skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point is we have to determine how to define a five-star item, a four-star one, etc. Currently, an Amazon item's star value is the average of the star values of every review. The author is saying that that's a bad way to compute the item's star value. The author would argue an item with only two reviews that are both fives should have a lower star value than an item with 400 fives and 1 four. We typically associate stars with the averaging algorithm (i.e. we define an item's star value as the average of the star values of its reviews), so it might help if we do away with the notion that each item has a star value, and just think of this as saying an item with 400 reviews of 5 stars and 1 review of 4 stars should be shown before an item that just has 2 reviews of 5 stars.

Currently, when we see an item's star value, we think of it as an indicator of the quality of the item. But if it's just the average of the star values of every review, the author would argue that we're not going to get an accurate indicator of quality. The author argues that whether the quality indicator of an item is expressed in stars or percentages, that value should be determined by the third algorithm, not the second, and that the order the items are shown in should be the result of sorting those quality indicators.
Related: http://www.wikipaintings.org/
I use to worry too, but then I learned to use Wireshark and all was well again.
Let’s bring back apprenticeships
I couldn't agree more...
Michael, could you explain why you are using Scala over Clojure? I know you've got experience with both, but Clojure has always seemed more appealing to me.
It's us hopeless dreamers that have built the world you say has no place for us. And we will continue to dream, and make our dreams reality, no matter how much you tell us we should accept defeat and just face the "reality of life", whatever that is.

So no, we're not going to "suck it up", but we're going to press on, to make a better world for future generations.
This is an interesting bit of trivia and fun to know, but I beg front end devs: PLEASE do not take this as anything more than an interesting bit of trivia. Please do not incorporate this information into your workflow; it would be pure folly as it introduces complexity, potential confusion, and potential bugs and yields infinitesimally small returns.

Thank you mathias for writing about this, it's neat to know how these things work!
To those offering advice about getting a lawyer: do you know how much a lawyer costs? A decent lawyer will charge you upwards of $300/hour. For just replying to this letter it'll run you about $100. And then if that other lawyer responds, the cycle will continue. Soon you're talking real money here, for something he did not do!
There are surely huge wins from having single TCP/IP stream and gzipping all of it including headers, but I wonder how much difference binary format makes on top of that?

Maybe you save 100B per request? On a large page that makes 100 requests? 10KB. When you've got one stream that eliminates roundtrip time/TCP/IP slow start that's simply 80milliseconds on a basic 1Mbit broadband.
Not knowing Japanese it's hard to evaluate the site for its entirety.

Often though, technically minded people tend to overlook the work required to organize and produce quality content on the web.

They might have content roadmaps made, pre-planned topics to write about during the year. They might have created a communication strategy, including stuff like how to react on current events in Japan and "the tone of voice" when writing to the public.

They might have trained the a number of staff to use the authoring tools and so on.

Doing the CMS integration is usually the easy part of the project.
Seven NetBeans Hints for Modernizing Java Code
I don't think we can blame Michael for writing comments that are upvoted to the top of the thread. I generally try to share my personal experiences as they relate to threads, and if the community as a whole finds them worth upvoting then so be it.

Perhaps you'd like a technical solution to your problem, in which case you can petition PG for a backend solution or you can whip up a quick browser extension to hide comment trees or to ignore Michael.
Technical Co-Founders/Partner Wanted
We are a new NYC based start-up in the Crowdfunding/microfinancing space.<p>We are currently looking to round out our co-founding team with 2 other technical cofounders.<p>Please Note:
-	Board is currently being finalized
-	This is a salary and equity position.<p>Please advise when you would be available to start as position begins in 3-5 weeks.<p>To Apply:
In addition, to sending your credentials, please answer the below questions.<p>- What portion of equity would you expect in a startup you are interested in?
- What monthly salary do you expect in order to cover your living expenses?
- What do you expect in terms of performance and deliverables from your fellow 2 co-founders?<p>We believe fit is the most important in a start-ups success. We will ask successful candidates to fill out an questionnaire upon applying for the position<p>Serious Inquires Only<p>Interested parties can contact me screenwriters@juno.com
Any owner of a Warp Gate installation will constitute a faction. Players will earn micropayments for use of their jump gate. The "Winning" faction will be the one controlling the most jump gates. Jump gates will require considerable exotic resources to maintain. Falling behind in jump gate maintenance will cause ownership to revert to the Precursor maintenance bots.
Show HN: My Chrome extension to add per-repo alert filtering to GitHub
GitHub's news feed has never been very useful (to me), because it's so noisy. Following a popular repo (e.g. Rails) floods the feed with so many alerts that I regularly miss things happening in my own repos. So I wrote a little extension with CoffeeScript and SCSS to try to fix it:

