skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin#Early_life_and_educ...

I'm glad Sergey's father and mother were allowed to immigrate to the USA. However, it's too bad that his Russian parents have stolen good jobs while there's unemployed Americans:

"His father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother is a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center."

I mean, there's unemployed mathematicians and research scientists right here in the USA, right? Why should these Russians be allowed to come in and take our jobs?

...I want as many intelligent, hard working people as I can find in a company I run, and in a country that I want to see grow. Take a look at that Wikipedia link at what a nightmare is what for the Brin family in Russia - thank goodness we didn't have shortsighted people trying to lock them out to "preserve the jobs here", or who knows how many fewer great jobs would've been created, and how much less useful and easy to navigate the internet would be.
I'm put in mind of Voltaire's retort to the notion that that "Life is hard"--- "Compared to what?"
You didn't laugh out loud when you got to "the correct solution"?
Quick explanation of the “Don’t Click” Twitter attack
The thing is: how many people look for performance parts, and how many look for parts to fix a car? Lots more of the second search than the first, would be my guess.
Maybe Amazon can implement "Sort by Kurtosis" :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurtosis
I'm soooooooo fucking tired or hearing this bullshit argument. Wikipedia will fail cause it's open. And the false dichotomy between quality and openness.
So you'd rather sort by variance?

I don't see why (outside of security issues) we can't just define our own sorting functions for a site.
http://encosia.com
The real threat to Wikipedia is over reaction from the powers that be. It's very successful, quite useful, and hopefully isn't going anywhere. Is it perfect, no, but I haven't seen anything at this scale and ambition being 100% perfect.
Hmm that depends on the book and who posted the 1s and the 5s, you just described the ratings of every scientology book and every evolution book in amazon.

But I agree that while there is a decent chance that a book with lots of 5s and lots 1s will be of value, the chances that a book with straight 3s to be worth anything are pretty slim.
Here are a set of links:

http://www.vetta.org/recommended-reading/

I'd second the recommendation of Bishop if you can hack the math, and also Elements of Statistical Learning, though I wouldn't attempt to learn techniques from the latter so much as look at a very interesting mathematical take on them.

gl
This wasn't CSRF, but clickjacking, aka UI redressing. CSRF protection does nothing against it. There are some ways to attempt to defend against it but I don't think there is any 100% reliable way yet.

http://code.google.com/p/browsersec/wiki/Part2#Arbitrary_pag...
I love stories like this. We're thinking for our startup that everybody can have the same job title: Customer Support.
I actually have yet to encounter a single website with this sophisticated of a rating system.

It is particularly hard to find quality content on websites with a large database (i.e. YouTube). Newer videos will always have a higher 'rating' because it is 'newer'. Older videos will always have the most 'views' because it has had more time to get to that state. If you can't reach a consensus about what the most optimal rating system is, implement a nested rating system. This way, the end-user can specify to sort by 'rating' and then by 'date' and then by 'views', or however order he/she feels most optimal.
I know one of the developers on GTA IV. He says it cost $5 million.
I would like to point out that as long as the situation is stable over time time, it will heal. Banks have "bad debt" that they can't value or sell. It's not the value of their assets are zero they just don't know what that value is so they can't sell it our use it as collateral. However, in time they will either be paid back or they will not and the uncertainty is going to become known. As the risks drop off the financial system will start to recover on it's own. And it's not like we need to wait 30 years for the loans to be paid back or fail, in 5 years inflation will tend to increase home prices and reduce the value of that bad debt.

I think having home prices drop and credit dry up is probably really good for the economy and suspect stimulus money spent on useful infrastructure is a much better use of taxpayers money, but I don't know.

PS: The banking sector was over valued in 2005, assuming it needs to go back to those prices before it's healthy is a mistake.
There is {Length}, which returns either "short", "medium", or "long". Then you just do something like .quote.long {font-size: 50px}

Check out http://www.tumblr.com/docs/custom_themes
Well it depends.

