skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Particle physicists generate data by the petabyte. If they used 3 sigma confidence they'd confidently declare all sorts of false things. We know this, because if you pay attention to particle physics you hear about all kinds of 3 sigmas that turn out to be spurious. (About every six months to a year or so, I'd say.) 5 is just where they start to feel comfortable, they'll take more if they can get it.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110119/full/469282a.html
Saturday project: a utility to give your MP3s proper names based on ID3 tags
This is Hacker News - do we really need "god particle" added to the headline? It's not present in the article.
An awful lot of it is, yes. I suspect it has something to do with what John Cleese once coined to be the Brits' paramount desire to just make it into your grave without being embarrassed once.
8 Bits Runner - A very fun HTML5 game
Thanks for that slam-bang tour, I'm going to digest it slowly.

I like rock, but I don't tend to put on music as much as others. I'm more likely to hum it than listen to it. I usually have something stuck in my head. I watched Soylent Green a few weeks ago and had Beethoven's ninth stuck in my head for days. Anyway, I think not tending to turn on music makes me less likely to discover new music.
The problem with the 10x vs. 1x statement is that the 10x people are not constantly 10x better than the median. The environment in which they are placed has a lot to do with it. Circumstantial mediocrity is often a consequence of poor management, and the product release cycle is the petri dish of mediocrity.

So a common problem arising from this situation is the choice between leaving a 10x-er on the line or promoting him to do other things. It's a trade-off. If you choose the former, you maintain increased productivity, but the exceptional developer will eventually get bored and leave; if you choose the latter, you end up watering down your production pool, and risk placing the developer in a role where he might not be a 10x-er.

Constant [relative] mediocrity in a given developer pool is the stable state in either case.
5 ways we ruined occupy wall street generation
The trouble is that when you have no experience with it, it tends to be dismissed because it is something you are not familiar with.
9/11: Cheney ordered civilian airplanes to be shot-down
well most of my domains aren't really important enough to be stolen via a trademark.

Anyways, the final price on ebpp ended up at $10K, which is pretty much what I was hoping for
Barefoot running: bad or beneficial?
I was always curious how they measured these things. Does anyone have a good reference that doesn't involve years of particle physics study?
THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING. God damnit Facebook.

So a couple of months back we did a give away, 100 people who like our Facebook page (for the Minecraft forum) get a free copy of Minecraft. After the competition "closed" I picked 100 winners and messaged them their copy, this is what, $2000 - $2500 value?

Less than 10% (edit: I checked my spreadsheet, 8 people) ever replied to me and this explains why. Because I can't message from a fan page I messaged from my personal account... so most of these people don't know that they ever won (they weren't my friends) and probably never will. The message is there sitting waiting to be read...

sigh.
It sounds like you have either crap NICs or crap cables.
Greg Proops is fantastic, but not everybody will like him. But he definitely ventures into less funny and more socially conscious territory with comfort and without pretension (ok, maybe a little pretension).
Getting started with F#
F# is a very cool functional programming language for the .NET platform. It's based on the ML-cariant OCaml but its creator, Don Syme, would like to think of it more as "Python for .NET." Even though Python and F# have large syntactic differences, they are similar in their static typing and ability to express solutions functionally. Since Visual Studio 2010, F# is now a first class citizen of the .NET Framework and is also available to OSX/Linux platforms via Mono. F# is currently in production use at many algorithmic trading companies and other scientific arena. It can also be used in Web Development (google WebSharper) or see ASP.NET MVC 3/4 F# Project Templates. F# is also used in Game Development (The Halo 3 True Skill ranking was implemented using F#. Try it now --> http://www.tryfs.net
> (Probably the best book on booze ever written, my favorite thing I've read all year

Highly recommend:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0971958769
This is extremely cool, but I question the wisdom of naming it after a fictional terrorist organization from James Bond.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECTRE
It is widely considered to be an abuse of tor. The system wasn't built for that from a technical perspective, and from a social perspective, you are degrading the quality of the service for the people who actually need it.
Dude, a comment like that will have the karma police around here all over you (and somewhat rightly) but I think what you're pointing out is the obvious lean toward trendiness their trying out here.

I think it's good they're showing that they kind of "get it". Microsoft is huge at the enterprise level but they're really leaving out all of us little guys who are into open languages and software. They've been really uncool for a long time and I know we shouldn't judge a company by how trendy it's tech is and I also think that there's a lot of people using obscure or trendy languages just for the sake of being different and trendy as well but the fact of the matter is that now there are enough people clambering for this that they can't ignore it.

On the face of it, to an outsider it would look like the majority of the startup and open source community were like a bunch of hipsters who think PHP is lame, Ruby and Rails is so awesome, using NoSQL over traditional relational DBs gets you major street cred, etc. I can't knock it either because I use the tools all the cool kids are using too.

