skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From a 30k feet point of view, the difference is that a business analyst or data miner focus on answering questions with data; whereas, a data scientist focus on asking questions with data.
Have you thought about combining your work with Kenneth Reitz's Python Guide? https://github.com/kennethreitz/python-guide

It looks like you're covering a lot of the same ground.
Zynga employees give Mark Pincus a 46 percent approval rating
>> But, how much do liberal arts majors contribute to said "well-rounded collective" and at what cost?

> Are you asking how they contribute to well-roundedness

Yes.

> How they contribute to well-roundedness is handled with the whole Subset A vs Subset B thing

Not clear. You're claiming that an LA degree has some "roundedness" value. That's not obvious. And, even if it's true, that doesn't imply that we need a lot of LA degrees to get whatever benefit there is. For example, how much worse off would we be with half as many English majors?

> I'm pretty sure that Hunter Thompson guy was good to have around.

I'd agree, but would ask whether his existence depended on the existence of a large number of LA majors. I'd point out that similar folks existed before we had a lot of LA majors and we don't have more Hunter Thompsons now.

> If they're equal then they're no additional cost, because their education costs exactly the same dollar amount.

Huh? It doesn't matter whether LA majors cost more or less than STEM majors. The question is the relationship between the cost of LA majors and the benefits of LA majors. (There's a similar question about STEM majors.)

It's interesting that we had a thread a while back about how China was better because its political leadership had engineering degrees....
LandingZone
I'm not even a web developer, I just read HN a lot, and even I thought it was strange.
I'd hope we don't have to be held to our convictions as conceived at age ten.
Don't let this put you off! I have a CS degree, and I also pretty much suck at math (at least compared to many CS majors).

There are many paths you can take through a CS degree, and it's entirely possible to come out with useful and applicable knowledge without having to deep-dive in math. It just means you're more likely to end up in, say, web-dev than building 3D graphics engines. For me that's been a perfectly acceptable outcome.

And besides, a CS degree takes a few years - there's plenty of time to brush up on math if you're really interested.
He didn't say that it was logically proven, just that he "reason[ed it] out". That's pretty informal and I think does not need any caveats along the line of "it could exist in such a way that is indistinguishable from not existing". After all, if I reason out that there's no such thing as ghosts, that doesn't mean I'm claiming to have a perfect logical proof that shows that they're impossible, just that according to the evidence it doesn't look like they're real.
I would just like to point out that if you would have named the site BAJS, it would have meant poop in Swedish.
Ken Russell has died
Giggle of the Day
Comment content on HN is user-moderated. Your account won't get nuked by mods for anything but spam, but the community will vote you down for violating the rules:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

People don't get "hellbanned" here, there are no dictatorial moderators.

EDIT: the above is false--please see child comment.
This is fantastic. Someone could make a well-visited site by creating similar documents for all the major languages.
Stop Zoom Creep
Where do I start my business: London or San Francisco. Pt.1
Game controller: My weekend hack using Arduino, Android and Node.js
I agree that as of late November 2011, Python 2.7 is the safer choice for a novice.

But I bet within a year, that's no longer true. (This is dependent on package migration, but there's been a lot of progress lately, and the chances of a novice needing a sophisticated package day one is slim anyway.)

There are a few items that Python 3 fixes that will make this a no-brainer when the vast majority of major packages are ported to 3. Specifically, floating point results of integer division, and print as a function are two that come to mind.

I can't tell you how many times I cursed at the same bug as a beginner (back before division was importable from __future__). 1/2 + 1/2 = 0. Uggh!

And the beginner may as well get in the habit day 1 of using parentheses in statements like print("Hello World").
Yeah that could be an idea, could be interesting from analytics to see how many people jump to that page and then bounce.
I think bad statistics education is just a facade that hides what is really happening. Now I don't have proof, but I think the majority of these "errors" are done on purpose. It's far better to fudge your math, get amazing (and wrong) conclusions and then get published in Nature then it is to not get published in Nature.

The prestige of getting published in Nature or Science far outweighs the criticism you will get for forging or manipulating your data. In large part because the later can almost never be proven. You can always say you just made a mistake or plead ignorance.
Steven Levy on Facebook, Spotify and the Future of Music
Yep, the wait time is mostly from Heroku. Allowing people to continue the tutorial while it deploys is a good idea, reminds me of the article about Asynchronous UI a few days ago.
Awesome! Thanks. I'll check these out tonight. It might be quicker to have mysql just return matching search results, but I wouldn't want to use LIKE on 1.6M text phrases, so I was hoping to just parse them in the browser, but anything over ~2k entries for regex seems to choke chrome and safari.
Informal Logic
Calculating Pi to 10 Trillion Digits; the last number is 5
As much as I'd love to imbue his grandmother (and by extension all grandmothers) with innate understanding of some programming principle that some seem to have trouble with I'm afraid this event or at least the authors recounting of this event does not lead to that conclusion.

