skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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These also don't make much sense to me, but to avoid getting d/ved to oblivion I'll say why.

Firstly both you and the author aren't really quoting any maths or real world papers or anything. He's backing his up with saying that all the advertisers are using this over A/B though, which is a pretty strong argument. But it occurs to me that for most of your points to stand you need to tackle this particular paragraph:

Like many techniques in machine learning, the simplest strategy is hard to beat. More complicated techniques are worth considering, but they may eke out only a few hundredths of a percentage point of performance. The strategy that has been shown to win out time after time in practical problems is the epsilon-greedy method.

So to tackle you points:

1. Only stands if you show his paragraph above to be wrong. Does epsilon-greedy only work on consistent payouts, or does it work on fluctuating payouts too? It would seem to me that this would be a common occurrence in advertising on websites. I imagine there is some research out there to settle this!

2. He addresses this directly in the post: This won't adapt to change. (Your visitors probably don't change. But if you really want to, in the reward function, multiply the old reward value by a forgetting factor)

3. There is no difference between this and A/B testing, the mock code he shows is supposed to go in your A/B testing framework, the code in the controllers is supposed to be the same (and you can remove it the same way).

4. Isn't A/B testing just as bad at testing multiple factors? Why wouldn't you 'notice', you should theoretically see the same percentages for each stage. And would be able to notice the oddity.

5. Again this only stands if you show his paragraph above to be wrong. You are suggesting that a complicated strategy will win, which he says isn't true.
Seriously? Ads?
And because you're rarely more than 5 seconds away from having a brand new car.
Totally agree. I've been using a Logitech Trackman trackball for about 10years now. During the periods when I wasn't using it I'd get wrist.forearm pain and bursitis on the wrist (I have plates there from a car accident). Stretching is still important but the trackball is a major leap forward.

If you have to use a mouse, please don't use an Apple mouse. They are generally far too small and don't provide any support. I'm still amazed that a company which does great hardware aesthetics completely fails to understand ergonomics.
http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/egibson/windows-phone-7-jump-...

More Windows Phone specific; I think there are many books suitable for learning C#. Just pick a couple that speak to you - older editions can be purchased from Amazon for less than five dollars and will cover critical language and .NET features in sufficient depth to get you started.
Real-time collaborative drawing: Nodejs, Socket.io & Paper.js
Possibly because that is all you ever post...
Yes, determining language based Accept-Language header is a much better idea. http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-accept-lang-loc...
Breaking the Bank Website or From LFI to RCE
Taiwan and Hong Kong and Tibet have been claimed by China years ago, get over it.

Not like Western countries didn't invade Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya to put governments that favor them instead.

The japanese and the chinese is an entirely different story that would take books to cover, it isn't quite relevant as I don't remember the mexicans brutally invading the US of A.

Furthermore medicare and that kind of crap is rapidly becoming better than what's available for free in the US, do remember China comes from much lower and will most likely improve a lot still, while the US is clearly in decline.

So as much as you're correct in pointing out that China has its own issues, they're not the same issues, and some people will rightfully choose China over the USA.

As a modestly rich European, I think my family would be much safer in China than in the US, and overall the Europe is still much better than both.
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I've been fighting this on and off for years. I've come to the conclusion that whenever I become lazy my hands and neck and eventually my back hurts. Lazy, meaning that I don't stretch and take breaks often enough. Also more importantly exercising, it's is the biggest and best solution. I don't mean lifting weights/running, I'm talking about something like Yoga. Call it girly all you want, it does miracle work for lazy folks like us that spend way too much time in a chair.

As far as stretching goes, take a look at this:
http://www.eatonhand.com/hw/ctexercise.htm
and just google "wrist stretches for carpal tunnel" and you'll get plenty of useful results as well as video tutorials on youtube.

Keyboards, Mice... I've used pretty much all of them. I even went out and bought a ~$1k ergonomic chair, changed desks...etc.. I figured that if my career was in danger I would need to invest a significant amount of money to recover it so that I could continue to work. So I've probably spent hundreds in different mice and keyboards. Ergonomic devices and furniture are great, but they are a temporary solution. For long term results, just don't be lazy.

Do three things to help and get rid of wrist pain:
1. Take small breaks throughout the day (or find a Rob).
2. Exercise
3. Stretch.
In my opinion, these help the most.

One note, if you're just starting to try and remedy your pain and you can't work at all, try switching the mouse to your left hand. This helps a ton and it'll only take you a bit to get used to it.