So on the one hand I think it's cool that MS is getting into the whole "web apps running on cool hipster tech" game (while still pushing their own stuff though you can kind of tell they know it's kind of lame to some of us). On the other hand, I still can't quite bring myself to think of Azure the same way I think of Webbynode, Heroku, AWS, Linode, and others.

I'd also add, on another note, that trying to get something as simple as an AMP stack on Windows up and running seems to require jumping through far more hoops than necessary. It's just always been a pain to work on the web using Microsoft infrastructure. That's the biggest reason I won't be trying this out for a looong time.
Watch Amir Khan vs. Lamont Peterson live streamig
Maybe, and I kind of tried, yet failed. Just not made for it, I suppose.
Show HN: Watch videos and create video playlists
Because Louis CK explicitly asks that you download the video via his site and do not torrent it.

By fetching this video via torrent you (generally) must seed it, therefore making it available to others who may or may not have paid for it.

Two downloads and two streams seems reasonable to me.
Product page: http://www.zapata-racing.com/uk/flyboard_uk.php

4900e sounds very affordable, but I suppose you need a jetski to power it
New Haiku Signs Will Make NYC Streets Safer Through Power Of Poetry
To a lonely girl obviously waiting for her date in a public place:

"You must be <name snatched from her ipod/ipad>?"

"Yes?"

"He's not coming."

Very big security problem, indeed.
Because of this: http://xkcd.com/882/
I really think there are some really powerful applications for this going forward. Building computation/logical rules into the materials to organically create complex structures might be one way to achieve goals synthetic approaches cannot. Reminds me of Saul Griffith's talk at TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/saul_griffith_on_everyday_invention...
I once spent an afternoon tracking down a "bug" as to why sales tax wasn't being calculated on LedgerSMB only to find out I had set the tax rate to 0 in the tax interface.... Ok, it was working as intended. I felt pretty sheepish too.
In Defense of Friction - Automated Trust Undermines Trust
I had the pleasure of using the out of the box pdf2txt tool just yesterday. Worked pretty well for extracting some governmental data released (i.e. buried) inside of a PDF!
As has Opera,

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/01/opera_on_google_nati...

Microsoft and Apple have not bothered to go on the record on the topic yet, but I would bet their position is similar.
Ask HN: looking for a co-founder in Buenos Aires
Hello there! i am funding this startup to help enterprises to build strong web applications easy and fast. Powered by years of experience in design and development, i am technical and looking for a co-founder.

Saludos!
It's a long way down the rabbit hole. There's a series of steps for measuring in a particle accelerator and each itself is a big area of knowledge:
- Detectors
- Hardware triggers
- Software triggers
- Data storage
- Statistical analysis

I guess Wikipedia can give you an idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATLAS_experiment
A common statistical method used in particle physics is the Monte Carlo method: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method
To see some more thoughts on this, you might want to look at:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/12/the-end-of-social.html

(discus) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3338839
I definitely like the idea of keeping the namespace. Sauce.js sounds a bit like a utility library (i.e. underscore.js/Sugar.js) rather than an MVC framework to me though.
Maybe everybody's assuming people smarter than you.
'Microsoft did a lot to remove crud to create a great developer experience, which is why I'm so frustrated to learn they're keeping support for Visual Basic.'

Why does he say that?
Ask HN: Have anyone used/using G-WAN web server?
A friend have sent me a link to this web server page, however, I have never heard of it, nor know anyone using it, and wonder if is was hidden only from me, and if it was used and actually fast as promised

http://gwan.ch/
What We Look For
Absolutely.

Think about it this way: "4x slower than native code" means that 80% of the CPU's cycles are being spent on the platform.

With NaCl, it becomes possible to instead spend most of those cycles on extra application richness without sacrificing the customer experience by requiring an installer or plugin.
> Functions implement the descriptor protocol so that when you access them as an attribute of a class they basically return a partially applied function.

Exactly. You just spoke like a true Pythonista: you used an implementation detail in the language to justify a language design decision. In my experience, people diving into Python will not care (or want to know) about the descriptor protocol (it's not mentioned in the majority of books about the language). They will not be messing with __get__ or __set__ the vast majority of the time. Only much later, when they want to start doing fairly magic things with attributes, will they even realize it exists. There is no analogue for the descriptor protocol in any other currently popular language. How can you consider a magic-method protocol that curries all functions when accessed as an attribute the "explicit" or "simple" way to design this?

I guess this is why proposing this is so hopeless. Methods do not have to be distinguished from functions to create an implicit self. Instead of having FooClass.bar() and foo_obj.bar() do any of this [1] (please tell me with a straight face that the average Python programmer knows or cares about any of that) have the former add to the local namespace FooClass as self and the latter add foo_obj as self when the function is called, defined as the behavior of the language's syntax. Like, I dunno, JavaScript, or PHP, or Java, or C#, or... For the 1% of people that care, allow it to be overridden by redefining __get__ and so on. Maybe even redefine the deprecated apply() [2] so people can specify a different self in the course of calling of function, like in JavaScript.

