skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Emotive wishes it were EEG; I remain unconvinced. Same goes for the OCZ nia: http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/ocz_peripherals/nia-ne...
Which vitamins do top doctors take?
Two things that I wouldn't mention except that the source is a metrics company, and so these fine distinctions may be worth considering...

() when reporting an 890x rise in traffic, precision to the percentile ("89,09_4_%") is a bit silly. Hell, I'd just round up to 900x.

() the very idea of reporting the increase as a percentage or multiple is suspect; the peak traffic is not a function of the earlier traffic. Rather, it's an absolute spike based on keen interest in the article topic, and the arbitrary multiple tells us more about how small the pre-spike traffic was than the size of the slashdot/digg effect. The real number of interest is the absolute value: ~110K page views over the peak 3 days.
Concurrent programming in Python: http://docs.python.org/library/multiprocessing.html
Python and Ruby are pretty equivalent in terms of what you can do with them. Given a choice between the two, I'd probably choose Ruby, as I personally find it to be less cognitively dissonant than Python.

I'm really not fond of having to haul the self parameter around all over the place in Python, and there seems to be some confusion between what's a function and what's a method. (Some of this is being addressed in Python 3 I think.)

The whitespace thing, I can just about cope with, but I always miss the colons off the end of lines. Oh, and at least on Windows, the supplied documentation is organized in a seemingly arbitrary manner (but at least it has an index if you know what you're looking for).

Having said that, Python probably has a better standard library than Ruby, so, meh, learn both and see which you prefer.
I hear ya. Let them go bankrupt. I believe that there is no reason why we should be saving them because of their inability and refusal to adapt and change.

The fact that these US automakers have blocked legislation to make cars more fuel efficient because the profit margins are gigantic is ridiculous. They are wholly responsible for their failure while other car makers around the world are creating better cars and not, you know, going bankrupt.

Isn't Chapter 11 bankruptcy made exactly for this?

The trouble now is the loss of jobs and the effect it will have on our economy. I have some trouble with this, but I also feel like these people could be better used creating and working at companies that progress their products, and not produce the same SUV across all of their lackluster brands.
Whatever is done, you cannot reward the current management. They need to suffer the consequences of their failure. (More so the case for Chrysler and their ownership by Cerberus). As I heard someone state this morning, why believe that the management team that created the problem will be able to solve the problem.

IMO, GM needs a major overhaul from their pre-1980 ways. Besides labor unions that were mentioned, they also have an overextended dealer network. Their desire to focus on so many brands with just re-badged cars (they even neutered Saab with this approach) needs to be changed. The Toyota/Lexus, Honda/Acura, and Nissan/Infiniti models show a much better approach.
Ars -

your seem to have a problem, that you use language wrong. your improper use of language causes you to be overly dogmatic in your thinking. 'The world is a simulation' 'spacetime is a matrix of pixels', what does that mean? All sentences of the form 'A is B' should be re-written 'A seems B to frame X' (or observer x).

loop quantum gravity does not say spacetime is pixels. it does say that spacetime might better be approximated as discrete at very small scales, and that such approximations might be useful tools for making progress. Recent experiments show that the idea that space is continuous at small scales is (make that, 'seems') an approximation. No one doing serious work on quantum anything thinks anything in the form X is Y. That worldview has been dead for 100 years. You can't play the speculate about quantum stuff game until you have changed your language to remove outmoded century old logical flaws you aren't aware of, which are built into the rules of a grammar you aren't conscious of, which governs the language you think in and predisposes you to make huge errors (like thinking there are cases where 'A is B').

You seem to think reality is actually one way, and our goal is to understand how reality is. That hasn't been the game for almost a hundred years. We now know that all models of reality, from physics to Aunt Edna's dogmatic catholicism, are tools that do not conform to reality. The idea is to refine our tools so they are more useful, not to figure out how reality is.

You need to drop some acid and read 'quantum psychology,' stat! The map is not the territory! The hand pointing at the moon is not the moon. The language that describes the map is not the territory it's even further from the territory. There is no meaning in life, because life is what meaning refers to. Looking for meaning in life is like looking for trees on a map. Looking for what reality is in quantum loop gravity is like looking for trees on a map.
Rumours of its death have been exaggerated. 99% of programming is sequential.
People latch on to little tidbits and think that they are the reason for GMs downfall. For example, the statement: "GM pays people not to work." Inevitably unions will be blamed somewhere along the line as well. There is more to this story than meets the eye.

GM is a factory with a semi-skilled labor force. They produce very expensive goods. Because of this, they don't produce at maximum output all the time. If sales numbers slump one month, they cut production. To cut production, they have to cut their workforce. When they cut their workforce, they don't want to fire someone that has a lot of experience because they may just need him/her next month when sales pick back up again. So they pay this person to keep up a relationship until they need him/her back at work. They may not even pay this person his/her full rate.

