skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi crazygringo,

I was intrigued by your estimation procedure and was thinking of a way of playing around with it:

(1) Create a random bit vector of size 45,000.
(2) Pick 40 positions in the vector at random and use those positions to estimate the proportion of ones in the original bit vector (so far this is easy).
(3) Select an additional 120 positions and use the more sophisticated procedure to refine the estimate from part (2).

I was wondering if you have code or pseudo-code for how you implemented part(3) specifically how you choose the 120 words for extra testing. It seems there are a lot of different natural ways you can do it. Did you write an academic paper about this?

Thanks!
The "Girl Power" attitude probably reflects more of a clique-ish divide common at that age rather than a social aside on gender inequality, similar to a "Generic HS represent!" cheer.

The more alarming quote was Cerf's "I was secretly very pleased to see that happen." The obvious corollary is that he would have been secretly less pleased if boys had won. Does that indicate he has lesser expectations for women? Would his (probably) sub-conscious bias actually hurt girls perceptions of themselves in the long run?

Reminds me of the Reddit thread for a women-only programming event that received some backlash: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/h0fe0/pyladies_...
Rupert Murdoch's wife throws a right hook at protester
Drawing App for Artists Debuts on Android Tablets
I think that you'd be surprised. Most of the Fortune 500 uses CF as does the federal government.

Even JBoss has an open source CFML distribution, http://www.getrailo.org/ so the whole cost argument is mute.
I'm a happy GitHub customer and your service is worth every penny. Keep building awesome stuff!
The Interconnected World of Tech Companies
I suggest clicking on the link before asking obvious questions.

"Whenever you see a short “g.co” link, you can trust that it will always take you to a Google product or service. We also have a public URL shortener at goo.gl. You can use this to shorten up URLs across the web."
Wait, what!?

Let's say, for example, that we have a country like Fiji where XC skiing is rare. But a university student from Fiji he takes up the sport. He ends up representing his country in the 1988 Olympics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiji_at_the_1988_Winter_Olympic...

Now, if he were to go on and actually win an Olympic medal, is it wrong of us to say, "Wow, that's amazing considering he's from a country that traditionally doesn't do very well in Winter sports?" Are we treating him like a hot house flower to celebrate the fact that he skiis and he's from Fiji?

Do we think Fijians have some sort of character defect if they need to be encouraged to try this sport that for decades has been dominated by people who aren't very much like them at all?
I wondered the same thing about the third place contestant. The write-up said she measured the carcinogens in grilled chicken using a high pressure liquid chromatograph-mass spectrometer. When I was in college, they would only let us use the analytic equipment in planned labs under supervised conditions. I can only imagine the response if I went to the lab manager and asked if I could put a piece of chicken in his spectrometer.
When you say "having to do training".. A great programmer don't need "you" to do the training. Just give him/her a couple of days to read your codebase and learn the language. Anyway, even if it was the best PHP programmer, you'd still have to walk through your architecture and important design decision. So, at this high level, it's not important at all whether the guy/girl understand the inner details of PHP.

And, might I add, PHP is so easy to understand and read.. You don't even have to know PHP to read the majority of code written in it ;-) Compare that to, say, haskell or scheme, where it's a whole new paradigm.

This is a crucial blunder from all no-tech people I know who are trying to hire great programmers. Seek Great Programmers, not Great "insert a language" Programmer! A good programmer will be good in any languages; a bad one will be bad in all languages.
Don't look at this as "What's the best hammer to buy?" You are buying a result--clean accounting that will let you see your business in operation and figure out if your business is doing well or dying.

As others have said in this thread (and elsewhere) you should not be the person who does this. You are not competent. I don't care who you are. (Disclosure: I am a tax lawyer. I did my payroll tax returns exactly once before concluding I should not do this job.)

That means you need to hire someone. Solve your "What software should I buy?" question by instead asking "What software would allow me to hire competent, reliable bookkeepers efficiently, quickly, and cheaply?"

