skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think computer models just mean you do replication the other way around. Of course anyone who runs the same program gets the same results, so ordinary replication is pointless--instead you answer the same question with a totally different program and see if your answer is close.

And then, of course, you wait and see if the predictions of the models come true. You can't reset the world and re-test it, but you can re-run the models and ask for more prediction in the future and wait some more.

Climate scientists do both of those things all the time because they're in one of the most heavily scrutinized fields.

Isolating variables just means you compare two setups with everything the same except one. That's actually one of the things the models are for. You can't re-run the world without humans, but you can re-run the model with humans turned off.

Then someone else can do the same with their totally different model. And if both of your answers match reality with humans on and each other with humans off, well maybe the difference between humans on and humans off is the impact of humans. Or maybe not. But adding more different models helps.

In short: climate science generates testable hypotheses, does replication, and isolates variables. It's possible they're wrong (and publishing source code is a good idea) but they don't have a methodology problem. And they're probably right.

Also, Michael Crichton basically wrote Hollywood scripts in novel form. He's not a good source on anything.
The Institute of Medicine report "To Err is Human: Building A Safer Health System" states: "At least 44,000 people, and perhaps as many as 98,000 people, die in hospitals each year as a result of medical errors that could have been prevented". Some improvements have been made since then but it's still a huge problem.

http://www.iom.edu/Reports/1999/To-Err-is-Human-Building-A-S...
Interesting bit from the end of the article:

"This isn’t just bad news for Shaw. Because his company is in the red, he has been unable to pull together the financing he needs to expand his factory in Little Elm. So he has partnered with Chinese companies, which put up money to build assembly lines in China in return for permission to produce his syringes for the Chinese market. When his patents do run out, the Chinese manufacturers will be the ones poised to bring his technology to the world market, meaning all the jobs and economic benefits that could have gone to the local residents will instead go to the people of Gansu Province. "

Goddamnit.
With the recent rumors around the idea of a Steam-based console, is it possible that all this work for a Linux client and native Linux steam engine is setting the framework for an open source (software and hardware) based console.

EDIT: I see other comments state that Valve is not working on any sort of console. Still, it leaves me thinking they may have a longer-term plan than just selling games to Linux users.
Automattic On Track To Make $45M In Revenue This Year
Not quote my point. What I'm saying is that you make an assumption that 8 letters are used due to the ridiculous complexity requirements. Then you get all the possible combinations of letters and numbers for 8 character passwords. Then you remove all dictionary words and reversed words, all dictionary words (and reversed words) ending with a year, all combinations with repeats, all serial numbers and known patterns (like ABC). Then you further remove from this list all the combinations that don't have mixed case, a number and a special character.

I'm interested in knowing how many possible passwords are left?
That method doesn't give you a running Postgres; you still need to configure the cluster yourself.
New study finds small startups typically overspend 50% on AWS
Anyone know why they pivoted? As of last summer, they were doing Cause related stuff (like we do at Causes.com). It was a little weird -- I saw a few cartoons on their site of a cute penguin (their logo) standing triumphantly over a dead polar bear (with the Causes logo). They also became the Mayor of our office on 4sq. So.. seeing that they're doing people search right now is a bit of a departure.
WWDC 2012 sold out in 2 hours
Very useful post, thank you. I'd love to see some charts in there too.
The analogy of a "horseless carriage" kicked off a cascade of comparisons in my head of how businesses are handling not only mobile, but distributed applications and more. Interesting article.
Neat project.

Interestingly enough, I often use the core memory patent as an example of a true invention worthy of being issued a patent. If there's an invention that was, at the time, new, useful and non-obvious this was it.

Here's that patent: http://www.google.com/patents/US2667542

One of my favorite examples of the opposite, that is, obtaining a patent for something that is not an invention is this MIT patent: http://www.google.com/patents/US5650704

Yes, they patented a motor connected to a spring with a force sensor to control, well, force. You know the old F = kx spring formula. Not to beat MIT to death --they do a lot of great stuff that I'll never understand-- but filing for a patent on a motor with a spring? The real joke is that the patent office granted it.

