skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"homeopathy was derived from a theory"

Sure, if, by "theory" you mean "outlandish idea someone made up without any basis in fact and might as well have pulled it out of their ass" ("just a theory") instead of "systematic framework of ideas intended to account for, explain and relate together a wide amount of existing observational and experimental data, and to predict the outcome of similar results in the same field in the future" ("scientific theory").

"Like cures like, and weaker is stronger" was not a "theory". It was a wild-ass guess which also turned out to be fantastically wrong. The thing that made homoeopathy practitioners think it worked was bad (non-blinded) patient experimentation, where things like the observer effect, confirmation bias, the placebo effect, regression to the mean, and a whole bunch of other psychological biases, all came (and still come) into play.
So just hit it again until it leads to something interesting.
That would seem to be the idea here wouldn't it?
Discussing Django/Python on HN isn't easy—slightest criticism leads to immediate downvoting, outfaded comments and lowered karma. People either avoid strong opinions or just stay away from Django/Python threads. So, it's very hard to get an good understanding and unbiased opinions on various web framework compared to Django.
You've never looked at academic or numerical code, have you? It's totally fugly. Go skim the first edition of Numerical Recipes in C--it'll give you nightmares.
What about mobile keeps Nokia, Coke, MTV & the Miami Dolphins awake at night
...and Postgres comes packaged with OS X. Lovely.
On a site called 'Hacker News', it's not entirely unreasonable to expect that a user may have the skills and inclination to contribute back to a project like the Linux kernel. Especially when it's a problem that affects them directly.
Agreed. Just reading the headline alone, I wondered to myself how presumptuous he was to assume that many Yahoo employees even wanted to work at Yammer.
Amazing short film... shot on iPhone 4
See also: h and ħ in physics.
I'm somewhat new to Node, but why do they have you run the test suite like this:

npm test

as mentioned here https://github.com/cloudkick/whiskey ? Shouldn't that just be 'node whiskey test' or similar?
Properly? References? Anyway, who cares, it's funnier to say when you sound it like "cat".
I'd go further and say that even with context my comments on hacker news are practically useless. I see online discussions as a pastime, not something that needs to be conserved on triple redundant backups.
0xOmar Releases Israeli Air-force training and dod standards
What Gowalla Should Have Done
I agree. This statement seems like an overreaction of Yammer's CEO.
I left Goldman Sachs for Facebook - a few left for Google, and of course startups, etc.
FWIW, that would require a drastic rearchitecture of the existing Internet, and thereby seems quite unlikely: most performance-oriented infrastructure is based on being able to approximate the latency to and location of a user based on the origin of their DNS queries, allowing you to direct people to highly localized servers for the actual content; this is how all the major CDNs, such as Akamai, work. When you start using Google's DNS servers the Internet gets a lot slower (and it isn't just a couple hundred milliseconds of latency-to-start: it can mean minutes or hours of time-to-completion when you end up streaming large files and videos from the wrong places... the bandwidth difference can be massive).
The awesome thing is, today he posted his own rebuttal:

http://spikedmath.com/fact-005.html
[ack, fat-fingered the downvote icon. sorry. someone please upvote!]
I thought his statement was over the top at first, but after I read the article I say good for him for standing up for what he thinks is right.

We all know that this patent nonsense has got to stop. There is nobody building any app anywhere that does not violate some patent. The only way we are surviving is by being under the radar.

Let's not forgive Yahoo for this like we forgave Amazon. I'm especially pissed at Yahoo for making me take the side of Facebook on something.
Online Marketing Products Information: Earn Money From Your Website
If newer versions of Android monetize better for Google, then Google should be paying handset makers a bounty for each of their phones that is upgraded to the latest OS to encourage them to push the update.
Otherwise it is likely cannibalizing their revenue from selling new phones (or at least they think it will), and they have little motivation to invest in updates.
Using OSX for the first time
I would have liked an intermediate option between "test all" and "test a few critical things". Pretty much we follow the 80/20 rule with unit and integration tests, and it's served me and different teammates well over years of software development.
Ubuntu is the best distro around... for what it's purpose is.