Hope this helps someone as much as it has me.
Indeed, it's the mouse's fault. I switched to a trackball years ago and it's a vast improvement. Best one I've found so far is the Kensington "expert mouse" which has a wrist rest attached at the front.
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As someone who has worked at many startups in India, here are my 2 cents. You chose to work at a startup not in the hope of a glorious exit via some acquisition or an IPO. You work at a startup because you want to surround yourself by really smart people.

When making generalizations, while it is certain that most startups will fail, it is also quite likely that most of your startup coworkers will eventually succeed and go to great places, and when they do, they will take you along if you were any good in the first place. Because one thing that almost guarantees failure is not trying, and you would find a lot of 'not trying, complacent with my good job' people not at the startups, but at the large or middle sized companies past their prime, running on the momentum they picked earlier.

This is what I tell people when I hire them, and believe me, a lot more people are getting this now than a decade ago, when startups were associated with unexpected riches and easy money. That's a lot of hope.
Prototype iPad sells for $10,200 on eBay
I grew up in an area in Maryland with nearly zero crime (and it was a modestly poor area). I went to one of the best public schools in Maryland, and again, it was in what is considered poor Appalachia. So I'm not sure what you're talking about. The only crime where I live now, is driving under the influence. There's 1 murder per year per 100,000 people in the entire county.

You obviously have extremely little first hand experience with America. Look up the crime stats for Boise, Idaho some time on city data. America is an extraordinarily diverse nation, the most diverse nation in world history to be exact, and it has every sort of living style and environment you could want to choose from.

Don't like the crime in Chicago, move to a safer city at your leisure. Seattle is beautiful, and so is Austin TX. Don't like Florida? Move to Virginia. Don't like Vermont, move to NYCity. Don't like NYC? Move to San Francisco. Don't like urban, America is massive and extremely low population density, so move rural. And on and on.
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
I don't think I accept your critique then - I make a clear distinction between "functional" tests (ie, the selenium ones), and "unit" tests, and I write both types

Although you may have a valid point that my "unit" tests aren't unit-ey enough to be called real "unit" tests, because they rely on django and the database - but I still think they serve the correct purpose.

Whatever you call them, they very clearly are written first, before any lines of code, and each line of code is only written in order to fix a failing test.

Maybe you're saying that if my "unit" tests aren't "unit-ey" enough, becauye they are too reliant on Django and the database, they don't work so well in the sense of test-driven design? If so, how?

Let's look at a specific example, ie how to design a model for Polls.

my approach, in pseudocode:

instantiate a model
assign some attributes to it
save it
retrieve it from the database
assert the retrieved object has the attributes assigned earlier, with the correct values & types (including a datetime value)

a more "unit" approach:

instantiate an object
assert it is a subclass of django's model types
assert it has default attributes with correct default types
finally, use some django voodoo or metaclass inspection to confirm that the datetime field, whose default value is "None", is actually a working datetime field...

That last bit is the clincher - in this case, I think particularly due to the datetime field, using a more "unitey" approach actually makes it /harder/ to use TDD to design the object... Whereas using my approach makes it very natural - the test influences the design, because the test uses the object in the way that the code will, the test is a client of the final objects' API, in a more complete way than a "true" unit test would be...

So, I think in this specific case, making tests "more unit-ey" wouldn't help make for better test-driven-design.

I do accept the point that if you're tests aren't isolated from one another, then it's very hard to refactor one area of code without breaking lots of tests in other areas. And I think that where it's my own code, I'm very prepared to spend effort isolating unit tests from each other, using Mocks or whatever else. But when it's Django code, which has a stable API, I'm not that worried by exercising it in unit tests...
I am still skeptical about the IQ tests and job-skill tests. They both seem to look at things at a very narrow timeframe. One could potentially have a high IQ and be great at a specific task, but it seems to say very little how this person is going to perform in future tasks - i.e. a brilliant mind, facing a challenging job skill task, might become highly bored or sloppy when settling in the day-to-day work frame. But I guess statistics and outliners have one way or another a problematic relationship.
Handy learning explain - things I've been meaning to play with for ages.
The admins here are a bunch of spazzes. But that said, if you're constantly promoting your own stuff and not contributing otherwise, expect to be perceived as a spammer.
Can't agree enough to this! If you can't make it to the gym there's always the ever-dependable push-up. It is a really simple equation - good exercise routine -> better exercise posture -> better general posture -> no annoying pains.
Are email newsletters the next generation of blogging?
This actually brings about an interesting question. Is it better to have multiple items do one thing well each, or have everything under one roof?
The Nest Thermostat Is Now Available At The Apple Store
Your post could prove my point. I am not a fan of Fox News or CNN, but it seems to be thrown out their anytime someone criticizes how our tax money is spent. Sadly, this type of stuff isn't really new to American politics (go look at the election of 1800).