The grandmother may not have been having trouble with the immutability of X. Her question was not "how can X be anything other than X?" It was "How can X be X+1?". Which could convey the more likely case of the unlearned coder not understanding the order of operation in program flow. I'm sure she understood that X could be assigned a value, I'm sure she even understood that X could be changed--what she was having trouble with, most likely, was how could you use X on the right hand side of the equator? How can you define a value with the value itself (Circular reference). And I can totally relate--when I first learned programming it was something that confused myself at first as well. I hadn't learned that the right hand side of the equator gets evaluated with X being resolved to it's "present" value which is then used to calculate the value and finally stored back in the variable.

I hate to be a downer, it certainly is a fond memory, but the initial supposition is inconclusive.
Sorry about the confusion, it's totally unrelated to Dojo Toolkit
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10895160/Screenshots/ajn7uqzaqu2r.pn...
I had to actually double check if the author was from the US or not, since in some places it was just so incomprehensible.

I agree the applications were glossed over or skipped, but that is probably the most interesting aspect of the equations as well.

Without practical information, the article is sorely missing true sustenance.
Show HN: I Made An iPhone App to Make a Point About Apps
What does "asking questions with data" mean?
You can run OS X in a VM. I originally had mine setup in VMware but virtual box works too. I've built a couple of apps with that setup so it's certainly possible. No doubt the experience is better on a real Mac but it works.
That's not the only reason. Tobacco is legal, and people consider tobacco companies dishonorable.
You could say the same about drinking water. Fundamental rights don't necessarily come free of charge.
Definitely the graph of "php" "python", it seems python is gaining in popularity. Also the graph of "php" "ruby" -- there are a TON more php jobs than ruby jobs at the moment. "android" "ios" is cool, it seems android is losing market interest, while ios demand is climbing -- although there are more android related jobs at the moment.
I don't think "a long career doing satisfying work, whilst having a normal life with family and your own roof over your head" has been a realistic expectation for some time now. Outside of a handful of rich-world countries it's never been realistic.

Personally I think this is an exciting project, and it needn't be a miserable experience; if done right this little floating village could be the kind of high-tech melting pot that leads people to do great things.
I've seen a wide variety of job descriptions for these jobs. Sometimes it sounds like a data miner, sometimes a business analyst, sometimes an accountant. It's hard to know what a Data Scientist is until you look at the specific job description.
Ask HN: Experiences with youtube revenue sharing?
Does anyone use youtube revenue sharing as a source of income? I'm curious to hear what the pros and cons are of this system from someone who actually uses it.
A few of my videos on youtube were denied eligibility, on very ambiguous grounds. It was either because I didn't demonstrate ownership of the copyrights involved, OR because the material itself was uninteresting to advertisers (one of the videos has 10,000 views).
I'm not sure whether to try to resubmit the videos in question, including more detailed copyright information this time?
The problem is that standard statistical tests have two outcomes: (1) "reject the null hypothesis" or (2) "failure to reject the null hypothesis". Moreover in the most common statistical tests the null hypothesis amounts to something like "the two samples were drawn from the same distribution" so if you fail to find a significant difference you haven't shown they're the same, you've just failed to show they're different. If what you want to do is show that they're nearly the same, you can design a statistical test where the null hypothesis is instead something of the sort "these two samples were drawn from distributions that differ by > X amount" so rejecting the null hypothesis shows they differ by <= X.
AFAIK, no one has ever suggested that the phone company is entitled to a percentage of the money that a biz makes by using the phone. Instead, phone companies have to make do with biz charges that are the same for all biz and based solely on usage and installed equipment.

So, it's unclear why ISPs should be any different.

I've often hoped that Google would do a "day without google" for ISPs that felt that they were entitled to a cut. I think that ISPs would feel the pain long before Google and I'm optimistic enough to think that the lesson would not have to be taught many times.
I would suggest making the libnotify one the default theme on demo page, just because the current one seems intrusive and anyone glancing at this would think this library is less useful than it is.

Also, I noticed that only one notification is visible at a time. It would be nice to be able to chain notifications to have more than just one visible notification.
Are there any existing startup communities by the beach in Mexico? I can't think of a more ideal way to work for a few months (for those of us without families or who otherwise can't move around).
Twitter Acquires Mobile Security Firm WhisperSystems
If you like this then you'll find JavaScript Weekly a good read too: http://javascriptweekly.com/
No need to apologize, I just assumed from past references that it was in reference to the toolkit. Give the definition that was provided below, it makes sense, you may want to consider differentiating the logo and the header of the site a little so that you do distinguish yourself from the toolkit or you may deal with similar assumptions in the future.
As There Are Lot Of Subprime Credit Banks Who Are Ready To Provide Loans To You.
It's a social network isn't it? I'm only really social with people.