https://github.com/adammck/gh-news-feed-filters

It adds an "alerts" menu after the watch button, which allows you to pick which types of alert (push, tag, issue, etc) you wish to see in your news feed. Uncheck an event, and it's filtered (on the client side) from your feed. There are a couple of screenshots in the README.

I hope it's not too rude of me, a lurker, to submit my own stuff. But I think it's pretty useful.
Confused, did this guy just figured out the advantages and disadvantages of plain text?
What's the news here?
<pedantic>Your still burning fossil fuels to get the wood chopped and into your house.</pedantic>

Granted, if your burning something for heat it's the best option. But, with that much passive solar and the fact he is living in California he could probably get by using more insulation and basically never need to use a wood stove. I mean just look at all those single pane windows.
The developers behind it have a C++ background. Code style was not the point of the language, and therefore they went with something familiar to the devs working on it.
Canon announced the launch of EOS 60Da DSLR for astronomy fans
That's bizarre, I found it quite palatable. Maybe I'm on the right side of the ocean.
That's a conclusion you jumped to. The product may not be popular simply because of the colors or pricing, neither of which have anything to do with the purpose of the product.
Don't worry, this doesn't replace READMEs! It's an extra feature for people who want a customized page for their project.
I really quite liked those graphs. Anybody know what generated them?
Aspose.Newsletter April 2012 Edition is out Now
Aspose Newsletter for April 2012 has now been published that highlights all the newly supported features offered in the recent releases of its JasperReports exporters, SQL Server rendering extensions, .NET, Java & SharePoint components. This month’s technical article shows generating a Worksheet Thumbnail with Aspose.Cells for Java & a migration tip for creating a new diagram with Aspose.Diagram for .NET. A video tutorial for rendering a Gantt chart with Aspose.Tasks for .NET.

- Collect original copy of Aspose.Newsletter, April – 2012: http://www.aspose.com/blogs/aspose-business/customer-newsletters/archive/2012/04/01/aspose-newsletter-april-2012.html

- Technical Article – Generating a Worksheet Thumbnail with Aspose.Cells for Java: http://docs.aspose.com/display/cellsjava/Generate+a+Thumbnail+Image+of+a+Worksheet

- Tutorial Video – Rendering a Gantt chart with Aspose.Tasks for .NET: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxrOC_3brw4&list=UUoKbPb28Htp4MUiLtW3CT9g&index=3&feature=plpp_video
I think the situation is much more informatively modeled by a partial order though. You can induce a total order on a partial order and you can use this formula to do so conservatively, but maybe the real way to solve the problem is to create an intuitive way for users to appreciate partial orders.
I don't think you have to resort to any overly complex machinery to achieve similar behavior. The simplest approach is to just use a non uniform prior. His pessimistic bound could be emulated by having an initial alpha that places more weight on low star ratings. The intuitive interpretation of that being "things are probably bad unless proven good" roughly. Another option would be to generate the prior based on the posterior distributions of other items. Just take the distribution of ratings observations for all products of a given type (perhaps only items produced by that company?) to get a sensible prior on a new item in that category.