Consider that while one car's sales are dwindling, another's might be picking up. Well, a person putting doors on a Chevy Malibu can probably do the same thing on a Chevy Trailblazer. In this case, the worker isn't paid to be idle, he/she just switches car lines.

Even if the worker is paid to be idle, you shouldn't blame the worker or the union. A contract requires two parties. The auto manufacturers made these agreements with the unions, knowing the consequences full well. Why blame a person for wanting nice pay and benefits?

Also, if the auto manufacturers wanted to renegotiate to save themselves, the unions would support it. In the past, the US auto manufacturers have renegotiated union contracts to cut pay. After all, what good is a union if its members have no jobs?
yeah when I heard anyone under 10 years will get a $100k "your fired" fee, and over 10 years gets $140k ... I just shake my head and realize the damage the UAW has done.

These are mostly un-skilled labor, who have "thugged" there way into skilled labor pay
Is fbFund only for Facebook apps? That doesn't really fit what I'm thinking of.
ADTree for (ad) inventory management
...some strange edge-case it handles awkwardly.

Or stupidly. I don't know if the following should qualify as an edge case generally, but it does in Matlab.

The controls lab in the aerospace department at the U of W had a wonderful inverted cart-pendulum device that a grad student was doing some seriously freaky non-linear control research on. We were tasked, as part of a lab, to write a controller in Matlab that would balance the pendulum and move the cart to a designated position. After trying for days to come up with a combination of gains to result in stable control, I decided to write an evolutionary algorithm to choose a controller.

It was dead simple. The genome was a list of gains. The code created generations of genomes and then ran them through the simulation. The tricky part (for me at that time) was finding the settling time (walk backwards from the end of the data, checking for values outside of the tolerance). Choose the winners, perturb, preserve best performers, and go around again. Doing all the steps by hand worked wonderfully.

When I ran the code, I got combinations of gains that resulted in massively unstable systems; systems that overshot off the chart as soon as physically possible given the hardware. What was going on?

It turns out, when I ran the simulation from the command line, Matlab graciously accepted my 5-second simulation time. However, when run from a script, Matlab ignores that parameter and runs the simulation until the output careers off the chart. Because I was looking for a minimum time with no overshoot, my algorithm was finding combinations of gains that overshot steeply enough to convince Matlab to stop simulating ASAP! It was bizarre. My secondary condition was minimum overshoot, so I got solutions that were exactly steep enough to cause the simulation to stop when the output hit the desired value!

A friend of mine stumbled on to a workable combination of gains. I used those.
"Let them die, but don't let them die now, because now things are bad enough as it is."

Ah - so let them continue to lose $2000 per car for a couple more years, because that'll make things better - meaning what's eventually left is worth even less to whomever finally buys it (likely the taxpayer it seems).
This is price fixing that occurred in the past, from something like 2001-2006 I believe. So, prices currently should reflect the adjustment down from the "artificial" costs from that time period.
Totally agree!

PR firms are good at closing you and then moving on to the next startup sucker
The only way to cut GM's health care costs are to cut loose the 406,000 retirees--and their dependents--who get health care via GM pension plans.

Of course I find it interesting that if I can't make the mortgage due to circumstances I didn't predict, too bad. I can't even discharge that during personal bankruptcy anymore, it's pay the whole freight or get out.

GM entered a set of contractual obligations, didn't predict a future where they could not meet those obligations, and now wants the taxpayers to bail them out, or they get to file Chapter 11 and cut the retirees loose. Taxpayers still pay because those retirees will need more government aid and cost of care write-offs which raise health care costs for everyone else.

All this would be moot if the US health care system were not employer-based, in which case the playing field would be level already, with a big fat 0 for both firms.

I'd also like to see how the $73.73 figure is calculated. The actual wage gap between the two is about 3 bucks an hour (same link) but the total labor cost gap is more than $25 an hour. Does that include healthcare (in which case it was counted twice). If not, that's awful high. Maybe pension obligations? That's way high. Using the quick 50% of wage cost--a common HR WAG when you don't have hard numbers--Toyota should be around $40, so they are high at $48, but GM should be around $46, and they're above $73.

GM also sells a lot of cars not because they're people's primary choice, but because prices for an equivalent car are lower, or the financing is better. Considering GM is losing money per car at this point, I hardly think those lower prices are GM's choice.
This looks pretty much like a knock off of google finance

As far as site wise
-too much space on the bottom
-newstrends are pretty useless for terms, since you get results like you have now "EPS" etc, I'd replace that with newstrends for actual companies.
An event horizon sort of implies a singularity doesn't it? Otherwise what is it the horizon of?