I see some differences between GA and the others (GA requires JS to be enabled so that may be why).

Woopra I use less for general stats as for "right now" tracking. Whilst clicky I trust most for historical data.(so, those 2 are the most accurate I guess)
I agree- I love the name. Nikola Tesla was a brilliant man.
Search engine library is better, ya.

However, creating the search engine is the hard problem. It helps to have tools to make some of the outlying problems a bit easier, but the challenge is being able to calculate a configurable set of multi-dimensional scores.

There are 3 places the scoring takes place: indexing-time, run-time, and search-time. Every solution (commercial and open-source) has an indexing process. Most have some run-time processing but only a few have multi-dimensional scoring at search-time and that is the coup de grâce.

When you make the relations configurable and increase the data set to GB or TB you have several incredibly difficult problems. There are commercial products that do it, big and small, but to my knowledge there are no open source projects that can.

In other words, the state of commercial products is so far ahead of open source ones that it's misleading to refer to both as "search engines".
It varies greatly between different themes, though. I just mean you shouldn't worry about the post blocks until you have all the HTML done.
I use the term lookup engine because it alludes to something more complex than, as timf put it, a glorified hashtable.
I don't know if it is so harmless drama - for example see this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/01/wikipedia_and_naked_... it is certainly overdramatized on itself by the journalist - but even if there is just a trace of truth - then it seems quite serious.
Twitter Blog: Clickjacking Blocked
Another neat trick with slices is that you can do a partial update on a list.

a = range(6) a[::2] = range(10,13) -> generates a with [10,1,11,3,12,5]

I saw a very elegant implementation of Eratosthenes sieve based on that trick
Yes, and it seems to be an issue with many of the programs in Oregon, charges for presenting to 'investors'; references to 'winning' funding, etc.

It's one thing to charge attendance to a networking event; but to charge companies for presenting to potential investors seems amateurish to me.

And everyone involved in the process needs to remember that funding is not the end, it is merely a means towards the end. You don't 'win' funding, you receive it; and you have to pay it back.
Josh, thanks for your comment. That's a good comment that the interview process has a contest-feel, and I'm not sure that will be the approach we take in the future.

More than anything, we want to find candidates who are a good fit for the challenge of working toward the $1M goal, have a project that has the potential to be viable in the market, and who are a good match between the other founders we are working with and Portland Ten staff/advisors.

Thanks again for your input--

Carolynn
Reactrix took 75MM (!) to project video games on the floors of malls, with an ad-supported (!) business model. 'twas ever thus.

Music startup Fuzz Artists couldn't get enough traffic to sustain a business model. So the founder blames the market, which in "better" times would have afforded him access to $10MM in capital to put his reckoning off by a couple of years. Shouldn't he instead be happy to have his life and his career back?

Or how about nTag Interactive, which sold RFID nametags for conferences. Not a crazy idea at all. But they hadn't had a news update since July '08, well before the market crash. What does this have to do with the current climate?

This is an incredible easy, lazy story for any journalist to write. There are always a collection of companies with a sob story to write about. When that collection includes Facebook, LinkedIn, or (hell) Twitter, maybe the story will have teeth.
The best method for developing software: whatever works for you.
b.vandgrift says do your own thing. since you're going to do it anyway.
Learn more about Cuda
Every site's crappy sorting has always bothered me, it reminds me of AltaVista (before Google kids).

I have not checked the math on this, but damn near anything should be better then what most sites are doing today.

In fact a better way to sort user ratings is a good idea for a startup.
> But I just can't get over the fact that they're having a contest and making you pay for the prize.

Education often takes this form. If you're accepted into a competitive university, you still have to pay for the 'prize' of going there.

Whether it's worth the cost is a separate question.
Some thoughts on trading in my AT&T Tilt for an iPhone
Exactly how is any of this quite serious?

The only serious threat to the encyclopedia would be a force that would prevent strong writing on relevant subjects from being incorporated into it, or a force that persistantly corrupted that strong writing once it was incorporated. This link is just drama.

