skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(Also at: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/118169b6-1d74-11e2-869b-00144feabd...)

I have a thesis that the kind of thinking required to survive med school is diametrically opposed to the kind of thinking required to do statistics well. It's the "rote pattern matching" versus "mathetic language fluency" issue that's at the heart of things like Papert's Constructivist learning theory[1] and it really causes me to have little surprise at an article like this. Doctors are (usually) viciously smart people who have to make a wide array of difficult decisions daily, but to operate at that level requires an intuition around a lot of cached knowledge, something I feel to be basically the opposite of statistical thought.

I don't think this is unique, either. It's the heart of Fisher's program to provide statistical tests as tools to decision-makers[2]. It's an undoubted success in providing general defense against coincidences to a wide audience, but it casts the deductive process needed in a pale light.

I think a principle component of the computer revolution is to provide more people with better insight into mathetic thought. Papert focuses on combinatorial examples in children in Mindstorms[3] but I think the next level is understand information theory, distributions, and correlation on an intuitive level. MCMC sampling went an incredible way to helping me to understand these ideas and probabilistic programming languages are a great step toward making these ideas more available to the common public, but we also need great visualization (something far removed from today's often lazy "data viz").

Ideally, things like means and variances will be concepts that are stronger than just parameters of the normal distribution---which I feel is about as far as a good student in a typical college curriculum statistics class in a science or engineering major can go---but instead be tightly connected to using distributions accurately when thinking of complex systems of many interacting parts and using concentration inequalities to guide intuition.

I think the biggest driver of the recent popularization of Bayesian statistics is that distributions as a mode of thought is something quite natural to the human brain, but also something rather unrefined. People can roughly understand uncertainty about an outcome, but have a harder time with conjunctions or risk. How can we build tools that will teach people greater refinement of these intuitions?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(learning_theory...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_Methods_for_Researc...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465046746
I can confirm the same bug in Chrome 22.0.1229.96 on x86 Windows 7 Home edition
Pentagon Reopens Program Allowing Immigrants With Special Skills to Enlist
Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't you email your co-founders and have that discussion before you start closing down accounts and making the move completely permanent?

Perhaps one of them has an idea to cut costs, or would like to open source the code, or can line up a buyer for the assets, or ... something.

Telling your stakeholders/investors/cofounders after you've pulled the trigger seems like the exact backwards way to do it.
A (very attentive) human spotted that, not the kernel. The kernel just computed the checksum and silently discarded the packets as corrupt.
TL;DR's should always go on top
Adblock on Surface Windows RT's locked down IE10
Wikipedia Is Nearing Completion, in a Sense
You expect to make more revenue than you actually do.
This is one of the more asinine articles I've read lately. It draws a false distinction between "saving lives" and "N-year survival rates", and then lambasts doctors for not understanding this fanciful distinction.

It's a false distinction because we all eventually die. If we look at 100-year survival rates for test B, everyone's dead, so the survival rate is 0. So there is no such thing as "saving lives". There _only are_ N-year survival rates.

Generally speaking, it takes a lot more than random musings of a random journalist to up-end an incredibly wide-spread metric of effectiveness of diagnostics and treatments...
Which part of his response was speculation, that Zynga is poisoned from the top?
So, the one bit of good news is that the AWS instances are at least in Virginia, which is significanly further inland than the scope of Sandy is currently projected to be -- or at least will avoid the brunt of the storm.

That said, to date, I've been without power for ever major AWS outage this year, so in a sense it's all kind of been imaginary, as I haven't seen the impact first hand (I'm in Maryland).

