skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
See the Twilight Zone episode or Matheson's story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button,_Button_%28The_Twilight_...
To save you the trip to Google Translate:

tripzilch: Hope is just a lack of information

Locke1689: I heard it: "Optimism is just a lack of information," I think
Autism Initially Asymptomatic
It’s not that I find these “setup” posts to be a form of pornography. They are, and I do, but in this scenario I would be the porn star, not the lonely guy who looks for tips on productivity blogs in lieu of an actual life.

Nice way to discredit your reader even before the post starts.
Jobs was an idea person, not an engineer. You have to imagine the engineer getting excited about the ideas going into building something. Later, Jobs sees that same idea popping up everywhere, and his natural response is to claim that it was "ripped off".

I think the same thing happened with the iPhone/Android controversy. Many of the similarities are emergent from the technology that became available at that time (larger screens, accurate multitouch panels, faster processors), but all Jobs saw is the idea.
I thought the article was brilliant. I stopped watching the series Numb3rs early on, so I wonder if it ever really covered real math like that?
He means "I'll be fired from my own company, even though I'll have made more money for the business than I ever had previously".
ah, that is a bummer, great minds think alike.

I didn't see yours when I searched, I did see an older defunct PHP one @ https://github.com/claylo/hastie
Be good if Amazon themselves got behind something like this, by providing the banking and payment infrastructure. They already issue credit cards, they could instead issue debit cards and directly pay into those. Would eliminate the need for a cash machine on the terminal, although the absurd ATM fees in the US might make it less viable I guess. I assume there are no charges for using debit cards for small transactions in the US (I live in the UK)?
We don't.

In my sophomore year of college, I discovered there were massive price disparities between old and new textbooks. Thermodynamics, 1'st edition (~1970) - $10, Thermodynamics, 7'th edition (~2000) - $120.

I used the old editions, and it didn't hurt me much (I lost a few points due to renumbering of homework problems). All they did was renumber the chapters and problems, no new material was added, most of the time the text was identical.
I was the only person my cousin could turn to for help when he was taking math in high school. When he asked me for help, my first instinct was to help him find the relevant information in his textbook. But the textbook wasn't helpful at all. First, he was often working with things that weren't indexed; even though his homework was from the textbook's supplemental materials. Then, the text was hard to understand. It just wasn't written very well. Finally, the whole thing was just too busy, with many different fonts, all sorts of margin notes, many footnotes, and colored boxes surrounding text. This made finding information harder and just gave me a headache.
You might buy the physical object (say a CD/DVD) but in most cases you only license the works contained on it.
I don't disagree with the difficulty involved, I think that's prominent in any attempt at starting a business.

I believe the odds / luck factor can be substantially altered in a favorable way by having at least an above average product to show off, combined with a vision for where you're going to take it.

Most good investors will spot very quickly whether your product is crap or not; they'll obviously size you up based on what you say, how you act, your confidence in your product and vision for it, and so on. If you have it, they'll see it, but you've gotta have a product to show off and you have to speak confidently to where you're taking it and how. You've gotta sell the investor on you + the product + the future.

Do those things, and any investor worth having will take notice regardless of your background or traction.
ResponsiveSlides.js · Responsive jQuery slideshow
First of all, the payment is about seven dollar according to the article that is slightly above minimum wage. It may be below some states wage but it is clearly close.

What mechanical turk does allow companies (and individuals) to do however is to hire people for a very short term (a few seconds) for, literally, pennies.

And assuming that enough work was available we should expect the rate to increase since there will be less spam bots.

And at any rate it is better than the alternative of make work.
It's mentioned on the first page, second paragraph from the bottom:
"Its computer scientists developed Unix and C, which form
the basis for today’s most essential operating systems
and computer languages."
I've seen the horribleness of my children's text books, and completely agree that they are not-good.

But now what? Who should we be talking to who can affect change?
I work with app that has about 100k installs across Android and iOS.

Android stats show we gave 375 different combos of device and OS versions. iOS has 75 which is pretty high for a platform with a supposedly unfragmented platform.
Not. But I can see how it could be read -

"How much did we pay for that sippy-cup toast?"

I was more referring to the fact that we have a functioning space station through international cooperation.
I met a 10 year old child with Asperger's[1] who was trying to do some math homework. The book was wrong; they hadn't labelled a diagram but were asking for those labels in the answers.

Maybe some children would have worked out to create their own key or to write in the book, but this boy just stopped. An activity that he's good[2] at, that he enjoys, is being slowly poisoned by poor quality materials.

It's not just math books either. Where's the Feynman quote about the horse evolution?