The strength of priors here is that it is very easy to take intuitions and encode them statistically, in an understandable way. Taking the lower bound of a test statistic doesn't admit much in the way of intuition.
Urban Dictionary no longer sorts by positive - negative, see e.g. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=usa. I don't know what they use now.
Brain Hack with Open Source TDCS Circuit Diagram
Thanks, I'll keep you in mind. :)
Au revoir, Mozilla. Good bye Mozilla
Previous company I worked with once ended up with Project Erick, after a CEO brain fart led to a meeting where he kept referring to (present and accounted for) John Erickson as 'Erick Johnson'.
CloudStack going Apache 2
Blue Gecko: a distributed team that works
Yes, that's mostly all that needs to be done. Everything else is good enough, even if not perfect, and the MEMS screen is as close to a book as I've seen so far.
Now even I want to create a new programming language.

for downvoters : pun intended.
You know, some time ago I decided it's much more important that a story is interesting, then that it,s true.

And your story was just brilliant.
I haven't investigated it in depth -- quadrature over a single variable as this is can be pretty quick to compute. Not sure how scipy does it.

Anyway, I personally think 95% confidence intervals are a crutch. The correct Bayesian approach is to consider two items, each with their own up and down votes, and integrate over all possible values for p1 and p2 (being the underlying probabilities of upvotes for item 1 and 2, respectively) over the observed data, and compute the likelihood of superiority of p1 over p2.

How to turn that into an actual ranking function? No idea. I doubt it would work, but you could compute against a benchmark distribution (i.e. the uniform 0-1 distribution).

If you do that, it probably turns out that your ranking function is the mean of the Beta distribution, which is simple: (U+1)/(U+D+2) where U and D are the upvote/downvote counts [note: we started with the prior assumption that p could be anywhere between 0 and 1, uniformly]. Basically, the counts shrink towards 1/2 by 1. This is a hell of a lot less complicated, and it achieves the goal of ranking different items by votes pretty well with more votes being better.
The Challenges for Developing Innovation in the Middle East
Technological leapfrogging is allowing developing countries in Africa and Asia to slowly build up their capacity for innovation after years of stunted potential. But the Middle East consistently ranks low in global surveys of innovation, even though the region includes some of the wealthiest countries in the world. Longstanding challenges, such as a lack of research, weak educational systems and restrictive government policies must be addressed, industry experts say, for the region to overcome the perception that little innovation happens there.
Amazing how much it means what time of day you post a story.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3791444
Try Push Notifications for Github in Firefox
I think the author is missing the point. The local TV station format is what it is because this is what SELLS. Our programs are subject to the same market forces. We are only free to design the internals.
I don't know what the threshold is, I just know I lost it months ago.
Somehow, I would guess that they were trying to "encourage" you to find a way to do what you wanted inside the firewall.
I implemented this algorithm by using likes/views in stead of positive/negative votes on http://mediaqueri.es/popular/ and have been quite happy with the results.
I bet hardly anyone (maybe even no one at all) will request the 3 months credit, even if they were inconvenienced. I know that if I were a paying customer of Balsamiq, this apology would be more than enough.

It's a shame to say most of our industry are not this open and honest, and that this is a breath of fresh air. Hopefully other companies will learn from this, I know I will.
Utilitarians are not nice people [Sept 2011]
Isn't that the OpenStack philosophy? "Lets be flexible"

I like AWS. You're right ... it isn't perfect. But it is good enough. And that's exactly what you want for a standard IMHO.

Just my personal opinions.
Absolutely! I just wrote a reply where I alluded to that, unfortunately I didn't refresh and see this post or I would have just plugged you instead.

The benefit of the Bayesian treatment here that I want to drill down on is how natural it is to adjust the prior to capture your beliefs about how items should be perceived in the presence of incomplete information. The frequentist approach is fine, but it does not provide such a pleasant, intuitive knob to tune.
Would love to talk more about your experience and results. Feel free to ping me @brennandunn on Twitter.
Patrick should write a book or extract his blog into PDF form or something.

