skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm glad you like it!
Actually I can extend it to pretty anything, from katakana to learning capitals or even words of any language.
Here is how the dictionary works (for the moment):
http://youpinadi.github.com/jlearn/js/hiragana.js
If i get some pull requests with other cards deck, i would be glad to integrate them in the interface!
The most painful part is that you used to be able to use Google Website Optimizer as a static-site-wide a/b tester. I was doing just that on my own (Hakyll-generated) site, gwern.net, and half-way through Google shut it down, and replaced it with some crippled thing in Google Analytics.
I'm not really sure the direction they're taking the iMacs is optimal. Yes, they look lovely but ultimately they're a desktop and not portable in the first place. With a notebook I'll sacrifice upgrades for portability, with a desktop portability is irrelevant.

I suppose they're doing it largely for the style but surely Jonathan Ive and co can make a beautiful iMac that's a couple of centimetres thicker.
Now all it needs is the Animaniacs to sing along with it [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDtdQ8bTvRc]
Interesting, I thought the large heat sink inherent in the CANDU design essentially ensured that with no human interaction that CANDU reactors would failsafe. My understanding was such that the 'reactor' might be destroyed but the design was such that the failure cascade would not release radioactive materials outside of the containment units.
Having friends who have gotten TV game show concepts to the pilot phase, it doesn't pay jack squat unless you achieve Jeopardy! or Wheel Of Fortune level of fame.
> "there is simply no good reason to believe that mycotoxin levels in ordinary coffee are high enough to have any measurable effect on humans who drink it."

I don't keep the links handy, but a one second google brings up this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16284846 and a tens of other references. Coffee was not studied as extensively as far as I know, but if you have reason to believe that it is better protected than wheat and maize, please let me know why. The only non-asprey link about coffee toxin studies I could find is a single article from the 1980 that says "I looked, I didn't find, I stopped looking".

> Some, but not all of that is infant mortality, yes, but the fact is that if people in 1910 had less heart disease than people today, it is likely largely because people in 1910 often didn't long enough for heart disease to become a problem.

Well, in 1860-1910, US white infant mortality rate was coming down from 21% to 10% (with black mortality rate, when documented, being 50% higher than the white one). I don't know if that data is included in the "1910 life expectancy", but it is likely that it is. In Italy, it was going down from 25% to 13% over the same period. That's enough to make the "48/51" lifespan you quote meaningless (sources I found say 54, but whatever). http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/haines.demography

If you consider "life expectancy of anyone aged > 4", then all of a sudden 50 years jumps to 62 years; and if you consider "life expectancy of anyone aged > 20", then it will surely increase the 1910 number to 70 or more, while hardly nudging today's numbers. I agree that his statistic is not conclusive in any way, but your interpretation is not valid either.

> That doesn't mean that butter fat is harmless. It just means that you can't see the harm if you also change everything else.

That is true. And yet, there is virtually no direct evidence of harm from butter than I can find. (Neither is there from cholesterol intake, for that matter - or salt intake, with the exception of a well defined 20% of the population - that is, if you're not in those 20%, there is no evidence of salt harm).

> Are we relying on what doctors were able to diagnose in 1910? Because that's a whole other level of flawed.

Yes, that's true. But that throws away any study done before the early 1990s - which is also flawed. We're damned if we do, damned if we don't, and everyone gets to pick their own favourite data and interpretation.

> What you think you've experienced through personal trials is not significant evidence.

What I discovered is significant for my daily life, is significant for my daily life (duh, it's a tautology). I'm not saying you should believe it because it worked for me. I'm saying you should try and figure what works for you.

FWIW, my ex was a medical doctor and I regularly read BMJ and NEMJ for a while. That was before Ionnadis's paper, but I remember thinking back then that 70% of what was published was statistically invalid.

Much of what is considered significant evidence in medicine and health today, is not significant evidence. If the experiment is simple and cheap enough, you should do it yourself.
Identity theft is still called "theft", even though nothing is actually stolen.

Piracy is more like counterfeiting. It's much worse than stealing. Stealing a TV only deprives someone of that physical value. Pirating software has the ability to destroy the value of the entire product line (why would someone pay $99 when they can just get it for free).

The same concept also applies to things like the app store. Now that games are 99 cents, it's not easy to create a game and charge $30 anymore (because the value is what people are willing to pay. If everyone were giving these games away for free or they were pirated and everyone knew these games could be downloaded for free, that value would be $0).
I don't think this is a totally fair comparison, because anyone who knows how to code their own site (/service) is already at a major advantage.

Now, if you downloaded an off-the-shelf MP3 search engine package and merely hosted it, it'd be different.