That's Quickbooks.

I use Quickbooks because it is trivially easy to hire a competent bookkeeper from Craigslist to keep things up to date.

If you use any other software you will have a harder time hiring a bookkeeper. You will then have to ensure that the bookkeeper is competent on the software you selected (who is going to judge this--you? Unlikely). You will probably have to pay more for this person.

All of the other vendors have nice products. But they are missing the boat on how to defeat Quickbooks.

Accounting requires a basic level of understanding, and it requires time. Both of those factors tell me that a business owner should not do his/her own accounting. Hiring an accountant/bookkeeper is essential to success.

An accounting software vendor should design software that is easy for an uncredentialled bookkeeper (i.e., not a CPA) to use. Then you'll have a zillion people at $25/hour willing to do bookkeeping for small businesses. That will make it less risky for a business owner to choose not-Quickbooks as the software to run the business on. That in turn will eat into the Quickbooks market share.

Don't focus on the end user (the small business owner). Focus on creating an extremely cheap service provider ecosystem to your end users.

I don't think you can sufficiently dumb down accounting software to allow a random business owner total safety in running his/her own books. There are too many edge cases in tax and accounting, and the random business owner does not have the radar to know whether he/she is an edge case or not, and what to do about it.

I don't do my own tax returns. I don't do my own accounting. I use Quickbooks on Windows (dedicated old PC for this in an office full of Macs) because Quickbooks on the Mac is shit. I sit down every other week with my bookkeeper and go over the last 2 weeks of activity line by line. Actually sitting down and looking at money in/money out has been The Most Important Thing I've Ever Done in the department of having a profitable business.
That's a very cool way to recruit.
Thanks for the feedback. Looks like they offer a free trial, giving it a shot.
With Facebook, you can use a pseudonym for your vanity URL and hide all content to be non-visible to all except those you grant access to. This works well, I feel, and hope g+ does the same.
I think people are misinterpreting the frustration with Github's pricing.

It's not that people have a problem paying $22 for 20 repos, it's that the 21st repo costs $23 per month!

Github's pricing structure has friction in this area. Without a controlled experiment it's impossible to determine whether this pricing model is best for Github or not.

Imagine if when you bought toothpaste there were two options, a small travel-size tube for $1 or a crate full of 500 full size tubes for $250. Or imagine if a restaurant served ice cream at $0.25 for a spoonful and then your next option was a full gallon.

The friction occurs b/c people don't like wasting money, and the pricing model Github has chosen feels like unused repos are costing money but not being put to use.

In other words, there is a nonlinear relationship between money spent and usefulness gained per dollar, which makes it difficult for people to maximize utility over. This is friction and it probably has mixed results. I think the most important thing to note is that we don't know whether it helps or hurts Github's business to do things this way. Assertions that it does one vs the other are only speculation.
I don't care if they won specifically because they were female. It's a sausage fest in the bay area. Time to get the women on board guys. They need to be part of the 'future' too.
For those that were confused by the title (like me), here's the TL;DR:

Online advertiser, Epic Marketplace, is using a very sophisticated javascript script to do "history stealing", where they iterate through thousands of URLs to determine if a user has visited them. With this data, they can serve highly targeted ads.
It's highly shady at best, and illegal at worst.
Even then, I can't think of much you've got to degrade for the iPod touch. The big stuff (screen/ram/graphics/cpu) is near enough identical. If you support the previous gen iPhone, the current gen iPod should be no problem. You can pick up location from wifi... all I can think of not being available is the compass...
The more alarming quote was Cerf's "I was secretly very pleased to see that happen." The obvious corollary is that he would have been secretly less pleased if boys had won.

Another alarming interpretation is that he was secretly pleased that the girls had won, but would have been openly pleased if boys had won :-)
OK. So suppose your voting preferences are available online.