Don't get me started on software patents. OT for this thread anyway.
Actually this is my very first project using Node.js, I assign myself small projects like this to learn a language/framework. I picked up some code snippets on various tutorials, so that's why it seems like déjà vu ;)
Node.js is really easy to learn and that's the kind of small app you could build after a few hours/days.
I've found one useful way to think about the question "what was before the Big Bang" is to ponder "what is North of the North pole"?

Don't stretch the analogy too far - I'm not suggesting that spacetime is topologically shaped like that - but to me it's a useful example of a co-ordinate system which seems locally euclidean going whacky at/near the boundaries.

Roughly, "But there has to be something before the big bang, you just go back a bit further in the same direction!" == "But there has to be something North of the pole - you just go a bit further in the same direction!"
It's would help to get deaths per mile driven, too. Do Vietnamese cars drive more or less than Americans? My auto sits in my garage all year, quite safely.
When I think of the federal government 'fixing' health care, this is the sort of thing I think they can fix. Not single payer, not mandatory coverage, just good enforcement of anti-competitive practices, ways to enable innovation with patient consent Etc.
Not to mention they know the names of your pets :-)
Physicists see solution to critical barrier to fusion
Agreed that tutorials on 'how to program' are and should be different from tutorials about a new language for experienced programmers, but one thing that both should do early on is a complete 'Hello World' example to show the minimum of code and compile/run steps required to run the simplest example. Too many tutorials skip that step and leave many of their readers unable to run the tutorial code at all because the authors haven't bothered to describe how to get a simple program to run. Those are obvious after you've done it once but completely unobvious to the people who read tutorials to learn a new language.
"Dampf" is German for steam. I believe its one of the things eaten at the Octoberfest to which the author alludes to indirectly the article:

>the land of beer and wonderful Bayerischen Frauen and delicious food

The author appears to have picked Germany as a bit of an overall theme (Beer, Prost, Dampfnudel, Bayern etc). Not sure why.
"because we’re competing with everybody who puts up a webpage on the internet"
Who cares about the desktop market? For games, what matters is the gaming market. Grandma's $100 after rebate machine doesn't count.

Gamers are rather picky about their machine and spend a significant amount of cash. They usually tinker with their machines a lot, to get a couple FPS boost. Give them an OS which will let them tune it and make it run all their games, possibly even faster than the alternatives, and they'll switch.
HTC-Facebook phone rumored for late 2012 launch
Obat Tradisional Gondok | Jus Manggis Xamthone
obat tradisional gondok >> Sebuah solusi terbaik untuk anda yang mengalami keluhan penyakit gondok. Saat ini xamthone plus dapat di jadikan sebagai obat tradisional gondok yang dapat atasi penyakit gondok dengan cepat dan alami. Xamthone plus sangatlah aman untuk di konsumsi tak ada bahan kimia dalam kandungan xamthone plus ini dan bahan-bahannya 100 % alami. Anda jangan khawatir xamthone plus juga tidak sama sekali menimbulkan efek samping yang negatif jadi sangatlah aman sekali.
...which involve error correction and a lot of redundancy. But I assume you meant radhard electronics boxes, which lets you run whatever you want within a cosmic-ray shielded box.
"aptonym"
Ask HN: Started recruiting. Decided this vs. a Resume. Thoughts?
عضویت در گروه فیس بوک
So you admit to a number of rather dubious practices both on an openly avaible blog and on a forum that has at least one EX NSA employee as a poster.

