skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there a "pundit prediction tracker" anywhere? Somewhere that tracks the predictions made by talking heads and shows how often they're right or wrong?

> uninformed jabbering.

And for informed jabbering. It's frustrating that analysis is being replaced with opinion, especially when it's clear that opinion driven prediction is garbage.
Cafe creatives: The hubs tempting Dubai entrepreneurs
10K is good monetization for 3 million free downloads. Its not easy to get that kind of money from ad displays. On a normal site you get a bit less for that amount of impressions.
ECMAScript 6 collections, Part 3: WeakMaps
Yes, if you can get other people to pay for it.
Depends on how you define effective. If you are getting free air time, with Apple PR picking up the bill, then yes, there probably is no better way of increasing your own revenue. However, if you are paying for the ad yourself - well, I guess there is a reason why we don't get a huge number of ads for individual apps (at least, that's the case here in the UK). Its simply not cost effective.
Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Full Disk Encryption
"My understanding is that it takes longer to grow CBD-rich indica strains than THC-rich sativa strains"

Other way around actually. Indica strains grow faster and are easier to grow. Most street cannabis strains are hybrid, where they are trying to get the high THC of sativa but with the favorable growing characteristics of indica.
Probably its working now! If it doesn't wait a bit longer or clear your dns cache.
That's a neat formula, and directly applicable to having a bunch of objects in a git repository.

Applying the formula for 160bit SHA-1 you need 1.7e23 objects to get a 1% chance of collision. The current Linus kernel repository has 2.7 million objects. So to get a collision you'd need a repository that's 6e16 times larger. That should be plenty.

For some wacky perspective that's 10 million kernel sized contributions for every man woman and child on earth together in a single repository. It would seem git will reach plenty of other bottlenecks before SHA-1 becomes a problem...
You're correct on everything, except for the "marketing plans and promotion", which were not deceptive, nor illegal.

Making it clear that the Liberty Dollar was NOT from the government was one of the key selling points they promoted.

Unfortunately, the truth wouldn't help the government's case.
Show HN : My weekend(s) project - Strapfolio
The idea that this was "a close race", "too close to call", was a narrative pushed by the media to make it more artificially exciting to drive viewers.

Pundits hate him for it because it shows how content-free, and ideological/ opinion-driven their arguments are rather than sound judgement based on available data.
Building a supersized PONG installation using Arduino
Wrong. Sativa strains take longer to flower and cultivate and they yield less. Indica is the typical street weed or sativa / indica hybrids.
CrazyEgg (http://crazyegg.com) and Inspectlet (http://inspectlet.com) do similar things. Mouse/click tracking, watching users as they move through your site, etc.
It was a poorly written law. Support for legalization nationwide is currently about 55-59% in the abstract, but on any given law it's rarely higher than 50%. Prop 19 was an especially bad law for a variety of reasons, and even then it came very close to passing.
The formula given at the end of the article implies that to have a 5% chance of a collision you would need 3.87e23 objects. (SHA-1 is 160 bits.) Even storing 1 trillion objects gives a collision probability of 3e-19.

So this is unlikely to be a concern, ever.
Doesn't even need to be in filenames, but the content of files aswell.
I found a couple of things that look useful at a glance (I googled for pundit prediction tracker):

http://www.pundittracker.com/

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/11/exhaustive-collection-o...

I remember hearing about Pundit Tracker before it launched, but I didn't look into it after that.
> Not that concept art, screenshots, or videos ensure success, but the complete lack of all three seems quite odd these days. Especially for a $2 million goal. That's fricking nuts.

I found this utterly pathetic. He asks for so much from the fans but hasn't even done the most basic of legwork.

Seems like a total cash grab to me, prepare for disappointment
The Rizzoli Conundrum
voting cannot be computerized ever without risk of manipulation. voting will always have to be on paper in the interest of democracy.
It is not a logical paradox, it is very counterintuitive. With just about 23 samples, you'll have a birthday collision with 50% chance. Many people would think to get 50%, you'd need 183 samples.

