skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN Aftermath: Releasing Followords.com this morning
This morning I've submitted our project to HN.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4099054

Got pretty helpful feedback. But that wasn't the only thing.

478 people requested invite out of 755. 63% conversion rate. Almost 9K unique visitor visited our website. At some point in the morning I was seeing 400+ active users on the website. Unbelievable. 35 people registered without telling them how to register. ( You cannot register directly, there is only a login form - but they figured out a way :)
http://imgur.com/Kbf9J

6K people visited directly from Hacker News, 1K from Twitter ( I guess Popular Hacker News post )

I was afraid that Nginx might not hold up, but that was not the problem. I wasn't ready for it! Stuck on my chair from 08:00 am till 02:00 pm. I am still feeling anxious.

People tweeted about us without using our application. https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/followords (even in Spanish)

Today another lesson learnt: So if you are working on a project. Release it. Ship it. Let people tell you how much your project, website or tagline sucks. Embrace it. Think about it, thank them and move on.

I need some sleep, tomorrow is another great day.
Thank you all for your contributions.
When that breaks, it's going to make a mess. 6 humans in, various bits of popped human coming out...
Based on the news reports, I thought it was controlled by the Swedish government's tourism ministry.
Yeah, I'm on the Hooktheory team that wrote the article. I love your idea! We're 100% set up to do that kind of thing. It would certainly make an interesting, fun, social set of posts. Today was our first exposure to the world and the feedback / ideas have been amazing. Thanks for the idea. - Chris
Well, there's the problem right there. They're using a dyno manifold to connect to the routing mesh. If they'd just use a flux capacitor, they could use a static manifold instead.
A friend of mine has a site that does something similar. It uses music theory to generate real-sounding music for musicians to practice sight-reading.
https://sightreadingfactory.com/
Futuristic trains could take you from NYC to London in an hour
Please change title to: "Why was the story about the story about changing titles killed."
Additionally, the only mention I see of matter to energy conversion is an aside about efficiency of propulsion technology, not energy generation; it doesn't appear that they evaluate matter-energy conversion as an actual energy source at all.
Ask HN: Best Menu/Catalog Experience 
I was writing an iPad application for a client, a restaurant. App is still under development and at this point I'm not allowed to share who my client is or what we are doing specifically. But I can say it's a menu app, a simple menu app with few features.

While I was thinking about this app I thought about creating a platform like MenuPad, but cheaper & easier to use version of it. And I want people to create the app inside my web app on the web, then download & publish it, unlike MenuPad, I think. These menu/catalogs apps should be downloadable on the App Store and it also should has an optional ordering feature.

But I want to do something different, I wanted to ask peoples opinions on this subject. I'll be asking this on HackerNews and may be on few other platforms, and then update this post with those ideas.[1] I also want to ask people about how can I get the best UX? Does anyone knows a good article about menu UX? But I'm not just asking about the UX, I want ideas on every aspect of this.

Some of my ideas (I can't share the ones that I'll be coding for my client's app, I'll update this post once the app is released):

Social sharing (Facebook Like for menu items perhaps?),
Optional ordering features depending on your location,
Should be integrated with sales devices (like printers and other sales equipment that is used in a restaurant or a coffee shop)

[1] I've copied [my blog post](http://go.batu.me/LRDnVF) to HN directly.
The title and your point are both just playing on the semantics of the words. The study is measuring "general intelligence", which is a better defined (if still poorly understood and somewhat controversial) subject amenable to scientific study. Basically everyone in the field accepts that it's real. Even informally, think back to your school peers: I'm willing to bet good money that, on balance, the ones that everyone called "smart" got the best grades, got the best test scores and ultimately got the best jobs. All those things are correlations, and they can be measured scientifically. And they're real.

