skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>What human can understand it?

Lets start with Wilson's midpoint, since that's just high school math.

def mid(upvotes:Int, downvotes:Int) = {
val total = upvotes+downvotes+0.0

val up = upvotes/total
val half = 0.5

val a = total/(4+total)
val b = 4/(4+total)

a * up + b * half
}

So there are two weights a and b. Using these weights, the midpoint is a weighted average of half and the proportion of upvotes.

It should be very clear that if the total becomes large, a goes to 1 and b to zero. At that point you end up using the proportion of upvotes, just like Amazon.

Now, lets bring in the entire confidence interval.

def wilson(upvotes:Int, downvotes:Int) = {
val z = 1.96
val n = upvotes+downvotes+0.0d
val phat = upvotes/n

val lower = (phat + z*z/(2*n) - z * sqrt((phat*(1-phat)+z*z/(4*n))/n))/(1+z*z/n)
val upper = (phat + z*z/(2*n) + z * sqrt((phat*(1-phat)+z*z/(4*n))/n))/(1+z*z/n)
(lower,upper)
}

Using the author's data points, the results look like this:

val itemVotes = List((600,400),(5500,4500),(2,0), (100,1))
itemVotes.foreach( x => {
val s = mid(x._1,x._2)
val w = wilson(x._1,x._2)
printf("Up:%5d\tDown:%5d\tMid:%.3f\tW:[%.3f,%.3f]\n",
x._1, x._2,s,w._1,w._2)
})

scala> Up: 600	Down: 400	Mid:0.600	W:[0.569,0.630]
Up: 5500	Down: 4500	Mid:0.550	W:[0.540,0.560]
Up: 2	Down: 0	Mid:0.667	W:[0.342,1.000]
Up: 100	Down: 1	Mid:0.971	W:[0.946,0.998]

Basically, we prefer the lower bound of the confidence interval instead of the midpoint of that same interval.
Wow. I think Dowd just lost his spot as the king of insane, Rube Goldberg-esque exploits. I'd love to hear not just how the exploit works, but how all of this was discovered.
I am torn between it being brilliant, versus it should have been taken as a sign that adding all those symbols was just a waste of time. I sort of feel like Unicode 5 is jumping the shark here. At the point where you're arguing about how to refer to the color of the hair on one of your "graphemes", may I humbly suggest that the goal of creating a complete global encoding scheme is apparently done and the committee ought to disband. Unicode has apparently ceased being about being a universal encoding for human text and expanded its mission into becoming a universal icon catalog. This is just silly. Next up in Unicode 7, we deprecate the face icons in favor of a series of combining characters that allow to mix and match hairstyles, face colors, eyes, noses, etc., to create arbitrary faces, why not.
Ah, that's the answer: automated tools are making the changes, not human developers.
This House is unimpressed about Airport Security.
typical opensores; project finally free from the shackles of the man with the iron fist...immediately into phase two...licensing arguments. yay!!
http://braythwayt.com/
Yes, registration does makes getting damages easier.

However, that's not the point, the point is that the poster who I originally replied to thinks copyright is copyright registration. Copyright is granted upon creation in the US.

Registration is something you can do with a copyrighted work to make damages easier to gain.

While the state grants a car title and a car registration, they're different things. Same with copyright.

Copyright before the modern era required eventual registration to be valid, and I believe that's where much of current misunderstanding on the topic comes from:

http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm
An iPhone helps save a little boy stuck down a well
I just went through this with someone else. It's completely different. IE6 specific was not any sort of standard. There really isn't any need to nurse people along until they feel the need to upgrade. "Progressive enhancement" does cost money and take time, which could be better spent on people who upgrade to a modern browser.

This is all obvious, right? You can also use Firefox as far back as 3.6, an "ancient" browser, if you'd like.
Steven Levy's book Hackers from the early 80s has a large section on On-Line Systems including the story of that photo. On-Line was a party, that's for sure.
Thanks for the link :)

That graph is nice but this is the real graph you want to see:

https://img.skitch.com/20120331-ft3faju2jpqseq3ucff1fgi31h.p...

That's the "estimated" (all open trials) revenue growth for Freckle over its whole life time. Look how stagnant it was, then slow, and for how long. And compare that to now :)

NB: real billing, trailing a month behind any given date, is 5-15% less than the estimate (due to trials not continuing etc).
Web privacy rules turn poachers into gamekeepers
You may have something there, I do recall meeting a member of Apple’s System Seven team, and his business card read:

Omniscient Thaumaturge, Blue Meanies Group
Texas Instruments 1GHz CPU Programmable Watch for $25
U.S. Tax Hackers: Cheating or Beating?
See also http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...

Or maybe more notably, https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/db/_s...
I have no experience with the OpenStack but I would be extremely surprised if anyone with any experience with the CloudStack switches over.

