skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>In machine learning, overfitting generally results from having too much test data or focusing on irrelevant metrics.

Huh? Overfitting usually happens when your training set is too small. The size of the test set does not affect overfitting because the test set is, by definition, only used to evaluate the accuracy of the final learned function.

In addition, overfitting doesn't happen because of "focusing on irrelevant metrics". It happens because your data set is noisy, or because your learning model is too simplistic to fully model the observed phenomenon (which is known as deterministic noise).

If your model focuses on irrelevant metrics, that won't actually be a problem as long as your training set is large enough to reveal their irrelevance. After training, those metrics will not have much bearing on the output function.

This misinterpretation of overfitting really hurts the analogy.
Thanks for that quick overview. :)
New management, new strategy.
I think another barrier that growing is how broken app mgmt is on iPhone and even more so on Android. I don't download free apps because I don't want the clutter.
I'm in the US and you have all really got me curious about the Aussie coffee. I too hate Starbucks and find it quite bitterly me a pot that's been on all day).

Unfortunately I just prefer Big Coffees off the shelf brand, but don't know what to try. Just that it's not Starbucks.

Is there somewhere that I can order Aussie coffee from and know its actually the coffee you describe and not just branded 'Aussie'?
Even the biggest fan of music will be annoyed at everyone playing their new composition at the same time.
I use Twitter via their official apps, I have tried some of the third party apps but haven't really been impressed. After all this time it didn't seem like the app ecosystem was coming up with anything really innovative besides slightly different ways of organizing the feeds.
>What individual choices would it make a big difference for?

Control your own data, for ex. when it's deleted it's really gone (except for whom you already shared with,) not just hidden until it's sold to somebody or hacked.

Not necessarily being forced into changing user interface ala Timeline, or any of the other dozen times it's happened, just to fit some corporate goal.

Sharing pictures or stories or groups with friends without violating the lowest common denominator social norms enforced by a corporate terms of service, and thereby being banned from the service for life.

Probably a more free "application" ecosystem whose selection criteria isn't #1 does this make Facebook, Inc. money or cost it money.
Agreed, the launches are interesting. YC job ads I see one of the ways the site pays for itself.

But seriously, tech startup launches? As opposed to another shallow-but-emotionally-intense political discussion? Easy choice.
This is the kind of thing that happens when you don't have a business model.
> If the food is horrible, I can send it back.

You CAN...but legally, you can't walk out on the bill. Even walking out after ordering is illegal, as I understand it. And if one thing that arrives is terrible, then are you really going to trust that something else will be better?

Probably not. So are you really going to walk out without paying? Most people won't, and you would be breaking the law if you did walk out.

Google already did an experiment in a 24 hour return policy. Guess what? A HUGE percentage of games -- GOOD games -- got bought, played for 8 hours, and returned.

A game for $0.99 isn't intended to be a lot more than a few hours of enjoyment. A $60 game may need at least 16-24 hours of solid content, but a $1 game is still a better value if it can entertain you for three hours. The 24 hour return policy was a stated reason several big developers refused to develop Android games, so Google changed it to 15 minutes.

One extreme to the other. Sigh.

Regardless, this whole thread is completely missing the fact that A LOT of good apps have demos/samples that you CAN try for free, and people still complain and whine about having to actually PAY $1 for a game they can find out for free that they like, or an app that they can find out for free works just fine for their purposes.

AND, you can look at reviews to see if the app works. When you go to a random restaurant, you don't get a pile of reviews pasted to its front door that you can read to find out if it's any good. In the world of apps, you CAN see reviews at the point of purchase.

And I hope you posted bad reviews (after contacting the app developers to see if they could help you!) on the apps you bought, to warn others.
The networks get very little (IIRC a small flat fee per transaction on the order of 5 to 10 cents, but I don't have our pricing in front of me and it's some of the most opaque pricing you'll ever see) - most of interchange goes to the issuing bank.

Blame the banks issuing credit cards for the high rates, not Visa and MC (both AmEx and Discover are, effectively, their own issuing banks - so go ahead and give them their fair share of the blame)
This has got more to do with production and consumption of a physical good as compared to a "virtual" good than anything else. The marginal utility you mention for coffee is derived from the physicality of the product - and thus I think the Starbucks vs. app comparison is invalid.

The barrier to entry to create and deliver a software application is extremely low as compared to creating and delivering almost any physical good. The physicality of a thing - especially coffee - ensures that only one instance of it can be used at any time (and it would probably be "used up" during consumption). Creating a new copy has costs (where copying and delivery costs are zero and more than one copy can exist at a time disorienting the supply/demand dynamics, people would always be reluctant to pay for a thing - hence digital piracy).