I'm not on Facebook, so if they're importing the concept of being social with abstract things from there then it just went whooosh, straight over my head.
The Next Kinect Will Read Your Lips, Know What You’re Feeling
HN is about anything that hackers might find interesting. We're even kind of tolerant of reposts with a sufficient time gap since the last post.
Japan singletons hit record high
Why 2 4k pages? If I'm allocating 1k of memory, what does having an entire extra page get me?
Not everyone spends all day working in OpenBSD, I learned something from the article.
Firefox was becoming slow for me and a real pain to use, until I lowered the browser.history_expire_sites in "about:config" from 40k down to 10k. I'll probably lower it even more. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.history_expire_sites
High Tech Holiday Party in Toronto
There are data protection laws in lots of countries. It's written into law.
Ah, yes it works for US now, Canada will be added before summer.
I work in scientometrics, which is like econometrics but with scientific papers and patents (patents are not optimal, but it's an adequate proxy for innovation). It's useful to detect new trends in science and adjust funding accordingly.

We do a lot of data mining, information extraction from very organic sources, data visualization, etc. It's a growing field and it's very challenging and we have access to incredible datasets.

I think I fit their definition of a data scientist, but I'll never use that title. It's pompous and sounds something like someone in marketing would make up (and I worked as a market research analyst for a number of years). My title is simply research analyst.

Data scientist is bad, but the worst title I've seen was: web strategist & tactician
The New Golden Age of Cartography
The first thought that crossed my mind was, "this may make my Chromebook useful!" I liked the concept of developing in Cloud9 on a Chromebook, but without Vim it was less alluring.
I care what people think. I don't care what inanimate objects or marketing abstractions think.
Apple's Original Corporate Papers Heading to Auction, Could Fetch $150,000
Dec, 2011 Delhi City will embellish with Exhibitions & Shows
You should take another look at the link - its all about ROR and Sinatra, not Dojo Toolkit.
I pretty much feel the same way but I feel like I'm up for the challenge and I keep trying to cover as much as possible I can in my free time (a side-effect of my unemployment).
You know what first came into my mind when I heard about this? Pirate Radio. :)
Backify is no longer in service.
Telcos Promise Business-Class Flight Through the Clouds
How to determine certain polynomials from two values p(a) and p(b)
Ask HN: What is the chance of single non programmer founder getting funded?
My friend who is not a programmer is thinking of starting his own startup. He is a single founder as his friends are not willing to take the risk of going full time due to the current economy situation. He is determined to do it, so he would outsource his project.

I told him that the chance of getting accepted in an incubator program may be close to zero, not that I discourage him, but I am just reading from Y Combinator FAQ (even a single programmer founder is having a hard time getting accepted at Y Combinator). He told me that to prove that his idea can work, he will have the prototype made.

Assuming he gets to that point and able to demo it, what would be his chance of getting accepted at some incubator programs like Tech Stars, Y Combinator, etc?

What about his chance of actually getting some funding (hundred of thousands USD) and actually can go full time and hire 1-2 technical people to improve and implement new features?

I appreciate your inputs.

Thanks.
This is the dark side of all the geeks saying "the Internet isn't like telephones" and "don't regulate the Internet" for so many years.
What? I'm pretty sure Apple got their arse kicked all over the block in the 70's and 80's. I strongly agree that it is a competitive advantage, but I don't get this comment.
The Airlines. When you are at the Airport to pass on your luggage. The give you some forms to fill out. Then you have to give these to somebody befor you get to pass on your luggage. The nice lady then Ask you questions like: "Have you every left your bags unwatched? (That was on the form allready)".

Made the line 2x slower then it had to be. Made me not wanting to go back to Amerika anymore.
Very true. When I was a kid, our family had a nanny from the Philippines. Never realized back then that she (rotated among several women over the years) probably had her own family back home. Now I look at the world and realize how many people, even in the first world, leave their families to go make money for their families.
It's hard to say without knowing the situation and the team involved better.

Almost any really new software or even feature generally needs some amount of prototyping initially and usually this will happen whether the team planned it that way or not. However, if this step of the development process wasn't communicated to you from the beginning then I would suspect that they are either ignorant of this, or at least their organization is (I assume this is a contract or agency situation?). Either situation will be a potential problem for your company since it means they will continue to accrue technical debt rather than iterating on the prototype.

Done properly the prototype is either all or mostly thrown out and re-built from the ground up to improve and solidify the architectural and software design aspects. This paves the way for future feature development to continue unfettered by technical debt and early defects. Trying to simple cover the defects with "duct tape" or "cowboy" code is likely to cause the rest of the work to slog on and future iterations an feature development will become very slow.