The government itself said on Jan 9, 2009 (days before inauguration) that Solyndra wasn't loan worthy. It was rushed and costly. Even the NY Times (not known as a bastion of Fox News lovers) said[1] that "Government Accountability Office, which found that Energy Department preliminary loan approvals — including the one for Solyndra — were granted at times before officials had completed mandatory evaluations of the financial and engineering viability of the projects."

Stimulus-related bets made by them have NOT paid off handsomely.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/us/politics/in-rush-to-ass...
Great article using new tech, definitely recommend!
US Attorneys (Federal prosecutors) are appointed by the President for 4 year terms. Local State's Attorneys or District Attorneys are usually elected.

If a case is primarily being handled by the FBI, it's generally a Federal case being handled by a US Attorney.
Entrepreneurs, if you could change one thing about France what would it be?
Ask HN: First client for web dev
I'm getting my first client (personal, non-business) for a custom project and I'm a bit unsure as of how to handle some things, and I would appreciate some tips, most economical.

When getting the domain, which will cost X$ per year as well as the hosting, should I register it in my name, and pay for it myself while charging the client?
Or should I set it all up in his name, with all expenses going directly to him, while I take the fee for creating the site?

If option 1, should I charge per year?

I Appreciate any tips/advice.
Thanks
Show HN: srctree = pastebin + git + canvas
Hello HN. This is my first webapp. It works like a pastebin, in which you can visually keep track of the changes you and others make to it.

I was a little reluctant about posting it here because I'm not sure it meets the HN quality standards, but, as a beginner, I would really appreciate to have some feedback and/or tips.

The url is: http://srctree.net/

An example of usage: http://srctree.net/1

Thanks!
Google Goes Up, Google Goes Down
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I think rather than get hung up on e-greedy vs. A/B testing vs UCB (Bayesian vs. non Bayesian), it is helpful to first step back and think about the larger problem of online learning as a form of the prediction/control problem. The joint problem is to 1)LEARN (estimate) the values of possible courses of action in order to predict outcomes.
and 2)CONTROL the application by selecting the best action for a particular situation.

I noted elsewhere that A/B can be though of as an epsilon-first learning approach, Play random 100% till P-value<alpha, then play greedy(play the 'winner'). As an aside, it is unclear to me how using p-values is a clearer, easier, or more efficient, decision rule for these types of problems. It is almost always misinterpreted as the Prob(B>A|Data), choice of alpha determines threshold but is arbitrary, and often a straw-man default - implicitly biasing your confusion matrix. Not saying that you won't get good results, just that it is not clear that is a dominate approach.

This simple post I wrote on agents and online learning might be informative http://mgershoff.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/intelligent-agents...

But don't take my word for it (disclaimer: I work for www.conductrics.com, which provides decision optimization as a service) take a look at a great intro text on the topic by Sutton & Barto http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/ebook/the-book.ht...
New business != startup.

Small and/or lifestyle businesses are great, but there are many properties they don't share with startups (mainly scalability leading to growth). In many cases a "new business" simply mean an independent contractor who in this statistic might as well be a regular salaried employee. Also someone spending time building a prototype, validating the market, looking for funding etc. but not bothering to register the business while there's no revenue could fail before ever making it into the "new business" statistic.

Therefore it's perfectly plausible that 95% of startups fail while only 63% of all new businesses do.

Then of course there's the fact that the 95% number is rhetoric, not a statistic.
You're right. I'd heard that they were now working for CryTek, but I can't find that confirmed anywhere. They still appear to be independent.

But my point still stands. What is special here is the workflow in creating a physics-based vehicle. Other physics engines like Havok come with pre-made rigs, but tuning a vehicle for desired gameplay is still hard. Making it run fast in a game environment is harder still.
I think this is pretty much the average position on HN.
In general, I find this approach incredibly annoying. Usually I would rather see the canonical version of a given site.

Hypothetical example: because I'm running Linux and in the US, a site shows me content/software geared towards US Linux users. However I am trying to find a solution for a Windows issue with my girlfriend's laptop, who is based in Ireland.

And a similar but different anecdote: Steam has consistently refused to let me pay for games with my US credit card while I'm in Europe. I have to use a VPN for the payment to process. Wat?
Yet you wouldn't dare to visit some parts of the ghettos your biggest cities are famous for.

The various movements of the 60s and 70s are completely impossible in the western world now, the brainwashing is far too advanced for that.