Software, has no such restrictions and virtually zero delivery costs. That's why RMS always said that charging for the act of software development is right. But charging for copies of the same stuff (and not providing its source) is not - people may talk about intellectual property - but that's a different debate.

When you buy a car, you pay for it - your neighbour with exactly the same model also pays for it. It's also "open-source" (or at least, it used to be) - you can take it apart and figure out how it works. What you might not be able to do is to create the car from scratch (you may not have the tools, materials, expertise etc.). And that's why you pay a hefty sum for it.

The same does not hold true for simple apps - they are easy to put together, the tools to do so are freely available in most cases and the expertise can be gained in a short amount of time. Hence, the $0.99 price tag - because the developer knows it's easy enough to put something together for free - if you had the time.

Note that this does not apply to high-end software where significant amounts of R&D and engineering effort is required - and hence the end-product can't be easily reproduced from scratch. That's why I still feel slightly guilty (and very privileged) when I can download and use Linux for free and browse through its source all I want - economics says it shouldn't be free - but it is.
Because not everybody has enough self control. I'm sure most people who waste too much time on reddit/tumblr/etc. realize they could be spending their time more productively, and many of them have made an effort to do so and failed. At that point they can try again, or just go with the nuclear option.

I would bet that cutting off their internet entirely would be a net positive for a surprising number of web users.
It wasn't sufficiently Helvetica.
Of course, all of this is absurd security theater, given that chip-and-PIN is already broken: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/oakland10chipbroken.p...
We used to say that using language like that showed the intellectual level of the user. I always believed it frequently showed their age, also.
This annoys me immensely. I understand a standardized format for installed packages, but I should be able to dictate the hierarchy of my own code....
"the tool of the worker, not of management"

If you have a stereotypical corporate antagonistic divide between workers and management then I completely agree. Good planning and estimation is about managing upwards and managing expectations.

If you are in the context that this post was about, with no or very little divide between management and workers, where blame for delays or praise for being ahead of schedule is equally or nearly equally shared among everyone it's quite a good essay imo.
Unfortunately, you cannot load Dojo with other AMD loaders. It has shims and features within its dojo.js that prevent's other loaders from being able to use it; dojo can load other AMD modules but not vice-versa.

Also, the comparison of FF/IE and Windows/Mac, the argument is flawed - the underdogs came out to fix problems with the status quo. Dojo does not provide significant benefit over jQuery or similar tools to warrant switching frameworks.
Scrubbable gif images
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> That's right, they all failed because the users don't care about the technologies and the APIs.

I'm so glad we agree on this. Users indeed do not care about technologies or APIs.

They care about great experiences.

Twitter does not excel at great experiences. If they did, third party clients would not have to exist.

Since they do, 23% of Twitter users choose to consume the network via superior-to-them, third-party offerings. Twitter has signed the death warrant of those products. Craigslist would be a valid counter-argument had it been initially built on the strength of third-party clients and then killed them. (PadMapper doesn't count, before you bring it up. It came to craigslist after dominance, not before.)

Twitter, on the other hand, has two native clients that began their very lives as third-party products.

We'll see. Maybe Twitter will be just fine after taking their most engaged users and sending them elsewhere.

Or maybe the users will follow their tech-savvy friends to a better experience, which again, isn't a hard category to trounce Twitter in.
The big question was whether the guy was a designer or not (the feedback sounds like a designer). I run a small design and dev agency and my partner (The creative director) won't let wireframe documents out the door that don't look designed even if in any other way they're perfect.

This is the nature of designers, and doesn't, necessarily, reflect a corporate culture.
I think "online purchases" (software services, mobile apps, etc.) are in special category because they are generally run and sold by people which really don't know a lot about pricing and selling.

I know that because I'm in that category.
Loadreport.js: DOM load-time benchmarking with phantom.js
> ??? x = &arr;

Does this compile? I thought an array was treated like a constant pointer, inexistent in memory so you cannot take its address, increment it, or attribute it another value. Although the point made by RegEx about sizeof, which I didn't remember, convinced me that an array is not actually a constant pointer.

To make my thoughts clear, if arr is equivalent to &arr[0], then wouldn't &arr be equivalent to &&arr[0]?
Perhaps the Cairo Declaration's signatories believe that sharia law protects universal human rights adequately, and that the UN's version of universal human rights is an attempt to lump together rights that are truly universal with some "rights" that are culturally specific, dubious, and in some cases downright wrongheaded, in order to stuff them down the throats of other countries?

