skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, I get that.

But that's why the bias can never be a (discrete) input, it is an emergent property of some unknown piece of matter, not something you set with a slider in steps of 1%.

As the coin gets more biased you'll need to flip more often to get a HT or TH pair with the amount of bias showing up as the frequency of the heads and tails over a longer run.

But the interesting bits are right around the middle where you can take a coin that is nearly perfect and use it in a perfect way, even when you can't even find out in finite time if the coin is perfect or not (and I would expect no real life coin to be perfect, but I would expect them to be so good as to be undetectable in a reasonable amount of time, 50/50 to me is 'perfection', I can't tell the left 50 from the one on the right).

The 'edge case', a perfect coin does not need three flips, it just needs one. If that's not the intended outcome you could either remove that 50/50 point or handle it correctly.

One of the more elegant ways of doing that would be to go from 49.9 to 50.1 or so, or an even smaller difference from the true center.
Health Coverage California
At http://www.lahealthcoverage.com you can find affordable health insurance plans for your family by comparing different plans and choosing the right one for you.
Thanks Steve Ballmer, I never knew there were so many computer scientists in the world (200 million+ android installs?).

I mean he's the marketing guy and he's spinning here and he's right Windows needs to get more competitive across the board and get some market share or mobile will turn into a bleeding ulcer like Bing.
FEEL Who Is Calling You With The ViBe Android App
> A question arises in my mind though, shouldn't I just pay $4 for a coffee at an actual small business?

Sure, assuming you actually prefer the coffee from the small business. Lots of people prefer Starbucks coffee.

The idea of big businesses funding local competition does seem absurd from a competitive standpoint-- but I think it could actually work out really well. If Starbucks still has the better coffee they will still get more business, meanwhile a healthier local economy will mean a bigger market for Starbucks. Especially vs. Dunkin Donuts or McDonalds, which currently beat Starbucks in lower-income markets.
How to Really Listen - Peter Bregman
> Why would I pay the same (more or less) amount as an iPad for a non-iOS device?

Because you don't want to support Apple, don't like the iPad, like Android, have a killer app on Android, or any of a myriad of other reasons. Until iOS5, "because I don't have another computer" was even a good reason.
It means you can have the CPU and OS running 24x7. So much simpler to program (and more like a desktop system) than most embedded where you have to wake up every N seconds, check for tasks and go back to sleep.
If you like these types of puzzles, the biggest online collection I've found is at:

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/riddles/hard.shtml
Good Luck!

There's a little typo - "We use Oauth to look at the amount email in your inbox, nothing else." - missing OF after amount.

On the learn more page there's an extra apostrophe - "email signature that let's other"

It looks really neat. How do you deal with "out of office" situations, where people are likely to have full inboxes?
oh! that's easier :)
All the arguments that defend Facebook e.a come down to: "making money trumps human rights".

There's no arguing about this subject with people who believe that people should not have the right to control their own data, just as there is really no arguing with people who don't believe in the value of free speech or the right to vote.

This is not meant as an insult. Believe what you believe. But if you want to argue the reality of negative consequences, please pick up some history books first. And if you do business in my part of the world, respect the local law.
Then we'll do more programming - I'm sure we've not run out of problems that can be solved through software.
>>> Wealth creation is happening, the problem is that the rewards for it are all being skimmed away and those in the middle are being squeezed

Those whose compensation is unfair usually run for another employer (that another employer sometimes being themselves). Money is simply a proxy for the value of the goods/services they produce for the society.
Microsoft “Roslyn” CTP
There's quite a substantial difference between ml-class.com and the equivalent CS 229 (Machine Learning). The former is much dumbed down, but still informative.

This link gives you access to the current (2011) lecture as it's being taught, if you're interested: http://171.64.93.201/ClassX/system/users/web/pg/view_subject...
Gmail - Inbox - jpoteejrgmail.com
non-story.
Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, speaks at Web 2.0 Summit in SF
Sounds quite arrogant to me. And didn't get the biggest problem: Not finishing stuff.
While this is a fair criticism of Android as a whole, the lead designer has very little control over the performance of the OS. I'm sure that all the lagginess in Android bothers him at least as much as it bothers you.
I'm not sure the poster understands. The information that is sold can be and is linked up with other information. The big consumer database companies in the United States maintain databases with thousands of fields of data per person in the U.S.A. That's today (or ten years ago). Tomorrow, or ten years from now, it will probably be hundreds of thousands of fields of data per person in the United States. Your consumer profile, readily available for sale, will include not only the fact that your favorite tampon brand is Tampax Ultra with Wings (that's already there) but also that you take medication for incontinence (that's already there) and that you spend 15 minutes every day at the local coffee shop during working hours (beep! This app requests to know your location Y/N?) and that you view a disproportionate number of webpages dealing with alcoholism and depression on days after days in which you have purchased 2L bottles of Wild Turkey.

