skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They can be used for prediction, and if they couldn't they wouldn't have any value at all.

Correct - they can't be used for prediction, and therefor they have no value at all (for prediction - they are useful for validation).

> Of course they sometimes don't line up with the real world

Then you improve them, but you don't try to predict from them. By improving them you increase your knowledge, but you don't predict from them because the only thing that comes out of a model is what you put into it. You learn nothing about a real world from a model. You learn about your understanding of the real world from the model. (They better you know the real world the better you model - the model teach you about your own knowledge. It has zero value in teaching you about the world since nothing can come out of it that you didn't put into it.)

> why do you think there are a metric shit-ton of scientists in Antarctica?

To do research about the real world? Is this supposed to be a big revelation? Not sure waht you were trying to imply here.

> The hard parts are now in factoring in relatively small changes to make the numbers line up even better

Well obviously. The details are always the hard part - the details is also where all the interesting stuff happens. You can make the best model in the world, and then miss the one tiny detail that only happens outside the domain of your model, and all the predictions are worthless.
What the hell does your sound guy want, exactly? A 64-core system that uses 6000W of power simply to boot?
$60k :D
What if you have a US kindle in say, the deserts of Australia? It's going to cost a LOT more than $.27. I mean a LOT.
Salman Khan's MIT Commencement Speech (Video at 7:00)
Did they install it after you installed your browser? If they did then that sucks. Otherwise it's not that bad. Probably a source of funding for the project.
Maybe. The problem is that a year ago when this first came up the admin(s) resorted to homophobic name-calling. This doesn't give them much credit in the image control department.
Tell HN: App Store Doesn't Close When You Download an App
The Apple gods have listened. When you download an app in iOS6, the app store doesn't autoclose.

Apple- if you're reading this, I haven't said anything else, so please don't take away my dev license.
Show HN: Merchpin: Put a Store on Every Page
Really? Is there no way around that? Ie just change your browser search settings? I was looking to try out mint, cuz Ubuntu is leaving something to be desired these days.
These fees are part of the 70% royalty deal he signed up for. See https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26O...

(updated with direct link to Amazon's royalty page)
What are the potential failure points of your startup?
Fotki Blocks Paid Users From Accessing Their Data
Dingo took Azaria Chamberlain, coroner finds | News.com.au
I've created what you call "trash" in the past, although I suspect we have different definitions of trash. Simply, it's a good way to make money.
This is a little ridiculous: you can trivially add the DuckDuckGo (or Google) search provider; e.g. on the right-hand side of the DDG search page[1] there is a "Add to Firefox" (and presumably similarly for Chromium) link that you can just click, and it just works.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=add+a+search+engine
Well one argument against it is privacy. by companies zeroing in on the source of the information and coupled with critical mass consumers don't really have a choice unless being a total outcast. Between apple and Facebook they know a lot about you and your habits in return for giving you a place to upload pictures and throw cows at your friends. Besides the occaisonal desIre to voyeur.

From a business perspective the platform gives an opportunity to use InfOrmation creatively and develop products and sell them. I don't see how such a personal information based business model can sustain for two decades unless it's ok for us as a society to live as a statistic because of the sheer amont of data that has been created and analyzed on individuals and groups.
Yes, string number/finger number positions are what I was referring to. And, as Goladus pointed out, getting stuck in those awkward positions definitely happens on piano, too.
Unfortunately Tab is equivalent to ctrl-i, which I already use (jump forward in history list), so I can't use this in the end.
You're right in terms of the Air; it's a great deal for how well it's built. Almost every single other computer they offer is demonstrably overpriced based on specs.
seems like i just found my new dvr/media box. that looks awesome!
Just to be clear, paying customers were locked out from accessing their own data until they paid more money to unlock it. They are not asking for much money, but is this really the right way to go about it?
Yah not implying anything negative.

I am just in awe of how well this response was executed and learning from it.
We will definitely aim to support Rails in the near future. That's on our to-do list for the next major release.

In terms of plans and pricing what you see are our indicative plans. We are still in beta so our current plan is free.

