skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you are not applying for the Y-combinator or are an alumni, you will tend to have a degraded experience to those that are in the "IN" group. Sorry to see that this affects you, but I am in the same boat. I've learned to just use this site as a kind of tech bookmaking site curated by popular trends. Sometimes there are interesting or insightful comments, but the overwhelming number of comments revolve around social politics or corporate espionage like discouraging competitors in the emerging markets.
Your experiment matches Dan Ariely's experiment very well. In his book, "Predictably Irrational" when people are made to remember the ten commandments or even the thought of ten commandments, or any such honesty pledge, their dishonesty level drops drastically.

One of these days, I'm going to make a chapterwise summary of that book so that I can remember the experiments and behaviours at a glance.
Why doesn't it work the same way with violence? Violence on the screen does not "normalize the behaviour".
In my opinion, the best solution is human moderators. The untrustworthy collective is too unreliable.
You added something to the text.

> If you can lay out all the major screens and the design then that’s worth its weight in gold. Design is also just about as hard to find as programming.

Not every person is created equal. If you aren't sprinting successfully, maybe you'd be a better endurance athlete -- this isn't to say that sprinting is better than endurance, it is just saying that is is a different and complimentary skill that you might have success with. Queue Sly and the Family Stone
Wait - you want to use a battery, to power a motor, to compress air, to then power another motor?
That too, but also, I'm going to wear him down with this someday.
Quite frequently - I'd say it's about 50/50 for me between general browsing and ask-specific browsing.
Try openly writing about your plans of assassinating some high-level official. You won't last a day.
This is a MySQL discussion, but I think it's worth it to say what two things I think keep Postgres from becoming the viable worldwide use-by-default contender that MySQL became:

1. Branding. First and foremost. MySQL had great documentation, an identifiable logo, and a wonderful name that every non-technical person could remember and identify. Postgresql is just, well, it's a horrible nightmare of a name. People would like to think this doesn't matter but: of course it does.

2. A really slick installer for Windows. You could say this is branding and to some extent it is, but MySQL and its admin tools have a really friendly installer that lets intermediate developers without a lot of DB experience get it up and running with their development environments quickly. I admit it's been a while since I used Postgres's but the fit and polish wasn't there.
I thought the minimum order to disguise the purchase was 10,000?
How I Got My Digital Life Back Again After An Epic Hacking
It's often true that you can figure out what the first handful (say, 3 to 6) PCA components mean, in a large problem.

The first is usually the mean of the quantities. It is typical in practice to compute PCA by using the SVD of the data itself; if you subtract the mean first, then of course it will not appear as the first PCA component. In matlab, this is literally a one-liner using the svd of the original data -- not even forming a covariance matrix.

No, the people who do this don't care if you know what the Karhunen-Loeve decomposition is, they just use the one-liner:

[U,D] = svd(X)

Anyway, after the mean, then you get the varying components. It's smart to plot these somehow, to interpret meaning.

The post should have plotted the time history of the 6 stocks together with the time history of each PC, then some pattern might have suggested itself. The first PC could be as simple as "GOOG,AMZN,AAPL,AKAM going up, MSFT steady, and FB going down", given the stocks mentioned and their weighting.

The classic examples are (mentioned elsewhere on the thead) the eigenfaces example (on Wikipedia), where PCA was used for faces, and various features like eyes, foreheads, and mouths are emphasized, plus "second-order" features like edges around the eyes, noses, and mouths. If you try it yourself, what you find is that adding more of these second-order features to a face (literally, adding, as in:

new_image = old_image + alpha * second_order_feature

where alpha is a small scalar) will shift the nose left or right, or make the mouth bigger.

People have done the same thing with natural images, and out pop things like 2d wavelets (the Gabor filters, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabor_filter). It's somewhat magical, because you went in with no information, and out pops this structure, which also characterizes (surprise!) the human visual cortex.

