skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I made this transition a few months ago. To be honest, I was called up by a recruiter, but I think the following led up to that call:

- Be open to non-engineering roles, possibly to the point of actively seeking them out.

- Having and showing an interest in the industry I work in. Product managers are focused on solving customer and business problems in ways that create value and solve pain points for the customer and make money for the business.

- Developing a sense not only of the best technical solution to a problem, but also what business opportunities that solution opens up. Even when answering technical interview positions for my new job I would always back up a level and explore some other possibilities or motivations.

- Learn to communicate potentially technical information to non-technical people. By this I mean concisely expressing problems, hiding details that aren't immediately important, translating "side effects" into consequences.

- Demonstrate an ability to dig deeper into customer motivations and needs. They will often express what they want in terms of what is immediately visible. Sometimes you have to dig deeper so that you can come up with a design that solves their real underlying problem.
@siracusa makes this very point in yesterday's 5by5 special http://5by5.tv/specials/1
If the new case didn't have glass on the back, had a larger screen, or was thinner/lighter, then you're right that it would be getting more praise. I don't find that weird. I had an iPhone 4 for a while, and since I had zero performance issues with it, I probably wouldn't upgrade until there's a more significant improvement. Sure, it's frivolous, to the extent that there are people starving to death in the world and I'm discussing cell phones with anonymous people on the internet, but it's fairly reasonable and not just about feeling superior by having a visibly newer phone.
The gears do move!
Thank you! I'm glad someone understood the point I was making.

For all the majority of iPhone 4 users know, Siri could have been in their device all along the they either didn't know or didn't care.

Let's think this through. The use cases for Siri are when a) you can't use the keyboard and b) it a situation where you can talk freely. It sounds awesome for when you're driving. Or if you have a disability. Or... No, I think I'm out of potentially useful situations. And to be honest, Voice Control worked pretty well for me on the one occasion I needed it.
You're asking a good question -- but you know a lot more than what you write above.

The main thing is, you know that C, D, E, and F came from either A or B. The p-values above don't account for that; they just say what's the chance, due to random fluctuation, that a sample could have come from from the same source as A.

That's reflected in the fact that the pairs of p-values don't add to one! (Like (A,C) and (B,C) in the table above.)

You also implicitly know that at least one of {C,D,E,F} is A-like and one is B-like (otherwise there would not be a problem). So even if you know P(X and Y have same source) for all (X,Y), which you don't, you couldn't multiply them.

Finally, the p-value returned by the KS test will underestimate the true probability of discrepancy. This is because it's only looking at one thing, the max value of a CDF difference. The significant differences between the distributions may lie elsewhere, like in the tails, and the KS test is known to be relatively insensitive to tail behavior. (Although at n=40 you won't be able to see far into the tails.)

There are a host of other tests that use the same idea (empirical CDF difference) but weight differently. Some can be more effective than the KS test if you're looking for certain types of difference. Here's an OK overview, albeit for the goal of assessing normality:

http://www.instatmy.org.my/downloads/e-jurnal%202/3.pdf

In a real problem, it's always a good idea to use more empirical-cdf tests than just the KS test, to compare variances and other moments as some people in the thread have done, and to make histogram or CDF plots -- especially if you're in just 1 dimension and the plots are easy to interpret.
> don't just say things you can't prove.

It was on Estado de Sao Paulo e Veja, as diego_moita said.

(in English)
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brazilian_President_party_receiv...

(in Portuguese)
http://pt.wikinews.org/wiki/FARC_pedem_para_participar_mais_...

Info on a related incident was leaked to wikileaks too.
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/07/06BRASILIA1511.html

> In a decision taken and kept in secret, the Brazilian
National Committee on Refuges (CONARE) July 14 granted
political refugee status to Francisco Antonio Cadena Collazos
(known in Brazil as Olivera Medina), the so-called Ambassador
to Brazil of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia), who was arrested in Brazil in August 2005 at the
request of Interpol, based on a Colombian arrest warrant
which included charges of murder for terrorist purposes,
kidnapping, extortion and terrorism.
India’s Own And World’s Cheapest Tablet “Aakash” Launched
Did Earth's oceans come from comets?
I'm on Opera and I don't see anything clock-like.
I think you are right. Apple delivered on every single other feature people were expecting/asking for, save NFC; and I don't hear anyone talking about the lack of NFC now. It seems like a pretty nice upgrade to me.
More importantly is why didn't it come out sooner, like in June? My guess is that the soonest it would have came out is actually came out is August 10, six months after the iPhone 4 CDMA, and probably because a contract between Apple and Verizon to not let Sprint in on the action quite yet, especially since the iPhone 4 could run on Sprint the entire time. Furthermore the white iPhone 4 didn't really come out until April. October is a fairly convenient 6 months after that as well.