Your boss happens to be a friend of the candidate, or a member of a political party. You are told to vote a certain way or lose your job.

You are turned down for a bank loan because your bank manager doesn't like liberals.

You are refused an apartment because the people on your street don't like conservatives.

You fail at an interview because the interviewer only likes people who vote the way she does.

This is so bloody obvious it shouldn't need to be spelled out. Secret ballots are secret so that people can exercise their democratic rights without fear of discrimination, recrimination or intimidation.
PlentyOfFish Team, What a Lean Startup is Like
It was actually the inspiration. I'd been doing this myself for a while, but hadn't thought about making an actual product out of it. When I saw the incredible response from the HN community to email canary, I realized I should really take a swing at this.
They reason they are doing this instead of just using goo.gl is g.co will only go to Google products. Anyone can create a goo.gl link and potentially send you to a phishing site.
"it's explicitly regarded as bad UI design by Apple"

I find that hard to believe considering that launcher concept is implemented by Apple in the iOS home screen.
Well-written code can still be old and slow. ;)
The title is inaccurate.

It is alleged that he signed up for guest accounts on their network with different laptops, changed his MAC address and re-registered if the IP he was using was blocked (by JSTOR) or cut off of the network (by MIT), and finally connected a laptop in a basement networking closet.

I guess you could say that is 'hacking' in the unauthorized access sense, but not in any meaningful sense. It isn't breaking and entering if someone repeatedly trespasses somewhere (say, banned from a store) even if they change their clothes to avoid detection.
True, but I guess I'm starting to feel that girls are no longer "disadvantaged." Less interested, maybe, disadvantaged, not so much.

EDIT: for context, I'm a child of the 90's, perhaps much different (or not) from some of you. I grew up in liberal(?) Silicon Valley. As a male, my entire life I've felt that girls were encouraged to succeed academically, received extra help, and greatly praised for their accomplishments, all because of a perceived societal disadvantage; whereas the boys were either expected to succeed, or largely disregarded because, hey what's the big deal? they're somehow at a huge advantage anyways.

in my high school graduating class, both the valedictorian and salutatorian were girls. and while I had guy friends who were equally brilliant, they never had the motivation or desire to succeed academically the way those girls (one of whom i was best friends with) were. to me it was striking to see brilliant young men and women, and the startling contrast in motivation and approaches to life (the guys were incredibly laid back, the girls were very much go-getters).

these are my personal observations, and as stated above, a personal feeling, fwiw (probably not much)
How to Enabling the Root User in Snow Leopard
One more problem: essentially tying healthcare coverage to employment and giving all kinds of tax-breaks to employers to offer it. You're artificially limiting the population that can get coverage, increasing the risk for insurers. Also, by creating a large population of uninsured (who still have to get emergency treatments and public health safety treatments (think epidemics etc)) and you drive the cost up for others who pay for healthcare.
How did Aaron get access to the for-pay articles (page 9)?

Also: nice going, Aaron! Drag research access into the 21st century, kicking and screaming!

Does anyone think it's odd that an Acer laptop could write these files to disk faster than JSTOR could serve them?
I can't seem to find the option that allows me to delegate. If that's implemented, I haven't been able to test it.

With that in mind, I wonder about how the delegation would work in practice. It sounds like a good idea, but the devil's in the details. For example, if I delegate my vote to someone else on a whole class of issues, but I want to cast my vote on a specific issue in that class, would that work?

Also, it would have to have some good controls for notifications. On the one hand, if I delegate my vote, I would like to stay informed about how that vote is being used. On the other hand, if there's a lot of voting going on and I get a notification every time my vote is used, it might just turn into noise for me. And the quantity might increase drastically if I have a long chain of delegation and people in that chain keep "overriding" the links that are further away.