Basically, if you want to quibble with the headline of the post, then I'll grant that it's a little confusing (intentionally so, as are most good headlines), even if IMHO that point is a little specious. If you really want to claim "there is no test that can accurately measure intelligence" as a matter of scientific fact, you're just plain wrong, sorry.
As more and more VCs split the $150k, the value of the early access to deal-flow decreases. Initially, it made sense for an aggressive VC to invest $3m (60 companies * 50k) per YC-batch to get an option into the hottest seed & series-A rounds in Silicon Valley.

But as this continues, it's looking more and more like a tax on seed round participation. Pay $x, or you'll be left out. Not that (YC) startups are complaining... they're more than happy to get the $150k on incredible terms.
When I was young and learning music theory in piano lessons, one day I realized that literally half the songs on the radio used the chord progression "I V vi IV". This was a huge revelation to me! To my dismay, I couldn't find any evidence on the internet that anyone else had noticed this, until very recently I saw the "Four Chord Song" by Axis of Awesome (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I). I was hoping to see some mention of that in this article, but was disappointed.
When writing for publication, I enjoy pondering this quote: "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." From S. Shchukin, Memoirs

That is to say, if you're going to write something, every word has to have potency. This gets at the cut in half, cut in half, cut in half advice.

In short, good writing is concise.
Much of the practice of Scientology is based on theater exercises designed to do exactly the same thing as LessWrong. The similarities are unsurprising.

Personally, I have yet to see any evidence suggesting rationality is even desirable. The most irrational people, selfless, story-oriented, tolerante of multiple conflicting subjective "realities", interested in the feelings and passions of people around them no matter what they are, are also those I most enjoy interacting with. Everyone I have met who strives for rationality is at least a bit of a prick.
Weird, because every now and again my Macbook will just die after waking up. I also find that while initially it was really fast and worked great, it's now really slow and takes up to 10 seconds, while my linux laptop (which doesn't even have an SSD) wakes up pretty much instantly
The developer provides some additional information in the forum which I found interesting: http://forums.crackberry.com/news-rumors-f40/real-fake-ios-a...

But yes, quite an amazing achievement for just one person.
>It would be impossible to persecute everyone who's used circumvention tools without emptying half of Tehran.

Judging from the recent actions in the middle east, the leadership there have no problem with going precisely that far, and further if they see fit.
This analysis misses the forest for the trees: modern pop music is all about stylistic and sonic innovation. Musical forms tend to evolve along certain parameters while holding others constant. In jazz and classic there has (historically) been a lot of exploration in harmony and melody, but the sonic palette has held steady over long periods of time. Pop music is the opposite.

In the world of rap music, the sonic innovation has been extreme. The meaning of a Public Enemey "song" cannot be assessed through this type of analysis.
Privilege Escalation/VM-to-Host Vulnerability on Intel 64 bit CPUs
That's exactly the problem, don't want to open another application to find which bus to take and when, we want it integrated into maps.
That's how I constructed the above list in the first place, but I get what you mean; you shouldn't be learning these as Street Fighter-like combos.
Cached: http://www.kb.cert.org.nyud.net/vuls/id/649219
When you're young, you've heard less music. Which means that things that seem derivative and samey to older people don't to teens.

There is also, in general, more tolerance for repetition in dance music than in other genres.
It's an interesting analysis, but I'm extremely dubious about the degree of extrapolation going on here. It's hard to imagine that the past 25 years have been typical in human history, or for that matter that the past 125 years have been. Is it really safe to make any quantitative assumptions about how technology and society will support spaceflight 200 years from now?

Those concerns are only magnified by the author's willingness to list a "nominal readiness date" of the year 5000 for humanity to be able to capture and use 100% of the entire galaxy's energy output (last line of Table 5). It would take 20 times that long just for us to reach the other edge of the galaxy, even assuming light speed travel.
It is now dead too with 188 points and 50 comments - one of pg: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103210

So there's not space here for community discussion about moderation. Bad^2.
Pride Parade != Hooters-style Restaurant. Sorry. We're out there to be proud. Not sell beer and wings. Little different context, champ.
Before the terrorists it was the Communists - people are just contrarian.
* But, crucially, an ensemble of linear models is just a linear model. So in fact, there should be no variance reduction in the authors' approach. *

You are right. But I disagree that " It should be better to train a single linear model on ALL the data " - because its impractical to find the right parameters for your training method. Since this is a large data problem, I assume author's are using a parametric optimization routine? - Hence a practical solution is to learn multiple linear models using different parameters and using different subsets of the data.
"We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody."

