skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always wondered why the great people I know can do so much better than having to do A/B testing in their own businesses. Sure they try new things, but they are most certainly not applying an A/B type algorithm.

It seems the article mentions something quite important in their algorithm: mostly do what has the most expected value. The people who are great just have a much better way to judge that. They can make a poster with 20 design choices (or 50 or 100) and make an estimate of what would probably work and what probably wouldn't on each one, from the size of poster, to the font sizes and types, whitespace, where to place different elements, graphics choices, etc etc etc. They certainly include a random aspect, but this is the exception rather than being the norm. Mostly what dictates choices is your expected returns on them, and the random aspects are compared with these.

They do pay exquisite attention to their random choices: "This week I decided to see what would happen if I mixed up the day, date, location, and description rather than have it be in logical order, to see if this engaged people any more" (or: to change any other choice randomly). But it is the exception rather than the norm, and done rarely rather than often. They still pay attention to the results, which helps inform their "expected value" function.

(I didn't spend much time on the article or the linked papers, so please feel free to correct me if I'm misinterpreting. A rigorous algorithm doesn't have much to do with real-world choices, and we are simply nowhere near having an automated web service to write your copy, regardless of how many users get to give feedback on it. So the whole thing isn't very interesting to me, and the above is just my impression of 'why'.)
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From Apple to JC Penney and The Perils of Everyday Low Prices
I agree with the first point, but I think compressing and non-reversible are necessary conditions for a given function to be called a hash function; if they weren't, any mathematical function would do, wouldn't it?

One could see a hash function as an (extremely) lossy compression method. However, lossy compression only makes sense when you can exploit features of the domain, e.g., psychoacccoustics with sound, or characteristics of human vision with photos; perceptual hashes come to mind here.
Llds: Low-Level Data Structure
With all due respect, this is a tall order of false equivalence. The US's track record on human rights, income inequality, etc., is far from spotless. It's borderline infuriating at times. But even to place it in the same ballpark as the PRC's is silly.

Consider that, in the US, people were able to protest and stop SOPA and PIPA from coming to pass. In China, the government controls the entire internet. It's actually debatable that we could be having a similar conversation about the government, on a site like this one, were we in China right now. The U.S. detains certain people without warrant or trial in its misguided "war on terror." But the PRC can detain any of its citizens, at any time, for any reason, and often does.

It's interesting to consider the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of our own government and society. I'm all for it. But we shouldn't lose sight of reality.
I read The Millionaire Fastlane recently, and it was fantastic. The author talks at length about the potential folly of saving your whole life in order to have fun at the end. Who knows how long you will be around or what your health will be like when you finally "retire"? The book has lots of great insights and strategies for the startup crowd. There's a Mixergy interview with the author available here: http://mixergy.com/mj-demarco-limos-interview/

Book link: http://www.amazon.com/The-Millionaire-Fastlane-Wealth-Lifeti...
Right now the most important difference is that in the US you still have democratically elected representation and a substantial freedom of speech component. So long as you have that, you have the potential to change the system peacefully through argumentation / debate / voting etc.

Is Obama a terrible President? A great President? Debate it endlessly, but he was elected by a massive wave of popular support in a democratic fashion, beating an opponent (Clinton) that vastly outmatched him in theory.

Doesn't mean the US isn't still going to continue driving right off the cliff, but with those pieces in place, it'll be nobody's fault but our own if we don't take the opportunity and remaining critical freedoms to reverse course and fix the system peacefully.
What do you mean? In terms of population? Europe is around 700 million and the US is what 400 million at the most and China is even larger.

So given the population trails behind China and Europe, human rights in the US don't look that rosy (neither does the UK for that matter). I mean the US has for some time had the largest prison population on the planet. I'm just putting that out there as well, and try to understand what you are getting at?
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China is incredibly larger for same culture/language population numbers, yet it doesn't have half the issues.

While this is all propaganda and the article clearly avoids some details, the truth is the situation is really bad and Chinese people have no reason to look up to the US, as much as US people have no reason to look down on China.