[1] Proper diagnosis from a set of real doctors.
[2] Got a scholarship to a decent school partly based on his math ability.
They seem to be too busy with another project to implement another payment system[1] but maybe you can email them and directly offer a smaller amount of money for a commercial license since your usage is so limited.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3636020
You should eat your own dog food -- I see your personal website is using Jekyll
Ask HN: How to learn Data Analysis?
I completed the ml-class offered by Prof Andrew Ng last fall

I started trying one of the problems in Kaggle

When I fit a logistic Regression, the algorithm gave me poor results.

I saw that people do lot of data analysis before applying any machine learning algorithm

I completed a book in Statistics and want to learn about Data Analysis

Please help me identifying resources/courses/tools that I can take to learn Data Analysis

Thank you
For the 18 guys living in the mountains, I guess water might have been less of a problem - other than hauling and storing. For the rest of the world, more of a problem.

18 guys? I think you vastly underestimate the mountain area population. Not everybody lives in Kansas/Nebraska.

In America, all rivers and streams are not safe to drink without sterilizing. Even in the mountains.

That's TODAY. Not when people USED to get its water for free. And I seriously doubt "all rivers and streams" in the US "are not safe to drink without sterilizing". Sounds more like over-protection to me... Any folks here near safe rivers/springs to chip in?

"Like free"? Sounds like a guy that doesn't garden or farm.

I'm actually from a rural area and we used to have potatoes, tomatoes, olives, cucumbers, oranges and grapes wine, IN HOUSE. And we weren't even farmers, just something almost everybody around those parts with some available land did. Potatoes for example were just in a patch of land 600 sq feet wide, but we didn't have to buy any. As for olives trees, we had (have) around 50 of those -- the most exhausting thing was beating on them or scraping them to have the olives fall down on special plastic nets, and that took like a week at most.

Produce isn't ever free. It takes an infrastructure of manure, land, water, labor and sanitation to exist at all. And nobody that gardens comes away without blisters.

The free part comes from the fact that people were doing those things ANYWAY. That was part of their everyday life -- and for those that weren't, it was dead easy to get some, even without buying (there would always be some relative, friend etc to give them some produce).
Federal minimum wage is $7.25 / hour. So it's slightly below minimum wage.
This is true for college textbooks. Not so for K-12 textbooks.

In this space, wholesale churn is rampant. Math series only have a several year shelf life, before old-and-broken is replaced with new-hotness. My wife and mother and sisters are all elementary school teachers, and they haven't ever stayed with a math series for more than 5 years. In our district, they are required to change them every 7.

K-12 level mathematics, compared to college level curricula, is much more "how" to teach than "what" to teach, and much more subjective. There were knock-down drag-out fights about the use of math manipulatives (which is the use of physical elements to show arithmetic operations).
> In the links in my original post 'Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, the director of the NSA,

Blah blah blah. An investigation of the US government concluded that the attack was an accident. Israel also had no motive to attack the USA and it happened in the middle of a war.

> I never claimed the sale went through.

I do not read your links to fringe sites. You talked of a "sale" (past tense).

To make vague comments about the arms industry is quite dubious. You know that the USA itself sells arms to countries which may not be so nice? (e.g. Saudi Arabia).

> I believe a lot of hackers would think twice about supplying advanced technology to Israel if they knew the facts about Israelis trying to sell it to China (or in the old days Apartheid South Africa)

Trying to flog a dead horse. You know that a lot of the technology that was passed on to South Africa by Israel was at the behest of the USA? You know that the USA encouraged SA to enter a war in Angola to support anti-communist groups and prevent the spread of communism in Africa? That the USA could not directly support UNITA because congress was being unco-operative?

You know that the Soviet Union directly (and through its proxies such as Cuba) supported communist insurgents, but the west did not do the same? Even China supported the same side as South Africa during the war – because they had a problem with the spread of Soviet influence.

But you like to dumb down everything into neat little sentences, bring up obscure facts and hypocritically judge countries such as Israel by different standards than its neighbours.

I never really understood anti-Israel zealots such as you. It seems often that it is some radically left ideology mixed with a healthy dose of anti-semitism.

> In fact I think I'll stop replying to you henceforth.

I would appreciate that! Also, take your tripe anti-Semitic tripe back to reddit.
I've wondered why there isn't a set of national texts available for core math and science subjects. They're pretty stable subjects. So at one point I decided to find out what the mission of the Dept. of Education is, and the shocker (to me, at least) was the following little blurb from the ed.gov website.

"In creating the Department of Education, Congress specified that:

No provision of a program administered by the Secretary or by any other officer of the Department shall be construed to authorize the Secretary or any such officer to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, over any accrediting agency or association, or over the selection or content of library resources, textbooks, or other instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, except to the extent authorized by law. (Section 103[b], Public Law 96-88)"

So even if we wanted to have national standards for math textbooks, the Dept. of Education is prohibited by law from doing so.
Subjecting Indiana Jones' “Fridge Nuking” to Scientific Peer Review
Is it okay to start with Rails now?
This is a great idea. It would really work if it supplements the welfare checks; it would get people into the mindset of working. Let me explain.