Depending on feedback we might tweak the pricing a bit (we do want our users to receive great value for money) but my expectation is that we will stay close to the plans we have right now.
Steps to Epiphany by David Weekly
Actually, we had 1600x1200 laptops ten years ago.
It's just a simple package that's installed with Firefox. The parent is just making it seem like a huge deal, but it's trivial to remove the package and/or change your default search provider.
If anyone doesn't care to explore the DOM themselves, this will show the Voronoi diagram and make the photo on top of it transparent. For Chrome, Ctrl+Shift+J and paste it into the console.

document.getElementById('data').setAttribute('style','');
document.getElementById('content').setAttribute('style','opacity:0.7;left:0;top:0;margin:0');
document.getElementById('underlay').setAttribute('style','left:0;top:0;margin:0');
Dell Announces $100M Innovators Credit Fund for Startups
So in other words, this is such a politicized issue there's no way to have any discussion about the facts?
We do need RMS.

Compromise is a dangerous game. Especially when the proprietary world doesn't compromise back (and it usually doesn't). How long could the free software movement have continued to mean anything if each year it had crept a little closer to the mainstream technological community?
I don't you have an understanding of how deep his fanbase is ... he raised that money in one day ... seriously think about that for a second.
How to outrun a crashing alien spaceship
No hassles. Sorry if I came across a bit grouchy.
Handy text manipulation tricks in Sublime Text 2
I don't think they're really equivalent specs, though. Notably, the 11" Levovo X220 weighs 2.9 lbs vs 2.38 lbs for the MacBook Air.

That's more than a 20% difference on the defining characteristic of the MBAir line.

Edit: Is this data wrong? Is it an inappropriate comment? I've been on HN for nearly 5 years and it seems like there's more downvoting by the month.
> You can't do science without speculation.

That's not true. It's a fallacy that the first step in the scientific method is formulating a hypothesis. It's completely unnecessary. The first step is "let's see what happens". You do not need any speculation or hypothesis first. That comes later - after you have collected your data then you try to understand and predict.

> Sometimes, when it becomes possible to make a measurement, the model is found to be accurate.

And for more often the model is wrong. But you have no idea if it's wrong or right if you can not test the real world.

> microwave background radiation

That's not a model, and the fact the you think it is makes we wonder. That's an exact mathematical representation of the phenomena. A model is imprecise, it includes as many parameters as possible, but by necessity can not include everything since the world is too complex.

> Models do not just do whatever you want. Many unexpected behaviours turn up in models and some of them can be almost impossible to know the future behaviour of in advance of running them, even when you know all the input states.

That's called Chaos. And the interesting thing about Chaos is that tiny changes in the input (for example what decimal precision you use) cause large changes in the output. If your model is chaotic then it's utterly useless for any conclusions whatsoever because it's completely impossible for you to enter the input with the same level of precision as the real world. Chaos is fun to look at, but pretty useless for prediction.

There's a second thing possible called emergent behavior. But that too can not be modeled without understanding the real world first. What you do is keep changing the model till it matches the real world, then pull out the seemingly simple rules that cause complex behavior. But the model will fail as soon as you go outside the domain it was built in. Just because something acts the same way every time in the limited circumstances you tried does not mean it will keep doing so forever. That's a common extrapolation fallacy.

So again, useless for prediction since prediction by definition puts you in a circumstance you have not yet seen.

> In science, models are often what you use when the science isn't known, as you can use them as a guide to pick up on interesting things to go and look at.

Operative word: To go and look at. Not to draw conclusions from. Engineering uses models to validate the assumptions, Science uses models to verify understanding. In no field are (should) models be used to draw conclusions.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/index.html
I won't hold my breath given Google's track record shipping a useful GMail app for iOS.
" If people cared most about function, every single person on this planet would be walking around in New Balance trainers (or maybe Crocs), basketball shorts/track pants, and a Wallmart t-shirt. But instead, people pay hundreds of dollars for jeans that are far from functional. "

I think your argument is salient, but for the opposite reason. Everybody on the planet does wear these things. It's a very small majority of the population, usually urban and with money to spend, that dresses in hundred(s) dollars jeans. Walmart pulls down half a trillion per year on cheap schlock with hundreds of millions of happy customers.