It is also counterintuitive, because it is unavoidable. Even with a very large hash range, one can force a collision with a relatively small number of samples.
Yes there's nothing hip about it at all. But for the best part of 30 years of BBC BASIC, I've not heard a single complaint about that fact.
> well known and well respected history of delivering high quality games.

Someone is forgetting how Elite 2 turned out
Not sure if you can spy on people. These things are going to be too loud.
> Prohibition of marijuana is an attack on science and medicine.

The really interesting part of the history of marijuana prohibition is that it was specifically designed as an attack on industrial hemp, funded in large part by Dow chemical so they could sell their shitty synthetic replacements for hemp products. The word marijuana itself was brought into the English lexicon for the lobbying effort in order to leverage anti-Mexican racism in painting cannabis as a dangerous drug.
In reading his analysis of the election here, he repeatedly mentions that having only two candidates makes things much more predictable.

In any case, we don't know if he got it "wrong" unless we know what % chance he gave this outcome. (He tries to account for the likelihood that polls are misleadingly biased, and that would correlate across multiple seats.)
> Once you get more samples and more knowledge about the subject, you can bring stronger statistical tools to bear to get error estimates, prediction intervals, improved models, etc

Like I said earlier, increase in data does not always lead to improved models.
PhDs from the Faculty's Perspective
so, .psdx
Look at the sales trend graph. He said $9k from Friday to Sunday, which add up to ~100,000 downloads.
NB. Big Picture mode is lovely: I'd never played with it under windows.
I am having a hard time understanding the reasons for support here in HN so please help me out. A common reason cited is that it prevents violent crime outside of the US but is that a 'good' reason to support it? Suppose that it is a more powerful drug that is very hazardous to a person exist. Doesn't that speaks to the same situation? Should we legalize that as well?

I can't articulate it well but shouldn't we make the decision to legalize it based on whether it is good for this country? I'm unfortunate that it created a lot of bad side effects elsewhere but that won't ever stop.

With that said, I am for it because I think drugs shouldn't be treated like criminals. They don't 'hurt' anybody but themselves so it's along the lines of alcohol addiction, etc...
See you on the web
> It's amazing to see how much of the area of the USA is red, even in states that went to Obama.

Cities vote Democract and rurals vote Republican. Since rurals are a lot more sparsely populated than cities, the area of the voting map looks overwhelmingly Republican.

Related: http://www.urbanarchipelago.com/
Not all LED Lights are Created Equal
So Nate Silver says that the demographics will be most favorable to marijuana legalization in 2022 - 2024. Because of this, 2024 is more likely than 2022 because it's a presidential cycle, and presidential cycles are always more liberal than midterms.

By this time also:

- There will be a ton more academic research about marijuana

- There will be several FDA approved medicines made from marijuana extracts and specific cannabinoids on the market.

- The price of LEDs will have fallen by 50% as compared with today, meaning that it will be both cheaper to grow marijuana indoors and much harder to detect since thermal imaging cameras will no longer be able to detect rows.

- Solar photovoltaic will also be much less expensive, and this becomes viable for keeping small indoor grows entirely off the grid when combined with LEDs.

- Medical marijuana will be legal in New York state, and probably in 25+ states total.

- Being able to synthetically fabricating new drugs using biotech platforms and 3D printing will be either here already or just over the horizon.

- The baby boomers will be in their 70s and 80s, which is when they will be at their most powerful and active politically, both as voters and also in the house and senate.
Either way, he doesn't have worry about reelection anymore and can afford making unpopular decisions.
Where did he get tens of thousands of dollars (even if in the Rouble equivalent)? Just curious. Seems to be a sum out of reach of any citizen who is not a miner, a polar worker or engineer-in-chief.
Sounds almost gimmicky, which it probably is not: Would you mind providing a screenshot of the email?
worked well for portugal : http://www.businessinsider.com/portugal-drug-policy-decrimin...
Perhaps the best way to close this column is with something I once heard attributed to Stu Card, a pioneer the field of human-computer interaction: "Grad school will be the best years of your life. Having said that, get out as soon as you can."