Other classic examples are in atmosphere/weather analysis, where ENSO ("el nino") will pop out of analysis of temperature and pressure fields in the Pacific ocean.
I liked the idea of OnLive. In fact since I've been travelling a lot over the past year I wanted to play some games that I couldn't (because my laptop sucks). The problem I found is that it is just too expensive to play the games I wanted. They cost the same amount as purchasing a physical copy. I couldn't justify that as it provides a degraded experience and I know when I come home I have a great computer I can play them on.

It's too bad they couldn't make it work since I the concept was pretty cool.
Coraid ships ATA over ethernet storage based on Plan 9.

Bell Labs still uses plan 9 internally and develops it.

9front is a community fork of Plan 9 with a bunch of interesting changes.

There's a small but interested community of die-hard plan 9'ers that care about it, and the principles it set forth. A lot of it came from some very good, very sane development with people who often spend more time thinking than coding (a virtue we could all benefit from I think)
It's not hard to make a tank like that strong enough for a car accident. It already needs to be very strong just to handle the pressure.
PCA can also be used for compression

http://www.willamette.edu/~gorr/classes/cs449/Unsupervised/p...

Also worth noting is apache mahout supports PCA - you can perform this type of analysis on large matrices pretty easily these days
I can add to disgust: 50% (unsubstantiated claim) of these people are active duty federal and state officers, sitting behind their boring desks in their boring offices across the country.

Seriously, though, if you think about it from this perspective then you'll agree that Tor is a great thing. Instead of working knee deep in the dirt, risking their real lives finding highly suspective local small groups of child abusers and infiltrating them, officers can do their jobs sipping lattes under air conditioner and risking no more than their avatars.
I assume because the cars need to be charged while parked so you can get home.
I thought I'd just say I completely agree with you, though I've only been a member for about 2 years and a reader for about 3, just in that small time I've noticed a change, and I think its sad, it really is a bummer. I've noticed many people posting their start-ups and either 1) not getting any comments (what's with that?) or 2) the things you mention just hate, where's the constructive critisism this site was so great for?
I can only hope my upvoting you that we can make a change here in the opposite direction.
That's absolutely the goal of every company, I think, but it's not always possible, especially if you're building a consumer-facing product. Companies like Github are more the exception than the rule

My point in this article is that nowadays demonstrating the ability to get some paying users, even a tiny amount, is going to leave you much better off than not trying at all. So while a lot of companies will still not be able to live off of the revenue, they can hopefully raise another round with the proof that they've found something people will pay for.
Usually the store is filming you anyway.
This was not made by Heello / Twitpic & has no affiliation with it.
> People are using up-votes as a way to bookmark stories

Whoa... mind blown. I never noticed that feature before. Thank you Wise Weasel. (Not that I would up vote a post just to save it. but it is nice to know I have a list of all articles I've up-voted.)

+1 on having a "save" feature. However, I would shy away from using the term "flag" as a way to get something into the saved list. Flagging a post is already available and has a very different meaning.
not made by Heello / Twitpic
But doesn't really help if it's on vibrate. And you'll probably still need to interact with the phone to at least turn of the ringer if its not somebody you want to answer, lest you annoy everyone around you by letting it continue to ring.
I've heard the phrase "color of bits" before in reference to
matters involving copy laws, and I vaguely remember reading
something about it. I think the following link/post from 2004
is what you're after, but it might be the wrong reference. I'm
not entirely certain, but ya, finding something like this with
a search engine can be painful if you don't know exactly what
you're looking for.

"What Colour are your bits?"
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
> Power and cooling for free

It's not in the slightest free. If you attached your windmill to a regular electrical generator, then used the electrical power as needed, plus a standard A/C you would come out ahead vs first compressing air, which is very wasteful.

The reason it's so wasteful is the "you've got heat sink vanes in the air flow being cooled by convection". You are throwing away energy there.
I loved this story. This is a good example of how you can go down the rabbit hole of solving a particular problem without stepping back to consider if the problem you are solving is key to getting the result you want.