It's very possible that US-EAST could get hit, and you should of course plan accordingly, but my educated guess for Sandy is that VA will probably be okay, as I'm not seeing substantial impact pushing past the DC area in the forecast.
Yup, from now on all edits done by outsiders shall be reverted with extreme prejudice.
Interesting design decisions although a lot seem to be simply based on OSX. However the user experience is lacking - it is very buggy.
Apanhar o Expresso Transmongol - De Moscovo a Pequim
it's nice to read something like this that's been written recently. it often seems like such war stories come from some golden past...
Sort of relevant to the HN crowd, MIT Gangnam Style: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJtHNEDnrnY
And this is one of the reasons unemployment in certain Eurozone countries is so high. It's better not to hire when you're unsure about future demand because you're sure as hell not going to be able to fire them.
Can you say what product you are working on? How would you describe the game design philosophy for your team, or Zynga overall?

I think when people say Zynga is evil, they largely point to three things:

* spaminess of the games

* propensity to copy other products rather than come up with original ideas

* tuning of games to maximize revenues from individual players

Do you think these are fair judgments about Zynga's methods? Is Zynga more guilty of these tendencies than other gaming companies?
> At least in China, I'd think it has to do more with status than necessarily physical attraction.

That's entirely possible, but that's why I mentioned the fact that it occurs in all Asian countries, regardless of wealth. Even in Japan, a first world country, you will find this exact same phenomenon. In fact, China's adversarial relationship with the West and general social conservativeness means that it's probably more so in Japan than in China. Either way, it's not just for money (assuming that's what you meant by "status").

> Plus wasn't there a survey that said Asian women preferred their own race more than any other type of women?

From this chart[0], it's actually the exact opposite for Asian women in America. Notice how the ratio of Asian men marrying women of other races to Asian women marrying men of other races is lower than for any other race, while the reverse is observed among blacks (black men are much more likely to marry someone of another race than black women):

> Gender differences are most pronounced among blacks and Asians. Black men marry someone from a different group twice as often as black women do, while among Asians, the gender pattern is reversed.

My personal theory as to why this disparity exists is that Asian physical characteristics are seen as feminine, while African physical characteristics are seen as masculine. So Asian men are seen as effeminate, which reduces their attractiveness to women of any race. Similarly, black women are seen as masculine, which reduces their attractiveness to men of any race.

However, there have been some anomalies. For example, through the hallyu and the internet, Korean pop and dramas have gained great popularity amongst a significant number of white, black, and Hispanic women over the last 5-10 years. This has created a lot of non-Asian women with a so-called "Koreaboo"[1] fetish for Asian men. This is largely an illusion though, as the vast majority of Asian men don't look like Rain[2] or Song Seung Heon[3].

0: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/29/us/20110130mix...

1: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=koreaboo

2: http://i.imgur.com/0K7JF.jpg

3: http://i.imgur.com/7oAGm.jpg
>The offensive has been dubbed “#OP MaZynga”

A pun for Mazinger[1]?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazinger_Z
Markov models work well for almost every genre-- recompositions of classical or modal jazz tunes are particularly awesome.
This is brilliant work. Thanks for sharing
Positive iteration for sure but a 'redesign' this is not.
I have the same experience with Backbone apps... Even something that graphed model/collection/view connections would probably be super useful.
Why China's 1% Is Now Discreetly Hiding Its Wealth
Options:

1. Deal with it in person. Risk getting punched in the face (or worse).

2. Ineffective passive/aggressive text on the screen.
2a. If it was 'found' rather than 'stolen' (not likely given the wording), then text MAY habe some effect.

3. Contact media about lack of police interest and hope that that gets you your iPad back eventually (seems unlikely, if you've had to embarrass the police into doing their jobs).

4. Do nothing, accept the loss, move on with your life.

Depending on the circumstances of the theft (ie, mugging vs. it being lifted in a cafe), I'd like to think that I'd go with #1, but in reality, I'd probably go with a combination of #2 and #4.
Right. This would apply if parson were built into a shared library and distributed as an .so. It is a possibility, though Debian's package dependency system exists exactly to safeguard against this sort of a situation.
IANAL, but I'm fairly confident that you're wrong about CA requiring severance pay under the WARN act, and I don't think you should be giving legal advice if you're not a lawyer. Your post can mislead a lot of people on HN.
Title should be 'Glider'.
Not unusual at all, Belgium imported 770.000 tons and exported 100.000 in 2010.