Ubuntu isn't around to cater to power users, the whole idea behind it is shipping a distro thats so easy your grandma can install and use it.
The benefit of the easier formulas tau might provide. Minus. The confusion of having different generation of students being taught differently.

Is it worth it?

The author tries to dismiss this by saying "it's easy, they'll get it quickly, we don't need to rewrite all textbooks if you can just say 'let tau = 2pi'". But it seems he's rushing in that conclusion. The imagine the confusion between trying to convince students who are used to a whole set of formulas to use new ones will be huge. The confusion caused by different generations trying to communicate seems huge. You might not need to burn old books but you would need to write new ones, which again does sound like a huge endeavor.

I'm not even questioning whether he's right about tau formulas being easier. That seems irrelevant to me. Just the problems you're creating with the confusion seems not worth the small benefits. It just doesn't seem the pros outweigh the cons.
I agree, the password should be hashed and should be unrecoverable. That may or may not actually be true, however.

It may be the FBI intends to try the password elsewhere. Lots of people use the same password across multiple accounts of various different types.

Or maybe they intend to submit it as evidence if it's something like "masterpimp"
True, and it's not even my marketing; it comes from Bob Palais' original article "Pi Is Wrong!".
So glad to read someone pointing this out. It's especially maddening on Caltrain, where you're trapped with a group of data-hungry, bored commuters. Even with five bars, network responsiveness is a crapshoot and the severity of the problem is completely opaque.
OTOH, people have been debunking homoeopathy for over 160 years, also arguably pre-germ-theory:

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/lessons-from-h...
For a second, he had me thinking that there were actually cool office buildings somewhere filled with interesting people providing free office space complete with coffee bars.

That actually sounded like a great deal. Easily worth the hassle of possibly having to move out and find space elsewhere.
Bcache: use SSDs to cache other block devices on Linux
Arch is what I have been running (since around 2006). I love the simplicity. When things do break, there is an amazing community waiting to provide support. The Arch community rules! I think Arch is quickly becoming what Gentoo was...(hopefully I dont start a war!).
Profiling is built into the developer tools in Google Chrome.
America's Killer Drones... Of the Vietnam War [video]
I had never had problems in Canada on my iPhone with my provider. I could in fact take an elevator ride 2 stories into the basement and continue a call. I recently moved from one suburb of Vancouver, BC to another and all that changed.

At the new neighbourhood I couldn't get service standing at my front door about a mile in line of sight of the nearest tower. After a long and ugly fight with the provider, I was able to cancel my service for half the ETF and move to another provider using an iPhone that I presume connects to the same towers and works as expected. I definitely wasn't happy with the result.

I've noticed that the 5 bar system does not work well for diagnosing actual signal strength and reliability: the display updates too slowly to be of actual use when signal is a problem -- watch people waive their phones around while they try and make them work. The bars don't represent the signal it's getting now, but some normalized value of the last little bit of signal.

At minimum, it would be nice to have an app that does a good job of diagnosing and explaining your current network situation. I'm sure it already exists, I'm just not aware of it.
Discrediting Greg Smith is hardly an answer to the questions he brought up ??? Hello misdirection!!!

I would agree with the forbes article that banks acting in their own interests is hardly--new news.
For some reason I viewed data science as all that (only as a means to an end) plus statistical analysis. Only one way to find out. =p
don't forget that they have strict requirements they have to follow for the data gathered from their forensics to be admissible as evidence.
Things are rarely that cut and dry. That "soulless" programmer could be locked into a contract from an acquisition, or have other reasons that I don't think warrant a presumptuous "soulless" label.
Like others, I also love Arch and have been using it since 2007. Although I started with Slackware, I find myself using Arch as my primary Linux distribution these days because I feel it is the best of Slackware, Crux, FreeBSD and maybe Gentoo to an extent. As power users, I'm sure we can all appreciate Arch for what it has become. I look forward to using Arch in the coming years.