--Buckminster Fuller

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth
Only tangentially related, but IR satellite imagery showed a significant, clearly discernable spike in temperature immediately above the epicenter of the Tohoku quake last March, that peaked three days before the quake. That's a lot more than a few seconds' notice, if it's consistent.
More internet misogyny. Fortunately, this one comes with a way to actual give for the cause.
Online portfolios considered harmful
If you really want to dive in deep, this could be a fun place to start since it covers the upcoming finals:

http://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/uweqv/nba_finals_play_a...

It's done by a redditor, Mens_Rea who has written up tons of stuff:

http://www.reddit.com/user/Mens_Rea/submitted/

It's worth finding a writeup of a non-Thunder/Heat team since they play fairly similar styles.
Bring on the art music discussion! 1) What ever-growing sophistication? Everything you can do with chords and harmony was done by Bach. The next 150 years were variations on that theme. 2) That Stravinsky and Bartok, et ali, are still seen as "edgy" says more about orchestras' willingness to educate their audiences than it does about Stravinsky, or Bartok.

And 3), rock and roll didn't kill art music, or rise from its ashes. It's a separate thing all together, with its roots in earlier popular music genres. (jazz, bluegrass, the blues...) Rather there was significant cross-fertilization between rock and the not-quite-dead-yet art music sub-genre of minimalism.
In Civ 4 the different leaders have personality. Ghandi is peaceful and will never backstab a weak player, Montezuma is batshit insane and lusts for blood, Isabella from Spain is a religious fanatic, Mansa Musa will quickly forget past wars and is happy to make peace to trade techs. A player can also befriend and ally a KI and win jointly.

There is a Google Tech Talk from the formet Civ lead programmer about this "Fun AI". In Civ 4 the Vanilla AI doesnt focus that much on winning. ManyAI Mods implement a more total War style and brutal min-max-gaming with huge armies to challenge experienced players. Also Civ 5 abandoned the Civ 4 style of diplomacy and replaced it with "hidden box" and a "Hard AI" which plays to win. It was at release date a huge disappointment of many veteran Civ players.
Remove State Attorney Angela Corey
Official Facebook plugin for WordPress Documentation
Thinner and lighter than a 13" MBP and lacking an optical drive. I think that's a meaningful definition of "Air-like".
Ones that might in the work already.
Surely I'm not the only one infuriated by their choice of blue text on a blue background?
Facebook Integration for WordPress (Blog Post)
The power issue is hugely significant. Using a GPU kills battery life, which is why laptops now have two GPUs -- a low-power basic GPU and a switchable high-power GPU
Not especially, although being able to comprehend rules and structure is a biproduct of systems-level thinking. However, the "non-linear" part of my definition also implied an ability to question, circumvent or simply ignore such systems as well, and includes the ability to reason within a set of rules without believing that set of rules to be accurate or true.