Here a list of european countries: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&...
The Relation Between Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Health [pdf]
Sounds like pip (popular package manager for Python) avoids this problem because you don't use pip to install or upgrade itself. If using the package manager to install updated versions of itself is an intended use case, then I agree with others: it should check your path after the install and make sure the newly installed binary is the one that will get used. Otherwise the design is making it too easy to do the wrong thing.
I'd be pissed at a transit provider who mangled packets like this.

The more ambiguous situation is that early Juniper routers would fairly frequently re-order packets. That's nominally allowed, but a lot of protocols didn't like it.

There are way weirder things on satellite or other networks (spoofing acks, etc.).
Algae, would prove a much better oxygen producer than plants.

There are many studies being done, and done previously, on the viability of algae oxygenating artificial atmospheres.

http://www.ecology.com/2011/09/12/important-organism/
I love this stuff. Applied Computer Science. I wish there were more articles like this on Hacker News and less of the patent-wars and gadget articles.
For the hackerishly skeptical: Dr. Vincent Felitti's CV, c. 2001:
http://www.caipm.org/about/felittiresume.html

Video: Dr. Felitti speaking at the Child Trauma Treatment Network of the Intermountain West September 2003 Snowbird Conference
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Me07G3Erbw8 [1.5 hr.]

Another short paper with a different angle:
Felitti, et. al.: Obesity: Problem, Solution, or Both?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2912711/

14 years of published research:
Centers for Disease Control: Adverse Childhood Experiences [ACE] study
http://www.cdc.gov/ace/index.htm
[underway since 1995 with Kaiser Permanente, 17K+ participants]
Here are two more:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293849

http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
Games Developer Gives Customer Support to Pirate Bay Downloaders
Any reason this is entirely in italics?

UPDATE: Must have been a bug. It has now been fixed.
Photosynthesis really seems to be this weeks "what if" scenario: http://what-if.xkcd.com/17/
Yup. Just pointing out that "idiomatic Python" is to prefer sum() to reduce().
I doubt it. Steve Gibson once related how he sold many copies of his software on his website, even when the website accidentally had an invalid certificate. His software is geared towards a tech-savvy audience. If tech-savvy people don't behave securely, why should we expect most people to?
IBM prepares for end of process shrinks with carbon nanotube transistors
Stop Designing for “Users”
This issue is known, intermittent and dependent on a number of factors. It has been addressed and an update is forthcoming.

This type of issue would be identical across NVIDIA based ARM PCs and large numbers of the reference platforms were available at the same time they have been available to external developers.

Developers on the Office team (and Word team) that needed to contribute to the ARM focused work had access to the tools and hardware needed, including Surface specific hardware. There was no shortage of knowledge, hardware, or communication.
Then I'll make sure my test subjects continue to practice QWERTY.
Tim Harford is hardly a 'random journalist'; he's a well respected economic journalist, and a fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford (which is notable within the university for its focus on social sciences).

Besides which, it doesn't draw a false distinction between the two, at all - you've misread the article if you think that it does. The point it makes is that if a new screen improves five year survival rates it is very possible that it has not actually extended anyone's life, and that this is problematic because many doctors are unable to realise this (or to appreciate how significant the claims of other treatments are).

In fact, your claim that there's no such thing as "saving lives" is a true case of asininity. Of course we die eventually - but some treatments can extend life, and that's why we use them.