Last time I checked it out, the CloudStack had a homemade ORM, no messaging queue, windows line endings on nearly every source code file (primary deployment platform is linux, I don't find that encouraging) and worst of all, the test coverage was in low single digits. It felt like a project being run by a marketing team, built using contractors and absolutely riddled with bugs. That said, if you're planning to run a private cloud with it and don't mind it falling over once in a while, then it's simple to setup and get running.
Quick hack to focus all parts of a Lytro image
The raw food movement would disagree but it's a valid point. Cooking does two things, both softens food and enables chemical reactions which create useful sugars.
It is worth pointing out that controlling and maintaining fire is distinct from knowledge of techniques to build fire ex nihilo. There are still groups that lack that technology.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese_people
Impressionist Icons – Vector Icons Pack
Impressionist Icons is an amazing pack made out of 200 vector icons. You will be able to change or adapt the icons the way you like them and play with their sizes (from 16x16px to unlimited sizes).
Should You Quit Your Job and Work On Your Own? Take the 3-Minute Test
Israeli terror expert: ‘Digital Pearl Harbor’ worries exaggerated
Let's just legislate everything! When you have a group of people whose job it is to legislate and they work a good portion of the year, eventually those people will create a law to govern everything including which finger you're allowed to pick your nose with.

I'm not sure how many days the Arizona house is in session but they should take a page from the US House and take a major portion of the year off. If this is what they choose to spend their time on do we really need them to show up for work? Hell, I'd be happy to have my taxes to toward their vacations if it kept them from coming up with these ludicrous bills.
I think Travis Goodspeed nailed this on Twitter: any time you're emulating or even just retrofitting one complex system into another, you can catalog the security assumptions made by both systems and look for clashes.

I found the underlying exploit here to be uncannily similar, designwise, to the Android jailbreak exploits in the INFILTRATE Android security slides that Immunity gave. "Oops, we allowed Dalvik processes to map read-write memory shared by init and the property database!"

(Understanding how Soeder could have discovered the flaw doesn't mean I think I stood a chance of putting this together).

I also think there's a fair bit of research done on the hypervisor/guest comms in VMWare. Also, Soeder appears to have taken up permanent residence in NTVDM. They should call it Soeder mode.
Size can be a meaningful metric. Would you prefer to download a 1Mb BMP or a 12Kb JPG? Why are all the JS minify tools so popular? Just some examples.

I'm actually surprised that no one else is curious about why some apps take 1Mb and others 10Mb and so on, or their contents in general. Sometimes it's because they have a ton of images, a little 3D engine or whatever. The replies about filters in this specific case make sense.
Download Torrent Files With IDM - New Trick + New Site
It's not an advantage at all.

Google Go uses syscalls directly because its threads ("goroutines") were designed for a 32-bit architecture so their solution to not running out of virtual address space was to use small stacks that can grow. But that means it can't just call normal C function directly because there may not be enough stack, so they have to reinvent libc on every platform they port to. Meanwhile virtually every desktop is 64-bit and even ARMs will soon be 64-bit.

Why design a new language around 32-bit computers? Good question.
Ask HN: any experience buying a website/app? Care to share?
Hi there

I'm planning to buy a website through flippa and the like. I've been reading up on the subject and watching the offers since one month now but so far haven't found anything interesting. I was either not convinced by the proof or thought that instead of buying a content site I could just spent the same amount of money hiring someone to write articles for me.

Does anyone has bought a site/product and would like to share the experience?

Or would you recommend avoiding marketplace sites and directly contacting existing sites?

Many thanks
TripAdvisor Files Antitrust Complaint Against Google With EU
Both incubators have been crucial in their own ways. YC has an immense experience and expertise in start-ups of every kind to draw from that helps us tackle general start-up challenges decisively. Rock Health has a deep network of health and medical partners and mentors for opportunities and challenges unique to health-tech start-ups.
I just leave it there...
https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/modules
Every time I go to the doctor with anything that isn't obvious I'm always amazed that some basic ML tools aren't part of the standard practice. Especially since the standard reaction now is "here take a bunch of expensive tests, you won't be paying for most of them out of pocket so who cares!" We've had the tools for decades now to at least say "given these symptoms, it's very likely you X, Y or possibly Z". Additionally I'd be surprised if there weren't some unexpected correlations between various features that most doctors would miss.

Of course I guess I shouldn't be too surprised since medical records keeping is still 30 years out of date. The fact that it's still common practice to share medical records by filling out a consent form and having one office fax paper forms to other is ridiculous.

I really hope we start to see disruption in this industry, so much potential for not only cost savings but improved care.
I believe you meant Linus.
"show, don't tell" = "get people to commit the fundamental attribution error".