It's amazing to hear someone be so honest about this.
True, but it wasn't too much work to find a HN thread about it and complain there.

Either be constructive or don't say anything. Both are good feedback for the startup. Being mean doesn't help anyone - the startup or the user.
Actual videos of killed/shot people probably does, too.
CNG and compressed air are quite different. One burns to provide energy, the compression is just for storage. The other uses the compressed air as the power source.

They are not interchangeable, and having one doesn't help you with the other since the pressures are so different.
This guy must need antacid like nobody's business. In some ways I envy him a little... I always try to assign more importance to my job than is really warranted; he has no call for that.
Agreed... someone posted just that on HN and it rocketed to the top.
This expository post lined up the 6 stocks and computed the SVD of the time history of all 6 together. This shows how the 6 stocks correlate.

You can do it another way. Run a sliding window across one single stock, line up all the resulting vectors, and then take the SVD of (err...apply PCA to) that. That is, if you started with a single-stock time history:

x1, x2, x3...

then form:

z1 = [x1 x2 x3]
z2 = [x2 x3 x4]
z3 = [x3 x4 x5]

etc., and use PCA on the z's instead of the x's. (In practice, you'd make the z's much longer.)

This will extract seasonable variability (on all kinds of scales -- not just annual). One name for it is Singular Spectrum Analysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_spectrum_analysis)
Ah, got it (humble pie eaten, apologies tptacek).
Start-ups: Looking for an awesome Web/iOS designer? Email me :)
I've been working as a contracted designer for a few months and have been working on my own start-up for ever a year now.

I'm always looking to take on big challenges, and working on something that will one day change the world.

Dribbble: http://dribbble.com/viatask
Email: shahedkhan30@gmail.com

I also have other iOS screens I've designed in the past, would love to send them to you if you're interested.

Cheers!
Wow. thts cool really cool. PCA of energy companies being correlated with oil.. intriguing and interesting
Favourite OS has to be Windows 7 x64. I run OS X ML in VM for Xcode etc and I have given Ubuntu tons of chances over the last 7 years; I just always come back to Windows.

Windows has all the applications I want - my CAD software and suspension geometry software for Uni; I prefer the layout and look of the OS over Mac and Ubuntu; every single piece of hardware I ever buy already has fully functional drivers built; there's tons of reasons why I prefer Windows over everything else.

Another big reason is that having to use the command line for simple tasks in Ubuntu is an absolute pain in the arse. I'm perfectly comfortable with using any CLI, I just feel I shouldn't have to be inconvenienced by having to use one to do something like install a new package or an update.
Well, if you'd read the memo you'd be able to answer that question :)

It goes on about it for a bit, but here's a good passage:

"There are other insidious dynamics of this crime, discounted by Mr. Hansen: the impact of the
content on the viewer, and the impact the collectors have on each other. In his article, Mr.
Hansen quotes Mr. Stabenow, who essentially suggests that child pornography laws are wrongly
concerned that the images goad the consumers to commit future crimes: “People who watch
movies like Saw and Friday the 13th are being titillated by the act of torture and murder ... That
doesn’t mean that they’re going to go out and commit torture and murder.” The analogy does
not hold water, principally because no one who watches Saw believes that the images of violence
are actually happening, where in child pornography images, real children are actually being
abused. Furthermore, what is the point of any pornography if not to stoke the fires of sexual
desire."
Super cool stuff.
I think MariaDB should be a viable alternative, right?
And I wonder if there is a bias in his telling... that he words it harsher than it was presented in reality out of a sense of guilt.
Gasoline is hard to oxidize fast enough, but hydrogen is not.

The LFL/UFL (Lower/Upper flammability limit percentage - the min/max amount of fuel vs air you can have and still burn) for gasoline is 1.4/7.6 - that's a pretty narrow range. But hydrogen is 4/75, so hydrogen will burn in virtually any circumstance.