What lazy or corrupt journalists choose to do with the content in the encyclopedia is a problem outside the purview of the encyclopedia.
Fender is a brand of musical equipment and also another word for the bumper of a car.

A straight relation between "fender" and "music" is a trivial expansion but it can become complex very quickly. You can expand from "fender" as a keyword and also as a brand. If you are in the business of selling musical equipment, you may have sold certain result placements to a competing brand like yamaha. In this case, a search for "fender" should produce results that match "music", "guitar", fender products, etc... but yamaha, as a paying advertiser, still expects yamaha products to have a prominent ranking.

I would agree that it's counter-intuitive. If I search for fender, I want fender products. However, that is not the only reality and it's the complexity associated to these edge cases that defines what modern search engines can do.
Ok, that's a nice story, but a bit short on meat. On the whole, it reads almost like an advert for Tender Support. Is the author affiliated?
2.1 billion people was the figure for people living between Europe and South East Asia (i.e North and Eastern Africa, the Levant, the Caspian, the Indian Subcontinent and the GCC States). China is of course a different story.

Giorgio Armani once said "Dubai is the new New York. It's the New York of the 21st century" (http://tinyurl.com/aqc63r). It turns out not to be as he thought, but for these 2.1 billion people, a cheap flight away from their cities, Dubai will always have its appeal.
It assumes that the aggregate outcome of a large number of Bernoulli trials (i.e. true/false; up/down; good/bad) are distributed binomially, which can be reasonably approximated by the Normal distribution when the number of trials is large. This is technically true, and works for HN-style voting.

This isn't true for Amazon ratings, since ranking something 1-5 isn't a Bernoulli trial. But the central limit theorem says that that the average of those ratings will be normally distributed (assuming that they're identically distributed and independent), so it can still work. The confidence interval is different, however.
In Mozambique, Rats Make Good Mine Detectors
> Clearly the answer is a .clone() or .copy() method...

if you want Python to smell like Java or Ruby. :->
He showed screenshots, without explaining anything wrong with the rankings unless the reader already intuitively agreed with him.

But why isn't the net-positive score the right thing for UrbanDictionary, and the average the right thing for Amazon? No case was made.

I could argue these either way, but if I were to write an attention-grabbing headline and yell "WRONG", I'd actually make a case. Attitude alone is not an argument.
The feeling I got while reading this was the same one I got many years ago when reading why Microsoft's PocketPC was going to wipe the floor with the simplistic PalmOS. Ironically, I agreed with those PocketPC articles at the time but now see why the simplicity of the Palm made it the winner back then.

Amazon clearly understands readers better than Gizmodo does and the Kindle, if Amazon's sales pronouncements are to be believed, clearly resonates with people. I think that's why Kindle sells so well and will continue to do so.

One final point, the author thinks the disappearance of actual paper books is inevitable but I don't believe that. Paper is easy to produce, easy to recycle and most people like the tactile feel of books. So paper may disappear but it's not inevitable imho. Paper Books are certainly here for a long time to come.
What is up with the two charts? They seem to have the exact same scale and data source, but in the first, facebook has approximately 200,000,000 total unique visitors in december 08, while the second chart shows them at about 50,000,000 total uniques.
> "Compared to what?"

Shopping! Creating a useful software product is harder than buying one off the shelf. Creating great literature is harder than buying something at Barnes & Noble.
one is a search, the other is a portal. Big difference.
Yes. And similarly, for sites like News.YC: I'd rather read a "2 points" comment with 100 upvotes and 99 downvotes, than something banal with one upvote.
Best home theater system
One of the toughest things to do for setting up your home theater setup is that of handling the wires that will be used. The home theater wiring will involve making sure that you have enough space for handling a setup and for getting the wires around the area.
That 'Electronic Bank Run'? Didn't happen.
Unrelated question why do you put "MM" instead of "M" I've seen this before but don't know why it's done like that.
I don't know why so many people gave so much credibility to an off-the-cuff remark from a virtually unknown PA congressman.
I suspect History won't look favorably on the last decade.
they completely gloss over the fact they've increased the carrying and towing capacity for the vehicle because they've got steps

Sadly, this might just be because they know their market and they know that most people who buy the F-150 aren't using it to tow stuff, but are the type who are more likely to buy it because it has shiny steps.
I don't know, I cargo-culted it from the m-team types in my last couple companies. ;)
Amen. This is a big reason that I can't see myself working as a developer for the rest of my life. I can't deal with the abundance of passive-aggressive personalities who will seize on tiny errors like this, and discount an individual's intelligence.