Happy Birthday Arch Linux!!
This has nothing to do with a GUI vs. command-line interface. You're confusing the decision of what information to present with how to present it.
Sure, but what you're describing is prototyping.

Prototype all you want without tests, but once you've settled on a design & are ready to make it production-ready you should spend time at least writing unit tests for your work or (ideally) take what you've learned & re-apply to a clean design written in a test-first manner.

You might think this is a waste of time, but putting code into production without tests is going to give you more trouble in the long run.
If you want to bind yourself from suing people who violate the patent just give the patent to public domain, it will have the same effect.
This is the same philosophy I subscribe to. It's wasteful to test everything in a non-world-world-is-going-to-end system. Especially if you're running lean and the code may be thrown away in a week.
Yep, now I just want to actively avoid learning what yammer is.
Mechanical Turk is a marketplace; are you planning to provide the opportunity for people to purchase points in the future? Sounds more like Experts-Exchange meets StackExchange.
No problem. I'm surprised that not many have brought this up before, which is why I did the post.
Lang.NEXT 2012
Textbook example of why geeks [0] shouldn't be allowed to name projects.

"What's the name of that package?"

"Natural!"

[runs off to Google to find "natural language processing", gets 9 million hits (as of today)]

"Dammit!"

[0] I'm a geek, too, and my project names also suck.
Why would you need an asynchronous callback-based server to do NL? Seems like a strange fit? Or am I missing something?
If you only decide to stop hiring Yahoo engineers now, you're a bit too late to the game. Anyone who's still at Yahoo1 today is probably someone who hasn't been able to find a job elsewhere. I have interviewed a lot of Yahoo! engineers these past years and it's been an unmitigated (as in 100% rejection) disaster.
I think carrying this to its logical conclusion will lead you to a self-hosted instance of something like http://www.engag.io meets http://thinkupapp.com/ meets https://singly.com/

Which would be a very useful tool indeed.
Programming with Algebraic Effects and Handlers
Hstore as part of a larger search index is really handy. We're using it at DocumentCloud to allow reporters to tag and search through their primary source documents by adding their own arbitrary metadata.

http://blog.documentcloud.org/blog/2011/05/arbitrary-metadat...

... when I search for "company:XTO" (or "company:*" for that matter), it can be serialized into an hstore query like so:

https://github.com/documentcloud/documentcloud/blob/master/l...

... and then be used to build apps with hstore queries on top of the API, like this:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/12/02/us/oil-and-gas...

... all without ever having to change the database schema, or indexes.
If I were a talented engineer, I would never apply to Yammer in the first place. (Yahoo employee here), I think its time these companies stop thinking so highly of themselves, the sad truth is everyone does patent litigation, fix the system before making sweeping statements or atleast be fair and blame everyone (apple, msft etc included) .There is a bias in the valley against yahoo, some of which is deserved most of which is not. Yahoo has some attractive challenges of scale that might be appealing to some folks and be reason enough to work here. Most of the companies that try to act supercool don't even have a real revenue model.
If you can't overreact on the Internet, where can you overreact?
JavaScript Perfomance Mythbusters
> Is the hiring situation in the Valley really so intense that anyone could find new work in 60 days?

If you can program your way out of a paper bag and find your ass with both hands and a google search, yeah.

Which isn't to say that everyone can feasibly walk away in 60 days. If you're waiting for compensation to vest after an acquisition by Yahoo!, say.
It's great to see more useful libraries like this for node. I recently built a sentiment analysis module for node (https://github.com/thinkroth/Sentimental). I think there's a need for more lower-level libraries like 'Natural' as well as higher-level libraries like 'Sentimental' that focus on one thing and work without much setup.
I wrote a similar article here sometime ago:

http://travisjeffery.com/b/2012/02/using-postgress-hstore-wi...