Moreover, this is actually a very important topic in the UK at the moment (note that this article was published in the Financial Times), because current NHS reforms are putting much more commissioning power in the hands of consortiums of GPs ('family doctors' in the US parlance) - so the ability of doctors to evaluate the claims of efficacy made for different treatments and screens is very important (and by the evidence of the research he cites, somewhat lacking). It's hardly lambasting - it is now important that GPs can understand these subtleties, whether they're happy about being in this situation or not.
I read through the article a couple times, but couldn't find any pointers regarding the efficiency of algae as an oxygen producer - only that there is a lot of it out in the ocean. Do you have any citations that would suggest algae would be better in an airlock than a potted plant? (starts off on his 90 minute google/wikipedia distraction of the day)

[15 minutes later - this is the best link I've been able to find - from a Navy research paper in 1963, no less:
http://torpedo.nrl.navy.mil/tu/ps/doc.html?dsn=7590785&h...

-- snip --

The results obtained with a small pilot plant containing 6200 ml of algal suspension have been evalu- ated; the effects of light intensity, rate of stirring, rate of carbon dioxide supply, and other variables were part of this study. Light energy was supplied by six 1500-watt incandescent lamps which extended through the suspension and were encased in 50-mm O.D. cooling jackets. When the light intensity at the surface of these jackets was 34,000 foot-candles (the limit with the equipment at hand), the oxygen production was 4500 cc per hour.
Oxygen production increases with light intensity, but the oxygen produced per watt of electrical en- ergy expended is constant over a wide range of light intensities. The amount of electrical energy re- quired to provide enough oxygen for one man is between 30 and 50 kw, depending on the design of the gas exchanger. This high requirement makes the process prohibitive at present; but the development of more efficient high-intensity light sources could change the outlook.
The dependability of the algal system in providing a constant supply of oxygen has been assured by this study; also, the volume requirements of the algal system are competitive with existing systems for carbon dioxide removal and oxygen production.

-- snip --
Why does anybody get to vote in the first place?
Actually, this is a fairly unusual song, in music theoretical terms. Almost all pop songs use the I, ii, IV, V, and VI chords, with popular progressions including I-IV-V, ii-V-I, and I-V-VI-IV. Since this is tonal music, it obviously includes the I chord. It does use only four chords, but they are uncommon. Most of the song uses the I chord (G major in this case), but during the buildup, it uses an surprising I-II-III-I-II-vii progression. The II and III chords aren't strictly in the key of the rest of the song, although they still blend well with the in-key chords. vii is just F# minor here, but it is not in the key of the rest of the song either. vii is not often seen in pop/rock/classical music; you often see vii° instead, since it is in-key. I can't argue with Psy's choices, though, since that little riff builds a lot of tension.
This is plain wrong. Unemployment in Eurozone is so high because of a lot of other Problems.
Switzerland has also quite a lot of laws which protect employees and the rate is lower than in a lot of countries.
Hey all - apologies, most of the Continuum people are busy travelling from PyData and dealing with hurricane sandy travel plans, we'll be commenting on these discussions shortly.
I think it'd be nice if it were an endomorphism, though; Making map(f, tuple) -> tuple, map(f, list) -> list, etc. would save users from having to write tuple(map(f, tuple)) (which is something I've done a bunch).
USB chargers? Try this one, I wish I could afford it.

http://kdyworks.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=ar...
I agree that I would like to see custom OS's be bootable on any device, but Microsoft is merely continuing the trend here. Neither Apple nor most Android manufacturers allow ARM devices to boot custom OS's. What is so special about Microsoft that it is an issue when they do it but not the 2+ years other manufacturers have been doing it?
Sadly, current NHS reforms mean that it is increasingly necessary that they can do so - broadly speaking, the healthcare system is being significantly decentralised, and much more commissioning power is being put in their hands.

And, of course, you already have this situation in the USA, no? How does your doctor decide which treatments they ought to prescribe for you? How does your doctor decide which screens are useful, which are not?
Whoever has enough karma to flag posts is as well.
Great points - a histogram might make more sense with the email volume graph and the labels for # of words can be improved for additional clarity. Thanks for the great feedback - please let us know if you have any more.
This isn't exactly a Markov model, although I reckon you could draw a mathematical connection.
Who will you vote for: Romney or Obama?
HNews friends... Who are you planning on voting for - either Romney or Obama, and are you are a hacker, hustler or designer?