Most people actually do dress like the Mac Guy

http://www.dailysloth.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/mac.jpg

Paradoxically, in terms of computer fashion, Apple doesn't sell to these people.
I had the same concerns so i researched it a bit more. While the processors used in these new macbook pros can address up to 32gb of RAM on the system, the DDR3 standard accomodates for up to 8gb per chip. With 2 chip slots, you are already maxed out, regardless of whether the chips are soldered on or not, so it makes no difference.
Amazon apply the fee regardless of delivery method. Check out the link posted by kennethcwilbur elsewhere in this thread.

https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26O...

Amazon charge $0.15/MB and the book was approximately 18MB in size.
The last time I checked, most major manufacturers except Apple (Lenovo, Dell, HP, ...) let you buy Accidental Damage Protection (which does cover spills among many, many other things).

From what I hear, Apple can sometimes be nice about accidents, but other times they're sticklers about the rules.
> running 1920 wide on 2880 would essentially result in "pixels" of RGBR BRGB RGBR BRGB and so on

What about vertical blurriness? If you just grouped the subpixels that way you would get non-square pixels, so you would still need to apply scaling in the vertical direction.
It's ridiculous to include the cost of the entire "Kindle ecosystem" with a fee called "delivery fee" - as other posts have mentioned, this is what commission is for. WhisperNet is another story - this is legitimately a part of the delivery - however, it's just 3G service that they leased from AT&T, and to assume it costs them even close to $2.58 per delivery is just ignorant. If I downloaded an 18MB e-mail attachment over 3g on my phone, essentially the same thing, I would be absolutely livid if I was charged $2.58.

Amazon's "delivery fee" is 15 cents/megabyte. By comparison, AT&T's most expensive pay-as-you-go data plan is $15 for 250MB, or 6 c/MB, less than half the price. Their cheapest plan is 1 cent/MB.

Amazon is known for having very reasonable data storage/transfer fees in their other services, so it's very clear to me that they're just taking a huge margin here.
Show HN: iBrewLog
Yes, it's soldered on, that's part of the reason they can make it so thin.

The point in buying it over the air remains: 15", retina, etc.

This is not something to be mad about. If you buy the maxed out 16GB, well, it's maxed out anyway.

If you buy the 8Gb, it's a compromise you make. You'll live with the 8GB, or sell the laptop to upgrade. It's worth the trade-off (small size, etc.)
What library/toolkit are they using for the UI?
The source has URLs to "/assets/<hex digits>" which looks very familiar, but I can't tell what they're using. Or is it all custom CSS?
i just use http://www.unlocktheinbox.com/dnslookup/mx/ or some other online dns lookup tools.
Facebook’s Camera app gets a new name: Camera•. Yes, “•”
"If you want non-Apple hardware, go buy it. There's nothing stopping you (or anyone else) from doing so. "

Unless I want to use non-Apple hardware with Apple software.
They practically give away the results of their development costs on OSX.

Most of the development was already done for them in the development of Open-BSD.
I think the real trick isn't convincing hardware makers -- they do what the operators ask them to (at least in the non-Apple world). Operators like Telefonica are interested. See e.g. http://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/02/27/mozilla-in-mobile-th...
Halcyon Molecular removed from Founder's Fund page - what happened?
http://www.foundersfund.com/

Should be in BioTech
Yeah, because they'd definitely find out who sent the drone up. No possible way to hide that. A drone is like a fingerprint in that way!
No problem. I can't comment much on the initial comparison between tablature and fingering since I don't read tablature or more than the very basics of guitar.

It is true that if you map in the reverse direction, tablature can represent playable music even if it's not particularly expressive, while piano fingerings can not. (Well, I suppose you could write music with only piano fingerings and let the performer improvise, but I'm sure that's not the point of this discussion :)
I actually started to write a response to this post about how WebOS and this project seem totally different in terms of the companies involved and being open source from the start, but then I thought more about it...