I also don't think that surviving a sudden upsurge in traffic is a particularly impressive feat just because it's Wordpress. If anything, it highlights how inefficient Wordpress is, which might possibly be a result of trying to be easy to set up. And a lot of the people who do use it don't realise how much worse they make it by adding plugins.
Usually I try to devise comprehensive solutions, but there are plenty of smart people on HN - so I'll just give my perspective here:

When picking speakers, we typically look for three things:
1. Reach - what cool things have they done that'll make them interesting?
2. Popularity - how well known are they?
3. I they have reach and no popularity, will they be able to express what they've done in a way students will find awesome? Alexis Ohanian came to speak in CUTC 2011, and he was awesome, for example (although some would argue he was pretty famous too).

For #3, maybe something in terms of videos for each user in a centralized location
Not to beat a dead horse with yet another recommendation, but here's what I'm using for my own site: https://github.com/Ceasar/staticjinja

Very simple, but perfect for my needs. Granted, I haven't added a blog yet, but it looks like it'll be pretty easy when I get around it it.
Selling my online project, and why you should too
Patient seeks access to data on his own medical device
Feels like a cheap solution, there is countries where guns are very hard to get, and in those countries guns are way less used in crimes compared to USA for example. This will result in even more guns and probably a even bigger problem in the future.
CloudFront offers HTTPS (on their domain). For low volume sites, paying for CloudFront is cheaper than paying at least $20/month for CloudFlare's HTTPS (which is also on their domain unless you pay $200/month).

Note: For this CDN HTTPS to be useful, you also need to have your main site URL have it, say, via a certificate from StartCom and a VPS or a good shared hosting site. It is a good deed to offer HTTPS even on static sites because it helps protect users' privacy (if they are using WiFi, Tor, or a sketchy ISP; which is likely). If you're distributing software or code, having some sort of signing -- HTTPS and/or GPG -- is critical to protect your users from malicious MITMs; more users are going to verify HTTPS because they don't have a choice about that one.
HTML 5 has a long way to go, not all features are supported across all platforms and even the single-most simplest animation or interactivity will require a lot of lines of code to function properly, let alone the extra lines of code you would end up coding to make it work across all browsers.
You can create two different versions of a page and use something like Google Website Optimizer right?
Literally listening to it right now. That's awesome. Good luck with the sale!
Thanks for the concern. I think you'd be surprised by our operating margins.
Skype - Palo Alto

Skype is looking for a big data engineer to help instrument and analyze the gargantuan P2P network that is Skype. Nosql, hadoop, map/reduce, node.js are the main drivers, although there will be integration with azure and esoteric legacy systems to keep it real. We need a solid, open minded engineer who has worked with all kinds of distributed systems and is not afraid of big challenges.

You'll need to be able to anaylze, interpret, publish, and present complex problems and solutions to a wide variety of people. You'll be involved in the ground floor of Big Data at Skype, so you'll need to be able to find paths to success in a sea of confusion and conflicting priorities.

You should really dig machine learning, data mining, stats, and math in general and understand the fuzziness of "answers" in the real world.

Contact f00biebletch at gmail for info.
>Generally when talking about how safe a given sort of nuclear power is the most important thing to consider is whether it has a positive void coefficient or not.

The void coefficient is only appropriate, when you are dealing with a criticality accident like in Chernobyl. Criticality accident (fission chain reaction getting out of hand) has never happened in commercially used Western reactors. In fact, in Western countries you can not get a license for a reactor design, which has positive temperature coefficient for power i.e. the fission power must decrease, if temperature increases.
> The true value of Social Media is in that it provides a
> very effective forum for both Corporate (business) and
> Personal Branding.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/i-am-a-brand-pathetic-man-s...
DynamoDB's shortcomings (and our work arounds)
#AngelHackPaloAlto
When Github goes down, use git-bundle
IE6 claims about 6% of the browser market share, users likely stuck in stone age
It's similar to many startups. Free initially to ensure growth, but always with eventual monetization in mind.
I built 6 static sites with Hammer this week, absolutely great product.
The VAST majority of people look at their computers the same way they do their DVD players, microwaves, and vacuums: they are a "unit" that they buy, plug in, and use until it's time to buy a new one. I've built more computers than I can count, but, due to the flattening out of the "end-user performance experience" (eg: there are very few upgrades I could do to a PC to make it faster without needing to replace everything), I'm becoming one of them.

Apple has recognized this and is using that knowledge to throw away old assumptions and put the resultant "compromise space" into beautiful products that people are proud to display in their home.

Sounds like a smart plan to me, but I can understand why there is a small percentage of the market who still sees their PC as a conglomerate of components. I'm pretty convinced Apple is not the company for people like that.
He is illustrating the deadweight loss of a successful copyright system.
The biggest reason BASIC was popular to teach back in the day, is because it is very simple. You are allowed to use GOTO statements which will make (bad) programming a whole lot easier for absolute beginners. On the other hand Python is a well-designed language. It encourages both OOP and FP, and honestly I am not convinced that just because smart people are actively pushing Python to become "the next BASIC", it is going to be very interesting for absolute beginners with little exposure to math and logic.
My argument is that improved UI doesn't appear to be the source for major improvements in reducing the number of drone crashes. While a simple UI might handle some engine failures, it can't handle all hardware failures.