Unionization doesn't make sense in communism. It amounts to revolution. Try a revolution in the US and call me back when you've completed your twentieth mandatory cavity search for security purposes.

I don't think you saw much of Gitmo on Youtube, even less today - luckily with the patriot act, anyone who pisses off the govt will get his own personal gitmo experience.

At least China doesn't pretend they respect the human rights - I think that's what the article was about, and fundamentally right.
Off-topic: Most of the time, such grammar/spelling corrections get downvoted because people think they are nitpicking and don't add anything to the conversation, or are rude somehow, but as a non-English, I appreciate them a lot!
Strictly speaking, there is no law dictating the government has to leave when receiving a "motion of distrust", although it never happened they did not.
No shower at the office, otherwise I'd have given up the Volvo for my Raleigh a long time ago. I agree with you about the fitness aspect of bicycle riding, and used to do distance stuff (no racing) until I wore the cartilage down in my left knee. Nowadays I treat that knee with respect.

Bicycle goodness notwithstanding, the Segway is a hoot to ride, and five years in I haven't tired of it.
Elon Musk gives a tour of the SpaceX offices
Zombies? Strange happenings in Florida and Georgia
why stop at credit card processing how about a Facebook Credit Card !
I'm not the one claiming the west doesn't have its guilty points. I completely agree with your point about Iraq. You on the other hand say: just get over it, about China's violent aggressions. You ignore and excuse what China does, but not what America does.

Saying those countries have been claimed by China is outrageous to put it lightly, and then saying to get over it is even more obscene. Tell the Iraqis to just "get over" the last ten years, see how that goes.

You're only safer in China if you never say anything.

And that's not even true anyway, because America is so diverse there are countless areas to live, of all variations, that are completely safe. The problem is, you're ignorant of America.
Whoops.

I forget what exactly I was going to insert there. Likely a brief condemnation of what has become overwhelming and universal tabloid journalism, not to mention the almost comically partisan books being pushed by news organizations to justify the media 'personalities' they populate talking-head shows with.
Dammit, then I'd have to reactivate my Facebook account.

And then Facebook would know everything I buy.
A Field Guide to Apple Hate
Too late, I think.

Facebook has scared off a lot of the "moms" out there by their bad bad bad privacy history. Do you really want to pay for things using their service?
> People will think twice about losing their ‘Facebook Credit Score’ over a few $ for an online presence they spent (literally) years building and cultivating.

Which keeps them from using that hypothetical service, because they don't want to risk losing the account over a transaction that went wrong.

Or maybe not. Who knows?
It may sound like a minor detail, but if you specifically select the colour, red (which obviously is not part of your colour scheme), it's almost assured that they won't touch it. And by putting the "advanced" button in your settings page instead of having its own tab(it should open in a new Window preferably), you're almost guaranteed to scare more than 99.99% of the users since you've indirectly hinted at the fact that "if you screw up on this page, we are not responsible, and we know you will almost screw up", without even saying a single word. Design and colour is a very powerful non-direct communication tool.

Of course, along with the normal people, there are exceedingly stupid people for whom you need to have a warning text.
I'm fine with it, as long as he's not extradited to US, and the Court and prosecution doesn't turn out to be very corrupt there.
For the Steam CC issue: fraud prevention!
This Rock Could Spy on You for Decades
You are technically correct, but in this case it's not the best kind of correct. Of course it's not 100% for sure they don't have a viable plan, but it's likely they don't and more importantly it's not worth your time to find out. The OP is right: leave.
I've been in very safe places in America alright, and it's more or less the same here in Europe, just less crime -

What I mean is if we're going to talk about countries, we take country-wide data and not cherrypick.
That's like saying there's virtually no crime in rural parts of China or Outer Mongolia or New Zealand sheep farming communities...

Also, your urban/population density points would apply to China.

Neither are relevant to the topic and nor is this whole article HN-worthy tbh, though China's retaliatory actions here are interesting. :)
I'm pretty sure my mom has no issues with Facebook's privacy history.
Seriously? Linking your checking account with Facebook?

It would definitely be the next step in user lock-in, but you'd start competing with banks and everyone else who offers a way to pay.

Now, I wouldn't complain if they bought some "bypass the credit card companies" service like Dwolla...
Daily Challenges to Amuse Yourself In Boring Corporate Meetings
Looks not that far removed from http://outcaststudios.com/forums/uploads/monthly_04_2011/pos... which makes me very excited.
Here’s what our web addiction looks like in 2016
Zuckerberg Drops Off Top 40 Billionaires Index As Facebook Falls