This project doesn't really feel like mozilla is trying to compete with Android or iOS in terms of developing a traditional mobile operating system.

It almost feels like mozilla is trying to lay down the ground work for what a web based mobile device SHOULD be. The entire UI using web technologies, JavaScript API's for everything. Think about that for a second... What users think about as the "OS" (basically the home skin, application launcher, widgets, themes and UI controls) is just an infinitely hackable web project for any company to come along and build on top of. Gecko or Webkit + Linux under the hood and thats it.
What's wrong with trying to fix education to restore the American Dream
I second this. While EC2 takes a bunch of really hard problems, allowing you to provision virtual servers at a moment's notice, the value proposition for RDS is much more marginal. It's simply not that hard to get MySQL up and running, even in a RAIDed configuration, and the fact that the underlying store is EBS means most of the advantage of RAID is spent simply overcoming the I/O handicaps of EBS.

We prefer running our MySQL instances on ephemeral storage, which is physically closer to the instance, and deal with I/O volumes by using lots of replication.
Job: Hilarious recruitment video pleads for developer
My friend just finished his first MBA year at HBS and is looking for a developer to help him create a social fitness app.
Mac Pro gets minor update with standard 12-core option, no Xeon E5
Resolution vs “real estate”
Thanks for the info. Bit beyond me, attempting that. But definitely interested in trying it if someone pulls it together.
One can be branded a "vexatious litigant," although one has to keep at it for a while for that particular achievement.
XBMC (supports Android remotes).
Why should I give my email? Are they going to email me more info? And, if it's a new email service, why do I need an existing email address to sign-up?
Humanize: my first open source package, mostly a rewrite
U should build a hackintosh using E5 Xeons

http://vr-zone.com/articles/ultimate-8-core-matx-powerhouse-xeon-e5-2690-r4g-7970dcii-and-more-/15123.html
http://www.macbreaker.com/2012/04/ultimate-xeon-hackintosh-server.html
I'd love to take that $20-40k and put it towards a company that does nothing but monitor websites like Funny Junk and issue takedown notices on the behalf of the content owners.

Companies like this probably exist, but I'm sure they don't come cheap and are used primarily by the big players (eg music labels, movie studios).

I think it is great that Matt is donating the money to charity. However, the idea of putting the money towards some kind of community focused content monitor struck me as an interesting alternative.

I also wonder to what degree something like this could be automated. I know sites like YouTube monitor their own content, but what if Matt could upload all his images, verify his ownership in a legally meaningful way, and then automatically monitor Funny Junk and issue takedown notices in real time.
ibuypower or one of the other custom rig manufacturers. or buy bare-bones kits on tigerdirect and put it together.
It helps to know what you're googling to find. Amazon's documentation is a mess (IMO) with half of it in PDF or other inaccessible format (.mobi) so that it's easy to get confused and lost in the process, especially for a first time author doing this on the side.
Except that Dell is now using the newer Sandy Bridge E5 Xeon processors while Apple's using models over 2 years old.

One simply can't compare what Apple's now offering with other workstations.
You are right, the monitor does have AC input. Still, it won't even power up unless it's connected to a Thunderbolt port. Believe me, I've learned this the hard way.
I've recently stumbled upon http://www.redmine.org/ and feel like it would be a useful tool. Anyone got anything similar or know of cool ones?
Groupon Baby Name Deal: Site Offers To Name Your Baby 'Clembough' For $1,000
The Industrial Design of Lenovo's X1 Carbon
I'd love one of these...though I would put Ubuntu on it...but at those prices? I don't think so.