Right now, if you're a bum, you make a decent amount of money panhandling + scamming the government ("disability", etc.); let's call this "freeloading". The problem is: the amount of money you can make freeloading is close to minimum wage (if you include everything). So there isn't much incentive to take up work; freeloading may not pay as much, but you get total freedom, no schedules, no boss, etc. After some time, you just become so used to that lifestyle that it's impossible to come back into the working mainstream.

A system like this can be a great way for people to, on their own schedule, supplement their freeloading income. Over time, they'd get used to the concept of effort and reward, and maybe consider taking up real work?

On another note: I think minimum wage should be much higher; say, $20/hour. This may not sound like a good idea, but think about it: it should be high enough that a freeloader has serious economic incentive to get off his ass and look for work! Another way to look at it is: I would much rather pay more for something, and have that extra money directly go to a worker's pocket; than route the money circuitously through government taxes, bureaucracy, non-profits, etc. to that person on welfare.

Edit: the above are just ideas. If you disagree with them, say something instead of hitting the down arrow.
You know, that brings up a good point. Maybe you could make a claim that when putting garbage on the curbside, you're simply "parking" it there until the pickup in the morning.

In this case, you could argue the garbage becomes public properly only after it is collected, and only by the collection services, which you would expect on regular basis.
Thus you'd prevent FBI from just pick up your trash, saying "well, you were gonna give it up anyway".

Thoughts?
Erl2 - A New Dialect of Erlang
This has been bugging me for a while, too. Jobs is given (and quite frankly, claimed) credit for far more than he deserves. The sad part about that is that it actually detracts from the many tremendously significant contributions things he did make. But as far as invention goes, I don't think Steve Jobs actually invented anything other than, well, Steve Jobs.
Bon Appétit Management's Role in Making New Farm & Food Data Available
Pepsi doesn't own YUM! Brands anymore, but does have permanent contracts with all their restaurants.
File Uploading and Java Web Applications
To my understanding hand driers are less hygienic. With paper towels you actually wipe off some the grime while with hand driers any left over stuff just dries on your hands.
Joe's main motivation of this, it seems, is to unify the shell and the modules. Whereas you could not define a module in the shell, and whereas you could not define multiple modules in a single file, with Erl2, both are possible.

And the fact that it won't generate .beam file without passing the unit tests first, is just icing on the cake :)

I find this rather interesting, and I'm curious what kind of traction this might get, or if any of the paradigms introduced here might be mimicked in Erlang.
Most people are pretty close to the vest with founder dilution numbers. It also tends to be complicated and hard to sum up. Convertible note or priced round? If it's a note, is there a cap, a discount, warrants? Participating preferred shares or no? Liquidation prefs?

For a $400k seed round, it'll usually be a convertible note-- nowadays usually with a cap (reading: http://startuplawyer.com/convertible-notes/the-convertible-n...).

Here's Fred Wilson's take on Founder dilution:
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/founder-dilution-how-much-is...
There's a lot of assumptions there.

Math literacy is generally poor, so we want schools to do as good as they can.

Not all children have "educated" adults around to help them with their homework, and we especially want these children to have good education to help lift them from poverty.

Someone is paying money for those text books, so that person at least has a reasonable expectation of suitability for purpose.

And why do we accept[1] educational methods without insisting on good quality research to back them up? Why is it acceptable to churn out a book that not only has small errors but which causes confusion and delay in children?

[1] If we do accept them. I'm not a teacher, so maybe there's lots of research and it's all rigorous and great.
I agree, lots of the Header only people live in a Utopian view of services. Many times these services are needed at the javascript, even plugin (flash, unity, etc) level that don't work well with hidden headers since all they have is a url and a body to make it work. The Academic view of REST is ideal but usage in the real world is difficulty with headers only.

A situation that may arise is people not even aware they are using the wrong version of the api. And which one do you default to? Do you start with the version header always or do you add it into the system on version 2? Then do you require the version header? What happens if you didn't add that in version 1? Which one do you default to the new one? Is it really easier to change one line header than one line service prefix?

It is much much easier when maintaining a large service with more uri focused api routes/actions/verbs at times. It still is defined as rest but has some rpc elements to it. You don't even have to go down to the the model like /api/profile/[uuid]. You can do things like /api/signup /api/login and match those sensible abstractions into the rest api that lives above the model layer. This is always more flexible for minimizing versions and allowing core model changes without having to change much and provides a better consumer experience of the api. This is more of a REST and RPC mix that works well if you have to work with things beyond just backend services such as games, interactives, scripted experiences etc.