Hydrogen is, however, lighter than air, so it tends to escape upward before, or while, burning, which limits damage tremendously (except in a tunnel).
For what it's worth, the best PCA tutorial I've seen online is this blog post, which uses plots to describe the technique:

http://stats.stackexchange.com/a/2700/2019

PCA is nothing more than a "basis shift", or changing where the x and y axes are placed. This image-based tutorial makes understanding very intuitive.
"bread and butter of practical unsupervised learning" -- true, although I might have said "exploratory data analysis".

If you can make a vector out of it somehow, it can't hurt to try PCA. Because you don't have to figure out some fancy tailored model, or really (cough, cough) understand much about the data at all. (It sounds like I'm being sarcastic, but I'm serious -- sometimes all you want is a quick look.)

Unsupervised clustering is a similar technique.
FYI Eigenfaces was a ground-breaking theory when introduced...almost 25 years ago. It's no longer used in any serious way for practical face recognition applications.
I was involved in a similar discussion a couple of weeks ago. I was looking at the same figures you were and complimented the space shuttle because of it.

I was wrong, and you're making the mistake that I did. Namely confusing reliability and safety. A reliable rocket is one that successfully does what it is supposed to. A safe rocket is one that doesn't kill people.

The US space shuttle has proven to be more reliable than the Soyuz. It is more likely to actually get you into space. But the Soyuz has been safer than the US space shuttle. If you try to get into space on it, you're less likely to die.

If this seems impossible, consider that in both Soyuz 18a in 1975 and Soyuz T-10-1 in 1983 the rocket failed, but the cosmonauts survived. (In the first case the rocket failure happened 90 miles in the air, but the cosmonauts survived.) The space shuttle, by contrast, had no successful aborts.
Then you should be fine with this restaurant, since they let you put your phone in a box at the front desk.
OnLive spent a ridiculous amount of time getting their technology to where it is today (9 years!), at which point it looks like they failed to license titles that anyone wanted to play. If there was a legitimate reason for the patent system it would be to protect all of their hard work. I'm hoping that "exercising" means licensing to other companies like Apple or Microsoft instead of just turning into a patent troll. It was pretty impressive how OnLive could stream real time graphics better from a datacenter to my TV than my laptop could over airplay, i.e. something that a lot of technologies could benefit from.
> Drug markets, weapon markets, assasin markets (altough I don't know how sersiously to take those), terrorist websites, child porn websites.

One of these things, is not like the others...
I think you nailed my issue. Based on the thoughtfulness of his response to Shipper, I'm pretty sure that his recommendation is not a statement about the lack of depth in the design field. The problem I have is packaging.
I don't think we "officially" have plea bargains in the UK but something similar does happen. I was on the jury for a case involving someone being assaulted with a knife, before the case could actually really get started it we were told the chap being prosecuted had pleaded guilty to another lesser offence and we were all sent home.
As additional color here is what he posted in a reply to a reply of his blog entry:

Perhaps I was a little too brief in my writeup. Nobody that I know (certainly not me) went to MAF and downdressed any of the workers. What happened was that the conclusion was reached in engineering and management meetings and the word filtered out to the workers that poor workmanship was the proximate cause of the loss of Columbia – as if there wasn’t enough blame to go around in many other areas. I really regret the erroneous conclusion, the impact it made on the workers, and the way the whole scenario played out at MAF. The people there were very hard working, dedicated, and proud of their involvement with America’s space program, many of them second or third generation workers at that location. Now, of course, they have all been laid off and the MAF plant is virtually a ghost town with very limited work going on there for other NASA or commercial projects.
If you're a developer working on a project & would like some help with it, please let me know. I have some coding experience but mainly my background is in technical & customer support & product development.

I guess this would be ideal for a developer that wants to focus on new features & updates & not the business side. I think it would be a fair swap in exchange for some friendly development advice & tips when I get stuck on my own projects.