Systems and rulesets can be a useful method to structure memory and reason, but being bound by them is detrimental to long-term correctness and comprehension. Being able to write syntactically-correct programs is useful, but neither necessary nor sufficient to be an excellent programmer. A meta-understanding of the effect such syntax has on the program at hand is more useful than always correctly following it.
huh? did you have a point?
I've located incredibly stupid bugs that I wrote enough times to know that I am not a great coder.
Google Tech Talk (2010): AI in Civilization 4
Yay! Another Git tutorial :-)
Hi fferen, I V iv V is indeed a super popular progression. You can see an example of it here: http://www.hooktheory.com/analysis/view/james-blunt/youre-be.... One cool thing about the way we store music (using relative notation) is that we can compare any two songs to see how similar they are harmonically. For example, there are several "similar songs" shown below the I V vi IV example in the link that all use the same progression in different keys.
Wow, these comments don't inspire much confidence in evolution even after they are cleaned up.
But you'd still have to wait for it to download, just like with games.
This is cool, but right now it's an inferior but slightly shinier version of http://bitcoin-otc.com/ .
This has been here an hour and only one comment (prior to mine). I wonder why.
Turning Soap Film into a Projector Screen
One of those times when changing the title would be good :-)

I find that people who believe that 'Bitcoin' could replace an actual currency don't actually understand what 'currency' actually is. As a criminal 'marker' system I think Bitcoin excels in all of its goals, but without understanding that a nation's currency is a marker for its economic capacity, you can't make durable statements.

And the Euro isn't "melting down" by the way, it is the fact that the economies that are tied to the Euro have some unsustainable fiscal policies. And correcting those policies is politically hard, so between now and when the corrections are in place, the Euro tries to price the actual economic capacity.
That question sort of bothered me - I have no idea how big a tree is, and even if I saw one, I have no reference for how many feet it is without doing some fairly exhaustive mathematics (and at the scale of "largest redwood", I'd likely be wrong). Given some information about redwood trees, of course people are going to use that information in the subsequent guess. They're not going to imagine a redwood tree, then imagine a building next to it, then count the floors and estimate the height. Or estimate the girth, then guess a height/girth ratio that makes sense given the composition of a tree, and then estimate the height. They're lazy.

If I asked you, "Will a frooble fit in my pocket/empire states building?", and then asked you to estimate the average size of a frooble, you'd certainly take into account my earlier question.

See http://lesswrong.com/lw/k3/priming_and_contamination/ for some better examples. IMO, the more insidious form of anchoring is contamination (vs sliding adjustment).
Thanks lince for the heads up. I guess we'll create some contradiction in Spanish :)
Some gadget that will instantaneously inject me with the ability to make enough money online to clean up my financial mess and support myself (as in with housing and everything)...
My thought process was approximately, "Ten cents! Wait, that's really stupid. Hold on. Mental algebra. Oh. Five cents."

I catch myself like this all the time. It's a little depressing.
How the hell does light rail track cost $2.5M/mile? How did people build railroad tracks back in the days of horses and buggys?
Animals are less irrational than humans. Children are less irrational than adults. Why do you assume rationality is better, rather than maladaptive?
As long as I've been around online communities, trolling has always been regarded as something playful.
Expertly Leveraging the Open Graph is One Secret to Boosting App Installs
Comments here reinforce the research.
I am tempted to believe this article is a troll. But on second thought, the author is probably just projecting imaginary racism on at least half of the so-called hipster racists.

The author suggests that the use of the hashtag #thuglife is racist. What kind of moron thinks pointing out the lack of behavior attributed to a "thug" (which, by the way, is not even racial in nature) in an ironic way is exhibiting a form of racism?

Then the author attributes the word "ghetto" with racism. News flash: ghettos are never fun to live in, much less visit. Certainly there's racial undertones because traditionally ghettos were populated by a single ethnic group, but even the explanation of the example by the author disregards race and focuses solely on the poor conditions of the area.

I won't comment on number 3 because there's no arguing with emotional instability.

On number 4, I have to say that it is definitely racist to say any ethnic or other group in general is bad or sucks, etc. That being said, I have lived with white anglo-saxon protestants for most of my life, and they can definitely be super lame. Perhaps it's an excessive amount of lameness that forces people who deal with it on a regular basis to lash out at the whole populous. Not good, but at the same time, I totally understand what the hipster is saying. And is it hurting anybody? I don't think so. The least-oppressed group can stand to take a few knocks for their flaws every so often.
Agreed -- support for an RSS feed would even let me use this with my Svbtle account and be my ultimate personal destination!
Awesome! This is great.

