skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"All models are wrong but some are useful" - generally credited to George Box.

A model, by definition, is a simplification, otherwise it wouldn't be a model (it would be the actual "thing"). Therefore, you shouldn't get caught up on whether or not the model is a perfect representation of the thing it describes (because it won't ever be), but rather if it is useful in the situation in which it is being applied.

For example, sometimes it is useful to model light as waves, sometimes it is useful to model it as particles, but both models are technically wrong because they can't explain the full behavior of light by themselves. That doesn't mean we should just give up those models and never use them, since they both are useful in certain situations.

So present the simplified model to the student, until that simplified model no longer can explain what you are trying to explain. In which case you present the more refined model. Just keep in mind there is overhead that comes along with that refined model.

And perhaps more importantly: don't think in terms of "truthfulness", think in terms of "usefulness".
But with articles, what you might have found uninteresting one day may become interesting the next. And what you thought was fascinating one day may become boring the next.

True. This is a real problem. Much better results can be obtained by partitioning the space of articles and predicting on more focused subsets. The partition can either be manual ("these documents are from my RSS feeds about Python programming") or automatic, via some clustering algorithm.

Ideally you identify subsets where your interests are less transient.

But the flipside of using a general purpose classifier is that you can train it to predict whatever you want. You're in the driver's seat. It doesn't have to be "interesting," it can be "most relevant to my primary area of research" or "most relevant to this book I'm writing" or "most relevant to my small business."

Communicating this capability to users is whole 'nother deal of course.

I did something similar using dbacl.

I remember looking at dbacl. There's some great information in the writeups, but I was disappointed that it coupled feature extraction to classification. For instance, what if you wanted to use stemmed terms as features? How good is the word tokenization for other languages? (compare to Xapian's tokenizer) Can it do named entity identification and use those as features? Can you toss in other features derived from external metadata? Etc.

We ended up doing all of these things, but our classifier itself remained a simple unix tool. For training you piped in (item,feature,category) tsv records. For classification, you piped in (item,feature) and it output (item,category,probability).
The X1 was light, but it was not thin. Perhaps thinner than other notebooks that Dell was making at the time. But compared to a MacBook Air, any computer that has room to stack two USB ports on top of each other is a friggin' elephant.
Oh this is actually kind of cool, i would probably use it if it let me send outside of the US!

I always wanted to make a service that let you send letters from nearby the location you're sending to. I dont recall the exact reason i needed this now, but a while ago i needed to send a letter (to a bank or something) in Australia, while i was in Canada...and really didn't want to wait 2 weeks for it to get there. My hope was i could write the letter online, send it to the online service, they would print it and send it from nearby the destination of the letter with the aim of reducing the time it would take to get there.

If you already have the product, maybe this would be a possible mod to support this kind of need?

Either way, kudos for sharing this.
Yes. We have detailed stats on page views, hits, bandwidth, cache hits, etc. etc. Looking at the most recent data which I get daily I see in the trailing 30 days: 27B page views and 162B hits.
How was it that the Lulzsec attacks were not as large? What qualifies a sufficient size attack?
Thanks so much, appreciate the words of encouragement! Though you're not a pet owner, I'd encourage checking it out further if you want to checkout or hang with a pet at any point - I have a few friends that started pimping themselves on Facebook, asking all pet owner friends to signup so they could watch their pets. One is already angling to spend time with a few puppies. :)
720p means 1280x720, 1080p means 1920x1080.

edit: apparently not, see sibling comment
If I remember correctly some guy posted lulzsec member identities online after simply following them in irc..
Meta question about the article, what is with the "Processy" text in the article and the garble around it?
Hi,
Collusion dev here. I don't think that's supposed to happen, as cookies should not be written when in private browsing mode. I'm guessing it's a bug in Collusion's visualization.

If you can reproduce the bug using 'generic' websites (I don't want to know about your private browsing habits), would you mind filing a bug report in https://github.com/toolness/collusion/issues ? It would be a big help. Thanks a lot.
It sounds like you have reinvented the original (1999) Napster client. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster
"Unfortunately, after a ton of work, we’ve determined that it’s not possible to dumb down page transitions enough to get acceptable performance in Android 2.x, even on a newer device like a Nexus S running 2.3."
I'd love just the last update for each project. It's handy to use "Watch" as a sort of bookmarking tool.
Man, if you want to make a colorscheme sharing site, I'd love you. bytefluent.com/vivify/ is decent for creation, and http://code.google.com/p/vimcolorschemetest/ is good for seeing a staticish list of existing options, but a well-made site for sharing, finding, and discussing them would be pretty damn cool. :)
Haha, yes! We've actually seen some trades for beer, wine or even dinner. So definitely some fun opportunities to integrate gifts. We've also talked to BarkBox about the potential for something pet related in the future, and are looking at some similar pet and non-pet-related gifts. :)
No blacksmith, farmer or famous scientist/artist/Renaissance man in history has ever known everything there was to know (about the field they worked in). Even back then, there was already more knowledge being produced than they could possibly ever obtain. As with us, the ultimate problem is a lack of time. Whether the time required to travel to a neighbouring city to learn from their guild or the time required to read a paper on the internet, the problem is time.