-- @stevenkaas
Citrix submits cloud-building software to Apache Foundation
Anyone have the opposite? I've been working in Python for a few years but now I'm taking a Perl class.
The giant snake that stalked the Earth
I think we agree here. I just believe their intent is not as ominous as others are making it out to be. But it is still a ridiculous bit of writing.

Edit: also I find your use of the "F" word to be offensive and annoying and it makes me feel threatened. I DO hope you don't live in AZ. LOL
Toronto Kitchen Renovation
Toronto Kitchen Renovation: WoodPecker Kitchen Designs Inc - kitchen contractors offers design & renovation services including countertops and custom cabinets, to Mississauga, Etobicoke & Toronto.
Not mentioned is the common idiom of assigning regexp matches.

In perl,

> my ($a, $b) = '12' =~ /(\d)(\d)/;

In python,

> (a, b) = re.match('(\d)(\d)', '12').groups()

Note the python code here will throw an AttributeError if the match fails, whereas the perl will just assign undef to the variables.
Harvey Mudd acceptance rates by sex:

---------

Male 21%

Female 46.3%

---------

That the most selective schools with the most interested applicants can fiddle with their programs to get arbitrary demographics is no surprise. With the number people that apply to Harvard I imagine they could have a class of programmers that was 100% midgets if they wanted; that does not mean other universities can do the same.
Be a Connector.
Make Technology--and the World--Frictionless
The use of vague words like "offend" or "annoy" isn't the only thing that's disconcerting here. The focus on "intent" should also give us pause.

The thing is, it's pretty damned hard to prove intent in many, if not most, use cases on the internet. And I fear that this law, as written, gives the offended the power to define the "intent" of the alleged offender.

Sure, it's pretty easy to deduce intent if you can find an obvious pattern of repeated attempts to bully or harass someone. But rarely are circumstances so cut-and-dried. And for areas like message boards, comments sections, blog posts, and other open fora, who's to say what someone's intent was? I might write a blog post that's critical of a person or an organization, and that person or organization may get "annoyed" with the post. Does their annoyance, therefore, retroactively define my intent as malicious? Or was I simply exercising my 1st Amendment right to criticize? What a dangerous path we wander when we allow the delicacy of people's sensibilities to define the intent of our words.

I'm no lawyer, but I would imagine that the letter of this law is pretty indefensible on Constitutional grounds.
Be Social: Creative Ideas to Jumpstart Your Social Media Presence
One of Rust's primary design goals is safety. This is the source of most of its differences from both Go[1] and C++. Nullable pointers, free pointers, and shared mutable state are common sources of bugs and programmer errors in languages that have those features. Rust tries to address those issues by requiring the program to be explicit about handling such features. E.g., only pointers marked as nullable can have null value, and you are not allowed to dereference such pointers without a null check. This is the so-called "Bondage and Discipline" approach. There are pros and cons to this approach; the main arguments in favor of it revolve around the concepts of design-by-contract, and being able to enforce that contract, which lets you code less defensively.

[1] I get the feeling that Go's main design goal is ease of use, on par with Python.
A quick google search will tell you that's flat out wrong - there are interview questions that are illegal to ask in pretty much the entire first world, pretty much anything directly pertaining to legally protected statuses/classes.
> (And it is carbon neutral, so if you're going to burn something, better wood than fossil fuels from that standpoint.)

It is carbon neutral only if you plant a tree. Which you can do anyway.

Burning gas or oil, which have a better co2/kwh ratio and planting a tree is better than burning a tree and planting a new one.
You are absolutely correct that they are not mathematically identical. I struggled to word it in a way that would not mislead people, the distinction is important to emphasize.
Well, I dunno, I've never really had issues with it but, like I say, vast majority of my code has been in Python and Clojure. I'm not arguing against braces, btw, it's just another delimiter like whitespace. It's all just about what kinds of things you're willing to train your brain to do, IMO.
What's your take on Mike Daisey's Chinese Apple factories controversy?
The poster above is full of hyperbole. Piracetam improves memory, not IQ, has greater effect in those with a deficit, and has a subtle effect at best, particularly after habituation sets in.
The filters mostly just add a little zazz and personality to the photos. It's more about sharing. I kind of liken it to Twitter but with photos as the centerpiece instead of 140 characters.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Yes, they have their hearts in the right place (or so they say, I have a hard time trusting these people) but the problems arise when the law is enforced. If its too broad then there are problems. For example, if I lived in Arizona and I said "fuck" like i just did there I just caught myself a class 1 misdemeanor if they really wanted to pick on someone.

