skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a study where scientist introduced a group of monkeys to the concept of money, and soon after they understood it, the monkeys themselves developed prostitution:

http://www.zmescience.com/research/how-scientists-tught-monk...
This needs to be resisted.

A nearly-identical law, the Recording and Interception of Communications Act (RICA), was enacted in 2002 in South Africa. While in theory it contained all the legal protections that have been proposed for the UK legislation, in practice it has been badly abused.

Between 2006 and 2010 just one of the South African government's regional interception centres (of which there are at least four and potentially many more) carried out over 3 million legal interceptions, a number which is known to have increased since then. Subsequent leaks to the media have revealed that even this is a drop in the ocean; illegal interceptions are performed routinely and are easily hidden from oversight amongst the millions of legal interceptions performed every year.

Looking at the numbers involved, it's not unreasonable to assume that every single connected South African will have their communications intercepted at some point, sometimes in illegal interceptions with no official control over the data collected. In fact, there have been examples of staff inside the interception centres being bribed by business rivals, spouses and others to spy on innocent citizens.

I see no reason why the UK will be immune to these types of abuses, despite having a less corruptible civil service. This kind of power in the hands of poorly-monitored government intelligence agencies is always a bad idea.
(I did throw away $100 on an ad on clientsfromhell.net and got virtually zero results)

My suspicion on this is that since Clients From Hell offers no reason to go to the site itself (no extra commentary, no user comments, etc.) it's easier to just read it from an RSS feed.
I snorted!
Hmm. So let me see if I understand the article. To paraphrase:

We in the west are becoming ever richer as a society; material wealth beyond the dreams of our ancestors lies at our feet. The low skilled have a quality of life that the kings and queens of France would have killed for. Where once 90% of us had to till the soil in order for us to eat, now only a tiny fraction of society truly "needs" to work in order for us all to achieve unprecedented material wealth. Where once the poorest among us starved, now they have iPhones.

...and this is terrible.

Look, this may be right, but that's an awfully big jump that needs some explaining. And while we're at it, maybe a little more attention on why it would be possible or desirable for everyone to have a computer science degree would be nice. A lot of people would suggest that we're already in the middle of a massive education bubble, and that with the possible exception of some STEM fields, we have too many people going to university.

But the biggest problem is that there is a fundamental disconnect between "we're getting richer and more productive" and "the poor are going to starve to death". The "managed decline" section of the post seems particular confused; it can't seem to decide if we're all getting richer or not. If we can't afford welfare, then we clearly aren't - but it was the process of getting richer that was meant to lead to an employment crisis. The implicit model behind this post appears wildly inconsistent, to put it mildly.
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Or, in layman's terms, "If we rounded up the entire population and forced every single person to carefully review this item and issue a rating, what's our best guess as to the percentage of people who would rate it positively?"

And to make the description slightly more accurate, at the expense of more complexity: "What number are we 80% certain the approving percentage will exceed?"
Fantastic product.
Just signed up with a throwaway and had a brief play.
It was all really intuitive. No real problems really.

You should also try and show that you aren't just for companies who might have multiple projects on the go. We only have a single product and could see the benefit of something like this as a very rudamentary issue tracker and feature suggestions between the team.

- What kind of a roadmap do you have (features primarily)?

- How long has it taken you so far?
There's nothing wrong with the math.

I never said there was. In fact, I praised it as an elegant solution.

It just requires better educators to explain it, with analogies and metaphor.

You're right. In theory. In practice, no one does this, mainly because they can't afford it. You're implementing technology that costs $200,000 to save $100,000.

Why would you compromise the data/outcome in a hope to simplify the problem?

Actually, simplying the problem actually reduces the compromise when humans are involved. So, no.

...wouldn't you look to hire (and train) the best people who understand the domain they are in, thereby being able to judge whether the outcome of an equation is valid or not?

Only if it made economic sense to do so. I am not going to replace 800 workers earning $12/hour with "the best people who understand the domain" because the computer suddenly has formulas that people don't understand. Experience has shown repeatedly that workers, at any level, simply stop caring when they feel powerless by "solutions" like OP's Wilson formula. That abducation of responsibility almost always far outweighs any incremental benefit that a more sophisticated but incomprehensible formula introduces.