The landing scheduling depends on the local air traffic controllers, which aren't under US direction and can't be solved with an improved UI. The planning problem might be that the local ATC doesn't care for the US military traffic in the area, and this is a form of passive protest. If so - and that is a pure hypothetical as the article doesn't go into those details - then the planning problem is at the high-level political level, and perhaps extending to how the world perception of how the US is dealing with the GWOT. That's extremely far from UI issues.

As minor points, neither Djibouti nor the Seychelles are a central African state. Also, the initial problem with AF 447 was inconsistent airspeed inputs from the pitots, causing the autopilot to disengage. I don't think it's useful to attribute the problem only to "lack of feedback." Yes, there's a "skill problem", but if you continue the analysis chain then there's a training problem, and if you go further then there was an incomplete understanding of the risk model.
It's a fair amount of overlap with other language communities as well.
Sub-compact publishing model used for periodical by university students
Is it just me, or is there something odd about the projection? I think it's a little too flat... it feels weird.

That aside, very neat. Yet more motivation to learn d3.
You kids and your fancy one liners:

import java.util.Random;

public class Maze {

public static void main(String[] args) {

String[] blah = new String[] { "╱", "╲" };

Random rng = new Random();

for (;;) {
System.out.print(blah[rng.nextInt(2)]);

}
}
}
I love this idea. Sure, one day it could evolve into what we might of now as a "robot friend," but I view this as an experiment in what humans can find patterns in. We're known for things like finding faces everywhere and ascribing meaning to randomly flashing blinkenlights. We're deeply social creatures. I'm not surprised at all that we'd feel like the little Arduino, with its blinking lights and maybe other basic actuators, connects with us. Rather than trying to build as comprehensive a robot as possible, this becomes an exploration of the minimum robot possible that one can build an emotional connection with. It's an awesome idea.
Runs quickly here, doesn't need to be compiled, source can easily be viewed and edited (while it's running, depending on your browser), and style-able with CSS.

Flash does one of those, and for the same reasons as HTML5 solutions, its speed depends heavily on the code backing the drawing and how much data is displayed. Why do I want Flash again?
Screenshot Absolutely Everything
> Especially if you are living one your own continent with no enemy around for thousands of miles.

How would they get here? Oh, right, the ocean. Better control the ocean, then.
Not if you can set up a framework where physical objects are equivalent to reversible computations (and hence energyless).
Sadly that didn't stop them from claiming that piracy was a $1.5B$ problem because the retail price of Office was $495. Even though even a child would tell you that no sane individual would spend more than 1/2 their annual salary to buy a copy of a buggy, but ubiquitous, set of tools. In fact they were willing to pay $2 for a pirated CD on the streets so the actual "loss to piracy" was $6M ($2 per each of those 3M machines) but that sounds so much less of an actual problem.
taligent your comment is [dead]
Taleb of Black Swans fame says that predictions of future technology dont pan out, flying cars for example. He says that the predictable new technology is a replacement of older less capable or less adapted technology. I suppose your could have predicted cell phones, having see analog wireless phones.

What he doesnt say in this book excerpt is that truly disruptive technology is usually around in the labs or experimental form 15 or so years before its disruptive phase. Could you have predicted today's internet from the early ARPANET? I was there and I didnt. Or the iPad from the integrated circuit? Good grief, Ted Nelson demoed Xanadu of a group of us in the 1980's and I didnt see the social implications of the Web.
Interesting but very over the top. An iPad might be called a tablet but it's very different than what Babylonians used (except in shape and sometimes purpose), contrary to Taleb's assertion.
That guy cheats by cutting the paper. That makes it too easy :-)

I was thinking of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_of_paper_folding. Examples and more math at http://static.usenix.org/event/usenix08/tech/slides/lang.pdf
How To Prevent Web Scraping Using Tor (Or Other Proxy Services)
The question posed at the end was interesting. The interviewer said he had asked a number of people associated with horrible shooting sprees like Columbine and Aurora if they would have rather have had a gun, and many say "no." Jonathan Rauch responds with: "Maybe the right question to ask that person was, 'would you have liked someone else ... someone who is comfortable with guns ... to have had a gun in that situation?' ... I think you'd get a different answer."
When there are no pictures, people will create their own images in their minds which are probably wrong. You don't want that.
To make animations like these on Flash, it's just a breeze, period. I own an Adobe creative suite in which Flash is available. The bundled Flash IDE (which was originally popularly called as Flash) is a lot lot better than say, writing hundreds of complex lines of mathematical lines to create just a 3d rotation or tween.
> "According to a 2011 Gallup poll, 47 percent of American adults keep at least one gun at home or on their property, and many of these gun owners are absolutists opposed to any government regulation of firearms. According to the same poll, only 26 percent of Americans support a ban on handguns."