Laws are used beyond their intended purpose all the time. Does the Patriot Act protect us from terrorists? Debatable. But it certainly does allow for unconstitutional invasion of privacy. It's all about who's interpreting and enforcing the laws and the benevolent rulers with their good intentions today are likely to become our malevolent overlords of tomorrow.
Thoughtback would let you do something like that: http://thoughtback.com/
Some people, however, just tell you "Show, don't tell." The above paragraph shows it.
Expired Groupons Are Valid Again
Amazing work JonLee and crew! Congratulations on the launch!
Point 1 is not the worst point

Point 2 could be additionally descriptive

Point 3 -peaked- (piqued!) my interest

Point 4 was awesome

Point 5 should be universally implemented

ps. related: http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
Blindly porting iOS app to android app without adopting Android UI/UX. Just like what Readability did.
The role of capital
Thanks, seems to be the right think.
Google+ is a good example of something that is plain wrong in my opinion.

I uninstalled it months ago, so I can't tell if it has great improvements. But from what I recall, it can be easily compared to... the Facebook app, for example. What is the purpose of those 20-ish Mb of difference between the two?

You would think Google would be making great and efficient apps with their own platform.
This looks cool! Any chance of releasing this under a license?
Check Your Excuses At The Door
It's carbon neutral in the sense that the CO2 it puts in the air was taken out of the air a decade ago, not millions of years ago.

>Which you can do anyway.

Buying wood funds planting trees. Buying gas and oil do not.
I live in Arizona and I've been pulled over on immigration check before. I would guess you were stopped because of your pale skin and red hair, the more non-hispanic people they stop the easier it is to claim racial profiling is not part of the sweeps.
On the glorification of Bitcoin
>I think a large part of not saying "We need to work longer" is that if the work is interesting and rewarding enough, then employees will WANT to work longer.

Not necessarily, no. It's entirely possible your employees have lives outside work.
<conspiracytheory> http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html was written before YC S11. </conspiracytheory>
I think it would be pretty cool to hook Brubeck up to ZeroRPC. Brubeck can do all the web processing and then communicate with Mongrel2 for HTTP while delegating other work through ZeroRPC.
You are right with respect ot maturity, and Ada does have some high level concurrency constructs, though I'm not well versed enough to compare them with other language's.

I think a main selling point for Rust is its type system: it's more up to date from the state of the art of... the mid seventies, having Algebraic Data Types and type inference. Though it does seem to lack some of Ada's features, such as its limited support for dependent types in the form of its ranged numeric types and fixed-length array, so it may balance out.

Edit: oh, and Rust has no null.

I guess people still dislike verbose syntax, and you still see people making macho arguments about how they like to throw type-safety over the window for 'power', but Ada without doubt is a seriously underrated language.
Yes. The same here ;-)
Brilliant Shots of Source Code and IDE Editors
I don't think there is anything nice to say about your comment. You call me foolish for having an opinion you disagree with. Pot, say hello to kettle.
I think the trouble is that, for many programmers, "work on my networking" is on the same level as "grow an extra pair of arms" — might be handy, but no idea how to make it happen. So they resent those who do know how.

(I realized this might sound kind of condescending, so to be clear: I am in the category of "couldn't network his way out of a paper bag." I just realized a while ago that resenting people who are better than I am at some things was counterproductive, and it's better to watch and learn.)
Instagram = filters + social. Istagram doesn't have the best platform for filters or social, but is a case where the sum is greater than its parts. For filters, I prefer Camera+ and for this type of sharing I like Tumblr. If only Tumblr had a photo filter app.
Yes. we agree on the bill being too broad and open for misuse. I just don't think it is fair to focus on only one aspect (and perhaps misinterpret it) and then rail against it for the wrong reasons. Even if your desired outcome is noble, if your argument is misguided your message is lost.
Because that's not exactly the same thing.

People who don't like big words work to continually reassure themselves they're missing no precision of meaning or accuracy of tone. They often are. The selection has a grade level of 15.73 (aka, Junior in college)

Doesn't mean everything should be expressed at the college reading level, but it doesn't mean everything else should be expressed at the reading level of a 6th grader.

To move this sentence down to the flesch reading level of a 6th grader requires the following:

>The intuition behind the theory is nonetheless compelling, which makes the scarcity of policy prescriptions frustrating

to

>Acemoglu's idea make sense to me. I'm still mad and unsettled that it does not tell the government what to do to fix the problem.

FK Grade level of 5.8

And it had to go into the 1st person to do so, Try to write the sentence, capturing all the nuance of what he's saying and keeping it in the third person. Requires several more lines.
You seem to be using size as a proxy for speed: how long until I can use this tool? A slow website (e.g. one that loads 1MB BMPs or un-minified JS) makes you wait every time you access it; a large app download only makes you wait the first time you initially download it.

If I'm going to be using an app on a daily basis for an extended period of time, the speed concerns I care about are how long it takes the app to start up once launched, and how long it takes me to accomplish tasks. Over the lifetime of using an app, I'd argue that an extra two or three minutes in the app's initial download is little more than a rounding error.
I'm too much of a Math idiot to understand that paper. Have you seen a code implementation of it anywhere?
Please Build This: A Search Engine for Statistics