Good points, nice discussion, but please, for the sake of this community, don't reply with words like "what?", "Further:", or "Hint:". You made your point without the snarkiness.
Yeah trigonometry does become pretty trivial if you're prepared to use complex numbers and some calculus. Here in the UK we were introduced to this approach later on at A-level, but still had to tackle an incredible number of "solve for the missing length/angle/area" triangle problems first.

(One thing the endless triangle problems do provide is practice at converting geometric problems into algebraic ones. But yes, too much of them I'd say.)

I guess teachers consider complex numbers an abstraction too far in order to teach applications to geometric problems. They don't want to field endless 'woah that blows my mind' type questions about i at that stage. The downside then being that you have to memorise (or read off a cheat sheet) a lot more identities in order to manipulate things algebraically. And to convince yourself of the truth of those identities you need to rely on geometric proofs, which come more naturally to some than others. Probably makes the subject more intimidating than it should be.
Here's a paper proposing a solution in that space, and which also compares itself to the article linked here (kind of nice to see... papers sometimes fail to cite stuff that's "only" posted online rather than properly published, even if the authors know about it and it's quite relevant): http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~dell/publications/dellzhang_ictir2...

I emailed Miller a while ago to see what he thought of this reply, and he thought it also seemed like a reasonable approach. But, in his view, the criticisms of his method within their framework include things that in practice he sees as features. In particular, they view the bias caused by using the lower bound as a bug, but he prefers rankings to be be "risk-averse" in recommending, avoiding false positives more than false negatives. Of course, that biased preference could also be encoded explicitly in a more complex Bayesian setup, which would also be a bit more principled, since you could directly choose the degree of bias, instead of indirectly choosing it via your choice of confidence level on the Wilson score interval.
16:47:42 up 70 days, 17:30, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.12, 0.09

It's a Linux machine, I don't need to shut it down often.

I did have a problem with the UI, so my Emacs only has an uptime of 5 and 1/2 hours, otherwise that would be not terribly far off the machine's uptime.
You could also go one step further on the Bayesian path and infer even alpha from the data on your site, and introduce a loss function on your ordering.

Or you could do a semi-frequentist thing and simplify your math by using MAP estimates to rank. Basically instead of score = #pos/(#pos + #neg), it becomes score = (#pos+x)/(#pos+x + #neg+y), where you choose x and y to suit your needs. You could choose x/y in proportion to the average number of up/down votes on your site or you could even choose x/y in proportion to the average number of up/down votes of the author of the post. That would rank posts of trolls lower than posts of good users. By varying x and y you can tweak the strength of this effect. You can interpret this as giving each item by default x upvotes and y downvotes.

This certainly works much better than the formula in the article. For example if a post has 1 upvote and 2 downvotes, his formula will say that should be ranked lower than a post with 1000 upvotes and 2000 downvotes (because he's using the lower bound of the confidence interval). Obviously that's bad because while the first post could be a good one, we know for certain that the second one isn't. In general his method will rank posts with a low number of votes very low, even compared to posts with a high number of downvotes.
Orwell is laughing somewhere.
YAML's significantly more complex (and probably harder and more expensive to parse) tough.
Al Lowe has all the questions listed http://www.allowe.com/Larry/1questions.htm
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Actually a site like this, which offers a nice, free experience on which nobody is dependent (or entitled) is a great venue for Google to push users to upgrade their browsers.
He's a British institution! :)

But seriously; the thing that always depresses me about Fry is that he is almost but not quite like Douglas Adams. Their views on tech, science, religion and society were very similar, they were both pretty funny (and they were friends, too) - but Adams was a damn good writer, and Fry has never quite managed the same.
C.S. Lewis on Writing
It did. No the 80% but at the end of 1999 yahoo had 56% if the search market while google had <1%. Can't post a prooflink from the phone will do that later
I've never found any really good resource to learn Math from.

The problem I get is that whenever I see a big equation I tend to see a few greek symbols that I have never seen before and I have literally no idea whatsoever what they mean.

At least when looking at some unfamiliar code etc I can usually tell from function and variable names approximately what something is supposed to be.

Wikipedia is hopeless for learning because the math articles seem to be more interested in being complete and accurate than being accessible. When I hit a math page on something on wikipedia it tends to link off to a whole bunch of other pages on increasingly abstract parts of Math leaving me more confused than when I started.

