skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to have this same problem. I'd get called twice a day by the same company, and if I picked up, they would just hang up the phone. Eventually I got tired of this so when I picked up one of their calls, I opened with "Hi, PizzaPizza here, may I take your order please?"
After that they never called again.
there is not a normative way to discriminate between those two predictions.

it comes down to what kind of loss you incur for making an incorrect prediction. for mean, it's a squared loss (which penalizes you for being wrong in the tails more heavily) but for a median it's the absolute loss.

the argument being made was that fb is an outlier and (as I read it) the mean didn't reflect it, so the maths was "lazy" as it didn't take that into account. actually the mean does take these outliers into account (since it's corresponding loss function penalizes you harshly for being wrong in the tails) and so is probably not too unreasonable at predicting on outlier companies (certainly better than the median).
Why do you care about your toolbar PR? If your site still has traffic from Google, and still indexed, PR is just a number.
Editorial: 38 Studios and the Dunkin delusions
Exec (YC W12) raises $3.3M
The main reason Google provides money to Mozilla is to buy billions of search queries from them via default placement in the search bar. That's it.
This is really great. Thanks for sharing it.
Modern fonts, particularly at least OpenType, can embed different information for different sizes pretty easily. If this problem could be solved by using a more modern font format and better quality fonts, that seems like a better approach.
At least with Chrome you can just use Chromium. It would be interesting to see if FB open sourced Opera.
* Using strncmp is more secure than strcmp.

* What's the harm in `inline`? I would encourage its use, rather than discourage?
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what's known as a "generation gap"
Wait, do you really consider "bitch" or "bitching" in these contexts sexist, nowadays? I've seen it applied to both genders, and, as in this case, a verb. It's moved on from the controversial stage to a common expression.
You don't understand how salesmen work at all, and I'm not talking about them being shady, I'm just talking about general business practices.

Lists of names/numbers are for cold-calling, and yes, cold-calling should check any opt-outs first.

Once you are actually having conversations with a specific person about an actual sale, lists are no longer part of the equation. There's not a salesman in the world who, if asked by a customer to call them back (as happened in this case) would check a list before calling them back. It just wouldn't happen, ever. And frankly it shouldn't be expected to happen, the only time it would ever be useful to check a list is the very rare occurrence where the customer is trying to catch you out by telling you he's interested but he actually isn't.
Subtle troll, is subtle.

And of course, DuckDuckGo search sucks.

Unless you describe how it sucks, this is just a personal opinion.
nice. I will try that next time :)
This makes it sound like the news got broken by their SEC filing, rather than via their own PR.
According to the S-1, most executives did not sell anything, only Zuckerberg, Breyer and Thiel, with most coming from Breyer. VCs and other pre-IPO investors sold about 10-20% of their shares.

It appears that 57% of the stock offerred in the IPO came from insiders, which is a very different thing. Pretty shoddy reporting.
Don't get me wrong, I think nothing bad of anybody that works in a niche. I just think of it as possible high risk for possible high reward. I might not even include COBOL because it has such a foothold in certain industries. It's just not a new, sexy language. I myself programmed in Pascal back in the day :-)

I was thinking more about some other guys I've ran into. One guy was an expert at this proprietary DB system and slowly would lose clients but somehow always found a new one - charging very high rates. I knew a guy who was quite old when I started and he was an expert with magnetic tape technology! His luck actually did run out, though, his whole department was phased out one day and he had to re-tool (and went into line printers interestingly)

It's really hard to say which of them hang on or not, I have some technologies under my own belt that I feel the same about!
The main argument is that Facebook has created a platform that reaches nearly 15% of the entire planet. Nothing like this has ever happened this fast. Coke and other consumer brands may have similar or even larger markets, but it took them many, many years to get there.
Scientists are not allowed to pray?

