skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get paid to do PCA analysis for the biotech industry.

Except that PCA is the least I do, PCA is what you learn in a bioinformatics 101 class, there are MUCH better tools then PCA.

If two things are noticeably different you don't need PCA, it's redundant.

You use PCA, when you're plumbing a huge data set, where things are mostly indistinguishable and you're desperate for ways to separate things out.

That's why PCA analysis is so convenient for human DNA, because we're so similar.

Look at this image: http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/genmapeuropeGermany.jpg

Are you telling me that the Germans from the blue part of Dresden bordering Munich and the Germans from the green part of Munich bordering Dresden are super duper different?

That picture sure makes it looks like Hans living in the exurbs of Munich and Frans from the exurbs of Dresden are two different species.

It looks that way if you don't have a fucking clue about what PCA is and how it works and what DNA is and how it works.

And two individuals from the same race are more different then two large groups of people from the opposite end of the earth, is not a myth.

It is a fact.

It is a statistical fact, the math doesn't care what you think and your grasp of stats and genomics is not nearly as tight as you imagine it to be.

No one imagines DNA as 4-billion dimension space, you're full shit.

And if you start looking at what ever regions you're fantasizing about, and apply a bunch more conditions, you can prove anything you want. That's not science it's charlatanry.

In conclusion, you do not know what you're ranting about, so stop embarrassing yourself in front of biotech engineers on the internet.
"google adsense click" as in they force send users to the advertisement link? That's huge!
Does anyone else keep the pot covered? I find that I can bring the water to boil faster. Once it is boiling I drop the heat to low and still maintain the heat. There's a bit of an art to keeping it from boiling over, but I'm "sure" I use "way less" energy.
Sify has been doing something similar from years. There, for every GB or so of bandwidth one day of the package is reduced.
I've had the Kindle since it first came out in late 2007. Here's my take (warning, probably won't be that new / insightful):

Good:

* Excellent for traveling. I have a 2GB SD card and more books then I'll ever read on any single trip.

* Fairly straightforward to convert into Kindle format. About half of the books I read are from Project Gutenberg and therefore free :)

* Book/Magazine purchasing is fast and efficient (instant gratification is nice)

* Battery Life: Not as amazing as people say it is, but still quite impressive

* Text resizing: Reading at the Gym / on a bus is much easier when you can bump up the font size

* Carrying case: Leather, makes it look like a moleskine

Meh:

* Internet access: Nice, although the screen refresh is slow enough to make it a little painful

* Audio support: Never tried it, so can't say

* Page turn speed: Takes a little to get used to, but then it's fine and doesn't really interrupt reading

* UI: A little counterintuitive at first, but easy to adjust to. Occasionally slow, and you do accidentally press buttons a bit

* Price: The device is expensive, and occasionally books are more than you might want to pay (I'm used to the library :) ).

Bad:

* Selection is wanting. There are many books that aren't available.

* Graphics: Illustrations don't translate well to 4 colors. This rules out a bunch of books

* My first kindle died within the first month, it was a pain to replace, but at least done for free

* Really bad for skimming / flipping through pages quickly.
As Agile as the Next Guy
Jobs and Apple constitutes a good example of Ayn Rand's individual vs. collective conflict. There is no "collective mind". There is only the individual mind. Apple is the product of the mind of one individual, Steve Jobs. It is not the product of a committee. The greatest innovations seem to arise from individuals, not "group-think". Hopefully Mr. Jobs returns to Apple. But if not, Apple needs to try and find another creative innovator like Mr. Jobs, somebody who can think outside the box, somebody who beyond computer science and business, is also and ultimately an artist.

It is the Howard Roarkes and Steve Jobs of the world that drive the economy. Were Ms. Rand around today, she would surely see Mr. Jobs as a Howard Roarke of today. For the sake of Apple's shareholders, I hope they can find somebody else similar in the event that Mr. Jobs cannot return.
I don't think they spent more than one man-day or so on this so far. Plus I'm pretty sure playback is something they would have built anyway.
Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines, by John McCarthy
IT deserves better than IBM or Microsoft
The many school traditions go back to middle age European monasteries part is true, the fidgeting part... poetic license.