The main theoretical problem with black holes is the information loss due to the no hair theorem. Look up "Black hole unitarity".

Another problem is that hawking radiation can send out anything, with no regard to the quantum numbers of what when in - so you put in a proton and return photons, which normally is impossible (conservation of the baryon/lepton/parity number).

No one really knows it that will really happen though, it's all theories and ideas.

But a black hole is not so much a prediction of relativity as it's the point where relativity fails. In that sense it was predicted by it, but relativity can not explain what happens in a black hole.
I hope you don't mean we should be using common sense and what seems ridiculous to our monkey brains as any sort of guide.
> program induction is in fact too general to be very interesting

Intelligence is general and is capable of coping with novel problems. AI therefore invovles building machines which have that level of generality. To say this isn't interesting is to say AI isn't interesting.

If you published exactly the problems that were going to be in the test, programs would be written that would solve those problems but would be very poor at doing anything else.

Anyway here are some input-output pairs that I think would be suitable for a learning program:

(i) append 'x' to the end of the string:

r => rx
123 => 123x

Similarly other insertions, deletions, copies of characters or groups of characters.

(ii) learning Roman or Arabic numerals or other number-coding schemes:

/ => i
// => ii
/// => iii
///////// => ix

3 => xxx
7 => xxxxxxx
9 => xxxxxxxxx
11 => xxxxxxxxxxx

Ideally, once the program has learnt the above two functions it should have an understanding of the underlying concepts and therefore find it easier to learn functions such as:

iii => 3
xii => 12
xvi => 16
I actually think this is a good thing.

Writing (correct) multi-threaded programs is actually really hard to do. The underlying philosophy of both Ruby and Python is that the programmer's time is more important than the computer's. Using multiple processes instead of threads may require slightly more memory and computation time, but the programmer will spend less time debugging.
Exoplanets finally come into view
Interesting read. I couldn't find any better source material that was free! Maybe someone else can find it.
Speaking of intellectual integrity, I never said anything implying Obama should not vet candidates. I disagree with one specific part of the vetting process, that candidates should be required to out themselves for having ever entertained any "potentially embarrassing" ideas.

If I am correct you hold the view that the best way to effect positive change in society is to maximize the political capital of our leaders by selecting candidates who have never had any original ideas or held any controversial positions. (And I add original ideas, since most new ideas are controversial.) However, I don't believe this is true. I believe that candidates who are intellectually curious and have intellectual integrity are the best leaders to effect change in society, since even if the public does not initially agree with all of their ideas these leaders will be in a stronger position to convince them. While I value your opinion, you have not convinced me that it is indeed correct, and so I see no reason to concede.
Yes, it is not easy to avoid the Ruby version of DLL hell.
I find of the 6 IMAP mail servers I use from my Mac, gmail is the least reliable. It will hang or be unable to connect every couple of days. I suspect this is related to me leaving my mail program running on multiple machines. It seems to be better if I close the mail program on machines I'm not using, though this still leaves one machine and my phone dueling with each other for access.
Or for example because length contracts based on speed it's possible for something to look like a black hole if you are moving fast, but not be a black hole if you are moving slow.

How does length contraction make something "look" like a black hole? Gravitational force generated by an object cannot possibly change based on what an observer measures its length to be; No matter how fast or slow the observer is moving.

I don't know an awful lot of physics.
For me, it appears that you are either intentionally throwing up random stuff to confuse others, or you are yourself confused.
[No offense meant]
Well, he did say it was a diktat, which I had to lookup: http://www.tfd.com/diktat
Yeah, except GM is so shaky, and credit markets so tight, there is serious concern that they could enter a 'restructuring' bankruptcy, but end up in a liquidation, because they won't be able to secure bridge and exit financing needed operate while in bankruptcy and to actually restructure their debt.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...
Pretty much anyone working with 3D, Image processing, AI and in many simulation areas will hope for more speed for a few more years.
Haha I thought Google has only one profitable product, AdSense :)

That said, a number of their high profile apps are in Python, most notably YouTube and App Engine.
Love the UI but feel a little ambiguous about the basic principle behind it. Would love to hear others' opinions about it though... I could be wrong on this one.

As I understand, you basically attempt to correlate stock movement with two major components: (1) market/sector movement, and (2) news.

The first one is easy. Market/sector goes up, stocks go up, market/sector goes down, stocks go down (in absence of major news, more on which below). I doubt you would have created the website to prove the obvious, so I'll leave this one alone.