I go over how to use the keys as fields, and some other common problems.
Well, i think actually, perhaps a call for developers to refuse to participate in software patents, refuse to put your name on it, might be more effective.
It means extra shit for nothing in downtown Chicago, where folks with an iPhone 4S get 4 bars of "4G", but can't even send or receive email.
That's an amazing story.

Few questions:

1) How many lines of code is in that man-century project?
Is the number of lines of code ~proportional to the number of man hours, or lines(man-hours) function is ~ logarithmic?

2) How does your typical project look like (or how does that project look like) in terms of testing vs coding?
Do you spend few months of covering old code by tests and only then start testing?
Or you do "add tests - add features - add tests - add features - ..." cycle?

What's the proportion between time spent on writing tests and writing code?

3) What's the proportion of time you spend directly working (analyzing requirements/testing/writing code) and generally learning (books, HN, etc.)?

4) Do you do most of the work yourself or you mostly leading your team?

5) How do you pick your projects, and when you pick them - what are your relationships with the clients: Fixed contract? Hourly contract? Employment?

Thanks!
He may have died quicker if he jumped into conventional treatment, who's to know?
The Azure Outage: Time Is a SPOF, Leap Day Doubly So
Modern IDEs already support the static version of what you want. You can ask Eclipse for all the call sites of a method, for example. This will not perform a text based grep, but a semantic code search. A dynamic version of this that works on a concrete execution trace instead of the static code base also exists. You choose a point in time on a timeline and ask "who called the currently active method" and it will give you the exact call site that called the method at that point instead of all possible call sites. For example researchers at CMU have created the Whyline. You can watch a video of it here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~NatProg/movies/whyline-java-demo-web.... Also related is a technique called slicing.

The Roslyn CTP for Visual Studio is an API for the C#/VB compilers. Visual Studio itself uses this for e.g. refactorings. You can write VS plugins that examine the abstract syntax trees of the files in the project, instead of working with the flat text.
Using Mac OS X for the First Time
There's definitly been some ruffed feathers from the BI professionals and data analysts over the "data scientist" title. We like this band before they were popular man!

And there's some truth to the criticism that its mainly a rebranding. Someone (can't recall the source, sorry) recently defined "data scientist" as "a data analyst who lives in California."

That said even though many of the generalized tasks are the same I think there's some value to the title. There are a broad range of big pro and analyst roles that don't fit. Lots of big pros just make ssrs reports or just build star schema or look at data for insights but don't apply any hypothesis, test, repeat method.

The key differentiators for a data scientist IMO are

- can do everything required to go from piles of unorganized data to usable insights. From data munging to visualization design to programming to applying statistics correctly to analyst activities like knowing what business questions to ask

- when doing analyst work they operate using scientific(ish) methods to test and verify data hypotheses.

That describes many data analysts and BI pros that don't have cool titles now, but may soon. Recognizing the difference between people and businesses that do all of that vs report writers and ad hoc olap browsing users is valuable and positive IMO.
The CEO of Yammer is free to hire whomever he wants, but saying you're either soulless or incompetent is a false dichotomy. Just because your employer's use of patents isn't the most important factor in your life doesn't make you soulless. There are much more controversial topics on which reasonable people disagree.
IANAL but people who Are A Lawyer seem to feel that there's no legally meaningful way to place anything in the public domain, currently, at least in the United States.
Redesign and refactoring is often related to quality, aren't they?
And even after all these years I still think that slashdots comment moderation system is the most effective one on the web today.
Just Sell
Microsoft Security Essentials most popular security program in US
To add to the 'quite effective' schemes: Cinavia. It adds watermarks to the audio in movies and is resilient enough to be maintained even when a cam-rip is done of a movie. Brilliant scheme, and the patent application (US7369677) is really well written. There hasn't been a break yet, but it'll come eventually.
An NLP API server might be a good fit. It wouldn't be awful to be able to throw lots of data from web scrapers, twitter streaming api, etc to a node server to do NLP. It would also be nice to use for any other node project where you'd benefit from NLP along with whatever else you're doing.
Also this is the first time I've heard of Yammer, while Yahoo is big and old. Is this even a likely occurrence? Have they had or hired many or any yahoo ex employees in the past?