Really, I'm serious!
> Every language is small compared to C++.

Good point. :)

However, the devs are aiming to keep the language simple. They're PL experts (watching them at work is quite intimidating, actually, as someone who doesn't have a PhD in CS), but they absolutely reject the allure of the ivory tower. Note the header on the page linked in this submission:

"a safe, concurrent, practical language"

Note "practical". I've witnessed several exchanges on the mailing list where the developers attempt to excise language features. For example, in Rust, `if` is an expression rather than a statement, and thus is redundant with the `?:` ternary conditional expression syntax familiar to C-like languages (the latter was removed). Alternatively, they often acknowledge that having three types of pointers is suboptimal from a simplicity perspective, but they consistently conclude that the semantics unique to each type of pointer are valuable enough to justify the mental cost.
I'm biased here -- but I see OpenStack Swift coming out as a winner out of all of this. It's an object storage system that can span multiple cloud orchestration frameworks.
They'll re-launch servers, returned or not. They don't need them though . All the data on those servers was uploaded by users, anyway. All the uploaded user content was put there because its replaceable and easy to re-upload.

Confiscate the servers if you want, just don't fool yourself into thinking it will stop a thing.
A patent is not a product.
Nice post! Just a UI suggestion, you want to make it as easy as possible for readers of your blog to learn what your product is about. Currently, clicking on the big blue "Projector" text only brings you to the blog's home page, not the site's home page. There is a small link at the very top of the screen that says "Learn more about Projector," which does take you back to the home page, but you might want a more prominently placed button, image, or text link. The big blue "Projector" text really looks like it should take you back to the site's home page, and I actually thought for a moment that /blog was in fact the same page I'd get to from the root of your site.
I downvoted most of the top comments on this subthread. This has nothing to do with the topic of this article or this discussion, nor is this even relevant to most people here. Please hash out your pissing contest / interpersonal grudges elsewhere.
Worth it to discover Intercom - looks quite useful. I just wish it could directly access my tables.
I agree the lower bound of a test statistic is a pretty indirect way of encoding intuitions. Somehow I tend to find loss functions the conceptually clearest way of encoding preferences about inference outcomes, though. But, in this case my feeling in that direction isn't very strong, and the priors-based solution seems fine.
Creating Custom Kendo UI Plugins
Floating shiny knot
I've always thought about this, and to me, a very simple (though slightly inaccurate) solution would be to sort using this formula:

(TotalScore - 1) / MaxPossibleScore

Such that (using the Amazon examples from the article):

((2 * 5) - 1) / 10 = 9/10 = 90%

((100 * 5) + (1 * 1) - 1) / 505 = 500/505 = 99%
48 cores and 128GB of memory and all messages are passed in the same JVM. So illustrates that Akka makes vertical scaling easy (is it really easier for complex cases?). But that doesn't translate for people who are trying to scale horizontally; They deal with other kind of synchronization problems.
What I'm talking about is beyond frameworks. I'm not a web developer, I'm a developer. For example: using scipy and numpy together to solve difficult statistics problems, rolling some stuff in C or cython to get speed boosts then pulling it together into an api by using tornado to service a rails app that needs some sort of on demand stats generation. Or programming an adrino. Or writing some mouse driving scripts, or using the SDL in C to make a game. Or whatever. Once you learn how to code to a certain degree you can do anything you want which is daunting because you don't only have a hammer. You have a tool chest and unlimited material to build whatever you want. Sure you could make cabinets (Rails apps for tabular data) which are easy and make good money, but you really want to make helicopters because that looks like a challenge, even though it will be harder and you will be in an environment you don't know how to handle.
Google Brings Churches Back into Nonprofit Program
Apple now worth twenty times Dell's market value
Off-topic, but still: Probably the reason JGC is having problems with CMYK colours is that he specifies them in RGB. Those are not the same.
One drawback to JSON files, and XML files and a number of other text file formats as well, is that they allow variable formatting. That makes them difficult to work with using tools like diff, which takes away a lot of the power of version control.