All in all, it sounds like a great idea, but there's a whole lot of details that remain to be solved. I'm really interested in seeing whether and how they'll address those details.
Case Study: Hurricane Party and Transitioning to Lean
Why would he do this? What is the purpose of having all those documents?
The Boston Globe's got an article written on this that they're updating: http://www.boston.com/Boston/metrodesk/2011/07/cambridge-man...
Disable Build Auto in under Projects
I'm not a dev, but I'd actually be afraid of releasing an app for ipod touch for something so reliant on internet access purely because of the low ratings it would probably get from clueless ipod touch owners...
So he allegedly goes out and buys a laptop just to do this heist...and then he blows his cover by doing a scrape fast enough to apparently bring down some of the MIT servers? Why was he in such a rush?
>Just because people are bound by the decisions of the majority doesn't mean it's centralized.

That wasn't the point my grandparent was making. The first and foremost critical flaw of democracy is (and always will be) that the majority can dictate over the minority. That has nothing to do with centralization.

Also, it's not about "personal preferences". It's about minorities effectively being dominated by the majority, without them having any way to fight back. While there might be some basic rights to protect minorities, they are essentially always stripped of the most important and fundamental right in such a society: influence on decisions that concern themselves. That is - factually - a tyranny for everyone who is not part of the majority.
Not really, being PHP, Python or Ruby, with the kind of load they are dealing with, no framework available out there is fitted.
Hope Pixar won't sue the program's authors. They are using one of my favorite characters from wall-e (eva) as logo :).
What do you use for accounting/bookkeeping in your startup?
Hello,
I'm doing some research for a new product and i'm wondering what tools/solutions startups / small businesses use for their day to day book keeping/ accounting.

please share!
On what basis do you think this? Simply because there are no longer any laws which explicitly disadvantage women?

For example, do you think women are equally likely to be discriminated against on the basis of sex as men? Do you think they are equally likely to be abused domestically, or harassed on the street? Do you think men and women are equally likely to be the target of sexual harassment in the workplace? Do you think the two groups are equally likely to be raped?

I doubt the numbers will bear out in your favor on any of these points were we to check them. And these are only explicit forms of discrimination. This does not account for latent discrimination, which is quite difficult to measure but probably exists more copiously than explicit discrimination.
I'd consider voter intimidation a sufficient reason. Why is it so easily dismissed, in your opinion?
This reminds of research showing that
"Over 80% of high school leadership positions are now held by girls (Fiscus, 1997.)"
( from http://cfge.wm.edu/Gifted%20Educ%20Artices/GenderGenius.htm )

It still remains to be seen how doing more of something (or being more successful at something) in high school translates to being successful at that endeavor later in life. Time will tell!
He has a history of collecting and analyzing large data sets. This sounds about par for the course.
She worked under a professor at a nearby University.

So, this work was either given to her, or she worked her *ss off to get there.
I did, however, I am not the one making claims that it is "not just another game". I'm pretty sure you have never laid eyes nor hands on it, so I would like to know what you are basing your opinions on.
Maybe I'm biased living in a college town and working at an engineering company but if I look around I see tons of craftsmen in all areas - kids building robots, treehouses, chicken coops. Maybe motorcycles aren't as popular as they once were and it's harder to work on a modern engine but I don't think things have fundamentally changed.

Also, I live in an area where there are tons of farmers, hobby and commercial. Almost every one of them is a tinkerer.

And of course, software is a craft too. You just don't get your hands dirty.
Lovely things about HTML5 markup
Scribd Launches Float
You just bought your shipment of 1000 servers. Do you really think you ssh to each one, edit config files, and copy your code over? Nope. You write a computer program to do all that. (See: puppet, etc.)

At that point, it's equally easy to install a stack like haproxy + varnish + nginx + a bunch of CPAN modules as it is to rsync over a bunch of .php files, and therefore "it's easier to deploy" is meaningless. You click a button.