It's possible we could have got an iPhone 5, but I'm sure apple is waiting for WiMax/LTE to really ramp up in both semiconductor quality and carrier service. Also, they won't release two phones, so they're going to wait for chips that do both WiMax and LTE at the power consumption they want, which will probably be in about a year.
How worlds cheapest 35$ android tablet aakash is made possible [video] - http://bit.ly/pN4hi6
According to their latest election manifesto (https://wiki.piratenpartei.de/Bundestagswahl_2009/Wahlprogra...) their main points are:

* legalisation of non-commercial copying

* prohibition of DRM technologies

* right to derive from existing works

* reduction of copyright terms (expiration with death of the author or earlier)

* (continued) prohibition of patents on software, business models, genes and seeds
Anyone who remembers the initial events would remember very well that the Nano was overbooked initially. So it is not the price point that led to lowered sales.

Cheap in price is in general associated with cheap in quality as well - market psychology. People buy it only when they feel it is good enough. Nano having been already branded and popularized as cheap in price got severely damaged by a few glitches and got rebranded as cheap in quality.

Essentially, production delays and a few unpopular news items made people reconsider their choices and before Nano could recover the market is filled with cars in the small segment made by Honda (who thought of a Honda car in small segment), Maruti/Suzuki, Ford, Hyundai...etc. Also remember that it was Nano which spawned a new generation of small segment cars by various manufacturers who would otherwise have not considered the option at all.
The advantage of operating at Apple scale is the ability to buy components in vast quantities, giving Apple better deals and exclusivity that their competitors can't match. The downside is that they have to buy at those scales. Apple can't afford to ship anything that contains components they can't source by the million.

If one HTC handset is delayed by six months thanks to part shortages, that's a problem for them. They have plenty of other products to fall back on, though. If an Apple product is delayed six months, it's a disaster. Apple would lose billions of dollars in revenue and suffer a PR holocaust. So when I see rumors like the Retina iPad 3, I always filter them by asking, "Can Apple get that part in increments of a million units?" Given that, it should be very rare for Apple to ship the first product containing any given component.
From the customer care side of it, responsiveness matters a lot in the enterprise world (and the non-enterprise world as well). Even if a very complicated issue takes 3 months to fix, responding to an email or opened ticket within an hour and keeping continuous communication with the customers. I have seen customers happy when an issue takes 3-6 months to solve because the person helping them talked to them every couple days asking for more info or giving updates on the the progress. At the same time, I have seen customers mad as hell because the initial response to an new ticket took 3 hours enough though the it was solved 15 minutes later.
First of all, isn't pinning the Chinese currency to the US dollar against WTO rules?

It is important to note that in order to pin the Chinese currency to the US dollar, China must regularly print more and more money, and then they buy US debt with it.

Considering that 10-year US bonds are at staggeringly low interest rates (1.91% as I write this), they're basically giving us free money every time they do this. Why aren't we spending more federally on job programs to get people employed (and/or trained for employment)? Oh yeah, because >socialism<.
Perhaps my http://hckrnews.com will suit you, since it archives anything that makes it onto the homepage (without crawling against the 'More' link).

I've resisted putting RSS feeds on hckrnews, because I think RSS feeds are a poor match for the format. Number of points and number of comments combine with the link to provide information that you don't get with an RSS feed. Often the utility of a link is not obvious from the source and title only.
Anti-Aging Medicine
I read HN in Google Reader in a tabbed browser, and I think I would prefer a feed that reversed the order of the two links. So that the first link goes to the HN comments, and the second link goes to the article itself.

That would allow me to use Google Reader's List view which does not display the expanded, secondary link, and then go down that list of HN articles, open the intriguing HN comments in a background tab, and then when I get to the tab, click on the link in the comments that takes me to the article itself.
"As always, data acquisition and cleanup was the hardest part."

I'm most interested in this piece of the project. What were your particular tools and methodologies? How long did it take you, once you identified your data sources? Any interesting stumbling blocks or problems that were solved along the way?
The IBM SmartCamp pitch is extraordinarily compelling; like a good resume, it feels like you had to work hard to cut all the awesome things you had to say into a small space. It's also really well paced; for instance, the logo slide with the FedEx quote is set up to be a payoff moment for all the previous slides, which build up from smaller customer testimonials.

So my question is: it obviously took you awhile to get to this point, but don't you feel like, if you can put together a pitch like this, there's not a whole lot of additional "hacking" required?
Hype: A clever marketing strategy which a product is advertized as the thing everyone must have, to the point where people begin to feel they need to consume it.

Substance: the actual matter of a thing, as opposed to the appearance or shadow; reality.