And it is true that some task require quiet. Math is one of those tasks. But I as an adult have no need to fidget all that much.

And if I remember correctly, what you learn in the early grades doesn't need that much sensory isolation, I image things quiet down during exams.

So I think the degree of stillness can be slowly increased until you're expected to sit completely still in college.
I'm right there with you. All you need to know about losing weight is this:

Don't eat so much.

Problem is people won't believe you and it is unmarketable. So, companies go out and produce candy bars, market them as diet food by slapping a label on them that says, "eat this and not much other stuff and you'll lose weight."

Cracks me up.
Side-note: we need more technical articles here. Someone on reddit said that there are too many business/web 2.0 articles posted here and they're drowning out the previously awesome technical articles.
It's a Python interface to OpenCV's shared libraries. You still need the OpenCV binaries to be installed, though not necessarily the source.
Flower is the only video game I've played that made me feel relaxed, peaceful, and happy
IPhone not selling well in Japan, now available for free
Chapter Summaries of Geeks Bearing Gifts by Ted Nelson
DataTables 1.4
What you can learn from McDonald's: Service, Quality and Price
Service, Quality and Price are three aspects of a business that every company should try to excel in.

I would also add a fourth, for the technology field, and that is: features (that differentiate you from your competitors).
Why is Soviet hacker Linus Torvalds listed as "white hat"?

The man is a criminal. He copy/pastes UNIX code, renames it to LINUX, and styles himself as the purveyor of a "new" operating system.

SCO Group should get all this criminal's assets forthwith, and Torvalds himself should be locked away in GITMO with all the other Soviet spies. This man is a greater threat to American free enterprise than his heroes Lenin and Trotsky. Instead of congratulating this commie, we should lock him and his "comrades" up for the protection of our country, and re-direct his ill-gotten gain back to SCO Group, where it belongs.
I couldn't say this at the time, but now that the Etherpad playback version is public you can see that I originally wrote that this was an exaggeration.
" Would it have been spoken by cavemen, would it have been simpler? What would be missing, future tense, abstract concepts we take for granted?"

The caveman language you describe look a lot like the language used by modern day teens.
This is great, I would love the same for Emacs and coding, I'd love to see how great hackers code.
OMNIWeb for OS X supports vertical display of tabs as well. They do it in a 'drawer', in the OS X interface parlance. I love this feature but eventually moved on from OMNIWeb as it got passed in stability, capability, elegance, speed, etc. by other browsers.
Did ZumoDrive trademark HybridCloud?
Local Motors: 1st Disruptive Entrance In Auto Industry in Decades - Open Source Car Design
İnternet, bloq və daha heç nə
I've been toying with the idea of adapting the Elo rating system from chess to a social site's user score. The basic idea from chess is that you assume someone has an intrinsic skill in some arbitrary units (I think you start out around 1,000 and a 2400+ is senior master) and that we can only infer that skill from how they perform in tournaments. Furthermore, your skill in any particular game is assumed to be normally distributed about that intrinsic skill value. It is also assumed that your skill will only change slowly over time (we don't have to pin down a moving target).

So the mechanics of this system are basically that when you compete with someone that is much better than you and win your score should be adjusted upwards. Conversely, if you lose to someone worse than you, your score will be adjusted downward. Adjustments are done in batches, say after a player has finished a tournament (I use five voting events between readjustment).

My application to a user karma system would be analogous in that a "match" or "competition" would happen every time someone directly rates someone else (stories may be exempt). A high-karma user upvoting a low-karma user would increase the low-karma user's karma and decrease the high-karma user's karma. If there are two users with equal karma and one up or downvotes the other. the number of points exchanged will be minimal (the gain/loss scales with the difference in karma).