If you ask me, it comes from the fact that software geeks are primarily young men, many of whom were emotionally abused by their peers while growing up. When you think the world only values your intelligence, you go out of your way to prove that you're smarter than everyone else.
I did. The way it was presented was rather classic.
So are there going to be more people saying Facebook's "just a fad" now or less?
One of the better suggestions I have heard was an all electric car where you could use an external generator for long trips. 95+% of the time you don't need and save a lot of weight over a hybrid...

Why is this better than a hybrid? Would the generator be powerful enough to provide enough electricity to operate the car? If so, I have a hard time seeing how you would save weight or how it would be more efficient, since you're going to have more steps in the process, each with more efficiency loss.
Comments like that are frequently dogmatic assertions about down-the-middle controversial issues (like religion or politics) that draw knee-jerk up/down votes from the two ever-combative groups. The comments with one upvote can sometimes be hidden gems in an abandoned thread, or possibly one great comment among many others.
In terms of "datedness," I would point out that the second edition is now out:

This major new edition features many topics not covered in the original, including graphical models, random forests, ensemble methods, least angle regression & path algorithms for the lasso, non-negative matrix factorization, and spectral clustering. There is also a chapter on methods for ``wide'' data (p bigger than n), including multiple testing and false discovery rates.

I'd be interested to hear what you mean by "simply less broad" as compared to Bishop's book, which (from having flipped through it) looks pretty comparable.
Thank you for clarification. It seems that Twitter thinks (http://blog.twitter.com/2009/02/clickjacking-blocked.html) they are reliably defending against it. Someone will soon be trying to determine if theirs is "100% reliable" yet.

EDIT: So what do you think of the sufficiency of the "fix" as explained at: http://dsandler.org/outgoing/dontclick.html ?
Abbreviations expand into a single output. TextMate Snippets expand that output and then make it trivial to move between the parts you'll want to customize.

So a 'for' abbreviation would output:
for (;;) {
}
and leave the cursor after the }.

A 'for' snippet would output the same thing, but you could bounce on the tab key to move between the three parameters to for, the body of the loop, and the line after the loop.
I think doing list(foo) to create a list copy is a pretty obvious way of getting around the 'variables are just references' thing.

I honestly have never seen someone do foo[:] just to copy a list, this is all news to me.
Spending $1 Billion on Innovation for the Disabled Could Yield Huge Economic Growth
Dice.com Tech Job Listings Finally Tick Upwards
Probably because M is already an abbreviation for thousand, e.g. CPM.
This is a dream of mine as well, but performance may be a problem. Custom functions mean no caching and arbitrary computational burden from each function.
The main problem is finding that useful subset that is A) useful to everyone and B) at a level that most find the distribution of information useful.

Personally I find there are two ways to handle it. The first is to focus on work flows. As in how to do something a person on your team does regularly really efficiently.

The second is to take a common tool and go in depth on it. Yes you end up talking about ls switches for 20 min but it should also focus on how this tool integrates in to the larger unix system.