Right now, as an European, I'd rather live in China than in the US.
Actually, you kind of are already in the RL space when using AB testing to make online decisions, you just may not be thinking of it that way.
From Sutton & Barto "Reinforcement learning is learning what to do--how to map situations to actions--so as to maximize a numerical reward signal."
That is exactly what you are doing when applying A/B style hypothesis testing to inform decisions in an online application.
Plus, personally, I think A/B testing is, in a way, much harder to interpret, at least most folks interpret wrong, which isn't a knock, since it is provides a non-intuitive - at least to me ;) - result.
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Sorry for the ambiguous wording. I was writing about the crappy ones, not all european websites.

I think there are crappy web sites and buggy back-ends all around the world, and we just learn to ignore most of them in everyday use (or you don't and you just go crazy).
Wait, but you do write off your car like that in GTA?

At least I do. The damage model may not be as realistic, but my cars rarely stay in proper shape for as long as 15 seconds.

Partly because wrecking cars is 70% of the fun in GTA...
In Canada, a number of illiberal statues, legal precedents and common-law practices have been struck down over the past 30 years, thanks to our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Britain has no such fundamental touchstone of liberty, so your legal rights there are rather murkier.
Back in 2001 I started having serious pain in my right wrist and solved it by switching to a trackball mouse. Laptops with touchpads are ok too as long as I don't pivot my wrist when I use them. Basically I've trained myself to keep my wrist pretty stable as I do things on the computer and that works well.
Hopefully, sharing this information and your story will lead to more informed doctors recommending this technique.

Thank you for an inspiring story and your exemplary perseverance.
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+1 for Carmageddon, still one of the best games of all time.

I can't even remember what the game-goal was (hit checkpoints or something?) but I do fondly remember randomly wrecking cars for way too many hours...
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Wondering why all of a sudden I am getting the "Stop Spamming Us" message for every second post I try to submit. I'm putting them up from UNTETHER.tv - not spam. Thanks in advance!<p>Rob
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Well lets get rid of her then!
Thanks for answering the whole issue I came here to complain about, always a nice change to see laws functioning semi-rationally.
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I'm not entirely sure why you felt the need to make a fake account immediately before posting this, your only comment to date.
With all due respect, you are blinded by the kool aid my dear.

In the US the government controls the entire internet, as well as every information every company holds, including facebook, twitter, google and apple - as well as Intel and Microsoft.

The PRC and the US both have "legitimate" ways to detain any citizen or non-citizen at any time, for any reason, and often do.

I would like to insist that there is NO difference on that specific point since the patriot act.

SOPA and PIPA aren't govt related, they're big content's attempt at having it's own control channel over the internet.

By the way, you forget the positive aspects of China, like those emphasized in the article: In a communist country, there's real security.

My grandparents were in USSR in the 70's, and many like them said they had absolutely NO FEAR AT ALL letting their kids play outside.

That's right dream on. You'll never get that in the US, unless you have your own security.
Have a transition activity after work to get yourself ready for your personal project. This could be yoga or a short run, or even meditation. Or a meal where you're not multitasking.

If you aren't taking classes, fix your after-work sked as though you have classes. Dedicate a night or two (or more) for your project.

Make sure you have time for leisure and other activities to avoid burnout or resenting your involvement in your project.
moot.

mute == "does not talk"

moot == "of little or no practical value or meaning; purely academic."

moot/mute is a tricky word combo because smart people can justify using "MUTE" instead of moot, and english is such a terrible language w.r.t. spelling there are no good clues to use one versus the other (and "moot" is far less commonly used).
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Which is a marginally better excuse than the standard 4 year old's "someone else did it and ran away", but only just.
Well, according to him, the only real threat he feared is Sweden extraditing him again to US after that (which would make no sense for Sweden to even try to do that, but who knows). But if that never happens, I think he can get rid of whatever charges he has against him in Sweden.
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Man is it going to burn when you open your eyes ...
what you've just said says nothing about the length of the hashes, which was my point. You would have to say something like "all possible inputs of a certain length are your pigeons, and these same possibilities(1) are the holes"

(1)this time interpreted as the hash of one and only one of the same list of possible inputs

The proof is not so straightforward, because it's not always true when you expect it to be true. For example, can you hash, reversibly and uniquely, all the numbers between 0 and 10 (real) to all the numbers between 0 and 1?