For example, you can take a JSON file and format it two ways: all on one line with little or no whitespace, and pretty-printed with multiple lines and indenting. Semantically, the two files are identical because they'll be parsed into the same data structure when you read it in. Textually they're completely different, which becomes a problem when two people with two different editors that use the two different formats when writing the file try to work on it. If person A commits the file pretty-printed, and person B makes a small change then commits it minimized, how does person A determine what's changed? It's a hassle.

XML suffers from this as well, and can be even worse. In some XML DTDs/schemas elements can be reordered without changing the semantic meaning of the document.

I've also had this problem with CSS files, which are partially order-dependent. If you have a big CSS file with lots of rules that cover different parts of your site, there are clumps of rules that are related and must be in the right order to cascase properly, but the clumps are mostly independent and their order doesn't matter.

In the past I've written tools that canonicallize formats like these just for doing diffs. It's a hassle, but it was necessary to allow my team to manage changes in shared resource files, and it worked well. Today, I'd use a tool like that as a git commit hook so that the repository always contained the format I wanted (assuming it's still usable in that format, which wasn't always the case) but back then I didn't have that option.
Arizona Law Gives 25 Years in Jail for Trolling
The described Pollution only exists if don't know how to start and run a wood stove. (like running it low on oxygen & overloaded with wood).
Most people who own such a stove know how to operate it right, for the simple reason that it saves money (less material burned) and work (less ash produced).
If you run an mis-adjusted oil-burner with a dirty nozzle you get (at least) the same level of pollution.
Former US Counterterrorism Czar: pretty clear US government behind Stuxnet
I agree, and I wouldn't suggest it as your general-purpose data serialization language. However, for configuration files, which are loaded either once or at most infrequently, the cost is negligible (IMO) compared to the benefit to human readability (and comments).
Not a definitive answer, but I quite liked the fact that my home country, Switzerland, apart from being neutral and having a government that doesn't have executive power centralised in a single person's hands, and having a relatively sane reaction to violent acts (see the Zug shooting, for example), also recently made a public statement that they did not feel that the issues that the movie/music industries face warranted any change of fair use or internet monitoring laws.
Is Mr. Braithwaite a technical lead or a director? Did he resign or is he just at the pub? Now I don't know what to believe.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a quick way to find the answers to these questions.
For HTTP, Fiddler is great too. It can already handle parsing a bunch of formats into an easier-to-read display, so I imagine it'll handle SPDY and WebSockets too if it doesn't already.
In defense of reinventing wheels
Hitting the streets of NY for feedback
Sometimes the most effective way to get feedback is to walk out of your building, go to places your users/customers would hang out and talk to them. That's what we plan to do April 7 - 11 in NYC, what do you guys think?
Test your Browser Cookie Limits
Math is hard, let's go shopping!

If you think this is too difficult then maybe you shouldn't try to design scoring/voting systems.
Making Data Import Into QuickBooks Easy
Thanks! We tried being taking the opinionated route and not making a focused effort on having it be meant for internal product teams (I think Pivotal Tracker is probably still best for that.)

We're working on the following:
- Constant UI/UX improvements
- A better dashboard
- Metrics that will help you see how accurate your estimates were vs. reality. A lot of people are using Projector as a "living estimate" that they send to their clients. Since it's money focused, you can see in real time how adding and removing tasks affects the overall project budget.
- Better email integration
- A functioning mobile experience

It's taken about 3.5 months to get the product to where it is today.
I may be wrong, but I believe SPARK may have greater validation fecilities than what rust provides at the moment.

E.g. SPARK allows static verification of bounded memory usage, which I am not sure if rust's `check` is able to express.
This is not about materials needs of the low skilled, but about the philosophical needs of the author. It's difficult to be a Marxist when, as you say, minimum wage routinely affords material comforts old royalty could only dream of. But, with a bit of effort, every Don Quixote finds his windmills.
Nice work Jeff!