Anyone else think this is ill advised to say the least - its just asking for your phones to work realy well "nudge nudge wink" ;-)
Barcelona petition FIFA to declare possession more important than goals
How bitly's realtime metrics system works
I'm part of the west coast Cocoa/iOS community and only about ~10% of got a ticket (I work on Growl). Prominent devs from Square, Instagram, and other startups that I know didn't get a ticket that all have been going since 2006.
Theres an App for that…if you have the money.
Clickatron - bitly's realtime metrics system
How to Set Deadlines for Your Students
I think it was a Starcraft joke :P
I actually wouldn't disagree with you on making distinctions. I specifically referred to it as "scholarly" because it's the term that's used to sound more serious.
"Comic" sort of carries a negative connotation, it's mostly associated with superhero comics (for comics) or action/comedy aimed at young boys (for manga),
and some people don't seem to like this association. So they invented a more serious sounding term so they don't have to call it "comics".
> A statement from Google regarding whether or not they will scan the data and files in GDrive to develop further profiling information or other data about the user

The privacy policy unequivocally states that they will use all your data to improve the service, which means that humans will be extremely restricted from reading your data, but the robots have free reign.
Abstract (I hate "tl;dr"): By using a graduated late penalty function with second-granularity, you achieve several desiderata:

(1) Ensure submission within a week of a nominal deadline.
(2) Be perfectly even-handed without being draconian.
(3) Eliminate whining and excuses.

Most importantly, it's socially efficient, incentivizing students to take exactly as much extra time as they need (to a point).
Totally agree. We moved from AWS to Hetzner and reduced the costs by 66%.
What an idiotic move - So now they want to make webkit the next IE of internet?

Standards are standards - period. I see ton of wrong with this approach, or... mabye we should just ignore the w3C CSS Working group.

Vendor prefixes are fine - as long they are used as temporary solution, and no one expects them to be the "default" way of doing things.
This caught my eye:

Kaiser spokesman Jim Anderson argues that if Shaw’s products didn’t make their way to hospitals it was because of “significant supply issues” on Retractable’s end. He also says they were prone to malfunction and that, in several cases, needles detached and were left “stuck in the arms of patients.”

I'm doubtful that a Kaiser spokesman would fabricate these problems, which leads me to believe that perhaps this reporting isn't as balanced as it could be. Maybe these needles are great, but perhaps there are two problems here, one being a competitor with a lot of control over the customers, and a second being problems with supply chain and quality control.
"Or he sold his wares to systems so small and poor that they weren’t on the GPOs’ radar—prisons, nursing homes, Indian reservations, and the like."

So to minimize my risk of line contamination, I'd be better off getting my medical care in a prison. (Assuming this guys product really does work).

What will change this is how hospitals etc. are reimbursed - the trend is that reimbursements will be based on outcomes, especially with changes introduced by the ACA that go into effect in 10/2012.
http://www.healthcare.gov/law/timeline/full.html

So what matters then, are actual outcomes. If in fact there is an increase in infections from line contamination, or poor surgical outcomes (from a towel being left behind or what have you) - this will be measured and monitored, and believe me hospitals will address them, especially the for-profits, which seem to be surging again.

There was a interesting company out of Blueprint Health that addressed hospital procurement, allowing price comparisons. I don't have the details on how the GPO's are dealt with though.

http://www.procuredhealth.com/
There is an google authenticator app for android that you can register with your two factor auth so you can just open the app rather than wait for the text message.
مشاهدة مباراة ريال مدريد وبايرن ميونخ
مشاهدة مباراة ريال مدريد وبايرن ميونخ بث مباشر اونلاين اليوم الاربعاء 24/4/2012 في نصف نهائي دوري ابطال اوروبا اليوم -Watch Real Madrid and Bayern Munich Live Online Wednesday 24/4/2012
It's not like every distribution out there uses a different audio framework, graphics API etc. The fundamental components are all the same. Efforts to standardize a lot of things in the free-Unix/Linux world have come a long way in the last 5-7 years.

Also, realistically, the number of supported distros would likely amount to a small handful. Bigger distributions like SuSE, Fedora and Ubuntu.
The 50% longer answer is 'yes':

Google - "giving itself all permissions it could possibly need" including creating derivative works of any kind.