I make services fully RESTful when I can but I have to build services that run in scripted clients without easy access to headers, this is where header based versioning is more difficult for the consumer of the service. What I have been doing is looking first for a header, then for the url version, the routes are abstractions anyways so I route those accordingly.

I am liberal in what I accept, conservative in what I send like a good service should be.
What?

Have you tried to install something using pip for Python? How about npm for Node?

Those package management programs compile stuff on your system all the time. Same as PECL extensions.

The ecosystem for Python, Ruby, Node works exactly the same as it does for PHP. Please leave your random PHP hatred at the door.
LCTHW - Data Structures and Algorithms
There is a portable option

I mean OS portable. I use Windows and Linux, you don't support that.

Oh, we should always listen to such kind of advisers.

I don't mean as an investment, I mean as entertainment. The "blackjack and hookers" is a reference to Futurama: http://youtu.be/z5tZMDBXTRQ

By the way, I'm not saying my solution is better than your application as a whole, far from it. I'm talking about the case where you only need clipboard sharing, which I know is only one of the features of your application.
"Two of its researchers were awarded the first patent for a laser, and colleagues built a host of early prototypes."

I hear that most companies own the things that their employees create while working there. The above quote seems to imply that the patents were owned by the individual researchers. Did Bell Labs have a policy of researchers owning their inventions?
$20 / hour is a nice thought, but unfortunately what that would do is create massive unemployment and much larger welfare abuse. There's a fine line on just how high you can set a minimum wage (in relation to the economy in question) before you give too much incentive to companies to automate that labor, shrink their business slightly, or offload the costs to the consumer with price increases (net negative result).

Google what happened in New Jersey when they raised minimum wage above the federal level years ago (low paid jobs got wiped out, companies fired workers and attempted to become more efficient, particularly it hammered fast food workers).

Or this:

"Dr. Peter Brandon of the Institute for Research on Poverty studied how raising the minimum wage affect the transition from welfare to work. He found that raising it keeps welfare mothers on welfare longer. Mothers on welfare in states that raised their minimum wage remained on welfare 44 percent longer than mothers on welfare in states where it was not raised"

http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/minimum/against/again...
> He wrote me a tax-deductible check for $10 for my cause. That was the lowest donation out of the many I ended up raising.

Did you happen to peek at his checking account on your way out the door? Maybe he just paid his property taxes earlier that afternoon, or his grandkid's tuition. Perhaps he wholeheartedly approved of your fundraiser but didn't feel like liquidating assets that morning to help you finance it.
Ratings are obsolete. The internet does not come with a rating system. Almost every literate American kid has access to the internet. This is not a recent occurrence, this is something that began nearly 20 years ago. The difference is now instead of using a desktop computer with a slow dial-up connection, its a broadband mobile phone in their pocket.

Lets admit what ratings really are. They are not tools for parents, they are tools to market movies to parents. And, to market movies to kids too.
Super Commuters: 1.15m people travel 100+ miles from work to home in the US.
Sorry can you explain how using PATCH for updates by default is better and promotes proper HTTP usage? I'm not REST expert but my understanding is that using PUT as a default wasn't RESTful largely because you can't guarantee or even rely on idempotency in the controller action and not just because sometimes people were only be submitting the partial state of the changed resource.

PATCH has the same idempotent requirement. It isn't simply some more generic version of PUT intended for generic CRUD updates. As I understand, it is a specific way to submit a "diff" of a resource to "patch" it so to speak.

PUT/PATCH verbs as far as HTTP/REST is concerned seem to have been designed with literal management of resource data/state in mind. The primary scenarios I can think of that require their use are things like blob storage APIs and perhaps other types of direct content management scenarios. It just doesn't seem appropriate as the general "update" mechanism that Rails is trying to make it out to be.

I'm not saying the Rails way of doing CRUD is bad. It's a handy abstraction and pattern that works fine for many, even most, cases, but as far s REST goes, Rails is really just RESTful theatre. From what I can tell the most RESTful thing Rails could do is just use POST by default everywhere and provide a convenient way for the developers to use PUT/PATCH where and when it truly makes sense.
I'm glad someone else is calling this for what it is: a way to get around minimum wage.

Another solution would be to use worker reputation (something explored by Panos Ipeirotis @ http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/ )

Because MT workers are unreliable, you often need to have several doing the same task. Better workers require fewer checks, and are therefore much more cost effective. Right now MT is a market for lemons.

So the challenge then would be to let poor people build up a reputation to fix that market...
Http - Micro Routing PHP Framework. Less than 5kb.