I'm glad I live in America where I'm free to pray even if I can discover the mechanisms of the universe through experimentation.
Textlinkads is not OK with Google. All paid links should have the rel="nofollow" attribute, as all Adwords ads do. That tells Google not to count them as editorial endorsement.
I mentioned this yesterday, but I believe Reisman's quote really captures that feeling we are all having about SpaceX and particularly their first ISS mission:

Pelley: "You know, I'm curious... you have so much background in engineering, you could have easily gotten a job at Boeing, or at Lockheed, but you came here..."

Reisman: "If you had a chance to go back in time, and work with Howard Hughes when he was creating TWA, if you had a chance to be there, at that moment, when it was the dawn of a brand new era, wouldn't you want to do that? I mean, that's why I'm here." [1][2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNwg8FvfuuU#t=425

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_Reisman
Thanks, that's what I thought: 57% of the stock sold in the IPO came from insiders. That's very different from what the submission title says.
Would putting each legislator's changes in the open help their ability to compromise on difficult issues or hinder it? Sometimes it's easier to do the hard thing if nobody can be pegged as directly responsible.

That said, I suppose each committee could use pay for a subscription to do their markup "behind closed doors" before the final pull request hehe.
Apple really has some classy people representing their company. Well done.
That's incorrect, see link below.
"Everybody" is already in a lot of places.

They're on FB. They're also on Google. A hell of a lot of them are still on Yahoo mail. They're using Craigslist. And eBay. And Amazon. And The New York Times and/or Fox. Hulu. Whatever Apple's calling its offerings these days. Even Microsoft. To say nothing of a bunch of B2B service sites that have large user lists (ADT, Delta Dental, Beico, etc.).

There are a bunch of sites that have a very large userbase. Large enough at least to get past the network effects problem sufficiently to start boostrapping social onto things if they want to do so.

Which is one of the reasons that network effects, in and of themselves, offer such transient advantages. You may be able to corner the network effect in one area for a time, but you're not going to conrner all network effects in all areas, leaving you vulnerable to intrusion and erosion.

Several of the players listed above have a vastly better advertising or direct revenue capacity (Google, Apple/iTunes, eBay, Craigslist, and most of all in my mind, Amazon).

Craigslist is a wonderful example of a site that leave huge amounts of potential revenue behind (charging for only a small fraction of jobs and housing listings) to create a hugely compelling advantage in the classified advertising market, and supporting some "social" features (there is a pretty active, if not grossly overwhelming, forums section). Amazon also has discussion. Google has entered directly into the frey. The direct problem of social networking is one of coupling a modicum of engineering talent to a financing capacity and and existing network.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: social is mostly a way of tying notices and feeds to specific users, and there's absolutely no inherent reason why it needs to be based on a centralized application model. Diaspora is already a community-based project, and may be heading toward a decentralized hosting model. Once that happens, IMO, the jig is up. Not because Diaspora will instantly subvert Facebook, but because all the 2nd-tier social networks will have the option of joining FB (or whomever leads the siloed SN space at the time), ceding significant power and control to them, or of playing in the open space.

It's the same strategy that's lead Linux to subvert all other operating systems on the server, embedded, and handheld/mobile markets (less successfully still in desktop/laptop). Sun, IBM, HP, LG, Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Google, Amazon, B&N, etc., couldn't take on Microsoft directly with their own OS offerings, but they could join forces by agreeing on an open standard which offered none of them a proprietary advantage of itself, but allowed them to exercise other business strengths to benefit (and yes, Apple's been doing quite well with an alternative strategy, though also based on an open UNIX base).

So yes, I'm bearish on Facebook.
>Normally, it is a company with more opportunity than capital.

Ahem. Like I said,

>If you don't need a large infusion of capital,
it terrifies me beyond all reason. It's roughly as palatable as a direct democracy,

Because direct democracy has been such a disaster for Switzerland.
The Time Barry Obama Bogarted All the Joints in Hawaii
Photoshop plugins don't work that way for the most part. There's no way to tell from a given file "uses" a plugin or not - usually a plugin is a specialized image manipulation method.