Not to pick on you specifically, but one argument that comes up quite frequently, especially in PHP vs. X discussions, is "I don't see how xxx feature of other language is beneficial." Well, the reason you "don't see" that is because you simply don't have enough experience yet. Deployment is the same way; a lot of people get by for years without ever "doing it right". But that doesn't mean the wrong way is right, it just means you haven't been required to get deployment right yet.
Fight hunger -- inspired by Ruby on Rails
This is from his personal site, http://www.aaronsw.com:

He is the author of numerous articles on a variety of topics, especially the corrupting influence of big money on institutions including nonprofits, the media, politics, and public opinion. In conjunction with Shireen Barday, he downloaded and analyzed 441,170 law review articles to determine the source of their funding; the results were published in the Stanford Law Review. From 2010-11, he researched these topics as a Fellow at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption.

He has also assisted many other researchers in collecting and analyzing large data sets with theinfo.org. His landmark analysis of Wikipedia, Who Writes Wikipedia?, has been widely cited.
The funny part is that when Rails and Django were rising to fame, it was argued that PHP was the better choice because finding developers to maintain the code in the future will be easier. Now that we are here, it seems it didn't turn out that way at all. Goes to show you should choose technology for technical reasons and technical reasons alone.
"Aaron Swartz ... was a fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Ethics"
by that definition all of life is an education is it not? I don't think college is the only way, but I still don't think an education is about becoming a producer instead of a consumer.
He liberated millions of documents from the PACER legal archive a while back:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/swartz-fbi/
Alternate link, in case these are taken down: http://pastebin.com/9vjfkigY
WOOPS - php framework
> There's not @facebook email

Yes there is.
Samsung certifies smart cover rip-off for Galaxy Tab 10.1
Snail mail my email
Why can't you do polymorphism? It looks like he just needs to add vtables to make that work.
I think that you have to ask yourself whether the deeper and more profound conversation is endemic to the bot or an artifact of my willingness to delve into difficult subjects with it and my willingness to attribute profundity to my "conversation" with the bot.

For the sake of transparency, the majority of the conversation with the bot was rubbish, but I managed to get some good bits from it-not all of which I included in the article.
WebStart for mac - Great LAMP pkg
Really good article. Purpose of article is to motivate talented people to join Justin.tv and I think it does that very well. First thing I did after reading, was to look for the available positions and actually found one that excited me.
Didn't apply though. Why you might ask.
Although article promotes the "doing" more than "doing absolutely right and best way". Job description is asking for more of "doing right and best way" than "getting it done". And I don't blame them for it, as they have successful product and they would like to keep it that way. What better of doing that than hiring best of the best.
For now, I am just going to wait and work on improving my skills to that point.
Voting for a representative and voting directly on an issue are two very different things. Sure, the idea behind them is the same, but the level of transparency of your stance is drastically higher in the latter case. In other words, you can always say "Well, yeah, I know John Doe is 'pro-choice', but I didn't vote for him because of that. I voted for him because of his ideas for lowering the unemployment."

On the other hand, if you publicly voted "pro-choice" instead of "pro-life", there's no way you can deny it. So it comes down to plausible deniability. As to why you would want to deny your own choice in the first place, several other commenters have already explained that.
Some foreign companies flatter me by borrowing my ideas to sell their products
Where is the contact info for the people behind Hyperarchy? This is similar in concept to something I published a few years ago called "The Electors" (http://theelectors.org/), and it would be cool to chat with the Hyperarchy crew.
I'm not surprised, google tends to not care at all about Touch users (see: goggles).
Socialcam looking for a performance minded rails engineer
Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sx1uHnu...

(edit: seems the site is back now)

(edit2: maybe not)
Honestly? Yeah. The 5 characters adds up, typing it over and over, and stylistically, it looks nicer.

A lot of little details make a big difference.
But if you bootstrap and find customers willing to pay for your product you've got a lot longer than that.
Anyone on MITNet has access to JSTOR articles free of charge to the user. Similarly the ACM, IEEE, etc. all have agreements like this with major universities.