Dropbox - "solely to provide the Services"

Skydrive - "solely to the extent necessary to provide the service"

iCloud - "solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted"

Basically Google can do anything they want with your data, but the others can only use the data for what you would expect (storing/syncing your data).
They could store a hash of your old password, along with 40 hashes, one for each character, hashed against the hash of the old password. e.g.

'this_is_my_password" => hash1
'hash1_t' => hash2
'hash1_h' => hash3
etc

This way, when you enter the first character of a new password, they can hash it against your old password, see if it creates hash2 and refuse permission to use the new password. Hopefully this is the same way as websites can ask for only selected characters from a password when you log in.
Simple and useful overview. I find enumerate() quite useful. I should probably define generators more often.

One built-in function I basically never use is zip(). I know how it's used and what it does, and I grok the names/ages types of examples that are always used to explain it. But I've simply never needed it in real code. Anyone else use it often, and in what contexts?
A file sync utility exposes data via the filesystem. What more headless do you need? And API for manipulating sharing ACLs and sync parameters?

I bet someone will reverse engineer the client/protocol to enable those features that are currently GUI managed.
This is an article about compliance at a call center - they aren't expecting people with lots of experience to be working there. This guy shouldn't be working at a call center, he said he was overqualified, it'd be like a gourmet chef working at McDonalds and then complaining that they are forcing him to use their procedures to cook burgers. The procedures aren't written for experts and if you don't know what you are doing there could be severe negative consequences.

This article would be more effective if it was in something which requires creative thinking as opposed to something that can be accomplished through rote memorization.
Nokia Europe - Nokia 808 PureView with 41 MP camera – Gallery
This is a good thing, and there is basically no way around it.

There is a varying degree of a WebKit monoculture on mobile. Without great site compatibility, users will never successfully switch to a non-webkit browser, but currently much of the great mobile content out there assumes webkit prefixes and userAgent. So Opera, Mozilla, and MS basically need to adopt some of the mobile webkit properties in order to get compatibility, in order to get users. It's either that or advocacy wherein we try to get every site ever to not publish with just WebKit prefixes. But in reality, this advocacy effort has been underway already for over two years and we're still in this bad situation.

Look at the chart linked to from http://paulirish.com/2012/vendor-prefixes-are-not-developer-... When IE10 comes out (or it's complementary mobile browser), less than 25% of all sites that use CSS transitions will have them working in IE10.

Vendor prefixes are bad for us as developers and they're bad for browsers because it leads to situations like these. We'd be in a better situation without them.

BTW, one detail that wasn't really covered: I believe this change is localized to Opera's mobile browsers. Their desktop story is, I think, unchanged.

(All the above is a personal opinion and not that of my employer, yadda yadda)
The Hobbit advance screenings disappoints  blames Red's high resolution
This is my theory.

After watching Steven Hawking's series on The Universe, he talked about Black Holes and how they keep growing and growing; sucking in more mass and getting denser and denser, whilst at the same time amasing more gravity.

i.e. the more mass something has, the more gravity it exerts, the more mass it attracts -- a viscious cirle.

So my theory, don't laugh, is that the universe if cyclical. After a Black Hole has consumed everything, including other Black Holes etc. it explodes and all that mass gets released creating the universe as we know it. And so on and so on over a gazillion years.

Is that absurd?

Edit: Many thanks for the informative replies...
To add to patio11's note: I don't have as much social clout here as he, but believe me when I say that people skills (I'm lumping in various communication skills here) are way, way more important than technical skills. Reprioritizing is right. In my opinion, his success is due more to his "soft" skills; he's closer to a one-percenter [grin/duck/run] in terms of his communication skills than his technical ones.

Even so, this isn't rocket science. Just like any other skill, effective communication can be taught. Like many other pursuits, it doesn't take long to distinguish yourself just because there's so much rubbish out there.
Bityl's Metric system Clickatron
Two people (aditya and dmarinoc) tried to submit this but bitly links aren't allowed:

http://word.bitly.com/post/21721687297/clickatron
I'm glad that our startup isn't dealing with medical devices, only with software. Still, I've been working with some medical device makers and it is a wild and crazy world they work in. The whole GPO system is clearly broken, but I've met some people - at device makers no less - that are passionate about ending it.