Yes, this is indeed the best way to close the column. Wonderful article, thanks for sharing.
Microsoft and Skype to axe world's most popular IM client early 2013
That's great news, very happy for you :)
Completely out of context, but I have visited your website http://www.criticalarc.com/ and I was very surprised to see this pixelate image on the home page http://www.criticalarc.com/_content/index/slider/2.jpg.
McDonalds is a bit of extreme scenario. Sell it in specialized shop, where everything is explained, where you have to sign paper that you do understand the consequences of trying this drug.
It's really every two years since he was one of the first that showed Republicans picking up big gains in the US House and governorships in 2010.
I believe bigiain is referring to the fact that git objects are stored by their SHA-1 digest (so a hash-collision will cause a collision in these filenames) not the filenames of the contents. (The objects are stored under the .git/objects directory, in the format xx/y...y, where the directory xx is the first two digits of the digest, and the 38 y's are the rest of the digest.)
It's fair to say I'm no expert on cultivating cannabis!

I think the idea more generally (can't remember where I heard this, think it was one of the many documentaries focussing on dispensaries) was just that those growing 'street' weed aim for high THC and don't care all that much about CBD, while those growing it for legitimate medicinal purposes aim for high CBD with as little THC as possible.
Noted, thanks for the info.
Transcript of President Obama’s Election Victory Speech
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وسيلتك
Interesting that the other parrot learnt by copying the first parrot, not buy independently coming up with the idea itself.
I don't understand how hackers who appear to be so stupid manage to steal a domain.

No public corporation would purchase a stolen domain name.

No one would pay millions of dollars to cause a minor inconvenience to Kim Dotcom. Universal buy the domain name for a million dollars. Kim Dotcom launches service on his second choice domain name. Service is still running. Service is still popular. Universal is out a million dollars.

Its ridiculous. There was the news about anonymous and Zynga.. seriously? "Hackers" have become super silly recently. Starting to think they are all a bunch of 12 year olds having a giggle.
Maybe the downvoter thinks he should have contacted the parent directly?

Edit: It's now back to positive, but I think HN could be improved by giving more private ways to contact people - the obvious way would be Private Messages, but this got me thinking about whether replies visible only to the OP and other posters in the thread would be a good solution - and yes, I know HN could implement a lot of other features before this one :) .
Just curious about your projects ;)
But it would only be handed over to the highest bidder if the individuals chose to hand it over ... which is how democracy is supposed to work isnt it? Arguably the current system favours a cadre of the super-rich already. People now can vote for whichever party will make them individually richer. It just seems to me like a logical extension of capitalist economics.
Looks great, but why do you need to have the ability to update my GitHub profile when signing up?
+1. This is just Phase I trial, it tells little about efficacy.
The support is actually pretty good - since the standard went through such a long process, most compilers had support for at least some of the features as long as a couple of years ago (back around the TR1 draft).

I already use it for some little new projects. I'm sure a lot of legacy stuff won't be able to move on to the new standard for a while because they need backwards compatibility with old compilers though.
Fortunately it's not their hosted apps too.
I have a wordpress blog hosted there and it's up - http://blog.freedomsponsors.org/about/
I use dnsimple

http://dnsimple.com
Slightly less? What ad networks are you using at $10k that would be an eCPM of $3.33 which for non-mobile ads is pretty high for what the app is.
Popular Tobacco Brands Improve Imperial Business
Popular Tobacco Brands Improve Imperial Business
How One Startup Is Changing The Way We Party
I want to (finally) learn mobile app development... suggestions?
<background>

I've been designing/developing websites for 12 years now, and for the last 5 years running a large corporate (Government) web team, while still coding/designing personal projects on the side. I'm proficient (advanced, I guess) in HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/MySQL on LAMP stacks, but have no major experience in any "proper" programming languages (a few courses to get "familiar" with Java but that was years ago).

