing just makes them look like hired thugs (working essentially for free, no less).
Hearst, Telegraph Join Apple’s Growing Subscription Team
Twitter did the same thing less than 2 months ago:

http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/numbers.html

As strong as our combined anecdotal evidence is, I don't think it's possible to draw any strong conclusions.
Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.

I guess the Sophists get the last laugh over Socrates.
That just protects Dow Jones.

It allows them to sue the anonymous uploader for breach of contract or perjury or whatever if they want (which they don't), but it turns it the rights into the uploader's issue, not Dow Jones'.
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.

- Steve Jobs

http://startupquote.com/post/5221103598
(Alternatively, if they were to publish them, would the US Government be forced to respond differently to how they did with WikiLeaks, so as to not be seen as hindering free press? I'm sure in the public's eyes, going after WikiLeaks is a much smaller thing than going after a paper as big as WSJ.)

Well the US Government has yet to manage much in the way of actually going after wikileaks. The Wall St Journal has the advantage of falling under its jurisdiction.

But the answer is: no, I get the impression that the WSJ will be more circumspect about precisely what it publishes. On the other hand if the WSJ does publish your leaked documents they automatically get a lot of credibility. And if you leak documents to the WSJ and they refuse to publish you can always leak 'em to someone else.

On the other hand, it's not like Wikileaks is publishing things indiscriminately nowadays -- they're still sitting on a huge stash of diplomatic cables and releasing a few every time they feel like it. As I've said before, if I were the wikimedia foundation I'd be complaining pretty hard about the fact that Wikileaks isn't actually a Wiki any more.
Video: JavaScript for beginners
I've never been a fan of ICE's technique of seizing domains. I don't think they should have the authority to do that. And then updating them and redirecting to their page that the domain was seized and potentially tracking the IPs of those that visit the site. It really bothers me that they have the authority to do that in the first place.

They have already got in to some hot water when they seized a dynamic dns domain that was hosting thousands of subdomains (only one was accused of pedophilia trafficking). They wildcard redirected the domain to an IP that hosts a page saying that domain was seized because the site was hosting pedophilia. Pedophilia labeling was strung across a lots of personal sites, church websites, and radio station websites in the processes. It took days for them to revert it and have all the DNS records propagated but the damage was partly already done as it labeled innocent parties as pedophiles without due process.

Not sure who is doing oversite of the DHS/ICE's efforts here. Probably best not to buy .COM/.NET domains, especially if you register it with US address in the WHOIS.
> Statically typed language for webdev = <3

Like Java, or Scala, or even C++ (Okcupid did it)? I'm trying to figure out why Go made you arrive at this conclusion and other languages did not.
Wikipedia says "Intel still holds an ARM license even after the sale of XScale." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale

I don't know if it's true five years later now, though.
This is the approach that Selenium 1 took, and there be many dragons down that path. It's workable (we've done a ton of cool stuff at Sauce Labs making it work), but it takes an usual mix of skills and insight to get it to really gel together. Selenium 2 was built with all that mind.

That said, it's not the important part. Selenium (and watir, windmill, etc.) is an execution tool, it doesn't help you avoid some very, very large pitfalls waiting for you down the road. Too often your tests are tightly coupled with the dom, data and selectors are strewn all about, you have manual pauses and timeouts set by someone who left years ago, and you have so many that the whole thing takes two weeks to run (yes, I've seen this a number of times).

Basically, I don't care about the tool to execute the tests anymore. They'll all become interchangeable with Selenium 2 anyway. The much more valuable piece here is in creating tests that are maintainable and a joy to work with.

Certainly best of luck, please be sure to share you experiences and insights! There's always more to be learned.
Smart. Thanks for the clarification.
It seems to me you're trying to break into a field where most people already know what to do (or think they do): art & photography. Maybe branch out into other areas too? Maybe target writers who want to sell their ebooks -- setting up that is a PITA, I can tell you as a writer. Otherwise, I like what I saw.

EDIT: One other thing, put a yearly fee on it instead of the $7.99/month. Monthly charges seem to inspire uncertainty in people.
Peter Thiel and the Challenging of the Meritocracy | Rortybomb
In all seriousness, what do you expect to find in their TOS? What if I send them an email showing that one of my colleagues is sleeping with the boss. Are they going to guarantee it will get published? In the end it will come down to trust. If they act in a manner that wins the trust of whistleblowers, they'll get whistleblowing. I can't see any of the legalese affecting this one way or the other.
Agree on all points. But I still like the idea as an optional way for people to log quickly in without having to give the site owner any password info.

And yeah its a little more tedious if the site doesn't have a long session time.
Another question, how are standard errors calculated? I assume they're not from the bootstrapping since the p-values clearly aren't from the standard errors ( +/- 1.96*se is crossing coef=0 for several cases but with small p-values). The other way I would think to get p-values would be the percentage of bootstrap replicates that have (coef==0). But for only 20 replicates you're stuck with p=0 or p=0.05.

I'm genuinely curious how to do coef significance testing for L1-regularized models. I once saw someone ask this at a Tibshirani talk and he said "oh we have no idea, we've resorted to the bootstrap before".
Sorry I misspoke -- I copy/paste from email confirmation fields. And I understand why password confirmations exist, but I think the option posed in this article is a much more elegant solution to that issue.
If WikiLeaks were a company in the US, and all their people worked in the US, they would be in deeper shit than they already are.

But, PR can spin WikiLeaks as anti-American, it's much harder to do that while trying to shut up the WSJ.
True but the other difference is that fission reactors have to be kept cool. With fusion reactors, the challenge is getting it hot enough. There's never a concern about loss of cooling, meltdown, all that mess.

Also of course, several projects are attempting boron fusion, which doesn't produce neutrons other than from a small portion of side reactions.
Great article. I gotta say, I hadn't personally seen those ads (I don't watch TV). But they were worth the time.

Why are Microsoft ads so...strange sometimes? Did anyone see the Windows 7 ad with someone throwing up? Microsoft had decades on Google in acquiring advertising experience. It could learn to be a little more sentimental and compelling
Leaking stuff to newspapers is a time-honoured tradition. But with an anonymous upload site it can be done much more easily.

The biggest problem I see is fake leaks. Make up some fake documents to embarrass someone you don't like (or just for the sake of the lulz) and how are they supposed to verify whether they're real or not before publishing 'em?
gem should be free.. I hate this idea.
What if I want to fork the code ?
And I don't want to put licenses all around the place when it comes to deployments.
I agree this is a step in the right direction, but I don't imagine something like Watergate breaking from SafeHouse.
This is probably way for them to aggregate potential exclusive story ideas. I'd treat it like you were going to speak to a reporter anonymously, they may have your back, they may not.
Yeah, I understand. The email confirmation link just seems like such a barrier to entry. Do you get annoyed every time you have to go confirm your email address? I do.
Simple game programming with Python and Pyglet
I saw someone point out that DHS's seized domain page isn't very accessible due to just being an image.

I noticed that the image is always named something generic like banner2.jpg and there's no other uniquely identifiable information in the HTML. I think they do it specifically to make it very difficult to Google Search for seized domains.
Reminded me of http://gumroad.com/ "Share and sell your digital goods with just a link"