skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gaussians definitely are not the only distribution. For example, the Poisson distribution is uniquely determined by its mean, so it also forms a monoid by the same reasoning. The Categorical distribution is also implemented in the HLearn library as a monoid.

The beta distribution is uniquely determined by two parameters called alpha and beta. Typically, these represent the sum of observations we've seen of some events. (On the same website is an example with heads and tails from coin flips.) The beta distribution forms a monoid simply by adding these parameters from each distribution. This is very similar to the Categorical distribution, and also generalizes to the Dirichlet distribution.

Things get really interesting when you stop talking about distributions, and start using them in the context of actual machine learning algorithms. If you know how the Naive Bayes algorithm works, for example, it should be plausible that it forms a monoid in the same way that the Gaussian forms a monoid. The future posts will cover how to apply this to some of the "important" learning algorithms like this.
The code he wrote for showing how to generate is pretty ugly and left me confused. I think this shows much better the relation between the 12 notes and a scale:

NOTES = ['c', 'c#', 'd', 'd#', 'e', 'f', 'f#', 'g', 'g#', 'a', 'a#', 'b']
# 2 is a whole step, 1 is a half step
MAJOR_STEPS = [2,2,1,2,2,2,1]

# returns the scale in the given key with the given steps
def scale(key, steps)
note = NOTES.index(key)
step = 0
notes = []
while step < steps.length
notes << NOTES[note % NOTES.length]
note += steps[step]
step += 1
end
notes
end

scale('d', MAJOR_STEPS) #=> ["d", "e", "f#", "g", "a", "b", "c#"]

I think this shows how a scale is just a list of steps applied to the notes from a certain key :)
Yes, it's similar. To explain the manufacturing situation in our terms, they're advertising for the equivalent of "Java programmer, 1 year of experience" and paying $10/hr. No one applies. Then there's a phony "skills gap". But also, no one wants to study to go into the field which actually creates a real skills gap.
This industry is more experience based. Sure, theory will teach you that under certain conditions a plasma cutter ( or welder)'s arc is going to be certain shape and the speed need to be certain inch/minute for minimal dross, however, it is never 100% accurate. Therefore, the actual skills lies in the know how to adjust.

Moving on, with CNC automation, you need experience in both industry to understand how to program a CNC machine. With full automation becoming the trend, I see a huge lack of skilled workers who can fit this wold. Afterall, why would you go into manufacturing of metals if you understand computers.
you think it's a hoax? it's been linked to from reputable news outlets as his blog where he's posting while on the run from the belize authorities.
When I came across the [Ghost](http://john.onolan.org/ghost/) while reading HN I really liked it, and have thought about making something similar, but have never gotten around to it. In the last few days though I have put it together just as John described (I don’t know if its legal or morally right to publish it, but I will blog about it at least because I have spent some time on it.

I finished working on the fifth image down in his post, -the post list and preview- I also finished the sixth image, which is the editor with markdown, and preview.

Now I am working on the backend which is created with PHP and the Slim PHP RESTful application framework. If you would like to check out the current version of my rendering of Ghost, you can see it on GitHub by following the link.
Is this really true? If you look at the top grossing movies, they're all studio blockbuster vehicles. The cost of star salaries, huge marketing splashes, etc are still as bad as ever.

I don't see any evidence that the COGs for producing the head revenue generators are any lower than what it was, say, 5 years ago.
Frequent travelers and members of rewards programs aren’t treated that differently

Um, actually we are. With Avis First (free to join) or Hertz Gold (last I knew there was a fee, but that may have changed), I take a shuttlebus to the rental car lot (or at the smaller airports, walk from the gate to the rental lot), look for my name on the message board, walk over to my car, get in, drive to the gate, show the attendant my license and I'm gone. In the really small airports (FSD or FWA for instance) it's literally 5 minutes from gate to road.