I now work for myself as a consultant, and have lots of spare time where I'd like to learn mobile app development, to ultimately/eventually build 2 app ideas I have for iOS and Android (no-one has done either idea yet, and I'd really like it to work on both).

</background>

Gurus of HN, where do I start? It's daunting!

Do I start from scratch learning Java / Obj-C and making each app separately, do I learn one of them and use a tool to convert to the other platform? Do I use some kind of tool that lets me build for both at once?

Thanks in advance for any replies.
At the very least, Emacs + WebKit would be a cool project. Emacs is great but one thing it doesn't have is bindings to modern graphics libraries. Can you imagine what people could do with that kind of lisp environment + a canvas element?
The web has gone through fits and starts- your job may seem stable now but how much warning will you get when demand shrinks for web development and your employer can't afford to keep you on?

Furthermore, getting that graduate degree in a real discipline is the surest way to tenure at whatever career you pick. That tenure translates to hundreds of thousands of dollars over your career.
I actually thought the app in the ad was Garageband for iOS! Congratz man!
Indeed. In the words of Dale Carnegie:

“The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.”

This email also exemplifies many of Carnegie's other maxims.
HTML5-Compatible Blink Tag
Microsoft Will Invest $100 Million in Rio de Janeiro
Silver's model isn't particularly advanced on election day. The further you get from election day, the more advanced his forecast is, accounting for various factors and ebbs and flows in polling data -- convention bounces, economic news, etc.

A big part of Silver's success has not been his math, but rather his excellent writing. He offers easy to consume analysis of the polls and makes a boring (to the masses) subject interesting. He can be portrayed as a stats geek when presented to the public, but really he's a great communicator who also knows his data.
Polls are not independent. If poll A is out by a large amount, then it's much more likely that poll B is also out.

That's a bias issue - I was only addressing sampling variation. If you wnat your model to address bias as well, of course you can build that in, given some priors on what the distribution of the bias is likely to be. I didn't bother in my model (which is why I was forecasting 98-99% chance of an Obama victory).

We could discuss potential poll bias as well, but I thought that was a bit too much for this short comment.
I'll have espresso, and amazing music.
For the New Yorker... we'll see ;)
I'll try to do my best ;)
Wow.

This is exactly what our YC application is about: "Thete builds tools for people who want to create new countries...We ask whether politicians are a necessary part of a political system."

:-) :)
No the idea is than normally you have bad connection, but to build that, we'll need the BEST internet connection.
I saw this commercial and I was upset that Apple didn't explicitly say which App they were using for the commercial. At the end at the bottom it just said, "App From App Store" . Glad that people are finding the app though, the commercial is great advertisement!

EDIT: Ok, apparently this app is not the tiny piano app I thought it was in my initial comment. Thanks for clearing this up. The confusion is why I was upset they didn't explicitly say which app they were using. I guess its a just a good day to be a piano app.
Starting With FirefoxOS's Front-End - Gaia
http://quotations.about.com/b/2007/03/20/if-i-had-more-time-...
Hi @olegp, I'm the founder of Bountify. Thanks for the kudos! Unfortunately, the only way to get the user's email and github url is to request the "user" scope, which has write access. Bountify will never edit your Github account, but I understand that's besides the point, it's a terrible thing to ask for. I plan to work around this ASAP, as I imagine it's dissuading quite a few would-be users. Thanks for the feedback!
Some of the tasks are at least an hours worth of work and they are offering a bounty of 1$?

You need to prune these types of job listings, they're just spam and completely unrealistic.

Example: https://bountify.co/1c

Solid days worth of work. Tweaking, designing, etc.

50 bucks! That's terrible. Any thoughts on how to mitigate this problem?
How to build machine learning applications
Maybe they pee onto a turbine to recharge the battery.
What I'd be interested in would be the question if he hides his tool or what happens to the tool after he gets the nut. Is there any sort of reuse or does he build a new tool each time.