[1] http://docs.python.org/howto/descriptor.html#functions-and-m...
[2] http://docs.python.org/library/functions.html#apply
If you're going to post a video, post a transcript.

Who has time to watch these things?
Some surprising facts
To expand on what was already a good answer, the Higgs Boson itself is not long-lived enough to interact with any of the ATLAS detectors. It decays into several other particles, which also decay until you're left with a bunch of less exotic particles.

Since a whole bunch of things are happening at once, all shooting particles at your detectors, you get a whole mess of particles all at once, and it's kind of a pain to separate which bunches of particles go together. So what they're saying is that the detectors have been seeing bunches of particles that look like they might have come from decaying Higgs Bosons, but there's still some chance that some other bunch of particles could have have been decaying in just the right places to look like decaying Higgs Bosons.
or, why you should always put a phone number, address, and/or e-mail address (even if they're all work contacts for privacy) on your expensive belongings. that guy spent way more time trying to contact her through facebook than i would have.

i'm not a facebook user, but how do people accrue spam in that other folder? either messages from strangers are legitimate like "i found your laptop" or they're from spammy facebook accounts which i would assume get quickly terminated from other users reporting them, which should delete all of the messages they've spammed out. no?
Sorry prawn, on reflection I think you're probably right. It's unnecessary.
> Who pays for the increase in your income when a road isn't built?

My employer, who pays me to write software. As we can see, writing software without seeing to it that the road gets built makes me X dollars, but writing software while seeing to it that the road gets built makes me X - Y dollars, where Y is the cost of seeing to it that the road gets built.

If the idea of me being obligated to spend my personal income on this matter makes you quibble about the definition of income and profit, pretend I'm a contractor with an LLC, and my LLC pays for the road. Either way, that's immaterial. I am letting people die by not building that road.
You're totally right, but those optimizations to this process don't become economically feasible until more than a few people are making a living this way. Sending Louis CK $5 right now is a simple way to make it possible for him to be an example for others in his industry, and thus create a market for the type of product you are talking about. So you've already started solving your own problem, and you didn't even write a line of code!
Yeah, it seems a little steep but I'm not sure if $600 for a relatively low scale instance is totally accurate either. But it's still steep. For a while now Microsoft has been focusing more heavily than usual on the enterprise market. The weird thing about this is that the design of this page and the pushinf of some of these languages seems to be targeting independant developers and startups whiles still having a pricing structure that feels like it would be for corporate/enterprise types.

It seems like they send mixed messages like this a lot. Like "hey, develop on Windows because you're used to it but in case you're not we can try to pretend we can comfortably accommodate those who don't exclusively develop in the MS ecosystem". I don't know, it feels almost like an attempt to be popular in the high school sense than to actually offer a viable alternative to AWS-type services to non Windows devs.
http://huffduffer.com/ZicklePop/31342

No idea of the legality. Please remove if it's not.
Lean UX and lean startups: is trial and error the best way forward?
Well, if we take the 3.5 sigma at face value and bound it using Chebychev's inequality [1], it seems that the discovery of the Higgs Boson is bounded by 1/3.5^2, which is 8%. In fact, the standard inequality is two-tailed. If we're measuring just from one tail, we can use the single-sided inequality to yield 7.5%. Remember, we can't always assume a distribution is normal, a mistake that even respected researchers often make.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshevs_inequality
apparently some trackers have fake peers that might use your IP address. regardless of if that is or isn't the case, it lends you some deniability.
Quantum Computing Promises New Insights, Not Just Supermachines
So far, Dark Market is a little too "Dateline expose" for my taste, but I'm only about a third of the way in (maybe it gets better).

I actually picked up Skiena purely from your recommendation of it on here. I wanted to go back to algo fundamentals, and I was irrationally opposed to buying CLRS for the second time (having bought and then sold it back in college), so I figured I'd give it a try. I like the presentation of material a lot better, but I've just been a lazy git about plowing through it.
Wordless Wednesday #6
I wonder if they can combine the experimental results from the 2.5 sigma and the 3.5 sigma experiments. If two independent experiments confirmed some hypothesis at 2.5 and 3.5 sigma, the combined evidence is surely much larger than 3.5. Does anyone know what the right way of combining experimental results is, to yield a more accurate answer?
Sorry, can't agree. Way too harsh on the surface and not enough insight underneath.
Honest question: what are they gonna do once they find it?
Angelina Jolie: 'I do not have a lot of friends' 
Angelina Jolie: 'I do not have a lot of friends'
From the website:

"Fly Board: Acceleration from a stand-up PWC (aka jet ski), 4900 euros.