The mintBox is available in two versions.

mintBox Basic ($476 + shipping, duty & VAT):

250GB HDD
APU G-T40N (1.0 GHz dual core + Radeon HD 6290 – 9W)
4GB RAM
Flat metal case
mintBox Pro ($549 + shipping, duty & VAT):

250GB HDD
APU G-T56N (1.65 GHz dual core + Radeon HD 6320 – 18W)
8GB RAM
Ribbed metal case
You've gotta divide by the usability factor of a digital book, which I'd loosely equate to a value of 3.26 times print. Still the markup is sorta ridic.
Gucci Sunglasses and Oakley Sunglasses Outlet Waiting For You
I wrote about working remotely a bit more from the employees perspective @ http://arandomurl.com/2011/09/03/working-remotely.html

Since I wrote that post I joined Mozilla as the only employee out of Scotland and I feel like I need to write the post again, Mozilla are superb at dealing with remote employees which I am sure comes from the foundations as an open source project.
Ask HN: Concise and performant languages for database loading?
I have a couple of cases where I need to load data from delimited files once per minute - they arrive at a one minute interval. The source files average 150MB in size, with a fixed length of 20 fields.

These are simple workflows where writing a simple script is quicker and easier to maintain than using an ETL system. However, my go-to language Python seems unable to keep up, taking about 3 minutes to parse and insert. An example pattern can be seen at https://gist.github.com/2914601 (I have tried a few tuning patterns, this is the fastest I have come up with). The example uses Redis, as an experiment, but not the only target.

I am interested in looking into languages that will be better performing, but come with some of Python's strengths - concise, easy to write, read and maintain code, and a library of relevant libraries and drivers.

I have been reading a bit about FP languages (Haskell/GHC), because of their performance, but I am not sure if the FP paradigm is appropriate for data integration tasks.

Opinions / Advice ?
Kind of difficult to ignore being litigated. Kinda stupid too.
Sure. Provide me a realistic way to provide an application across Windows, Linux, OSX, Android, iOS and platforms I haven't even considered with the same codebase (allowing for minor changes to coincide with the cross-platform hacks that go into CSS/JS) and it might be realistic.

But even then, we've still got to deal with the unwillingness of users to install applications versus their total willingness to visit a web page.
HR people listen up. Partner with your cities to offer these same lotteries for your staff to ride their bikes into work. Massive civic payoff with a teensy bit of capital. Also might benefit your health insurance bottom lines.
Depends on what you're doing. I'd be satisfied with a 12-core Mac Pro for everyday development--but if a 128-core Xeon were available I'd take it gladly.

When I was working on quantum state diffusion, it took many hours on a 24-node cluster for a single run. In many of these tasks, the problem will expand to consume all reasonably available resources; more cores allow greater precision, wider sampling of parameters, higher fidelity, etc.
Except open distribution and being automatically cross platform...
Apple going for Google's jugular with new releases
The new ASUS Zenbook Prime (UX21A 11"/UX31A 13") models that were announced last month have similar specs to the new MBA (Ivy Bridge, up to 256Gb SSD, etc.) but are both available with 1920x1080 IPS screens. I had the original UX21 and sold it because the keyboard was not so great, but from the reviews of the new models, they have improved the keyboard and trackpad.
Make Up: Prom Preparation Makeover - Free Online Games
I used this to the very end :) A friend who first started using OS X with 10.6 saw it and installed it right then too.

Good news! There is a system preference in 10.8 to ungroup windows (by application) in Mission Control.

Still, the "spaces bar" and dock show up every time you use MC, so there's less real estate than on 10.5. Dragging to the Dock stopped being useful in 10.6 IMHO, that's still the same in 10.8. (In 10.5, dragging an icon to the dock in Exposé would act the same as clicking the icon - e.g. for Skype it would open the window if it was closed.)
Ryan, I noticed from past posts of yours that you are probably a very family oriented guy. Just wanted to get your perspective on moving you and your family half way across the globe. I myself am considering moving a good distance from my family (parents and siblings, I'm not married yet) and I wanted to get your advice on big moves.
A Day in the Life of a DJ #2: Turning Lemons into Lemonade
"Since the OS and apps will be in HiDPI mode"

I'm pretty sure not only will many popular apps be updated but you can turn HiDPI off.

With updated apps I believe you'd have to be using ~43% of your screen on chrome and UI elements to lose real estate when moving to the retina MBP.