You would expect the answer to be "no" since there are "more real numbers from 0 to 10 than from 0 to 1". But that's actually not necessarily true the way you might expect, and the answer is actually "yes you can". Simply geometrically establish a coordinate plane like this

a

0 b 1

0 10

so that point (a) has a well-defined coordinate, say (0,1) the 0 from the second line is at the origin, the 1 at the second line is at (1,0) and the bottom 0 is at (0,-1) with the bottom 10 being wherever the ray passing through a and passing through (1,0) - enough to uniquely identify the ray - has the y-value of -1.

Now to get the hash simply move 'b' to wherever between 0 and 1 you're trying to hash, solve for the ray that passes through a and that point, and solve for the x-value of the ray where it has y-value of -1.

Through elementary proof which should be obvious, you'll see that any b casts a distinct ray (which is easily reversible introducing a c into line 3), and you can solve for it if you like.

I'm not saying that you're wrong, but I think the proof isn't as "obvious" and straightforward as you're saying. It doesn't apply to just anything, but to the specific case of the impossibility of hashing distinct length inputs uniquely into a discrete space defined by a uniformly shorter length of bits.
To elaborate a bit, I don't mind the ads in google because google does a decent job of targeting them, I sometimes learn more about my search from the ads.
This is certainly true, but I don't think it offers much practically. I would prefer to use a language that re-used or recycled keywords made up of letter than use a soup of punctuation just for the sake of being different.
China doesn't have half the issues? That a lie, and then some.

There's a very good reason Chen Guangcheng desperately wanted to escape China.

China has every bit the racism and nationalism problems that America has. Ask China what they think of the Japanese some time.

China is surely very willing to leave the peaceful, successful nation of Taiwan alone, right? It's not like they have any intention of brutally, viciously conquering the island when it's convenient, invading and murdering its people all in the name of reclaiming land that acted as a safe haven for Chinese fleeing from the genocide of Mao (Mao having killed tens of millions of his own people).

China is massively belligerent and violent. Should we free Tibet? Oh right, Tibet doesn't really exist any more because they gradually cleansed the entire country of its people and culture.

China has radically worse inequality, 3/4 of a billion people living on $1 to $2 dollars per day, half a billion people without proper access to sanitary drinking water or indoor plumbing. China still has half of the poorest 10% of people on the entire planet, meanwhile they're printing billionaires along the eastern coast.

China has no systems comparable to medicare, medicaid, or social security. As faulty as they may be in the US, China doesn't even have a real social safety net at all.

Chinese workers have absolutely zero rights, and there are no rights to unionize.

China has almost zero property rights at all.

There is no right to democratic representation in China.

There is zero freedom of speech in China.

China is even more violent, with mass executions in large stadiums just to clear out crime numbers, regardless of whether those executed are in fact the guilty. 5,000 people were slaughtered execution style in 2009 alone, roughly 50,000 people per decade are killed in execution fashion by the Chinese Government. Texas by comparison executes about 25 people per year, and that gets endless press.

China routinely locks down entire villages. Over 200 riots were reported last year alone. They shut off all access to the external world, and proceed to haul off the trouble makers to gulag camps for political prisoners.

The propaganda that China doesn't have half the problems of the US is complete bunk.
In Paris there are the Parisjs meetup: http://parisjs.org/

You can have a look at the links here: http://demojs.org/tips.html
Around Lyon there is the VIP demoparty also Alchimie event.
Or this community is full of engineers and scientists who don't believe in the quack medicine conspiracy theories about how their being oppressed by science.
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Nope. I'm completely right in what I said, and I was very careful to be specific about it.

My eyes are in no way closed, and what you said is not a valid retort, it's proof that you have nothing to say.
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The difficulty here is that NL has a strong oversight on wiretapping - so whereas in the UK, a single wiretap warrant can get other phone numbers on as riders (usually one cop doing a favour for another cop), which makes the UK numbers look smaller, the NL is more open and so has larger looking wiretaps.
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Really simple way to answer your false declarations:

Then how come Hacker News exists and I can say what I want here?

Try that in China some time =)
The Spiral of Learning
You should use a vertical mouse.
Its kind of surprising for me that PHP is popular among YC companies. I thought RoR/Python is more demanding than PHP but I was wrong.
Genuine question: What would you be looking for in an alternative? What are the must have features of bit.ly that no other service offers?

I ask because I have to wonder why people are having such a hard time finding an alternative. I thought there are loads of services out there that did similar stuff?
"you have the potential to change the system peacefully through argumentation / debate / voting etc."