This amazes me. I wonder how many of those 47% have had training? Or how many regularly practice firing the gun? This is one of the main reasons I'm opposed to people being allowed to own guns. Most probably don't know how to use them and in a situation where the weapon could be useful an untrained person will probably make the situation worse either by shooting another civilian or losing their cool and firing the gun and making a situation worse (e.g. in a robbery where everyone could come out safe if the thief gets the money - but some idiot with their own gun decides they will 'save the day', the thief freaks out and suddenly their are dead people).

Another reason I think guns should be make illegal in the US is the incredibly obvious evidence throughout the world that easier access to guns leads to more gun related crime. Coming from a country where guns are illegal it's very rare to hear or anyone being shot dead. Violent criminals obviously turn to other weapons such as knives but I would rather be up against a man with a knife than a man with a gun.
Well, keep praying. Perhaps you will get a christmas miracle. (Though I wouldn't recommend holding your breathe.)
I'm a Firefox user. Extensions are a big deal for me. I'd love to move to Chrome, but:

1) I use tree-style tabs (tabs arranged in a column at the left) in Firefox since I usually have 10-some tabs open. Chrome used to have this but they disabled it, and no extensions for this work.

2) Firefox uses less memory (older versions of FF used to be notorious for leakage, but the benchmarks I looked at showed Firefox outperformed Chrome in memory usage).

Granted, Chrome probably has slightly faster page loading.
Saying No to College
It's in the class of restricting personal liberty in the name of public safety. I don't think you'll get people to move on their positions very easily.
One thing you have to remember, is that after a decade or so of playing video games, you are not the same person you were.

Your tastes are far more refined, which means that you are naturally more inclined to notice flaws in the games that you are playing than you were when you were a kid. Also, you are probably a lot better at video games in general than you were all those years ago. Truly classic games have always been rare.

I don't know how you feel about FPS games, but recently I've been blown away by how awesome Borderlands 2 is. I played the first one and thought that it was pretty good, but I didn't feel compelled to finish it. I finished the second one in 3 days though. Not because it was short, but because I spent almost all of my 4-day weekend playing it. It reminds me of how much fun I used to have playing Doom, Duke3d and Quake.

If you like RPGs, you should try Torchlight 2. It's a Diablo-like game, made by one of the creators of the original Diablo. It released soon after Diablo III, and a lot of Diablo II fans feel that it is a much better game than Blizzard's latest effort. Where Diablo III starts to seem like a job after you reach the highest difficulty, Torchlight is pure fun the entire time you play it. It's also only $20.
Another Webby user here. I forked the repo when I learned it was no longer maintained and I got tired of patching string.rb with "#encoding: UTF-8" whenever I was installing the gem someplace. :)

I tried something else at some point; I forget what, but it was more complicated, so I stuck with Webby.

Extending it is just easy. I've been using it to create mobi and epub files from Textile, as well as plain old Web sites. I think I use it for pretty much every site I have that isn't hitting a database, and even with those I probably have a static section built using Webby.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzFWRPiNXOI
I normally might flag something like this, but there's an important point in here that has to do with our relationship to technology.

Guns fill a role in society that allows any person, no matter how weak, to execute deadly force against another. For many, this is the height of idiocy. Why would we allow individuals to have such power?

But technology is doing the same thing that guns do -- it's giving every person unprecedented power over his fellow man. DDOS attacks can bring down banks. Bio-research could unleash a deadly plague. As technology increases, the powers that one person has continue to grow.

So the issue of gun ownership is the same issue as freedom in technology. How much power should one person have? Every time somebody commits a crime on the internet, we're going to hear the same cries: why should individuals have so much power over others?

I don't have a facile or slogan-worthy answer. As a libertarian, I always want to err on the side of empowering individuals. But I can see a powerful argument to continue to take freedoms away from all of us. The issue of gun control was just the first shot fired in the larger war that is now upon us.
Article fails to mention that when CloudFlare has issues, they present Captcha's to the Google Bot, and your site gets delisted.

Also fails to mention that if the CDN gives you an IP that is the same as a Kiddy Porn site, or a pirate site that you could have Law Enforcement on your doorstep (worst case) or be delisted by Google, or blocked by NetFilters.

CloudFlare is not worth the headache. Put a squid on Azure, Rack, AWS, or Google Cloud Compute and you can have nearly the same features, for nearly the same price. And not have any of the negatives.
Anonymous threatens to shut down Syrian govt websites