Facial recognition is shortly going to render every digital photo and video ever uploaded to the net FULLY IDENTIFIABLE as to all of the people pictured. Coming in 2020: a startup (or Facebook plugin) that traces your entire life through publicly available photos and videos.

Kevin Curtin has a very limited imagination regarding the privacy apocalypse that is upon us. The data shadow that follows every person around is already huge, and will become gargantuan. It's already inescapable and out of your control.
It doesn't help that the instruction set version is numbered similarly, but their numbers are not the same as the chip version.
Why Not Space?
Link to original study: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
Cool idea but I tend to glance through every email as it comes in and either respond, do nothing or mark them for a later action (flagging, etc) so it doesn't quite fit into my workflow.

On the other end of this, there are definitely times where I've wondered how busy someone I'm emailing was. I'd enjoy being able to quickly gauge their status.
tl;dr: Chicken Little doesn't like Gnome 3, notes that some other don't either, and that some of them are switching to XFCE.
In Denmark, they tax fatty foods to discourage them. In the States, we tax payroll.
That sounds likely :)
Apple cranked up the textures to 11 in iOS 5. So ugly and juvenile... I really find it difficult to believe that this is the same company that produced the gorgeous iPhone OS in 2007.
I work for a quantitative stock trading firm, and if this data is an effective predictor of stock returns you are underpricing it by a factor of about 4x to 25x. Most data providers charge at least $10,000/year, with the more effective ones charging in the six figures.

The primary thing a quantitative trader would want to see is a rigorous track record. Ideally this would be a "point in time" record where you record the information that would have been available as of a certain time in the past. If you don't have the data recorded for that, or it's for too short a time period, the next best thing would be to rerun your metric on all the historical tweets you can get your hands on.

Showing potential customers a mostly complete historical dataset of what you would have told them is a fairly common way of selling this sort of data. Don't show them anything too recent so that they need to buy the data from you. Firms have different investing processes, and so they often need to see a larger sample of data in order to know whether it fits well with how they invest.

Please feel free to contact me if you'd like to talk more about this -- my email is my handle at Google's mail service.
Well of course IQ isn't set in stone, IQ is based on the results of a test that babies can't take. QED.
Ha, I'm sure there are other typos as well!

If someone gets a full inbox while on vacation, I'm guessing they would still want others to know their inbox is full, no?
The site looks very nice, and the idea looks interesting. Another small typo: "Also until we get create a proper login system".

How do you determine what are "healthy" and "unhealthy" amounts of email? If I ignore a bunch of mailing-list type email in my inbox by just glancing at the title, I may have hundreds of "unread" messages but that doesn't mean I'm totally flooded with email. Thoughts?
His plan is good but it only creates a limited amount of jobs and it is not especially environmentally friendly.

My plan will create at least an order of magnitude more jobs, jobs for those with no education, jobs for the illiterate, the literate etc.

It is simple to. Nothing needs to be broken.

All you have to do is to outlaw electricity, gasoline and diesel as well as any other method of generating power except by human or animals.

It will easily end the current unemployment mess not to mention cut the CO2 emission to almost nothing, create a community spirit, end the surveillance programs (both the one run by the CIA and the one run by Facebook and Google) bring the troops home (although it will take a while as they will have to walk) put an end to money in politics reduce the income difference between the 1% and the rest and solve plenty of other problems as well.
Duqu, Stuxnet's Zombie Cousin, Is Coming For Our Data
Private College's Entrepreneurship Course Helps Generate Successful Start-Ups
Summary: journalist visits a Nokia software development site in Tampere, where everybody used to work on two mobile operating systems that Nokia is phasing out.

Understandably, these people are not particularly willing to admit that the software they spent years on wasn't good enough to keep up with Apple and Google, so the old conspiracy theory plops up: the Nokia CEO must be a "mole" who's intentionally driving the stock price down.

The root cause of this myopic idea is neatly summed up near the end of the article:

Linus Thorvalds, Linux’s Finnish founder, says that “Microsoft-hatred is a disease” among open source programmers, but in Tampere it’s more of an epidemic.
Standard condom size should be good for virtually all people. They are extremely stretchable in width, e.g. you shouldn't have a problem putting one on your head (by which I mean the head that sits on your torso). Soft tissue is the real danger for STIs, which is well covered with a condom of any size. No matter the size of the condom, normal skin will always be exposed. Condom size also has no effect on doing the correct side up.
"We should have sex some time" as an example message to send is probably giving off the wrong message and will not attract the crowd you want.
FTA, it's intended to be used as a standalone in sub-$100 phones, or as a low-powered processor that could be paired with a more powerful chip and take care of tasks that aren't performance-intensive. So it's not out of the realm of possibility that it will see duty in top-of-the-line phones.