Would he recognize premade tools, maybe pick the best one from a collection of tools present?

There's also some potential in seeing if birds exibit certain types of economic behaviour. If it would be somewhat tedious to collect two nuts per day and he could live off one, would he save some nuts to build a more complex tool (requireing a day+ of build time) that would allow him to harvest a "free" nut each day etc.
I think I see where the confusion is. The Indica "brick weed" that's commonly sold is typically imported from countries where it grows naturally in the wild. The Sativa strains you're referring to tend to be grown in the setting of domestic indoor operations. The Sativa strains are more expensive and are in higher demand and are higher risk due to a) the time that it takes to grow them and b) the fact that it's being done in a high security and low corruption country. This provides motive to grow them as quickly as possible and make them hard hitters when smoked. You want to produce the most "bang for buck" in terms of the physical space you have available, so high concentrations of the most noticeable compound (THC) are favourable. There is also a higher correlation between hardcore drug use and those strong strains, whereas more casual users are likely to buy the Indica brick weed. All of those documentaries are probably referring to the hardcore users, not casual users. They are addressing a real concern but gloss over the fact that the reality is more complicated than it appears on the surface.
I still use MSN and I guess I don't really mind, MSN has a lot of history but it's a mediocre client and Skype is much better. I used to have 100s of contacts on MSN with ~50 online at any one time, now everyone that used MSN casually uses Facebook chat so I have... 2 people online (both of which are listed as away) and anyone that uses IM seriously seems to use Skype. It was inevitable.

Does anyone here still use MSN? They say it's the most popular client, but that doesn't fit my current experience, I guess China makes up the majority of that usage? Of the people I know that still use MSN they just have it running because why not, they don't actively use it. That's how I use it.
That being said, sativa strains have more often an uplifting high and are therefore often preferred for recreational use while some indica / high cbd strains are actually cultivated to work as sedative or for pain relief.

e.g.
http://www.resinseeds.net/Cannatonic,en.html
Open data is the big thing for me. There's a lot of buried gems in the gov data and doing the ETL and make it available to the public in a usable format is a good way to build skills.
So basically if you buy a .ga domain this USA based company can take your money [via their subsidiary] and violate your contract at will?

Surely the US government will step in and ensure the rule of law is upheld?
Governments are by definition a protection racketeering club.

Monopoly on violence and all that...
Get Paid to Get Things Done with Boston Startup TaskUp
How Amazon works in Europe
It's a little much to claim that this guy called it. The minor detail of actually conducting the polling was done by others.
A common reason cited is that it prevents violent crime outside of
the US but is that a 'good' reason to support it?

I am struggling to find any potential answer to this which doesn't boil down to "yes".

I can't articulate it well but shouldn't we make the decision to legalize
it based on whether it is good for this country?

Why not both? The national harms done by prohibition are very, very real.

I'm unfortunate that it created a lot of bad side effects elsewhere but that won't ever stop.

Legalisation will cut off a major funding source for those "bad side effects." It might not stop them completely, but it ought to make a dent.
Anonymous hacker arrested for attacking Home Secretary website
"those growing 'street' weed aim for high THC and don't care all that much about CBD"

People growing weed illegally for commercial purposes usually care more about weight and grow time than anything else. Of the actual breeders and geneticists who create the different strains, there are a variety of different factors that are optimized for. E.g. check out the webpage for apothecary genetics:

http://apothecary-genetics.spruz.com/

Most of the good breeders are in the Netherlands, but they are probably the top ones in the US.

"those growing it for legitimate medicinal purposes aim for high CBD with as little THC as possible."

That's definitely not true. The vast majority of medical marijuana is high THC. While many dispensaries are starting to carry high CBD weed and extracts, they'll usually only have one or at most two strains out of the 20+ they offer. In terms of actual medical use, different cannabinoids have different medical properties. So THC also has many medical uses, it's just not the only cannabinoid with medical uses.