>Splash screens are just a lazy way of saying the user's time isn't valuable.

Wow. Hyperbole much? I'd rather get all my loading done up front instead of waiting per file or per action anyways. Secondly, it's 8 seconds or so per app start. Less if you have an SSD or a non-recommended-reqs system. Perspective.

Also consider these are pro-tier applications. The target market isn't going to be exiting their apps again and again, rather launch once and stay inside them.
Also "Random and Pseudorandom" is very good.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00x9xjb
Are You in a Bubble?
no i don't have explicit quote. but this is what it boils down to. What else could it mean?
Although it doesn't have a complete list of changes you can check some changes in the blog.

http://elixir-lang.org/blog/

There are some posts with a little summary of what happened during the week.
> and they will open source it only because it’s the optimal model for them to develop this kind of project.

Why would that be? Opera already has a very optimal closed source development model.
A lot of agencies use PR and Alexa rankings to negotiate rates.
It always freaks me out how much power Google really has over all sites, not just the spammers. The panda update, for example, killed TeachStreet, which recently ended up selling to Amazon as an aquihire.
It'd be great news if this is just a bug in a single Google DC/Node, but we're located in different parts of the world; and we're getting PR0 on all of our SEO extensions. The prcheck websites are also showing N/A.
I found it very hard to read this. The whole time my brain kept getting distracted by how bad the fonts look.
Oh how I would love to do this. Unfortunately a place selling home security seems relatively easy to find who is calling. Not that it actually is easy - in fact it seems it required a good amount of social engineering.

The calls I have gotten are for credit reduction or other dubious services and the impression I get is that their whole operation is shady and secretive - and perhaps not even a legitimate business at all. When one of those wakes me up at 8am on a Sunday I thirst for their blood!
I see a PR6 for your website, and a Google search for "private internet access" brings you up as the top result.

The PR score reported by browser plugins can often be incorrect, as Google usually only bothers to update their forward-facing PR scores every month or so. Of course, their internal PR is updated constantly.

I've also had my site return a N/A PR score a number of times, and it had no effect on my actual rankings. It's probably just an issue with your particular browser plugin, and it should begin reporting correctly within a day or two.
That still leaves Microsoft in a position where they pay others to send takedown notices to their competitor for the stuff they don't bother to take down themselves. You'd think they'd do that for themselves, too, if they thought those links are so horrible for their own business. My guess is they just want to mess with Google and waste their time on money chasing hundreds of thousands of links a month.
That's exactly the problem here. A typical user who adds capitalization to make her password more difficult to guess is basically screwed over by Blizzard who has decided that passwords don't need to be case-sensitive.

Users who opt to (I'm not talking about forcing users to use capitalization here) to use capitalization for a more secure password are unaware that their efforts are in vain.

Also, it isn't only trivially more guessable. That's nonsense. If you're using a password list and you capitalize only the first letter of every password in that list, that list is still double the size of the first list.
Also a fan of virtualenvwrapper. workon with tab completion (in bash, at least) is so nice when you've got more than a few virtualenvs and can't quite remember your naming scheme :)
Over-Promise and Under-Deliver
I'm an electrical engineering student. When it came to docking mechanism I was an embedded systems programmer. Yes, to my knowledge the docking is fully automatic.
Everyone seems to be going on about bad webdesign, but with the exception of the blue-on-red in the search bar at the top I find the choice of colours uplifting. It's a personal taste thing I guess, but DDG isn't going to score points for homogeneity so they might as well stick with it.

Where DDG really scores over Google is that it is cruft-free. It's not inviting me to look at maps, images, my G+ account, it's not got sidebars, and it doesn't break up the search to add in image/shopping results. My brain is working optimally on the task of scanning the results, I am 
fitter
, happier and more productive. That's DDG's killer feature for me. It's not even an original feature, Google used to have it but they got rid. In short, DDG isn't a Google killer, but it's a great companion.
Possession is 9/10ths of the law.