I'd never have time to go through all of these topics and learn them properly, if I was going to do that I'd have become a mathematician.

Khan Academy is good, but seems to focus more on the mechanical skill of doing math rather than explaining concepts.
Well, it's right in fact that they are some rules that must be followed in order to build a good app. The bad thing is that these rules are hidden and change constantly. Another thing is that internet seems borderless but it is not - there are different habbits in different countries that are to be taken into account (although there are some apps that fit all but it is again due to following some rules).

So, I guess, building a good app is even harder then creating good TV-channel in some way (if you have enough money for the second, of course :)).

But that makes the whole thing much more interesting. You know we have a song called "Men in front of the monitors". I won't translate it, here's Google Translate variant:

"Those eyes could stare into the distance and look for land on the horizon.
They could tear from the cold mountain tops or from the dry dust storm in the desert.
Those eyes would go blind from the white snows of the polar
dim light or navigation devices.
They could, without blinking, pierce the night and see the stars ...
But those eyes looking at the screen
The man's eyes at the monitor

These hands could compress the steering wheel.
These palms can be abraded on the ropes and sails and ropes the front.
The fingers could be cut by the rocks and ice.
They could turn black from the fires and winds, they can become hard and dry,
but relate to women's leather soft and strong,
taken by the waist or shoulders as take forever ..
But they quickly ran her fingers over the keys .. men are in the monitor

These individuals could be weather-beaten all the winds,
they could become peaky and whip wrinkles:
fine wrinkles around the eyes, deep forehead.
These cheeks can become hollow and unshaven, the lips can become dry and cracked from thirst in the blood,
but to be able to kiss her so, so touched his lips to your favorite ...
And those lips are stained from coffee, tea and cigarettes
these persons in the pale blue light of the screens ...
Men have monitors

Those eyes are tired of sleepless ...
These fingers are running over the keys ...
But it seems that the fingers grip the steering wheel, paddle, or compress or squeeze the shoulders of wonderful ...
Men have monitors"

Well, the whole point is that nowadays all discoveries are made near the monitors as they were made in faraway seas and countries.
(although song is not exactly about it - it's just my thoughts about it)
Watch a Mac app being made: Part 1 - Mockups [video]
You can remedy that by ditching whatever framework you use, and writing your applications at a lower level.
From my experience, it is not going to be easy but the final result will be a lot simpler (and you will have lots of fun). Also, you will notice that far fewer patterns emerge than your framework try to impose on you.
The Google is doomed talk is as crazy as the Microsoft is doomed talk.

But honestly, I think you are missing the big picture. Search and social are no longer seen as two separate markets. If Google lags or fails are social, it could suffer in search. Much of the content which needs to be indexed (which is to say that people are looking for) is found in social networks, be that Twitter or Facebook.

On top of that, your account is 14 days old. Whining about reading "the same shit over and over every day on hackernews" is silly.
> Sadly, we're moving away from text protocols. SPDY and WebSockets are binary.

Nothing prevents your WS payload from being textual, as far as I know.
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The analogy doesn't hold up.

The equivalent of making fundamental changes to a TV station in IT is to use your CS degree to make Facebook allow customised homepages in the style of MySpace. The fact that you can make a Facebook/MySpace clone at home in a few night compares to buying a video camera and recording your version of the news in your kitchen.

Now, I agree with the conclusion: Computer programming is the great equalizer: for the low cost of a computer, a few books and an Internet connection, anyone can build the next Facebook. There are literally no further barriers.
I appreciate people who take the time to apply math to things in the real world, and share it with non academic crowds. Thanks for that.

5 star rating systems are obnoxious. From a mathematical perspective, if you treat them in an ordinal fashion they are poorly behaved, and if you treat them categorically, you lose the relationship between stars. There seems to be some popular movement towards binary rating systems, and I think that is great. Not only do people tend towards binary rating behavior in the real world (only rating a movie they thought was very good or very bad) but they admit a much cleaner mathematical treatment.
Much of the "Google is doomed" talk is based on the mere fact that Google is entering these new markets. Getting spread too thin is the fear. Google could focus just on being the best search engine it can possibly be but it's not doing that, it's trying to do dozens of other things too. Some of those things are innovative and cool (self-driving cars!) but other things seem like stupid me-too efforts (everything they've done so far in "social"). Nobody cares about "the potential entry of Facebook into the search market" - that would just be as big a warning sign for Facebook as Google+ is for Google.