The biggest killer for his iPhone 5 question is the fact it's not slated for release until 2013, which puts it well past the iPhone 5's introduction.
Lytro lightfield camera launch: captures 11 million picels
Yes, please! Any form of official tutorial would be welcome. And indeed, if you could "endorse" high-quality tutorials by linking to them it would be great.
I get the feeling that this is a MVP or feature test for something bigger. Because truth be told, I don't see why people would care about someone's inbox health, especially since people use their Gmail account as a garbage dump+todo list+backup. I've seen inboxes with THOUSANDS of unread email and most people I know don't archive anything at all.
If you did, then it was very likely me interviewing you, and you should have said that you had seen it before. #busted :D
Related: I vaguely recall hearing of a p2p game client where dice rolls were needed and to secure against cheating they polled each client and took the modulo of the sum of responses (iirc). You get unbiased outcomes as long as one player doesn't cheat.
Three flips is correct. The idea, which could have been explained better, is to flip the coin repeatedly until you get HT, or TH. Once you have achieved that, you take the first of those two flips (either H or T, respectively) and that's your fair flip.*

When you have a fair coin, there is still some probability that you will get HH or TT on your first two flips- on average it will take you three flips to get HT or TH- which is why is says "Average 3 Flips" when you move the slider to 50%. Try it if you don't believe me.

As someone mentioned, if you know the bias (or lack thereof) of a particular coin, you don't need to use the "flip till you get HT or TH" algorithm. But it becomes useful when the coin's bias is unknown.
They are waiting for one year before takeover. There is some kind of rule designed to block takeovers that says the sale price must be determined from the maximum price of past year. I'm not sure Elop would walk alive from it though, Finns are pretty passionate about Nokia.
The opposite approach is much simpler. There's only one sign that you are a great programmer:

Clients and fellow programmers are still happy with your work two years after you've delivered it.

(Of course: "still" implies that they we're happy at delivery, which includes actually shipping working software in a timely fashion.)
> A point for concern is your response that you're a Java developer with no interest in a different language.

It's not that I'm not interested in a different language (besides Java I use other languages, too), it's just that I was not interested in Perl.

I agree with you about the value of learning new languages, but I think you are more successful in learning a new language when you learn it because you want to learn it, and not, because you must learn it. Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation.
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Siri would be pretty annoying and useless if it required unlocking the phone to use it. If it's actually a bug, I sure hope they don't fix it, or at least make the "correct" behavior optional.
Isn't Lightbox a good alternative to Instagram on Android?
I appreciate a good hack, but just can't get past the idea that this is a solution in search of a problem.

2 Reasons I would never consider using this:

1. I don't want anyone to have any idea "how busy I am". Maybe I'm old fashioned, but the size of my inbox, like many other things, is no one's business but mine.

2. This effectively makes the sender the gatekeeper for deciding what's important. I want to be my own gatekeeper. I would much rather have everyone send everything when they would normally send it and let me decide when or whether to read it. I can't think of any good reason why losing control and losing data would be advantageous. I'd rather figure out ways to manage my time and my inbox than wonder what I'm not receiving because someone else made a decision "on my behalf".
> It's pretty surprising that Apple has the default
> set to be able to use Siri without unlocking the device.

Siri is turned off by default, so this is actually a pretty misleading thing to say.
Poll: Which blogging platform does your startup use?
I'm interested in which blog platforms are most popular among startups as company blogs. My startup, Blogic, allows you to instantly create a blog theme that matches your website. We started by building our own blog system, but from yesterday's discussion and feedback (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3127692) we're developing a theme generator for existing platforms.
Great point. In future versions we may only ping your Priority Inbox, instead of everything. Would that be a more accurate reflection of your "busyness"?
That is one likely shift. That the great programmers, and people of all tech disciplines for that matter, will do their own great things, rather than be employed by someone else; who will only hire the really great. Again, there is no reason for employers to take on the risk of just a great programmer when they can wait for a really great programmer. Just being a great programmer will not be enough for employment.

However, right now, that is not a role the average American wants to take on, even if they have the skills. Much of our society is based around the idea of a stable income from being employed by others. People of HN are typically outliers in that regard.
I have no problem with KDE as my desktop - its fast, love the whole eye candy experience and whatever KDE shipped with Kubuntu 11.10 has been nicely stable (compared with 11.04) - no crisis here brother.

Big thanks to the team at KDE and Kubuntu - you folk rock!
Beware of clicking on this link. It opened my personal Gmail.
I really like the "live" style of these screencasts. It seems almost like I'm pair programming. I appreciate the polished feel of screencasts like the RailsCasts, but this feels more... real somehow.
Smarty 3.1.4 released
I think we just forgot to turn them off. Certainly we're not doing it for the money :-)
Optimizing a Basketball Shot
A lot of these make sense, but I would caution against being discouraged if you show any of these symptoms. Like another front page article that says IQ is not static, I think this also definitely applies to programming ability.