The other tenth is having the biggest fuck off guns to destroy all contenders.
Not totally well. I still get lag spikes in a _single player game_. It's really confusing to me why they make the client rely on the server, especially when I've turned off "quick join" mode.
Africa is an enormous continent that is sadly very, very, very far from being able to function as a unit.

It's not like Europe is functioning that much better as unit. And almost continent sized new world countries like Brazil and the US are not something the old world should try to replicate.
I would imagine this is where the 'unsubscribe' link in the email newsletter would bring you if you did want to use this for a classic newsletter.
SAP is a proprietary software that is not easily available on the internet to be trained at. However I know that a lot of people sell SAP trainings on ebay. Also, SAP is a giant which has many modules. Are you interested in ABAP ? Sales and Distribution ? MM ?
No, I don't buy that at all. It's unfortunate that it has moved to the common usage, because it is equivalent to "when you complain you sound like a woman, and that is bad." People should learn to speak respectfully instead of normalizing legitimately offensive language.
Sigh. Some people have no grasp whatsoever of the insignificant scale of human activity in the context of planet-sized objects. For some perspective:

Let's say we start extracting rocks from the moon. Let's say we get SO enthusiastic about this that our extraction of rocks from the moon becomes equivalent to the total amount of iron mined every year on Earth. That's a completely ridiculous thing to suppose, but let's roll with it. That's 2,400,000,000 tons of stuff removed from the moon every year. A big number, right?

The mass of the moon, however, is 73,477,000,000,000,000,000 tons. So at this completely ridiculous rate of mining, it would take just over 306 MILLION YEARS to change the mass of the moon by even 1%.

So, what would happen if we did change the mass of the moon by that much? Answer: basically nothing. The moon has been slowly spiralling away from the earth since its formation, meaning its gravitational effects are decreasing all the time, to no ill effect. 306 million years from now, it will have lost much more than 1% of its tidal influence on earth -- and nobody will be the wiser. It just doesn't matter that much.

In short, he notion that the gravity of the moon could be upset by us mining for trinkets is as preposterous as the notion that my sneeze in London could collapse a skyscraper in Chicago.
How could we possibly eat all these pigeons? There are flocks, 300 miles long, that turn the sky dark.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_Pigeon
Even though I agree, virtualenvwrapper is currently a shell script. That makes me think it probably wouldn't be included, but a pythonic version of the same thing could exist and fill this gap.
Ask HN:What is the function of a program manager
I work in a large silicon development company. There are a large number of program managers in the org who do absolutely nothing other than aggregating others weekly reports and repeat the same in conference calls .This keep them occupied for about a couple of hours a week and they are completely free rest of the time . However they are felt to be indispensable by senior management we have one PM assigned to every project. I dont think my org is an exception. What could be the business reason to have such positions that can be done better by a script. What should be the actual responsibility of a PM
I like this article,Great idea!!!
That was a great read. Not even telemarketers like telemarketers.
This would actually be an awesome outcome. A bigger Opera marketshare, particularly if they eat into Webkit's, would mean that there will be stronger pressure to keep web development standards compliant.

I'm not sure it would promote the standards itself faster though. At least the WebKit side (Apple, Google), has like the exact opposite incentives for that to happen. The Facebook-Opera push would have to be quite hard.
APPL: Airfoil Speakers Touch pulled from iOS App Store for using non-public APIs
Ask HN: Is it a mistake to launch an app that only supports iOS 5.x?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9094584/launching-an-app-for-ios-5-and-beyond-only-a-mistake
Close on the heels of "bizarro incomprehensible homemade TOS/license" is using a standard license that doesn't match the ecosystem -- for example, using straight GPL rather than the Ruby License for a Ruby gem. If your license doesn't match the rest of the tools, many will choose an alternative if it's available.