Sure, by voting for one of two parties that have existed for centuries and been sponsored by the same 1% for as long.

You have the potential to watch your fellow americans brainwashed a bit more everyday into accepting their function as modern slaves with less and less benefits and more and more stress.
Why can't he be questioned in Britain?
Ordered - thanks :)
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Slightly related, I think you should make MakeLeaps a bit more visible in the Hacker News meetups, even if it's just a logo on the door or reception desk. Alternatively, hand out the stickers you mentioned in the article. I'm sure lots of us would be happy to stick them on our PCs to show appreciation.
You can talk and it makes no difference, I doubt that is as relevant as knowing your children are safe.
Not doubting you in any way, but do you have a reference for that? Is it part of the Equality Act 2010?

I'd like to be able to say this with some authority (without it sounding like "this guy on the internet told me").
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It might indeed have quite a lot of potential but on the other hand I am already annoyed when websites are geo-ip'ing their language setting based on my "alleged" location. But maybe enough behavioral targeting is going to segment myself into the leave-me-alone user group.
Put up a copy of the categories and the technologies in each please. I want to go through and use d3 to make it look prettier and convey more information.
Searching through ShowSlow.com provides more visibility:

http://www.showslow.com/details/92778/http://twitter.com/#!/...

That's 1,887 ms to render anything and almost a full second of JavaScript execution time.

Waterfall graphs show a similar story: they pushed everything past the document load event so the monitoring tools are a bit off:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120414_9W_3Z15P/ shows an acceptable 1.4 second start of render, which isn't great but acceptable, but looking at the actual video shows that's merely how long it took to render a tiny part of the page - displaying the content which the user actually wanted about took over 8 seconds!

http://www.webpagetest.org/video/view.php?id=120414_2a4075f2...
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I find his company's investment record eerily aligned with Francisco D'Anconia, of Atlas Shrugged. Unintentional, I'm sure, though I wouldn't be surprised if he noticed it himself and proclaims the parallel loudly among his peers.
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I used to have constant problems with wrist pain until I switched to a stand up desk. I have no idea how/why the standup desk helps this, but it did for me. Anyone have any insights into why this helps?
- Fewer SLOC means less code to compile and execute.

- Fewer SLOC means more code fits on one page.

- Fewer SLOC means it may be easier to explain/document/remember what it does.
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The American people can wipe out the parties at their leisure, they have chosen not to. Throughout American history, our parties have changed numerous times, some disappear, some rise, some evolve, and that isn't going to stop.

Americans get to choose. If they choose to be brainwashed as you call it, then that's their volition. If America collapses, it will be the responsibility of the people that they didn't use their voice while they had it.

The Chinese do not get to choose anything. Every time they try - and they have tried - they get violently put down by their own government. In China, nothing like the Occupy movement would ever be tolerated at all, those people would not be allowed to squat on park property and protest, they would not be allowed to march, they would not be allowed to do even a fraction of what they got away with here in the states, and it sure as hell wouldn't all be filmed and put on YouTube for everybody to see.

The various movements of the 1960s and 1970s would have been completely impossible in China. Try holding a rally for free unionization rights in China some time, see how that goes.

Try openly and expressively declaring your religious beliefs. See how much they love that.
Hmm, good point. Is that also true for JIT compilers?
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Not saying that other countries are better, just saying that there are still a
lot of inconsistencies.

[As for the doctors: for what regards the money, this is what I've heard. Of
course there will be nothing official but: I know 2 (!) persons who died of
uncured cancer, because Dutch doctors just told them to take pain killers (not
kidding). Then I know other 2 (we were close) that had to go to their home
countries to get the cancer cured, because here the doctors told them to wait a
couple of weeks. Once home their doctors hospitalized them immediately, saying
that further delays would have killed them. A PhD student from Russia, also
here in the Netherlands, emailed me after reading my blog post, because the
same happened to his knee and the doctor didn't want to treat him. My
mother-in-law had kidney stones, and what did the doctor say? Drink some warm
milk. She had to fight 3 days to be sent to the hospital. I'm here since 2006,
but I already met so many people who where shocked by the incompetence of
Dutch doctors, that I could write for hours. The entry in my blog reflects some
facts happened directly to me or my family.]