The second one is where I see the major problem. The problem being that NEWS DO NOT MOVE STOCKS. You'd think they would. After all, good earnings report, stock goes up, bad earnings report, stock goes down, right? Except that's not what happens. Granted I have limited trading experience (selling/buying/sometimes shorting several times a month at the most) but I've seen enough to conclude that there is no meaningful correlation between news and stock movement.

I just tracked several stocks that I happen to follow where I have a reasonable idea as to why they've moved in the last year. Your chart only proved the above. News were well presented along the spikes/dips (again, the UI is awesome) but the clear presentation only served to show that no correlation exists. (To clarify, by news I mean anything and everything, e.g. earnings reports, analysts upgrades/downgrades, company announcements, actual news, etc; and by no correlation I mean good/bad news accompanied spikes/dips equally.)

Anyone care to argue with me? Prove me wrong!
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." - George Carlin
How to Take Your Community To the Next Level (video)
What you are saying is that loop quantum gravity does not say "the world is discrete", but rather "a way to calculate stuff is to assume that it's discrete"?

To me that sounds like saying protons don't exist, it's just we can explain all sort of stuff by assuming they do.

If that really is the thinking in quantum physics it would explain a lot, but I think it's simply a cop-out because our intuitive sense does not work with the rules of quantum physics.

Thanks for posting this, it helps me put some strange papers on quantum physics in their proper perspective - they are not "this is what the world is", but rather "we found some cool math".

I guess that's what happens when you can't do experiments but can only make models and theories.
this site is great as a tool
i think you are wrong by calling it a google clone
also with all that's happening now on wallst i get a chuckle checking it out
10 OSS/Freeware Tools for System Protection
Thanks! Agree that most of the news are fluff or something that is already expected by the market. But there are events that have profound effect on the stock and we try to identify them.
How did this get to front page, I wonder. The first paragraph:

AS befits a company whose name is a play on words, Google (named for the mathematical term
“googol”) has come up with playful names for its workers. Employees are known as Googlers,
new employees are Nooglers and gay employees are Gayglers. Now that the company has been around
for a decade and employs upward of 20,000 people, another group has earned its own name: former
Googlers are known as Xooglers.
Clojure adds AOT compilation
It looks pretty, and looks kind of interesting, but where's the 'there'? Like vaksel notes... it's pretty similar to Google Finance - what's the compelling reason to keep coming back to your site?
Actually, I'd say the main benefit is that closing tabs actually releases memory because those processes die.
Gravitational force is also a function of distance - the closer you are to the object the stronger the force.

So if the object contracted and got really small, you could come very close to it and thus feel a gravitational force strong enough to act like a black hole.
Take part in the class action lawsuit if you're eligible. Quick Google search turns up: http://www.lieffcabraser.com/antitrust/lcd-antitrust.htm
Oops the formatting got fucked up. What I meant was:

r => rx
123 => 123x

and:

/ => i
// => ii
/// => iii
///////// => ix

3 => xxx
7 => xxxxxxx
9 => xxxxxxxxx
11 => xxxxxxxxxxx

iii => 3
xii => 12
xvi => 16
I absolutely love Merlin's Twitter name, I just can't decide why.

"Hotdogs, ladies!" just sounds hilarious.
I got "Access denied" message.
There are 2 main things right now: measuring market influence and filtering the news. We plan to let people submit their own explanations and add discussions soon.
Classic Moser essay. I thought this would be a post about spoken languages as well, and would put mandarin at the top of the list as well. Since people are still hiring here (especially in tech related fields), I will happily take this opportunity to plug our Chinese learning product:

http://popupchinese.com

The ability to roll your mouse over the characters and see exactly what they mean, or just change all of the characters to pinyin on-the-fly makes it an incredibly effective way to learn Chinese.
Intel may try to sell many-core but who wants to buy it?
Interview with Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunas on micro credit’s long shadow
The exercise is to make your critical region (ie. the section of code that only ONE client can be executing at the same time) as small as possible, since it will be the limiting factor.

If you don't think my solution will work, please explain, in terms of business requirements, why it won't - because I can't see what your alternative solution achieves, except being orders of magnitude slower then mine.

For an example, you want to search for the current highest bidder. Why not always keep the current highest bidder in the same place? Looking in one place costs 1 cycle, looking in thousands of places (searching) costs thousands of cycles.

Write me an email (see my profile) if you want to continue the discussion. You can NDA me if you want to.
No, you're right. What I was saying was a shorthand and an (over)simplification.
Doesn't Google Finance do this already?

I don't understand the use of the "index"...

The logo and interface looks a little '5 years ago'..
Also, it isn't always the news that moves the stock. These features could be very misleading.
One-Man Geek Squad Brings Web 2.0 to Firefighting