(nothing against the GPL... just using it as an example).
What you want that to look like?
Why I'm not leaving FaceBook...
Because I don't want to make a new account for every website that comes along.
Being the second person to say this, we really hope you are both right. Before this, we couldn't find anyone, anywhere who could find it reporting anything other than N/A through sites and plugins. We also waited 24 hours before bringing this to light to see if the issue would fix itself.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but none of this (do not call list, TCPA) applies to a business phone line, correct?

I get constant sleazy robocalls on a business line.
The denial pictured here is a bit chilling.

Anyone here familiar enough with 38 Studios to comment on it?
A better undo with git reset
Complete bollocks. This is a planet. You are talking about taking a shovel to an entire planet. This is not something that's going to just, whoops, accidentally happen in a couple of hours, sorry, didn't think about all that science lying around. We haven't even done that level of "damage" to Earth, by orders of magnitude, with the entire history of human civilization, on a much larger planet, and you're sitting there worrying about bespoiling a dead rock.

By the time we've "wrecked" all that precious precious data about the formation of the solar system we'll have better recording equipment than we can even dream of now anyhow, since we're talking centuries and centuries from now in the "best" case. Not to mention we'll have visited a few other places in this case.
negotiate rates for what?.. link buying for Pagerank?
It's incredibly difficult to overstate the importance of this moment

I tire of statements like this. Either you have no capacity for exaggeration, or I have grossly misunderstood and the docking is actually more momentous than the discoveries of fire, DNA, germ theory, cell theory, flight, and nuclear physics combined.

Now, if we figure out how to beat aging and live forever, that is something whose impact might be difficult to overstate.
So, as someone just dipping their toes into Python, what did you do regarding 2 vs 3?

As someone who was learning Python for fun personal projects rather than serious business projects, I decided to use Python 3 wherever possible, while familiarizing myself with Python 2.7 just in case. It turns out the two versions really aren't all that different. A lot of people will still recommend starting with Python 2.7, since it really is such a small jump from there to using Py3k; I essentially did the opposite. Both approaches work. Finding tooling for Python 3 might still be a challenge (I remember having to fix one or two bugs in IPython before it would run at all), and the usefulness of these tools to a beginner is really the biggest reason why you might want to stick with 2.7 for the moment. But if you're adventurous, I do highly recommend Py3k. Especially with the upcoming 3.3 release (due later this year), I'd argue that Python 3 finally has enough new features (and enough library support) to justify using it full-time.

(When will it be possible to know, beyond doubt, that Python 3 is ready for prime time? When third-party implementations like PyPy and Jython make the jump. I don't know about Jython (which just recently made it to 2.7), but PyPy's working on it as we speak.)
That's also my guess, which I indicated elsewhere in the thread. I'm definitely withholding judgment until we get a wee bit closer to the release date and have a better idea what Microsoft's actually trying to accomplish here. The lack of simple compilers in any capacity is bizarre, if taken as a final statement, since it'd really throw the wrench in pretty much every Windows build farm ever. I suspect this is simply that, right now, given that VS.NET 2k11 Ultimate beta is free anyway, they don't yet have the compiler or doc downloads. I expect them to show up soon.
Opera Software ASA’s product is Opera Web Browser. Facebook wouldn’t buy Opera to continue making money on licensing. And we know that Facebook uses Open Source model for developing things they don’t profit directly from[1]. It also makes everyone more easy about the privacy issues etc. The question really is, why wouldn’t they open source it? The have plenty to benefit from and nothing to lose.

[1] https://developers.facebook.com/opensource/
I doubt the local police department will care. Why not think of this as a way to practice not being nervous?
Thanks, added to the reading list.
Opera is one of those browsers that stores your cache on their servers to make your browsing quicker.Your browsing habits are already going through their servers.Now add Facebook to the mix.What do you have? The mother of all profiling softwares.☼
NServiceBus Hackathon
Agree with everything except Perl. Python is the new and better Perl.
Oh my god this is so awesome. The version numbers are increasing asymptotically to e (2.718281...).