WRT Flightcar, that has absolultely no appeal to me as a car owner parking at an airport, or as a car renter. As a car owner, when I get back from a trip, I really want my car to be there so I can get home, I don't want to have to deal with my car not being there because the renter got stuck in traffic or had a change in plans.

As a renter (for both business and pleasure) I want to be able to have some flexibility in my rentals - if I want to extend my rental, I just visit the website and extend the rental. Would I be able to do that if the guy who's car I'm renting needs it back at a certain time? Also, how do I know that the car I'd be renting would be in decent running order?

I think that airport car rentals could use some disruption (for example more flexibility in refueling is nice, but I don't see that Silvercar really solves that problem), but I don't see these businesses doing it. Of course YMMV.
Changed the template, so that you can read it better :). Do Checkout
AMA With Serial Inventor Of 120 Patents
A Hacker News vote button
> Netflix's problem is that there are no switching barriers to keep viewers loyal to Netflix.

Sure there is. Nobody else has Netflix's library. If I bought the shows I watch on netflix from iTunes or amazon, I would probably sink 10x the money in. I've probably spent around $300-400 on netflix over the years, and I've watched many times more content than that. Ad-free, subscription, with lots of content.

Let's look at the competitors: Amazon prime, which is cheaper but has only a few titles that set it apart (West Wing is the one that caught my eye). Of course, prime is worth it even without the video library, so perhaps it's not the best comparison.

Hulu has a much smaller library, and its paid model has ads (which renders it unacceptable for me). As a free service for watching recent TV, it's alright, but that's not really the same market as Netflix.

iTunes, Google Play, etc etc, are only worth it if you watch <$8 of content a month or want to keep up with current television.

And, of course, let's all remember the biggest competitor in the room for the generation that's most likely to consume internet content: piracy. It has the best selection, best price, best quality- it really only fails on a convenience level.

I also think that the download-the-drm-video is destined for failure. People want large collections, and anyone building that collection with video you don't own for that much money is either stupid or has a lot of money.
Jobs Are Obsolete
TL;DR: Probably not on legacy industrial equipment. Or legacy people. But maybe if you start from scratch and only involve computers.

I was given a good piece of advice when I started work: "A process engineer's job is to make themselves obsolete." I've striven to make sure that I did everything I could to make sure I wasn't needed anymore.

And I'm happy to say that the processes will keep me employed for as long as I'm willing. Not from any self-serving malice, but rather that in the end it's terribly messy. The sheer inelegance of industrial manufacturing seems to defy strong automation at the meta-level. And not just because the machines are all only halfway obsolete, new, deprecated, upgraded, documented, up-kept, cleaned, and run (halfway to spec).

It's because to a computer, this mess quickly degrades into special cases. Lots of them. There actually are some shockingly clever software packages out there capable of the early stages of what you're describing, and - this is the kicker - they all require specialized engineering support to create, install, train, and use. The end product can be handled by a floor worker or management, but at some point you've got to explain the situation to a computer somehow, and that ends up being as complicated as programming.

For a much better written punchline, I'll defer to the short story Profession by Asimov [1]. I think it's cynical to think we'll never be able to solve the 'original thought' problem, but I also think it's easy to underestimate it. Things really are different today than 30 years ago, so perhaps a few more iterations will lead to tape-machines that can program the tape-machine programmer tape-machines. [2]

[1] http://www.abelard.org/asimov.php

[2] Perhaps the worst part is we sorta already have this. There was just a post on the LLVM [3], which discussed how a computer translated and optimized a division command into machine code. That used to take a lot of work, and it took Real Programmers to optimize that code before this sort of automation. So it's not inconceivable that your ideal comes true. But I am cynical enough to think sami36 is right [4]: Doodleware is past the horizon. But computers that can talk to computers is probably in sight.

[3] http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2012/11/24/life-of-an-instructi...

[4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4827459
Your anxiety is misplaced. I've lived in the US my entire life and I've never witnessed a crime involving firearms.

If gunpowder had just been invented, and guns only existed in the hands of a few companies, scientists, and inventors, then gun control might work.