We're doing our part to help that along.
http://word.bitly.com/post/21721687297/clickatron
Spacecraft are generally closed, and will likely contain fans for circulation. Won't that be a problem?
The Man Who Makes the Future: Wired Icon Marc Andreessen
The movie EDIT "puncture" (thanks diek!) is a reasonably entertaining account off the retractable needle.

US healthcare (and thus, US patients) may miss out on improved syringes, but I hope they're able to sell many of these to the developing world where needle re-use is a serious problem. Re-using needles when 10% of the population has HIV/AIDS is awful. Not just because you risk transmitting HIV to other people, but because people with HIV are not able to resist any infection you pass onto them.

I'm surprised that the practices are legal - I'd have thought that the US would have had good law to ensure free and fair competition.
I personally hope the software world picks this up, so we might get some actual data on things like TDD, agile, waterfall, instead of peoples' anectdotes and experiences on past projects and whatever Martin Fowler thinks up (no offense, I love Fowler, but he would benefit from proving some of his assumptions)
Answering a direct question is not unpolite in my book.

I am not crazy about the colors of the wordpress theme. I chose it in part to try to coordinate with the existing site and in part because other design elements are nice. I will look around but if I had more of the right skills I would probably first try to tweak the existing theme instead.

I don't understand your last sentence in point 2. Do you mean leave the archive as the main body of the site? I don't want to remove the older part of the site because it has detailed instructions on treatments which I once used but a lot of the info there is out of date. I would like to preserve it but move the emphasis to the blog and try to find a means to more effectively convey my current thinking and mental models. My preference is to emphasize rubrics which can lead to multiple possible effective solutions. I think a top down, one size fits all solution helps create problems.
Apple Offers 150 Student Scholarships For WWDC 2012
Yeah, the reimbursements look like a good measure. We're a fan of some of the outcome criteria, especially the opportunities we've found to streamline things.

dr_, are you in the health tech field?
In some ways, I understand the need the vendor prefixes, but they do seem to be causing some fragmentation. I'm getting to the point on some CSS properties that I just use the real CSS name (like border-radius) and don't use the vendor prefixes at all since all the major browers that support radius use the non-prefixed name.

If you all remember back in the IE6 dominated days, Opera was built to the web standards but in order to make it a viable browser for pages that were only tested in IE6, they had to try to emulate IE6 behavior in Quirks mode, and I'm sure Mozilla had to do the same thing.

Hopefully this is a short-term thing unless standards are more finalized and browser implementations become more consistent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_model
edit and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_cosmology
This blog is about interesting
I thought the truncated Chebyshev series of an arbitrary function minimizes the L-inf error among all polynomials of the same degree, because Chebyshev polynomials have minimum L-inf norm among all monic polynomials of the same degree.

Let's try this: Tell me how you would construct a minimax approximation according to your definition?
The screen is resistive touchscreen, cannot hold a 135° angle open, the keyboard is weird, the analog sticks too, the buttons are tiny, the pandora is super heavy and bulky.
Next generation cinema camera battle – who will win?
A Google wishlist
That's functionally equivalent to storing the password in plaintext. The individual letter hashes would be trivial to reverse.
I'm very wary of the idea of tampering even slightly with the mass of these things. It would not really take an awful lot of effort to send one our way after dislodging it from a stable orbit.
You won't work anywhere in the financial industry without agreeing not to give investment advice or do anything that could be perceived as giving investment advice on the side. This includes having any side project (paid or unpaid) that remotely involves finance. Having been an employee of one of the big banks, I can say that I haven't seen these companies actually enforce the rules to the extent that the author details, but I suppose that varies firm to firm. I must say, though, that the author's description of the job gives me mental images of a worker at FoxConn. I think being fired was a blessing.