Optional: Acceleration from the Flyboard directly, 900 euros."

If you watch the video again, you'll notice that Flyboard isn't attached to a PWC but to something smaller. There's an another video [1], where you can see a close-up of it on 04:27.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM8kEHjQz9U
The worst bugs are when things work as intended, but you still think it's a bug, such as your example.
Did you accidentally click the '6 month plans' option? It spits out much larger numbers with the '/mo' label on some of the sliders when it's actually the '/6mo' rate.
Doug was on Louie this season and did an amazing job. He seems to be a comedian's comedian--his name comes up in interviews all the time when comedians are asked who's their favorite among their peers.
Thanks Peter, great submission. I'm curious what kind of gear is needed to reproduce the ambisonic recordings accurately?
I worked for about 3 years for an spanish law website which main business goal is to provide a centralized access point to legal documents for lawyers, and transforming PDFs to text was a regular task to do. We used perl and lots of PDF -> text/html tools. I can say it's one of the most horrible tasks to perform, and I'm glad there are more options to work with those documents, but PDFs as a method for content distribution should be shot and buried in the desert. It´s annoying to say the least when you don't have the necessary plugins/reader installed, and of course they can't be easily converted to other forms of documents without destroying something in the process. I'm happy I don't have to keep working on that anymore. A good thing though, is that now I master regular expressions.

Anyway, if someone gave this PDFMiner a shot, let me know how good/bad it is.
And who will supposedly buy all these good those factories make? The 1%ers?

Those factories only exists if they have a market for the goods they produce.
Obvious! Learning all streets in London is hard training for the brain. What a waste of money researching this.
Marketing reports and novels have specifications just as real as any physical engineering project, you're just required to guess at what exactly they are.

Whatever you're making, there's going to be some set of things that it must accomplish. It's much easier to make the correct thing if you know what those are in advance. The fact that acquiring specifications is hard, or that users don't actually know what they want doesn't change the fact that you want as precise a spec as you can get.
Really depends on the experimental approach, but there are certainly techniques for combining independent results. For example, in genetics, inverse-variance weighted meta analysis is common. Studies are essentially combined with their effect weighted by the degree to which their results are tightly clustered around that study's mean result.

I would be interested to learn about common procedures from physics as well.
> should delete all of the messages

I'd hope not. Deleting a Facebook account shouldn't delete all of the messages sent from it from their receivers' inboxes -- what if a long time friend decided to delete there Facebook profile? I could lose years worth of conversation with them. Messages belong as much to the receiver as the sender, if not more.
Are you satisfied with a 1 in 20 chance of complete BS for the foundations of physics?
Correction: automation possess a threat to those who do not work principally with their mind. Knowledge workers won't be in danger of marginalization in the near future
I am working on an app for their API, but it doesn't appear yet that Etsy has an affiliate program such as ebay or amazon.
Assuming the errors are random and uncorrelated, the total significance is the square root of the sum of the squares. In this case, that's only 4.3 sigma.
unless your friend gets flagged as a spammer, i don't think their messages would be deleted.

and lets be honest, facebook doesn't ever delete anything anyway, it just sets deleted=1 and hides it from you.
I would, however, bet a beer.
First, a big celebration.

Then after the party, everybody has the hangover that may never end, because finding the Higgs right where we expected it is potentially the worst case scenario: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/315/5819/1657.full
because it makes it so difficult to provide exit nodes in the US for people that actually need them. DMCA complaints will quickly take down an exit node because of tor users sending bittorrent traffic out of it.
It's depressing to me that NaCl people frequently emphasize the "great piles of existing code" out there, and how "the biggest deal is that there are all these existing code bases", and how well they'll run on NaCl.

I'd feel better about NaCl if they talked more about why their design might make sense for the web in the long term, rather than just why it's going to be popular in the short term.
> Wait until paypal sees hundreds of thousands of $5 payments and a balance over $100k

A lot of the account freezings happen when the receiver of the payments isn't distributing an actual product (donations, fundraisers, etc). Louis could very easily provide the details of all the downloads, confirming delivery of the product.
That can be true, but based on my experience in the game industry it isn't necessarily the case.

Often a game will be GPU-bound, in which case the JS, Flash and NaCl versions will all have the same bottleneck, GPU shaders (in fact for this reason more and more is done in scripting languages in game engines these days). If that is the case, you might as well use JS, since it will run in many more places than Flash or NaCl.

But again, there are situations where you are CPU bound, and in that case CPU speed does matter - you are very correct in those cases. Currently JS is indeed at a disadvantage compared to NaCl in that area, however, I believe that it will match it in time (through a combination of API additions like Intel's RiverTrail, and further improvements to JS engines like static analysis). The real question is then, will NaCl fix its problems (portability, adoption in browsers other than Chrome) before JS fixes its problem (speed). My bet is on JS.