This piece is hype. Those that push off hype as substance are swindling your valuable time and are basically saying "come on everyone, let's hope on board the train and base our infrastructure off of unproven, new shit." Which is fine; but only because most of these people are just writing the same social shopping website over and over again; and will do so until the next hyped idea makes its way into the business world.
And I would argue ClojureScript brings even more to the table than SproutCore or CoffeeScript for clientside development. Having done MVC in all shapes and sizes, I'm not convinced that traditional MVC is a good model given the realities of the DOM.
My point wasn't that Siri wasn't any good (or even that Voice Control was bad — it worked when I needed it) but that users neither know not care about it. In fact, the only users who knew about it probably discovered it accidentally by holding the home button down!

As you say, time will tell whether it's a hit. I'm betting not.
Totally agreed. And I didn't thank you for writing the post. So, thank you. =)
"So there's been a broad detente in the industry... Except that Apple broke the truce... Apple was wrong to have shot first"

Apple shot first in the mobile industry the same way Greedo did.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20073471-248/a-brief-histo...
Suffering for Beauty – Graphic Photos of Chinese Footbinding
While that is true, I don't think it is so clear what the other parties stand for, either. At least when it comes to spending the billions. It doesn't seem as if the established parties where so successful with their economics.
This. A basic GSM phone costs less than $20; attach it to an iPod Touch and voilà: a cheap iPhone!

You're right! It's SO easy a 12 year old with a soldering gun could do it! Your insight is blinding in its brilliance.
Did you read the sentence almost immediately before that?

"We've never liked the DMCA's anti-circumvention language, so we'd be delighted to see the rest of the judiciary agree with Judge Marshall."

I don't think it's insulting, but rather that the author thinks others might interpret the judge's ruling as one that he didn't do his homework. Now, if the judge had written a larger report specifying exactly why the ruling stands in great detail, this ruling would have been a bigger precedent and not something that is just about DVD ripping and not against the whole DMCA anti-circumvention.
PG, how many users are there on hacker news?
Assuming for a moment that they're right:

What's the alternative? OS/2 had nice features; it got crushed. BeOS had some nice features; it got crushed. (Yes, I'm aware that they're probably still around in some OSS version.) Plan9 keeps being mentioned, but do regular users understand it? (Is there a "this is why we do things, and this is why that's good" written for people who haven't written their own compiler?)

Are people working on experimental new OSs to "fix problems" in existing systems, or have we gone way past the point of no return? Is there any work on new microprocessor architecture? How much stuff in my modern OS is there because of legacy 8086 stuff?

I think, but I'm not sure, that the length of time it's taken people to get (for one example) IPv6 rolled out shows that change is not likely.

Plan9 LiveCD and installer:
(http://cm.bell-labs.com/plan9/download.html)

Haiku:
(http://haiku-os.org/)
... until 6 months when two or three other new frameworks will be the next greatest thing to hit web development and people will be scoffing at your "legacy" backbone and coffeescript apps...
I dont know how to reach you - but no, I'm not & lesseverything is 2 dudes who know each other working together... on awesome things!

like:
lessconf.lesseverything.com
lessmoney.lesseverything.com
lessaccounting.com
lesstimespent.com

I'd be glad to put you in touch!
This is fantastic. I think you should follow natbro's lead on a few things - allow disquss commenting and show excerpts of the book.

Also I have a series to add: Harry Turtledove's "Darkness" series. It is like 5 books, if I remember correctly. I'm at work...
Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss discuss startups, VCs, apps and more (16 episodes)
The iCal export at Facebook is unfortunately written in a way that lots of calendar software chokes on. I wrote this utility to fix that problem.

In the process, I also added a filter on RSVP-status, so you don't have to consider all the events you have declined.

I hope it can be of use to some of you guys :)
I've received alot of feedback regarding #occupywallstreet
Shaking Things Up at Coca-Cola
That looks a lot like an instance of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
Bureaucracy and taxes are bad indeed, but on the good side you can make good money on consulting alone, and living cost is much lower than in US.

Can you tell us the name of your company?
The fact that he didn't spend pages talking about it is not the issue, but that he didn't when there's a large amount of case law that interprets the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA completely differently. The second update to the story provides a more likely reasoning for the lack of analysis:

"Update: New York Law School's James Grimmelmann emails to suggest an alternative explanation or the shortness of the judge's DMCA analysis. He notes that the plaintiffs focused their arguments on the trafficking provisions of the DMCA, but ignored the circumvention provisions. Since the plaintiffs didn't raise the circumvention issue, Judge Marshall didn't need to address it. He dismissed the lawsuit without prejudice, so Ambrose can amend its complaint and try again."
I think E-ink would be pretty slow to react, but maybe high-resolution PixelQi or Mirasol displays.
A hook into Google book library reference 'available at your local library' would be awsome.
The Worst Boss Ever
Some Turks joke that the Turkish army has the largest gay porn collection in the world.