It makes as much sense to say that the Cairo Declaration "subordinates all human rights to sharia law" as to say that the UNDHR "subordinates all human rights to the will of the UN General Assembly". And characterizing the signing of the Cairo Declaration as "rejecting universal human rights" is exactly opposite of the truth: the Cairo Declaration is an affirmation of universal human rights.
Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead
1 week to write a Twitter clone, several years to blog about it.
I thought this was really cool, until I saw that it cost $129.... Realistically, who would buy this? I'm assuming that because it is proprietary, it can not be used on the Internet, and if you don't have to cater to arbitrary OSes, why not use grh software?
Sorry - that doesn't cut it I'm afraid. When someone is accusing someone else of something as serious as "rape" - and it is simply "word against word" (no physical evidence, no witnesses, no violence, etc), one ONLY has the actions and credibility of the parties involved both before and after the events in question. In this case, it appears plain that the sex was consensual, in both cases. The behaviour afterwards (Willen refusing to sign a rail-roaded statement and Ardin continuing to cuddle up and have more sex) would seem to indicate all was well. In cases such as this, the CONTEXT of the behaviours before, during and after the events are ALL-IMPORTANT. And in THIS case, when you factor in the political gain to be had from smearing and legally debilitating Assange, combined with the absolutely clusterfucked process via which they (eventually) launched arrest warrants and red notices, combined with their leaks to the press and unwillingness to question Assange by phone, videolink or in person in the UK ... really leads one to believe there is more going on behind the scenes than can be seen. At the end of the day, a simple question suffices. Would any of this be happening if the guy involved was JOE BLOGGS, rather than Julian Assange? The simple answer to that is "of course not." So ... what are we talking about again?
I know, I joined.
Sharing a bike is cool if you need it only sometimes, like a few times a month or less. Or if you don't have space to store your own bike.
Anyone know how to check the number of users that have authenticated the apps on the twitter dev portal?
Funders Club raises over $1M for startups online — including itself
R.I.P. Twitter

*06/2006 †08/2012
I think you're really underestimating the value that "normal people" provide to Twitter, I would bet that the majority of Twitter users (that are active) are not "early adopters", but "normal people" that follow celebrities and talk to their friends. I left high school a few years back and the majority of my Facebook friends are ~19-20, almost all of them use Twitter and not a single one could write a line of code in any programming language, nor could they give a damn about whether or not Twitter is open to developers.

Take a look at the Twitter trends list if you want proof that Twitter caters more to "normal people" than it does "technology" people, here's the #1 trend as I type this: http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23NameATurnOn

Yes, their only defense is their network (which is, in my opinion, their "product"), but the majority of their network is not going to leave because of their developer relations. Twitter are safe as long as an alternative doesn't exist and they provide value to their users.

Twitter aren't stupid, they're not going to be enacting this plan if the majority of their users use third party clients. I suspect the majority of people that do use third party clients are those using "value adding" third party clients, like Hootsuite, and those that use Hootsuite are the people that get value from Twitter's network (for example marketing people) so if Hootsuite shuts down they're not going to quit Twitter, they're going to move to an official client.
From what I can get, it's the design of the twitter feed. The article is attempting to show how deeply ingrained design and detail is in the company, along with being part of the team.

You'll often see internal tools will be the last place that design matters, because customers don't see it.
one thing i learned abt making games is to limit the game space, and user input. Foster a healthy community first, then introduce freedom.
That's because they bought the cool third party apps like the TweetDeck and Tweetie, and have since begun shunning third party developers. In short, the official apps were third party apps, and now no one wants to make any additional Twitter apps because Twitter has become hostile to developers. They've closed the door on third party inovation for their platform.
Currently you can't. They used to show those numbers but dropped it, I think, for scaling issues a long while ago. Maybe Twitter will bring it back.
I fully agree.

The only problem I have is a desperate will for people to work out self control without resulting to absolute extremes. I really want to make the argument that people should just tone it down a bit, and maybe try to remove themselves from the shit that ends up actually being wasted time (facebook, 9gag, mainstream reddit, stumble, etc), but there's a part of me that completely sides with the idea that people should just fuck off from it entirely and enjoy the nice day.

I don't really have an issue with time management, so my internal conflict ends up hanging on the fact that I've never been in those proverbial shoes.
Possibly but doubt it. Not enough of a major selling point.

My guess is multi user support and not just for iPads, iPhones but also for the upcoming Apple TV remote. It would be integrated either into the home button or possibly a swipe up from the bottom lip.
This is not quite true. They can offer a discount when paying in cash, but they can't charge an extra fee when a credit card is used after the agreement to purchase.

Source: http://usa.visa.com/personal/using_visa/checkout_fees/index....
No one was buying stuff over the internet 12 years ago.
If the only thing you're selecting your merchant processor on is a couple of basis points, you're going to end up screwing yourself over regardless. You'll never get the real cost of processing out of a traditional merchant processor regardless - in fact, you really can't unless you know the cards* you'll be charging ahead of time. There's a lot more that also matters, like time to receive funds, reserves, chargeback costs, handling, and dispute resolution, gateway fees, breakdown of authorization versus capture costs... the list goes way on.