The idea is that your ideas are competing with the opinions of the high-ranked users. The assumption is that new users will have bad ideas and that high-karma users will downvote them. A downvote from a high-karma user is expected and doesn't cost the new user very much (they are expected to "lose" to them often).

I've sketched out some of the functions here:
http://paste.lisp.org/display/76193

EDIT: grammar fix, typed this before coffee
I'm in love. This is like seeing conversations in GMail for the first time. Of course you should be able to do this. I want this function everywhere.
John Carmack interview on bringing Quake Live to browsers
Maybe they're loosers too, in that they fear 'loose lips sink ships'.
If you tell people that the secret to losing weight is "eat less and exercise more", they a) think its too simple to work and b) too onerous to actually do.

Delta in mass = inputs to the system - outputs from the system - energy expended by the system. If you desire negative deltas, decrease inputs, increase outputs, or increase energy expended. (Options #1 and #3 are probably better for most people, owing to the inability to control #2 in a safely scalable manner.)

The human body does not get a free pass from physics just because its details are complex.
As a psychologist, my father has always deplored the fact that psychology, in the last 100 years, has focused on experimental and pseudo-scientific techniques as opposed to allowing for the usefulness of non-scientific ideas, practices, etc. A lot of psychology was discarded because it couldn't be measured, and what was left at the end of that process was less than what psychology was before.

In that context, I'd tend to side with the non-x-phi's in this. Scientific analysis is only one way to understand the world, and it is not the best in every situation. You can't grow a tree with a hammer and nails.
These are just summaries but contain some interesting quotable thoughts:

Many tekkies think all structure is hierarchical, and have arranged not to see any other kinds.

people are told that organizing hierarchically is "thinking logically", though it means cutting many connections and associations to select a few. Many technical people believe this is correct and necessary. However, essayists work differently.

The universe officially begins on Jan 1, 1970 (when Unix time kicks off-- now the official timing system of most of the computer world.)

The PARC guys are first to have bit-mapped screens with pretty fonts, which electrifies all the visitors. They dismiss the Engelbart and Xanadu notions of connection and instead go after appearance.
The best social media marketing advice I've collected over the years
If you have to ask, it's better to have the raise.

The bit in there about employers being happy to see their share price rise to just $10? It's pointing out that your interests and the founders interests aren't aligned. Founders have so many shares that a $5MM sale can be a winning lottery ticket. It might mean just $5,000 for you.
Well, the whole conceit of the piece is that the guy is his own horrible boss, but could presumably be as effective working for someone else who appreciates his ethic. The whole thing could be a lot more direct if the goal was to persuade, but then the humor would be lost.
I agree with that. I used to be extremely paranoid. Now, less so. But I did have an experience once that reinforced my paranoia: A local prominent business woman visited first startup under the pretense of being a potential investor (which gives her an automatic out -- investors don't sign NDAs). She watched my demo, took lots of notes, asked lots of questions, left, and then called me three weeks later to invite me to breakfast at some fancy private club. I show up (she's wearing some sort of see-through shirt which freaked me out a bit -- I was suddenly worried she was going to try to seduce me) and then, with a straight face, told me: "I have complete notes about what your product is, the direction you're taking, and your business model. I also have a team of great engineers who recently left Sun who ready to start coding tomorrow if I give them the go-ahead. Unless you hire me as your CEO immediately, I will steal your idea, launch a public campaign to discredit you, and make sure you never work in this industry again."