I hope this isn't used by some to push the mantra that 'not everybody can code'.
My hypothesis is that the popularity will rank as listed.
I agree. I find it very frustrating to see Gruber and others say, "Oh, it looks like a nano -- ripoff" with no examination of the actual product beyond its appearance.

Given its price point and features, I don't even think it should even be compared to the nano. It combines an MP3 player with the capabilities of fitness watches such as Nike+ Sportwatch and Garmin Forerunner, and I would say it is more of a direct competitor to the latter category.

While the market for dedicated MP3 players is dwindling, they still make a lot of sense for fitness. Yet, Nike+ is too anemic for serious fitness buffs (simplistic web site, captures relatively little data, no GPS). I've seen many fellow runners abandon Nike+ sensors for Garmin Forerunner or similar GPS-enabled products.

I don't think its a nano-killer, but I think it may serve a certain audience much better than the nano does today, and its features demonstrate a much greater sense of purpose than the nano does with its complete stagnation in 2011.
If anyone is wondering, the interactive calculator is done using Tangle (http://worrydream.com/Tangle/) made by Bret Victor (most recently of http://worrydream.com/#!/LadderOfAbstraction fame).

Good to see more examples of it in the wild.
You knew this.

http://bible.cc/proverbs/16-33.htm

10 i = i + 1

20 IF i > 99999 THEN i = 0: PRINT ".";: GOTO 10

30 IF INKEY$ = "" THEN 10

40 PRINT "Line:", i

Line: 23709

God says...
said unto him, Why have I found grace in thine eyes, that thou
shouldest take knowledge of me, seeing I am a stranger? 2:11 And Boaz
answered and said unto her, It hath fully been shewed me, all that
thou hast done unto thy mother in law since the death of thine
husband: and how thou hast left thy father and thy mother, and the
land of thy nativity, and art come unto a people which thou knewest
not heretofore.

2:12 The LORD recompense thy work, and a full reward be given thee of
the LORD God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust.
Yeah, sorry about that, it was addressed below(above?). It should be fixed now.
I must admit I'm bad at this. However, in my defense it comes down to: bad management.

I'm forever being told to work on the next MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER only to be told after a few days that I need to work ON THE NEXT MOST IMPORTANT THING and that the MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER that I was working on is no longer important at all.

le sigh
The case was specifically about "was a link - a republishing of an article" not, was the thing linked to legal.

In this libel case publishing the article was the offence. So 'if' making a link was also publishing, then an article that only linked to the original that was a new offence.

It doesn't mean that you can put up a message saying "riot at the mall tonight" and then tweet a link to that claiming "you only sent a link" - it's still inciting a riot!

In other words making a link doesn't suddenly protect you from what was in linked to message - it just means that it isn't a new publication of the same message.

In practice it has big implications for both Google (who don't have to police the entire internet!) and for libel tourism - you can no longer pick a convenient jurisdiction to sue in based on somebody there only publishing a link
Sorry, I think that's a wordpress "feature". We're reskinning our blog. The revenue generated from the company blog isn't really what's keeping us afloat.
It's been observed that the anophele does prefer cattle. I just dug this though http://www.malariajournal.com/content/6/1/100
How about MeeGo Harmattan, which is said to be even ahead of iOS in terms of usability, performance and polish. Definitely ahead of Android. Elop stated that they couldn't get it ready until 2014, but surprisingly it's on markets before the WP phones. Nokia store is also way ahead of WP marketplace. It's just huge downplay of Nokia's products, while WP is not at all proven platform.

Elop's statements were understandable back then, when nobody had seen the N9.
Researchers build touchscreens that react to fingernails, knuckles
Funny you mention "Say yes". So far I often heard the advice to say "No" more often, especially during my apprenticeship.
Great compliment! That is the exact type of experience I'm hoping to bring with both these screencasts as well as CastingCode.tv. I know I really enjoy sitting down and pairing with folks myself, so I really hope I can bring a similar experience with these types of screencasts and live coding events.

Thanks!
Why is he getting downvoted? Are you supposed to downvote whenever you disagree with what somebody says?
Hungry people often don't find a way.

Or rather, they sell drugs and rob houses. Or take those two minimum wage jobs and tell yourself "someday."

I have seen very few people pull themselves up by their bootstraps, so to speak. And this isn't an easy gap to fulfill.
Yep, MVP indeed!

Our core idea is that email interactions should be based on one's availability. More thoughts on that here: http://blog.getsmokesignal.com/post/10660730744
There's a flag in settings to allow/disallow siri while locked.
Khan Academy Triples Unique Users To 3.5 Million
Guy who said "Steve Jobs wasn’t great; he wasn’t even close" wasn't right