I think this kind of exchange is a good starting point for anyone looking for a potential co-founder as it may lead to joint ventures.

Anyone interested, my email is in my profile.
The problem aren't the people who do it for money :/

Why would they ever meet up? What goods are there to exchange, other than, uhh, tips and tricks? I wish I could share your optimism, but I decidedly don't.
> You're throwing away the mechanical energy.

No you are not. The waste gas vented from the system is very cold, using it as A/C costs nothing.

Although if you are sitting in traffic you are not moving, and have no waste gas.
Humor is sometimes lost on the internet.

I see app.net as a project/product by someone spurned by closed systems hoping to build a more open and egalitarian system, but it still is centralized. There is a leap of faith to believe that this goodwill will not alter over time (as business needs change, etc.).

Ideally, I'd love to see something more in line w/ what Dave Winer has proposed -- decentralized services not controlled by a single entity and the like. However, Diaspora was one such attempt in that arena and did not do well.
I looked around with "laptop uefi support" and found that most laptops from the last 2 years have this support. Lenovos have it as a switchable option, in fact, in their BIOS. They support Legacy and UEFI at the same time.
What is considered "basic courtesy" changes, from person to person, region to region, and time period to time period. It's unwise to allow yourself to be offended or bothered by people with different ideas about what constitutes "basic courtesy." Unless you want to be perpetually unhappy, either choose to not be offended, or choose to avoid encounters with people of another ilk than yourself. Personally, I recommend the former.
Show HN: A Starting Point for Great Documentation
There's also a UX component to this: I have accidentally upvoted nasty comments and downvoted comments I liked because the touch targets for the vote icons are so small on my phone. Even worse, it appears that I can't undo my mistaken votes either.
Take a break from work and travel through Europe...Inspiring video
I fail to see any connection between your comment and the one you're replying to...
One could also replace the apostrophe with %27

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupon_collector%27s_problem
I got them from Element14 here http://www.element14.com and got them about a month(?) later.
Is this for real?

The moment you start talking about seeking legal remedy from a corporation, the only interaction you're going to have from said corporation is through their legal department.
Thank you for the correction. My intent was not to speak to the state of Groupon. Groupon has had far more success and impact than anything I have created to date. I felt it best to not argue with the parent and focus on the attitude behind the comment and not an assessment of Groupon.
I hope that law enforcement agencies at least use this as a window into how these people operate.
How to Easily Add Referrals to a Website
I think you have a great point. This is a reminder that we do need to be a more proactive community as a whole.
No - I meant powering a compressor using mains power.
Presumably not very often, but that should make it even more acceptable to keep a phone with you during a dinner.
Dribbble: http://dribbble.com/viatask
Email: shahedkhan30@gmail.com
The seasick squid
Bias-Variance Tradeoff: The Heart of Machine Learning
The case for the Twitter API changes
IEEE admits its MS-DOS history revisionist is in Microsoft's pay
Does anyone know how much an operation like github cost to get off the ground before it was able to support itself (excluding founders time)?
Wow, 277 comments in here and just 10 in a front page article for a new project: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4398344

This is a good post but it also feels like you're just insulting the whole community rather than giving constructive criticism. Want some constructive criticism? Foster the community you want by being the kind of member you want to see (Gandhi said it better).

Also, your post seems like flame bait but it inspired some really interesting discussion about forum moderation. So maybe the community isn't as bad as you say.
I'm not even sure I even realized it was there.
When the Network Effect Goes Into Reverse
I think the inequality and poor distribution and needs fulfillment is structural.

It starts with the belief system which is more or less Social Darwinism, even though many people don't want to admit that.

If you can correct that flawed perspective and make the world truly more egalitarian, the next basic problem is figuring out how to create a system or fundamental operating principles for a system which results in holistic efficiency while at the same time supporting local adaptation and evolution.