According to a Turkish friend of mine, yours is not an accurate characterization of Turkey. There are still huge problems with democracy, power of the army, corruption, media controlled by people in power, torture, Cyprus, and more. According to him many of these things are worsening -- he is afraid that Turkey is going to go further in the direction of Syria instead of the EU. Telling is the 6 month compulsory military service for all men, except gay men, who are barred from military service and are considered to have a disease in need of treatment by the minister of family affairs. Those who follow the rules (and choose safety over the risk of rape and violence) and disclose that they're gay are asked to supply photographic evidence of enjoyment of being penetrated as proof (being exclusively the active sexual partner is not considered gay). The less lucky have to undergo a rectal medical exam. Additionally on the point of censorship: gay organisations' web sites are being blocked by the government.

Despite improvements in the economy Turkey is not yet fit for joining the EU. Sadly "stuff like the acceptance of evolution" (see below) is one of the least of the concerns.
Demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeWfkPeDQbY
No point in that configuration though as your browser will report the site as insecure.
Why Apple's Biggest Announcement was the iPhone 3GS
The best aspect of all of this for apple today is that they have so many products, so you can jump from rumor-hyping one to the next, avoiding burnout. You can go from the retina-ipad to the iphone 5 and then you still have plenty more places to hop around to (such as macbooks, itunes, acquisitions, ebooks, etc.) before you hop back to the ipad or iphone.
Not to mention that kevent contain the number of bytes to be read, or the number of connections to accept, which can avoid you a system call that returns EAGAIN in a non-blocking socket.
acid-state, http://acid-state.seize.it/, which was previously known as happstack-state, and before that HAppS-State, has been doing it since 2005 or so.

acid-state currently lacks replication/multimaster support, but happstack-state has had several experimental implementations of that as well.

acid-state is Haskell specific.. but that is part of the appeal. You can directly store fancy algebraic data structures with acid-state. You are not limited to a simple combination of records integers and strings (for example).
I've written a lot of data tools as part of Urbanspoon and subsequent startups. I like to collect publicly available data, clean it up, normalize it, and then release it in a more useful way.

Hot tips for crawling data:

- Cache pages locally while you work on the indexing
- Nokogiri is awesome
- Don't be afraid to use regular expressions
- Initially, put data into a spreadsheet (not the db).
That way it can be checked in and diffed.

I also have a lot of subtle tricks for cleaning up messy data. For example, to see if two similar authors refer to the same person, I have a method that converts an author name to an author key. The key is just like the name, only it's been uppercased, apostrophes removed, etc. Plus weird stuff like this:

# replace all vowels with the letter E
s = s.gsub(/[AEIOUY]+/, "E")

It's little things like this hack that make a big difference in data quality.

(edit: formatting)
Ask HN: How would you react to this programming test?
Say you were applying at a well known, well regarded company. Eventually it progresses and they give you a programming test. A key part of that programming test are questions about a language you've never seen. For this example, it's a language so rare, that it might as well be an in-house language for which it is impossible to have any previous experience, even cursory.

The test lists operators and their functions, precedence, and the order of operations, and then provides a bunch of code that you have to decipher. However, the syntax, operators, and look of the code as a whole is fairly different from anything you've ever seen before.

They won't hire you if you can't learn the language on the spot.

How do you react?
Some things from this article just don't make sense to me.

Like, why is AJAX/client-side MVC pointed out as something that overcomes the HTTP request/response cycle? No, it doesn't. It just means you don't have to refresh the entire screen every time a request is made. Whether the server now sends back "a wad of HTML/javascript" or some JSON to be parsed by the Javascript MVC framework du jour, nothing you are doing is transcending the HTTP protocol either way. AJAX changed the way users interact with web applications, but it did not change anything really fundamental about their architecture.

Second, Coffeescript does not liberate you from Javascript. It IS Javascript. It makes it easier to control some of Javascript's difficult areas, like the meaning of "this" as execution context changes as one example, but it doesn't suddenly give you license to write browser code the way you would write Python or C++.

In any case, let's not confuse convenience with paradigm shifting.
Exactly... I don't think anyone in their right mind would write a clock webpage to seriously replace the built-in system clock on every PC/device out there!
I always view the PM as a mini-CEO.

Rather than evangelizing the product in the community to gain funding with investors, it's about acquiring the resources and good will within the company. You still need all the skills to not necessarily create the product but rather know what it takes.

That being said, it's very safe. It's entrepreneurial just short of being an entrepreneur. I'd like to think it's the best position to gain experience for starting your own venture without actually developing/designing the product.
I am using firefox 5.. they don't appear to move in my browser.
WCDMA is basis for UMTS, which is also called 3G. Plain-old GSM (2G and EDGE) is TDMA-based.
Of course there are control issues as well, turkey has 73 million population and so would instantly be the 2nd largest voting bloc, very likely to become the biggest due to demographics in the future.
It would make sense to have a much stricter standard for accepting large than tiny countries as new members.