I laughed because I was sure she was kidding. Turns out she wasn't. I politely declined her offer and walked out the door. She told me I'm making the biggest mistake of my life. I probably spent the next two months being in such a paranoid state that I was pretty much useless as a contributor. It turns out she never did follow through on her threats. But I learned then that even someone with the worst of intentions can't necessarily take someone else's idea and turn it into a reality. That's when I started to relax a bit when it comes to NDAs. But, that said, I still ask contractor programmers to sign them but what I ask them to sign is so amazingly simple that it's more an agreement to respect each other's ideas.
Worthless stock certs that were once worth millions (From Fred Wilson)
How Twitter could be a threat to Google
Interview: what's next for Google Chrome
This 'feature' seems ripe for a MS Word add-on, if it catches on. I doubt everyone will abandon their word processing software and user Etherpad.
Common sense, isn't.
Rails deployment missing piece, filled in
Tech Market Will Emerge Stronger Than Ever
You're right that `sort{rand}` is a bad idea, but not because it could run forever. `rand` in Ruby just returns a number like 0.9307038377384, used in sorting this will just always sort the same way (since it's always > 0). So Ruby will use the result of `rand` to determine if one element should be sorted before or after another. So maybe a better solution would be to use `sort{rand - 0.5}` or something, so that it will randomly be either < or > 0.

I was curious so I looked Array#rand in the Active Support source code[1], the implementation uses the following code to get a random element:

def rand
self[Kernel.rand(length)]
end

So, this is much better than sorting the whole array in random order and pulling one off the top :) But it still uses `rand`.

[1] http://github.com/rails/rails/tree/e56b3e4c0b60b2b86f5ca9c5e...
/me goes off to read http://yaml.org/spec/1.2/

There's another problem. YAML is so simple, you don't need to read the damn manual for it. That example already taught you 80%. Ok, the easy 80%. But if you come from the Java (and XML) world, reading the manual is what you do just to get started.
+1 for recommending McWhorter's video course from TTC. It's excellent material and he teaches it very well.

For those that are interested, McWhorter's non-linguistic books are also worth a look, he also writes about race relations.

Edit: A major point I took away from his course is to not be opposed new words or other dialects of seemingly "less educated" nature. He talks about language as a dynamic, living entity and not something rigidly defined by a dictionary. He argues rather well that it's just part of the natural growth and mutation of language and should not be looked down on.
Hear, hear! If I had gotten a mileage card when I was 18 and used it for everything, I'd easily have a few round-trip first-class tickets' worth accrued by now.
A CDS for US Treasuries seems crazy. I wonder how many counterparties would be alive in case of a default...
An impossible alloy now possible
It's also the major reason I'm not on Facebook. It makes stalkers out of friends and just isn't something I'm interested in.
Apple Tells Investors That Steve Jobs Plans to Return
I'm guessing most of the English words can't be older then about 4th or 5th century, I think that's when the Anglons, Saxons and Jutes, came over from Germany.

Older words would have to be of Celtic origin, and would probably also occur in Welsh, Scottish and Irish.
I don't think that's what he meant. Google would lock that shit down quick if it was true.
I disagree. I would forgo credit cards entirely. The reason is human psychology: people spend more when they use plastic. I don't care how smart you are or how disciplined you are, it is more painful to part with cash than to swipe your card. Somewhere between 10-20% more painful. In other words, you're likely to spend between 10-20% more than you would if you solely use credit cards than cash.

A typical credit card rewards program pays 1.5 or 2%. Hardly a good deal. I'd switch to cash instead.
I noticed that sentence too, but my brain saw:

"Launching lets you observe the collusion between your presuppositions and the needs of actual users."

I went back, and you are right, it is collision.

Collusion is more fun though. :)
Writing has no effect on the "complexity" of the grammar. Language is almost always acquired by children in the absence of writing; a 4-5 year old who is just starting to read already fully understands almost 100% of the language's grammar and going forward will mostly only acquire vocabulary.

Now, whether writing slows down the course of language change is an open (and interesting) topic.

The stereotype that Western languages like Latin and Russian are "complex" because they have things like case systems is a curious ethnocentrism of English speakers. If you dig deep enough all languages are phenomenally complex.
My plan:

1. Attack a hard problem.
2. ...
3. Profit!

Once I refine and prove this technology, I expect it will open the doors to bigger things like integration with hosted platforms that want to differentiate themselves.
The silicon valley is insanely expensive; other places in California have more reasonable costs of living. In my hometown (Sacramento), $40k/year can buy you a modest house and a comfortable lifestyle. In San Jose (where I live now), you'd better be making at least double that (for a modest home).
Please, let is stop.