But since the USA was originally (from Europe's viewpoint) a vast, wild frontier, guns have been very common throughout the USA for all of its history.

Pretend that firearms were magically outlawed in the US tomorrow. But there are millions already in circulation. So people who are determined to get a gun, aren't concerned about following the law, and are willing and able to pay, would certainly still have access to the weapons.

A firearm ban would only punish conscientious, law-abiding citizens who want firearms because they're a fun hobby, or to protect their families from armed criminals.

And then there's the other reason for the Second Amendment: Revolution is the final defense against tyranny. Power corrupts, and the people who started the USA were under no illusions that the government they created was perfect and would remain so forever. If a future US government somehow manages to undo all the Constitutional safeguards and exercise unchecked power, or finds some clever way to be really crappy to the citizens while remaining within the letter of the law and the Constitution, the people can always withdraw their consent to be governed, and, being armed, can have a decent chance of winning.

Remember that the Second Amendment was approved not long after the USA's independence from Great Britain, and its authors had personal experience with armed revolution against an oppressive government.

Many people who are unfamiliar with firearms tend to have a visceral reaction: They're scary and bad. Think about how many people who are unfamiliar with computers tend to have a similar reaction. Try to move past your prejudice and try to find reasons for your beliefs. If you can, great -- let's have a debate! If you can't, please spend 30 minutes thinking about your worldview; try to make it logical and consistent by changing beliefs and/or thinking up new lines of reasoning.
Mother’s Day
Mother’s Day - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/11/25/mothers-day-doodle-google/
Mother’s Day - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/11/25/mothers-day-doodle-google/
Mother’s Day - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/11/25/mothers-day-doodle-google/
Mother’s Day - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/11/25/mothers-day-doodle-google/
Mother’s Day - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/11/25/mothers-day-doodle-google/
Mother’s Day - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/11/25/mothers-day-doodle-google/
Have you tried to advertise your inventory on Google AdWords?
I think a core problem is "HR" departments with absolutely no understanding of the positions they are supposed to be hiring for, even for technology companies where technology is supposed to be a core competency.

The only thing stopping me from calling out HR departments in general as a sign of organisational cancer, since I am yet to encounter one that pulls even a tenth of its weight, is that they tend to be comprised of the only cute girls in the whole company. Even on Friday (2 days ago) I was out drinking with a bunch of tech guys and a single cute HR girl. That is pretty much the sole reason I would oppose eliminating HR as we know it from all technology companies.
NFL is locked in. Should be interesting to see when they make the move to online. There is currently no way to watch NFL online in the US because networks pay a LOT of money for exclusive rights. With the amount of cash Apple has on hand, for example, we could see some huge shifts.
I think an important factor is that benefits muddles the value of your total compensation. It gets really tricky to compare an offer for another job with your current package.

At my last job, I got subsidized gym at a fancy place with a pool, but it was as bit out of my way. At my new job, I get free gym, no pool, but right next to my office, so I can go in my lunch break. Which is the more valuable benefit?

I'm in the UK, so I have universal healthcare. But my last employer had a private add-on that was really good and not too expensive (benefit-in-kind, ie. company pays, but I pay income tax on the cost) which I took. My new one has an even better, but more expensive one, so I probably won't take it. Which is the more valuable benefit?
Agreed. Further, I personally think this is the issue at the core of the "data science shortage" right now.

"Data science" means many things to many people. Some shops want BI folks who can code. Others want people who can keep up in deep learning threads (like the one on HN's front page) and know about Hinton's work. Others still want HDFS badasses who can distinguish between Cascading and Cascalog (lol).