* Unless you're doing billions of CC volume per year, in which case that turns into real money.

Not all Visa cards are created equal. Different Visas cost different amounts to process, based on a huge number of factors. Debit/Credit/Charge, Intl/Domestic, Business/Personal, Prepaid, numerous sub-categories, etc.
Want to stalk great white sharks in real time? There's an app for that.
Yeah, this is really old. I remember seeing it six years ago when I started using OCaml.
> There's a huge, huge difference between doing relative point-based estimation and date-driven, pointy-haired-boss estimation, and it's a total disservice to the software community that so many engineers seem to not really understand that difference, and seem to think that the only two options are "unrealistic date-based estimates" and "no estimates."

This was my beef with the article too. Basically on the one hand he proposes a strawman composed of known-worst practices (estimate-by-deadline, estimate-by-gut, ad hoc estimation and so on) and thereby tars all estimation with the brush ... except for the one alternative he approves.

This is the fallacy of dichotomy.

The root problem is the concept that estimates have to be accurate. Well, duh, they can't be. The bigger the project, the more people, the longer the timeframe, the less likely the project is to meet the estimate.

That's why you don't perform one estimate.

That's why you have confidence bands on estimates.

The whole blog article feels like a pastiche of criticism cribbed from agile books and not from a direct, thoughtful engagement with the primary or secondary literature on software project estimation.

I'm only 31. By any measure I'm still a young man. Why do I feel like such a curmudgeon all the time? Because apparently nobody reads books or papers any more. It's all blogs citing blogs who echoed the summary of the notes of the review of a single book.

One more thing. There's a difference between a plan and an estimate. Plan-and-control is not the same thing as performing an estimate; DeMarco's self-criticism is not directly applicable.
Or better still, allow developers to specify a trial period if they wish to. Only Windows 8 and Windows Phone App stores currently do this, I believe. Some apps that might be of a single use kind won't make sense for this, but most apps like games will and there will be less resistance to upgrading rather than downloading the "Pro" version all over again.
There's really no such thing as 'Aussie' coffee, as I doubt coffee is produced in commercial quantities anywhere in Australia, although there are local roasters.

What they are referring to is coffee made by an Australia barista.

Basically, coffee culture is huge in Australia, and being a quality barista is seen as a cool kind of job to have, despite the generally low pay.

It's not unusual on a city street in Australia to have 5 or 6 coffee shops in a row. At this point, they are competing on coffee + barista quality. With this type of competition, the consumer gets well educated on the nuances between cups, and so it goes.

I had no idea this idea of 'the aussie barista' was being exported to the world, but I guess it makes sense.

In reality, what you're probably seeing is the competitive advantage given from a business cluster in Porter speak. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster

Ironically it grew out of Italian culture, mainly through immigrants to Australia. While my best coffee experience was still in Italy, generally I find coffee in other parts of the world appalling in comparison, esp in the USA.
As a programmer I want to think that it's just self control, that we can impose discipline on ourselves (or products) and engineer a solution. The thing is that it looks like from the recent studies that the internet fundamentally changes the way our brain works. I'm away from my copy of The Shallows by Nicholas Carr [1] but I know that he references specific studies on the way the internet changes the brain. Here is a quote I found from a recent interview with NPR:

"Neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered that, even as adults, our brains are very plastic," Carr explains. "They're very malleable, they adapt at the cellular level to whatever we happen to be doing. And so the more time we spend surfing, and skimming, and scanning ... the more adept we become at that mode of thinking."

I highly recommend The Shallows[1]. It's a look at the way the internet is changing our brains. It really might be a good idea to limit exposure to the internet. As a programmer and geek it's worth spending some time thinking about these questions and least being aware of the affects of the medium.

[1]: http://amzn.to/Ofpbd2
This is one of the most nonsensical articles I've ever come across on the HN front page.

Synopsis:

1. Coding is dead (title)

2. Front-end development is being democratized by higher level paradigms, thereby obsoleting "coders" (defined loosely as those who code at the lower levels of abstraction)

3. BUT WAIT! Because programming has been made available to those who don't have the most fundamental level of understanding of the craft, this in turn liberates the low level guys to focus on stuff like optimizations, scalability, or robustness.

Er, wait, how is coding Dead again?

I'm assuming that these guys are investors in DataNitro, considering that both the VC firm and the startup are located in Boston, and since the submitter works at DataNitro.

I like DataNitro's product, I like the guys (whom I've talked to) at DataNitro personally, but this article is quite senseless.
Nice idea, however isn't it better to use language compilers like LESS or SASS instead of using a library to handle browser prefixes for you?