Think of the children.
Claim for whiplash from a professional like 1st Claims
It is a right decision to claim for whiplash from a professional like 1st Claims
Four big reasons to get behind the smart grid
Why do people cook?
Awesome News. Lets save some power!
they load much faster on the kindle 2. on K1, it used to suck to read graphics-heavy docs (such as the pragmatic programmers beta iphone book), because the page with the images would load more slowly than the text-only pages. that is mostly fixed in this version. the images look better too, thanks to the increased gray-scale support.

the screensaver images look great as always. it makes it seem as if image handling is an under-utilized feature. a black and white graphical novel would look spectacular on this thing.
Heist: a Scheme interpreter written in Ruby
That doesn't seem like a very nice assumption, that new users will have bad ideas, and if old users lose karma every time they vote up a new user, how can you ever know if the new user genuinely has nothing to offer, or if old users are just wary of decreasing their score, and therefore, influence? (i.e., I have lots of karma, and I know if I upvote this comment that I like, it will increase their score quite a bit - I have influence now - but it will also lower my karma, and I'll have less influence over the next comment I see which I may like more...)

This is what happens in chess: highly-ranked players just simply won't play new or lower-ranked players at all. It's not a bad thing there, but then again, it is a competition. A social site isn't, though.
I think Twitter might be a complement to Google, but not a substitute. Just curious to hear what others think... I have a Twitter account, but haven't used it much. It's hard to find time in the day to post. The search function in Twitter seems like it could be useful, but with 6 million users there aren't enough posts to provide relevant search results for many search terms.
Flagged as so-obvious-its-dumb
In general this is true. The only real protections are secrecy and relationships (e.g. if you were introduced to x by y, then y is on the hook if x screws you).

However, there is one case when NDAs aren't stupid: when you're applying for a patent. If it ever comes to litigation, you have to be able to show you made an effort to keep your invention secret.
Often, an algorithm that requires iteration in a certain order is a sign that you are keeping information implicitly in the ordering instead of explicitly in a more appropriate data structure. You also may be trying to pack lots of unrelated functionality into a single object when multiple objects would serve better.

But it's hard to say without better examples, and there are times when you do want order and lookup. Can you give a couple situations where you want ordered dictionaries?
> Could anyone in HR really understand what it is like to start a company?

Odd that you would assume that anyone in HR is incapable of starting their own company.
You might as well go whole hog and link to the PDF: http://weblamp.princeton.edu/~psych/psychology/research/pron...
Well if you know that you won't pay your balance on time or that you would spend more money then its not the thing for you. Frankly credit cards for me are also a nice convenience. They save me the time of going to the ATM, paying for my purchases and tracking what I'm spending my money on. It also eliminates all that loose change I always lose or accumulate in a big jar. For my start-up business it makes giving my accountant my expenses a much easier task as well.
And much like nukes, having them in the first place was a backward idea.
There's a talk specifically about this conundrum at PyCon this year! You should come!

http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/5/
Yeah, totally, like I wouldn't be surprised if they kneeled down with gifts of food in front of them as a fealty.
A Completely Unscientific (Yet Accurate) Look at Social Sites
Yeah, the people I work for would never stand up and sing me happy birthday.
Got to love Torrents. One of the smartest pieces of software ever created. I would put it right up there with HTML.
If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

Really that page is a joke and isn't very rude. It's friendly competition and clearly states why they're competing: needless complexity in the existing tool.

>Being rude isn't fine, and shouldn't be tolerated in any community.

That page isn't rude and the community will tolerate being rude if the code is any good. Look at Linus Torvalds', Theo de Raadt's, and other awesome coders' comments! They're still appreciated by the community for their code and if rudeness weren't tolerated, they'd be kicked out quick quick.
Automatic iPhone sudoku solver grabs images from paper
Not really - the academic papers aren't particularly readable and the summarized news article provides good context for other research as well.
World's Best Programmer is...