All stacks have always been too complex. A farmer, to produce optimally, has to understand everything there is to know about meteorology, biology, sociology, economics and earth sciences concerning his specific area. That has never been the case.

In that sense of 'understand', nobody has ever completely understood any system they worked with/in. Given a system and a person, you can come up with a legitimate detail question about the system that you also believe the person couldn't answer.
I can't remember the last time I saw a Path link in my Twitter stream, but I see a few 4sq ones a day.
Banking Trojan Hijacks Live Chat to Run Real-Time Fraud
It means 1366x768 like usual "720p" displays.
I have made ~/.macromedia a symlink to /tmp, which means Flash cookies are regularly wiped.
Proper haptic feedback would be huge. This might also help to explain the leaked pictures where the new iPad is thicker than iPad 2.
Why would you do that? To use precious SD storage to install yet another x86 OS to painfully slowly (10-20MB/s and huge latency) boot up another computer, that in 99.99% of the cases already has an OS. And I don't think they implemented a shared storage between such a computer and the embedded one through the USB storage interface.
I haven't heard of a company that lets you idle even if you produce an average employee's week output in a day.

The 'fixed amount of work' only works one way. You need 70 h to do it? Stay long hours. You did it in 20 hours? Well great, we'll just pile more work on you.
It would seem inappropriate to ask people to take their pictures because you can't remember who they are. Can you actually do that to girl you met at a bar? Or a new client you just had a meeting with.

I have been collecting a lot of information on Evernote and I am also getting rid of my online social profile. I certainly do not think social networking in Evernote can be of any use.
Ask HN: Idea guy put me on his incubator application without my consent
Throwaway account here.

About a week ago this idea guy, let's call him John, asked me to work as the developer for this startup him and another guy in another province is working on. I was already working on my own startup so I told him I was unable to work for his startup at that point.

I've never worked with John before and we've only met a few times. There were never any agreements between the two of us to start any sort of Venture or anything.

So last night John messages me on Skype. John said he applied for this incubator(not YC, but I won't name it). I congratulated him and wish him good luck.

So the conversation went on a bit as we talk about this incubator. Then all of a sudden John said:

"I put u on the application just to let u know, we could get a huge investment!"

I was shocked felt pretty pissed off for what he did. I myself had plans for my own startup to apply to this incubator, but John have put my name on his application without my consent to give him creditability. I told John I was not impressed with what he done and he can't just put me down on his applications without my consent.

At this point, I thought about e-mailing the incubator and tell them that I'm not apart of this application they just received, but I am not sure how I would come off and what they'll think when I put in my own application. I don't want to make myself look bad so I loose my chance of getting into this incubator as well.

Dear HN, please give me some advise on what I should do. Thanks.
Dell should have mentioned the resolution specifically, but it's also 1366 x 768, not 1280x720(720p).

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/xpsL321x/en/sp...
That IS a difference, but I don't follow anyone on Path (yet). The Path links I consume are via Twitter, as were the Foursquare ones, so arguably the credibility and selection bias are equalized.

Since the links I consume have been shared on Twitter (by people who don't follow me, and whom I don't follow) people are breaking out of the Path limitations by automatically, simultaneously publishing their updates to Twitter as they're being posted on Path. Effectively people have subverted the 'private' differentiation the Path offers in a lot of use cases from what I am seeing.
>So nothing would have stopped them from using a high end plastic or a nice composite?

Besides the fact that this would make it not look like a MacBook?

>Something that would tell their product apart from a MacBook Air?

They're not aiming for "not MacBook". They're aiming for "we also have a MacBook!"
Moving your product from a fad to a utility
Are you Chasing a Mirage?
Albrecht Dürer: Portrait of the artist as an entrepreneur
I decided against Sencha Touch because it doesn't use HTML- you construct the entire site using their JS functions. So if you ever want to transition away from Sencha, you can't- you're locked in.

While I'm not that happy with jQuery Mobile, it does use HTML for layouts. So you can abandon the library without losing all your work. Indeed, I'm starting that process myself right now- custom building something more suitable to my needs, and copy and pasting HTML to bring my existing UI work along with me.
Is this posted because the Ultrabook is interesting, or because the scroll-to-animate functionality of the website is interesting? For me, it's the latter, since I have long forsaken Dell.