I'm also working on an APNS gem called Lead Zeppelin, which is similar in design, but adds a few things like a pool of connections (read: concurrent on threaded systems like JRuby and Rubinius): https://github.com/geoloqi/lead_zeppelin

There is some high quality code here, this is a great start. I think the error handling needs to be drilled down a bit, and there needs to be more logging. I'm definitely going to borrow some components of this.. the apns test server is really awesome! I'm happy that APNS support is improving in the Ruby community.
What, exactly, does the lilypad one have to do with biology...?
The questions, judging from the ones in the article, seem to be about testing one's logical reasoning skills. The SATs, at least the qualitative portion, attempt to measure one's math and logical reasoning skills. It seems entirely reasonable to me to assume that someone who scored highly on the SATs should not be tripped up by these kind of questions, and the finding that they are actually more inclined to be tripped up surprises me.

It might be better just to look at a student's qualitative portion of the exam, since one could score highly on the SATs while still getting a (relatively) poor score on the section most similar to these kinds of questions.
The other Civilization thread reminded me of this one hour presentation by Soren Johnson, the lead designer and AI programmer of Civ 4. It is also interesting to note that Civ 4 has a big mod scene and in patches/Mods the AI was extended (Better AI Mod). Also the sequel Civ 5 changed the approach to AI heavily (I dislike it).
What you are talking about is hyperparameter optimization.

For example, in a typical l2-legularized logreg model (like in this paper), there is a single hyperparameter which controls the strength of the regularizer.

What we typically do is train one model for each choice of hyperparameters, perhaps doing a line-search if its a single hyperparameter. This hyperparameter optimization is "embarrassingly parallel", to use a term of art. So if you have multiple machines, each one uses a different hyperparameter and no Hadoop is necessary. I wouldn't be surprised if this approach is over twenty years old. Choosing the hyperparameter over ALL the data and training a linear model of ALL the data should be superior training an ensemble of models over subsets of data, and picking hyperparameters over subsets.

On interesting area of research is when there are many hyperparameters, particularly for non-linear models. For example, in training a deep neural network, there are many hyperparameters, and it becomes prohibitive to do exhaustive hyperparameter selection. Randomization is one good strategy. James Bergstra has done some recent work on improving hyperparameter selection. If you used a smart technique to guide the search within the hyperparameter space, and had one "master" node that gave hyperparameters to the worker nodes, and this master node did the hyperparameter search, that would be a sophisticated and useful technique.

[edit: spelling]
Harmonic sophistication is a...fraught term. There were jazz musicians who developed a style based on 1 chord, but it needn't be harmonically simple. Ever tried riffing off a humming appliance? It's really fun. I used to do it while waiting for my laundry, since the washers all hummed at the same pitch. When it's you and a fixed tone, your harmonic palette starts opening up in wild ways. Microtones creep in, and new decoration schemes.

You also have to be careful because Bach and Purcell didn't think in terms of our modern harmonic structure. They worked in voicing and figured base, which produces similar, but not identical, results. Go back a little farther, and it's all voicing. Palestrina in in some ways closer to Schoenberg than Haydn.

As for the breakdown of harmony in art music, not so much. Serialism got all the academic and theoretical attention, and many mediocre composers with a theoretical bent worked in it, and a few great composers like Stravinsky and Shostakovitch, but it's hardly all the art music that was being composed. Many composers got through their whole careers without any particular use of it, such as Walter Piston. What that has to do with rock and roll is a mystery to me, since it's an offshoot of jazz, which is alive and well and still serving as a wellspring for new music.
According to Restoration Hardware, "CARING is the ultimate competitive advantage". They're just figuring that out now.
Moustagram: Instagram with Mustaches
I immediately switched to generic variables X and Y, rather than keeping the original names. It helps.