Shops classify all of these things as "data science" when they're really very different (respectively: Excel/scripting BI analyst; ML researcher with a focus on deep learning and neural networks; data infrastructure developer with broad exposure to MR frameworks)

This is stupid. I worried about checking off these boxes until I realized recruiters are doing the 1990s Java thing all over again. This time, though, the buzzwords are Hadoop, information retrieval, and Andrew Ng. I think it's best to ignore this, keep working hard, and grow your employment options.
The only Canadian landmark on there now is the largest mall in the world, West Edmonton Mall: http://goo.gl/maps/aSYCO Very neat
Your comment reminds me of a segment of Urbanized, the documentary [1], in which a young woman, Candy Chang [2], creates a simple system for enabling citizens to voice their opinions on what should be done with vacant buildings in varying states of disrepair.

She created vinyl stickers that read "I Wish This Was", under which is a blank white space (resembling the My Name Is stickers common to networking events, etc.). She affixes a grid of the stickers to the building/scaffolding/whatever along with a Sharpie, and folks passing by write their suggestions on the stickers.

For me, what makes her idea so incredible is that the suggestions are made in context; they're not discussed at a town hall meeting miles away from the location, they're not submitted online in a fancy web app, and they're not handed down by local government among suggestions for hundreds of other plots.

It's great that OP is asking on HN, because I think (s)he'll get some great responses here, but the best place to ask might be in the space itself, in the company of the folks that make it more than Some Bookstore In Massachusetts Ripe For a Pivot.

Why not host an event to discuss the future of the store? Send invitations to professors and post flyers for students at local universities and see what happens. It can't hurt, right?

1. http://urbanizedfilm.com
2. http://candychang.com/i-wish-this-was/
I generally don't tackle projects that have the words "DIY", "retinal", and "laser" in the description.

Granted, the author addresses safety issues.
Is that Ruby? :o

I agree. That is 1 million times better. Sometimes I wonder why I don't think of these things. I'll probably fix the code and use something like that... except in Python, obv.

Thank you;
Nobody can buy Netflix because the content licensing deals are broken by a change of control. I'm sure they'd have been picked up by someone years ago were that not the case.
"Stealing" still not be the proper term, but the grandparent posting was not talking about stealing IP, but about stealing fundamental IP rights.
I would guess that one would only want to create a legal market for an illicit good when the illegality of the market is causing more harm than the market transaction itself. I think that many countries, for example, have tried legalizing prostitution as a way of tackling forcible sex trafficking, unfortunately as far as I've read these efforts have failed to thwart sex trafficking.
The reason I got rid of my Netflix subscription is because I have lost the time for the imaginary quota of movies/tv-shows I wanted to see each month to make the monthly payment worthwhile. I have my Prime membership and sometimes I watch stuff on there, but it's always been about the free 2-day shipping, and that's why Amazon will have my business indefinitely (i.e. until I don't need to buy physical things) whereas Netflix lasts only as long as my availability/desire to watch passive entertainment does.
I was part of the Lemonade group for a time, and one of the big arguments for a new submission technique, when it was proposed during my membership, is that ISPs were doing more and more blocking of port 25 and 587 from user connections to fight spam, and some mobile carriers had even more strict filter. I worked for Oracle at the time and we were actually proposing SUBMIT-over-HTTP because, drum roll, HTTP routeability was less complex and more predictable, and far less likely to run into end user customer support issues. I don't know who proposed the benefit as 'tcp connections are expensive' because sending mail is a rare event. We were much more concerned with traversing 3g networks, ISPs, and corporate firewalls.

There's also cases like, if you want to forward an email, on a mobile device, you'd have to download the email + all attachments, and then reupload the message through SMTP. The Lemonade group came up with hacks to do forward without download (BURL + IMAPAUTH) or CATENATE, but my guess is, if you have an advanced mailstore backend shared by the IMAP and SUBMIT servers, it could be a lot simpler if the servers were unified.

I do think the IMAP group was often too pragmatic, too stuck on maintaining compatibility with ancient systems, and not as concerned with end user / customer issues, and more concerned with the feelings of a few implementors.