However, without knowing more about your situation I'm not sure how useful or correct my advice is here.
yeah, a buddy of mine who is a lawyer working in real estate said he wanted to register the next year because of the free phones.

I just figured they should create a registration category for "no freebies." Seriously, I don't need the phone. Just wanted to attend the conference.
C�mo Concentrarse M�s
There's a development company based out of Cleveland that already has a boat. All they need to do is make it sea worthy...

http://leandog.com/
Maybe CL0wn3d?

Hmm. Still seeing clown. :(
LaunchNow Turns Building Startups Into A Game
How custom labels are used the most?
Steven Pinker: Human Nature’s Pathologist
The second 4k is a guard page, to catch buffer overflows. So the heap looks like:

3k empty, 1k data, 4k empty and read/write-protected.

The extra page is needed since you can't set the memory protection flags at a higher granularity.
How  We Ruined the Occupy Wall Street Generation
Don't let this be intimidating to you - instead of asking yourself "how come I don't know this?" ask yourself "how can I learn more about this?". This might sound cheesy and simplified but it's as simple as "nobody was born knowing this". I'm 31 and I wish I had the money to go back in education and learn all of this with the official way but for now I'm just picking resources on the web and who knows? It just might happen...

Enough about me. If you want it, go get it. Period.
I have a CS degree, and a math minor. After over a decade of professional work, I remember hardly anything of my math minor, and very little of the mathematical content of my CS major.

If you want to do 'interesting' stuff, you'll need solid math skills. If your goal is to make money, you will likely do fine with average math skills. Oddly, however, many employers currently interview for CS/math knowledge even though their jobs will never, ever make use of such knowledge.
"While not a software tool per se, PEP 8 is a very important resource related to Python."

Actually, it is :)

pip install pep8
They do have to do something, because for I/O 2011 people were buying $450 tickets and immediately listing them on eBay for $1500+. Meanwhile, other actual developers just plain couldn't get in.

But, I do hope that whatever coding problems will be simply whatever is necessary to rule out scalpers who don't know squat about programming, and not to require people to build full-blown apps or the like.

If you have to jump through some flaming hoops to get in, I worry that they're not going to be as welcoming to "noobs" as they had in years past.

Google's offered "Boot Camp" in the past with tutorial sessions, on tech like Android and HTML5 to get you from zero to a point where you can get value out of the main conference sessions. They also gave some pretty substantial academic discounts to get students in the door, too.

If you are inexperienced with the featured tech, but you genuinely want to learn, you could still get some serious value out of the talks there. I didn't know the first thing about Android development prior to going to I/O 2010, and a month or so later I had a polished app to put on the market.

I wonder if the coding challenge will be something to pre-qualify you to be able to buy a ticket -- maybe you will have to write some code to pass some automated test case that's personalized to you, so you can't just Google for the solution.
3d Printing Difference Engine: Making it
What was the point of this rant? He's going to stop telling people to go all-Apple and boast his Apple-ness?
Parse Powers Back-end For Mobile App Developers
Isn't that why Software-as-a-Service is much more palatable to a purchaser? It feels like your company is actually doing something for the money spent.

If you were to sell the software as a download, people would demand lower prices, since 'after all' they're doing all the work (and hosting is cheap). It's an interesting dichotomy.
This isn't even the least bit correct. I don't know why it is voted up so much.
News Flash: Black Friday isn't worth it.
That's interesting. I always thought business analysts worked on processes, not data. I've never met a business analyst who I'd consider an expert in statistical analysis. Focus was always process, and they (not to be demeaning) didn't seem to have the intelligence required of what people consider to be a data scientist (i.e. heavy math, scripting, etc).
Fundamental physics
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I think "a long career doing satisfying work, whilst having a normal life with family and your own roof over your head" is possible only in academia if you can get faculty position quickly. Although, the probability of getting grants is so small that it hardly can be called "normal life".

It's just sad that you create new technologies for U.S. and getting cold shoulder from Uncle Sam.
I agree that security these days is by far overkill, and even agree with many of the deadweight statistics in this thread. But 5.5 hours is highly abnormal. I fly fast, I generally leave my house about an hour before my flight. I'm lucky enough to be a short 10 minute drive from my airport. Security usually takes me around 5-10 minutes at SJC, and 10-15 minutes at SFO. I can fit two weeks of clothing (fresh shirts for every day, two pairs of jeans, fresh underwear and socks for every day, a jacket and a blazer) as well as all my office supplies and toiletries into carryon baggage, so I never check bags. All in all it's usually 45 minutes from my front door til I step on the plane. It's not hard to make flying fast, it just takes dexterity with the security. The TSA themselves recommend showing up 90 minutes to 2 hours before your flight, but it's very doable to show up 30 minutes prior. I fly about once a month for business, and I've yet to miss a flight.
The evolution of co-operation: Social networking tames cheats
I love my ISP