Once the site loaded completely (which took a fair bit of time), I was able to use scrolling to move forward/backward through the animation of the demo. This is certainly an interesting UX, but after about 20 seconds of this I found it cumbersome.
Rubbish! http://www.southgatearc.org/news/november2010/make_a_transis...
How to Get Your First 3 Employees
I was going to write up some big rebuttal but I realize now we are arguing from very similar positions.

1.) Developers don't understand what they are worth
2.) The culture of 50+ h/week working is pervasive

I think the point where we disagree is about the optimal behavior from the companies POV. Based on the exclusivity of existing condition eligible health care and collaboration by major tech firms to illegally collude to prevent competition for work, I don't conclude that it is a system which will fix itself. However, the only viable solutions I can imagine would be unpalatable to too many programmers to be enacted.
FTC: Identity theft still top consumer blight
good to know. i was curious how the support has been for the wireless/wifi drivers in their newer machines...
We've really reached a sad point in the development of civilization when accurately tracking which games your friends play is a pressing issue. (p.s. Considering how I spend my time and attention, I'm including myself in this indictment.)
Brilliant! I'm currently petless, but have hoped for a service like this in the past with my Shetland Collies!
Three CS students and a tablet
Absolutely correct, room for iteration, and lots of opportunity yet to be unearthed. :)
Geo2img - Add GPS coordinates to a image.
Have you ever wondered if you should parse html w/ a regex?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-...
Stanford Law Review's Privacy Paradox videos on drones and more
David Pogue just got lucky and landed a job at the Times. He really isn't special in any significant way
Code review is good in general; however, it's a chore for the code reviewer. There are very little incentive for the reviewer and it always cuts into his schedule. Unless the team has set up very clear incentive for code reviewers, it will become a rubber stamp routine.
I'd just ask the incubator to remove you from the application.
I just added a downloadable jar for it as well: https://github.com/ibdknox/live-cljs/downloads

java -jar live-cljs.jar
Damn it. Caught. Clicked the link without realizing it was a Calacanis article. More and more I'm contemplating building the Calacanis blocker I've mulled about before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2613955. The internet is becoming less safe every day.
The population is strongly clustered on some big cities in the coast, the roads aren't super safe, and the terrain around the coastline is not flat, so it's probably just cheaper to lay them out in the ocean.
I second that. I've worked for three years in a company where code review was mandatory for EVERYTHING and all I can say is that it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
New Nike Parallax Site
Atlas Van Lines Migration Data 2002-2011
+1. Very disappointing. Can't get it without Windows either :-(
Yeah, maybe =) but as I remember Napster was more about downloading songs not streaming them.
I sent you a patch for a problem (well, IMO) I had fixed, it wasn't anything important or where I was hoping for a response, it was something I was doing to be neighborly.

> And again, if you think an email list for A/Bingo users would increase world happiness, nihil obstat.

The idea was merely that it's generally not a big deal to run that kind of thing for a small project, and yes, there often are benefits. Generally, however, open source projects also benefit from being somewhat centralized: far fewer benefits accrue to everyone when various random people just run off and fork things willy nilly.
If you want to try my home made exercise and comment on it, you can check out www.markmyplace.com It is an alpha but I actually use it and will respond to feature requests and bug reporting.
http://eeemo.net/
GitHub 2 Evernote – Making the watch button useful again.
I cannot help but salivate at the dense links connecting US/Europe and US/Asia.

Here in Kenya we only have 3 cables. Since last week the internet has been very slow after the main cable was severed by a ship anchor. The second cable seemed to have problems upstream so all the traffic has been routed to the third cable.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/28/east-africa-inte...
Does Slide Share Drive Engagement?
Also know when to keep your mouth shut and don't nitpick when they make mistakes. Such as a beginner learning a language. He/she is probably scared of speaking, so don't point out more mistakes than needed. You want to build confidence first.
Why do people insist on using Apple marketing terms for what are commodity components? It's a ~300DPI LCD. Apple didn't invent it, they just bought it from someone. Ditto for all the people talking about the performance of the "A5 CPU".
I'm curious how much the movement toward the mid-Atlantic states is the growth of federal government consulting jobs over the past 10 years.
ONLINE MOVIES: Tere Naal Love Ho Gaya (2012)
From a quick glance it looks ok but there are a few features (missing, I think) which would make me (as a mac book air 11") envious:

- 1080p screen

- 1080p web cam, tilting

- large choice of colors for the anodized aluminum lid (the carbon body is a nice touch, assuming they can't find factory capacities to produce a full aluminum body at the moment ?)

- matte cormin gorilla glass (no idea if that's physically and chemically possible but cool it would be)

- alternatively, a glossy screen which does not only look like but is a capacitative touch screen (I always end up trying to use touch on the macbook air, oh my)

- some other detail which really surprises people and makes you really want to own one of those ...