Headline read to me "Small no name startup says they won't hire employees from huge company that's also never heard of them"

Seems all about the publicity.
It would be more accurate to say "natural language processing in Javascript". Javascript has a few NLP libraries but afaik there is no clear go-to library yet.
White House CIO's first 40 days included 'worst day' ever
Microsoft and Apple would be history, just for starters.

Y'know, publicly calling on people to quit their jobs based upon one's own political opinions is really unprofessional and if this guy really said that, it says more about him than Yahoo.
Why Windows 8 Does The Right Thing The Wrong Way
Windows 8 is the best OS from Microsoft so far...for the majority of users
Assistente Virtual - ANACOM
But there is a difference between punishing the company management that made the decision and employees that had nothing to do with the decision.
Video tutorial on how to optimize big transparent PNGs
In this video I explain how to use Posterize in Photoshop in order to reduce the number of colors in a transparent PNG. Of course, this means that the resulting image will be smaller in size, but at the same time it will keep its original quality and its alpha transparency.
Chinese Trojans Gh0stRAT used to attack pro-Tibet organisations
That's just you though. Yammer is a pretty well established company. Not large compared to Yahoo, but not a tiny unknown one either.
Just Say No to Feature Creep: Xcode Edition
user.name@gmail.com is the same as us.er.na.me@gmail.com, too. Far less trivially defeated, as the period has meaning in many other e-mail systems.
I haven't tried running this, but I just spent a little time reading through some of the code. Looks cool: Chris and Rob have made what looks like a good start using Javascript for NLP, wrapped up to use with Node.
The Action View Helper | Boulevart Labs
That was a really great explanation on how capturing works. I've just always used bubbling. But wouldn't it be easier to just setTimeout for maybe 1.5 seconds? Or perhaps split your page load into two parts: Essential core stuff, then once that's done it signals to start the second, less critical part, which would include things like .sortable()?
Any talented engineer under the age of 30, yes. (Corollary: any engineer over the age of 30 has no talent in the eyes of the Valley)
This comment is correct, but I would make an exception for the fine folk in Yahoo Research.
What we need is something that indicates network quality. This would be
a third indicator (or replacing the two previous ones). It would
indicate the level of service that one could expect while on a cellular
band.

Whoops, physics!

The current signal indicator is based on the periodic heartbeat packets the phone broadcasts. This is the bare minimum for a cell phone to work at all: in order to route a call to a phone, the network has to know which cell it's in.

A "network quality" metric would require, say, a ping running to a host a couple hops away. This requires using the radio to actually transmit nontrivial amounts of data, and (depending on a whole lot of things, of course) more often than the heartbeat.

This would kill battery life. Absolutely murder it. You'd go from 200 hours of standby to 50. Maybe less.

Even worse if you wanted to get an idea of throughput. You'd have to transmit, say, a hundred megabytes of random data. Now we're down to 20 hours of "standby", and dramatically higher load on the backhaul. And, of course, li-on batteries die quicker the more heavily you use them, and the iPhone doesn't have a user-serviceable battery.
Yammer as a company has almost 300 employees, just raised an $85 million round, is growing like crazy, and has (a lot of) real revenue. Hardly a "small no name startup".
The Road to Hell Is Paved with Viral Videos
A little bit OT, but did anyone else find that the fixed header on the blog made the article less pleasant to read? I kept trying to get it off the screen to focus on the article, and it felt like it was "covering up" something I wanted to see.