When you consider someone like Google implementing mail on a BigTable cluster, or Oracle on some of their RDBMS (Oracle Collaboration Suite), putting forth arguments that new features must somehow be relevant or not upset ancient mbox based systems seems silly.

I think if one were designing a mobile email client and scalable server today from scratch, you'd be crazy to design a protocol like IMAP.
A hacker-publisher friend does "print-on-demand" the simple way; a high-end laser printer plus a high-end perfect binder and cutter. I think they kept their equipment costs down below $10K. The standalone machines don't do much besides print and bind and I believe cost much more.

This is a solution for a low print run rather one-of-kind printing but it works for him.
Flightcar sounds like a tough call...a lot of moving parts to save a few bucks on parking and/or car rental and with added anxiety for both parties.

Silvercar sounds more like how renting a car should be (except for the limited car options)(I'd go with a Toyota/VW lineup).

The things that are completely stupid with current car rental companies: 1) lengthy checkout process, 2) inability to choose car and 3) anti-customer gas policies.
Strikes me mainly as a trendy recasting of the statistical concept of a "sufficient statistic" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufficient_statistic)
Has anyone figured out how to switch floors? It's really irritating me.
IAmA serial inventor with 120+ patents to my name. AMAA
I can't seem to find a way. I was expecting Google to have a neat new UI for this!
It's a purely informative post written to explain police corruption to an outsider. He mentions his disdain for sex slavery.

What about that quote qualifies him as a "piece of shit"?
Thanks a ton for the great explanation, I dropped you a line about some typos and other off-topic stuff.

Of all the bits and pieces I've looked at over the years explaining the circle of fifths this is the one that stands out for me as the easiest to remember. Being able to re-derive from basic principles is so much better than memorization.

Thank you again!
> different. Not necessarily worse.

> I too can openly criticize my government and people aren't disappeared off the streets

In the UK, you can't. That's the main point of the article. Criticism of government results in criminal penalties in the UK. That's the whole point of what the article says. That's the definition of "not being able to exercise free speech."

(Okay, you won't be "disappeared off the streets." You'll be given a fair trial before an impartial court, convicted, and sent to jail. But the relevant idea is having a criminal penalty for criticism of government, not the precise form of the penalty.)
Bradley Manning is not a case of free speech. He only ever had access to the information he leaked under a completely unambiguous agreement with the US government to maintain the secrecy of it.

That, of course, does not justify torture. Even in a theoretical Jack Bauer world where it's OK to torture the bad guy to find out where the bomb is, it is clear that Manning had no such information. He should be tried in a court of law and be punished, for what he did was unambiguously criminal, but he, like anybody else, enjoys the constitutions protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
Why I hate redhat?
Show HN: Java Advent Calendar
Publishing an "advent calendar" (a technical post / day between the 1st and 24th of December) is a well established tradition for many programming languages (for example perladvent.org or phpadvent.org), but there wasn't one for Java I could find. Thus I decided to rectify it: javaadvent.com

Subscribe if you would like to receive 24 high-quality technical articles each year! Also, if you would like to write an article (it need not be about Java, it can be Java related, like running PHP on Java :-)), ping me at dify.ltd@gmail.com. Your help is appreciated!
all exponential family distributions may be written in a form that depends upon a set of fixed dimension sufficient statistics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_family
these sufficient statistics have the additive form described in this article (this is a consequence of i.i.d. sampling).
it is common to exploit this structure when implementing efficient inference in, for example, mixture models.

if you combine this property with a bayesian analysis, and put a conjugate prior on the parameters of an exponential family distribution, then the posterior distribution, and the marginal likelihood depend upon on the data only through these sufficient statistics and everything else is easily computed. in this form, one of the sufficient statistics often has an interpretation as a "pseudo-count"; how many effective samples are encoded in your prior?

exponential family distributions include: poisson, exponential, bernoulli, multinomial, gaussian, negative binomial, etc.
The first half I wrote (i.e. the 4 comparisons) was really the main point of my comment, rather than the "get started if you're eager" example code.