- linux driver support for all components

edit:
- an external blue ray player, thin and matching in style

Still I'm looking forward to hear from people how the build-quality turns out, could be a nice affordable alternative for people looking for a windows notebook!
Last night I was curious about physical wire connections across oceans for communications. So I started researching and learned about the first ocean line implemented in 1858 for telegraph communication. Seeing this link on the top of HN today was pretty much exactly what I was trying to conclude my research with last night. What a strange coincidence.
Since he was a contractor, not an employee, labor laws may not apply.
If you don't like unpaid overtime, move to Massachusetts! Programmers aren't overtime-exempt here.
I've got a modest proposal. Let's bring back slavery. Then employers would worry about employee injuries, have work for them year round instead of only hiring during peak season, and in general treat their slaves with the concern that posters here seem to reserve for robots.
Nice! Thanks so much for the note - definitely encourage you to hit up your pet owning friends, as it is awkward/ difficult for them to ask for help, but I'm sure they'd love to know you're willing and able if that's the case. Signup and pimp yourself to friends. ;)
I think it depends
The iPad presents a unique problem though: you can use the iPad in any orientation. For example, when using it in landscape mode, the home button can be on either the far left or right: it's a huge moving target, and with a screen the size of an iPad, it's often outside your peripheral vision (unlike the iPhone).

What if the home button moves depending on screen orientation? i.e. the home button is always at the center of the bottom-most bezel edge? It's not a particularly usable solution without the best capacitive button ever made, but it's interesting to think about.
"It's not steaming crap. It's cooled!"

I'm not trying to rip on you, but to me that's about all that says. (Yes, it's fairly standard among not-Apple laptops to put a 1366x768 13" panel in a laptop, but that's unacceptably crap given the competition.)
thanks, Saevar :)
All I can say is: Amazing! What's next? Minority Report user experience?
God sees everything that happens to me. He might not care. Do you feel lucky?

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\YANKEE.TXT

. Then she emptied the conveniences out of it
and fetched it full of water, and I drank and then stood up, and
she poured the rest down inside the armor. One cannot think how
refreshing it was. She continued to fetch and pour until I was
well soaked and thoroughly comfortable.

It was good to have a rest--and peace. But nothing is quite
perfect in this life, at any time. I had made a pipe a while back,
and also some pretty fair tobacco; not the real thing, but what
some of the Indians use: the
Sync Your Data without the Cloud
Obviously, the LICENSE file wasn't there when I posted my snarky comment. Props to the author for adding one, though, since now I know that I can use this code.
That's an interesting finding, in that it clearly predates any concept of a red-green-refactor cycle. The idea of getting code reviewed before running tests just seems utterly alien to me.
I feel guilty. I just got the book for free and I feel like I need to justify it. I really respect Raganwald and I would love to pay and he deserves it. I took it free because the honest truth is that business is really, supremely bad right now. I have a total of $60 in the bank and a few grand in bills due plus some other awful things. I justify (maybe wrongly) downloading it free by assuming the book will help me and when business picks up again I'll buy another copy for as much money as I can muster to the point that I'm almost uncomfortable with the price I pay. I promise this. And I'm sorry.

Do my other freeloaders feel guilty? Or are there none? Or are there some but don't feel bad at all?

Edit: Just read the "Why You Need a Degree to Work at BigCo" section and already it's worth a lot more than the asking price.
"300DPI LCD" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue :)
That's awesome. I also love scraping, there's just something about which I find really satisfying.
The dev team I am on currently has five people. With all of us working in the same code base, I find the code reviews are a good opportunity to understand the changes my fellow developers are making. While reviewing code isn't strictly required on my team, having your code reviewed generally is. My personal incentive for reviewing is for my own understanding.
Your testing methodology will fail horribly the moment the core component fails to produce results on real-world use cases, or scale up with the included modules that are required for it to even be called a modern day web-server.

You eventually have to test the whole, not the part, unless you want to see benchmarks for useless/no-context metrics.

On the other hand I do realize its fun to see tests like this, and they can even give you a bit of insight... For example, that Apache now comes close to competing with Nginx on static loads, especially for larger files (9KB vs 54KB).
That is exactly what happens. There are so many tiers of issues its hard to dissect.

1. Big corporations get much better rates by pooling all their employees together and then negotiating for coverage.
2. The insurance companies pool all their subscribers and use that as leverage to negotiate better rates with the hospitals.

As an individual, you don't get the diversification effect of #1, so you end up paying a premium rate. If you are an individual the system is basically setup to vet you biasing toward no coverage.

Its hard to keep up with the state of the laws in my own country. (US) There are talks of market exchanges to basically give individuals back bargaining power, but I've heard that the insurance industry has managed to hobbel them pretty badly. I'm not sure where we are headed on this issue.