Let the games begin! (And remember to Vote)
In this article[0], Guido says:

> We already have sum(); I'd happily trade reduce() for product(), so that takes care of the two most common uses.

product() never made it in as a builtin; anyone know why?

[0]: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196
> It's a false distinction because we all eventually die... There _only are_ N-year survival rates.

The metric he's discussing is death rate from the disease in question. So although we all eventually die, we don't all die from, for example, pancreatic cancer. Thus, "does it reduce the death rate by pancreatic cancer" is a notably better metric than "does it reduce the total incidence of death over the next five years."

As to whether a random journalist can come up with a better metric of success than the medical profession, look at your own response to the proposal. You misunderstood, you got angry, you questioned the credentials of the source. If the medical profession in general has that attitude to outside criticism, then yes, it seems likely that they would not be using the optimum statistical measures.
I love the idea! I want to try playing :)

But "Singularity Chess" is an awkward name. The center of the board is not a singularity in any reasonable sense of the word. The space of allowable movement trajectories appears to be nonsingular.

Maybe a more correct name, albeit drier, would be quadratic chess (because the transformation looks like a quadratic form).
Maybe co-founders had moved on earlier and he was giving his last shot alone?
Except that doctors actually do have to evaluate information like this all the time, and how they evaluate it determines what type of treatment they choose.
Lessons learned from growing LinkedIn to 175 million users
By the way, our startup's office is pretty much 50/50.
To me it sounded like the guy had a good idea, it was slow growing but it was also not his main focus. He had paying customers, distributors, and producers using his service, it had roots. It may not have been worthwhile in his eyes to keep up, but to me it seemed like he had a good idea, good people behind it, he just needed to keep going a little while longer. Did he give up too early right when things seemed to be at the end? I guess we'll never know. Startups are hard. If it was easy everyone would do it. Not to downplay this guys dedication, it seemed he had a lot, but 3 years of working full time and growing a startup, that seems like it would take a toll on anyone. I guess everyone can't just take a leap and quit their job, but something has to give I feel. When you're starting a company it absolutely needs at least one persons complete focus.
There's more choices than Romney and Obama, and I envision there being a lot of support for Johnson from people on HN.
I don't get why this one founder would be closing everything down on his own either, but then I didn't find any mention of co-founders or even co-workers in the story.
He only mentioned that he didn't know how to ask for help.
What kind of 'co-founders' were these co-founders?
Well, while we're at it, here's my crazy MTU-related war story, although not as crazy as that one!

I was troubleshooting with a user of an audio streaming application running over a LAN. The user could stream classical music but not rock music. Seriously. Classical was fine, but when streaming rock, the connection would drop after a few minutes.

The application took chunks of audio, compressed them with a lossless codec, and then sent each chunk in a separate UDP packet to the other end. It tried to use IPv6 whenever possible because it was generally more reliable in the LAN environment, although it would happily use IPv4 if need be.

After a huge amount of boring troubleshooting going back and forth with this guy, I finally figured it out. Somehow, he had set his network interface's MTU to 1200 bytes. IPv6 won't perform automatic IP-level fragmentation for MTUs below 1280 bytes, so larger packets simply could not be sent at all. The streaming application would try to send an audio packet larger than 1200 bytes, get an error, and bail out of the connection.

Why did it only happen with rock music? Turns out to be pretty simple. Lossless codecs are necessarily variable bitrate, and classical music compresses better than rock music. When streaming classical, each chunk of audio consistently compressed to less than 1200 bytes, but rock music produced occasional packets over the threshold.

The user didn't know why his MTU was turned down and didn't need it, so we turned it back up and everything worked just fine.