Trying to do too many things at once is a good way to do them all badly.
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Thank you all for your replies. I'm entirely self taught and attempting to become a 'better coder' in the abstract whenever possible, things like this definitely help along the way.
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This was a fantastic read. Thank you!
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The 10,000 lines of code are for controlling the systems in his house.

I would guess he wrote a lot more in his career.
That's why a friend of mine joined the army engineers.

As a civil engineer working for a local city he might be involved in a 10year process of approvals to add a freeway on ramp. Where most of his job would be checking that an army of subcontractors were all doing things to code - not that they were doing things well, just to the written requirements

In Afghanistan if they want a road or a barrier he basically finds somebody lower rank points at a bulldozer and tells them to do it.

An interesting point he made was building a simple village clinic with a clean water supply that would save lives for a few days work and a few $1000. At home he would be involved in a multi $100M, 20year project for a new hospital where most of the money would go into pretty decoration and parking structures and would probably end up costing lives compared to the existing old hospital that was working perfectly well.
Bayes all the things!
Every language is small compared to C++. And keep in mind that Rust is still very young, and if simplicity is not a goal complexity can skyrocket before Rust reach 1.0 state.
I too am a linux user. This kind of stability was a breath of fresh air when I first switched from Windows XP.

Shutdown has a benefit though - it feels like a real break from work and helps me unwind. Weird, but true. :-)
You can use textual payload, but the WS protocol itself (aside from pretend-HTTP handshake) is binary and your payload may be masked on the wire too.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6455#section-5.2

0 1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-------+-+-------------+-------------------------------+
|F|R|R|R| opcode|M| Payload len | Extended payload length |
|I|S|S|S| (4) |A| (7) | (16/64) |
|N|V|V|V| |S| | (if payload len==126/127) |
| |1|2|3| |K| | |
+-+-+-+-+-------+-+-------------+ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - +
| Extended payload length continued, if payload len == 127 |
+ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - +-------------------------------+
| |Masking-key, if MASK set to 1 |
+-------------------------------+-------------------------------+
| Masking-key (continued) | Payload Data |
+-------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - +
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Seriously, I was more than willing to complete this survey until I got through the first 6 questions and saw that my percentage complete was only 10%. Rethink your survey and reduce the number of questions because filling out the answers to potentially 60 questions is not how I wish to spend my time. I am not everyone but I am sure there are a few people just like me, that passed or bailed half way through your survey because of how long it is.
Ahhh, yes, that is very true! Time to crank up Thunderbird Portable again :)
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I just assumed that Team FizzBuzz was him anonymising the actual team involved.
> You can try something new but it doesn't mean you'll be popular.

It's a conclusion to this statement.
This brings back memories
Thanks for the link. Nice explanation.
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Very interesting. So would you say developers should probably use the incomplete beta function, rather than Ev's method? Or is it too computationally expensive?
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I actually faded pretty quickly on the Games issue because, you're right, it was a bad decision but this wasn't an ethics problem. Once it was clear that it wasn't going to go the right way, I stopped trying to change it.
Not a bad idea. I found the Unicode glyphs for "Squared Plus" and "Squared Minus" and used them instead. They needed to be scaled up a bit but after that it was fine.

This latest version of Hacker News Comment Hiding is available at the same URL as before, https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/130027 .
Wow. Thanks for the insight. Suit $300 + airfare $340 + taxi to/from JFK $80. Yes the suit will last a while. Still, the kid could go broke interviewing
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Yes.

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3434
> I think the right usage of statistics is to enlighten and confuse simultaneously, not to "answer". They should provide analytical depth to a decision, never an escape route.

You're right, but I would go further. I would argue that when statistics are presented as "the answer," in many cases they are being abused. A good scientist recognizes the limits of his dataset. Like how a computer program can only do what it is written to do, statistics can only tell you what is in the data, they can't tell you what is _not_.
Great post! Nice to see others are looking at the long term plays and building great products. The post was refreshing to read and validates much of what I experienced over the last year building my apps.
Uh, did you read the final quote? Give the author some credit, he knew exactly what he was paralleling.