The last thing to pay attention to is documenting your sessions. I use find about once a year, I never remember how to use it and spend a good 20 min looking at the man page. If I had in depth training on grep and find then I would be annoyed that I was back at the man page the next time I needed it because I didn't have a useful reference.
Current code:

<form action="http://twitter.com/status/update"
id="doingForm"
method="post">
<input name="authenticity_token"
type="hidden"
value="bd7a45884127cc55d971a53733026770aee78597" />
<input id="tab_action"
name="tab" type="hidden"
value="home" />
<input id="authenticity_token"
name="authenticity_token"
type="hidden"
value="bd7a45884127cc55d971a53733026770aee78597" />

Just to be certain, they include the authenticity_token twice ;)
All of those things you describe need to be underwritten by solid economics. Rather than Monaco, think Switzerland. Or better yet, Malta.
The Hacker's Guide to Markets
Self-surrounding Tiles
Labyrinth Tiling
This also highlights the key difference between journalists and the vast majority of bloggers.

A whole lot of people just posted Kanjorski's video with a few breathless comments. Porfolio blogger Felix Salmon actually took the time to critically examine the claim.
Useful, indeed. But necessary? Nope.
On Kongregate we do the same thing that Newgrounds does - games don't display an average rating or appear in the rankings until they have a minimum number of ratings. For us that's 75 ratings.

Of course we only get a hundred or so new games a week, so it's not hard to get that many ratings. Much harder for a site with lots of stuff, especially if they have lots of stuff from day one.
awesome. can I use F# too?
Umm, America has been through that process ever since colonization. German and Irish Boroughs in NY, Cubans in Miami, Chinese in SanFran, Mexicans in the Southwest.

America will be fine, we're an immigrant nation. Sure, a large influx is a terrible idea, but to shut off immigrants is protectionism and hurts in the long run.
Paradoxes and Contemporary Logic
How Bands Can Make More Money By Not Putting A Price on a CD | pampelmoose
http://docs.python.org/library/copy.html

Seems to disagree with you.
Apple prepping iTunes Replay on-demand video service
Copyright reform unlikely, advocates say
How To Lose Your Users and Kill Your Web 2.0 Company (2/07)
I do.

I'm an engineer. A car is just a tool, a tool for transportation. I don't neglect it, but I don't pay any more than absolutely necessary to keep it running. I work on my car myself because I am cheap and practical. I can't stand paying for things that I can do myself.
MenuPages.com Search Box Design Suggestion
Did You Know About the **Other** Time Hitler was Almost Killed?
I just read the New England Journal report. He wasn't infected with another strain. Strictly, everyone with HIV is infected with a distribution of strains because it random mutations happen. The virus can bind either the CCR5 receptor or the CXCR4 receptor. As pressure on the CCR5 pathway increases, survival of CXCR4-tropic variants becomes more pronounced. Essentially, CCR5 is the easier and more common target of the virus, so the wildtype tends to equilibrate toward a cluster of strains that favor CCR5. It's simply more energetically efficient for the virus. It's a thermodynamic equilibrium. In fact, the report explains this. As HAART therapy is used to suppress the virus, the surviving viral genes get better and better at binding CXCR4 and it is a well observed part of the natural course of the disease that CXCR4-tropism develops late in the course of the disease. The patient lives longer with HAART therapy, but dies of a slightly different disease than they were infected with. It's very much the same sort of evolutionary thing that happens with other, less exotic forms of bacterial antibiotic resistance.

The big deal, intellectually, for me, is the clear-cut experiment that shows just how dependent on CCR5 the virus really is. Now in my fourth year of medical school, the professors have always been hedging their statements: well CCR5 is a known tropic factor, but we really don't know how big a deal it is, and then there's CXCR4, and maybe there's other factors, so we really don't know.

Compare that to "took him off HAART and the virus came back like a ton of bricks. Reapplied HAART and the virus regressed. Coincidentally, we took the CCR5 receptor site out of his system, then took him off HAART again, and we get an entirely different response: no virus, and any evidence that there ever was a virus is slowly fading from his system".

Hopefully there will be other advances in how to kill the HIV, but this very much a lightswitch sort of event for medicine.
I like the gist of this post but I would add that the best method is one that works for your team and your organization. After, software is generally a team effort and a large part of modern languages help you make the logic of your actions clear to those who read your code later
does work include other things besides oil changes?