skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am a non-biologist applying random forests and other methods to large genetic studies and I think it is unfair to discount the importance of specialists.

I'm not really surprised that domain knowledge doesn't predict success in these contests because the data is all ready featurized and sanitized to remove any features that could be used to "cheat."

Random forest works really well and will quickly pick up on any features in the data that it can use to build an accurate model that isn't useful in the real world. This includes unique identifiers and features that are correlated for the wrong reason.

For example if you are an e-commerce site with tiered shipping cost scheme and turn it loose on your raw database it will think shipping cost predicts purchase price. It will also think order id is an excellent predictor of purchase price since there since every unique order id has a cost.

The role of the domain expert is to determine what features can be fed into these black box methods and to recognize when the model is overfitting and re featurize the data. IE they might replace the "shipping cost" feature with a boolean "discounted shipping promotion" feature and see if still effects total purchase.
Unfortunately not! It is something I've seen before and the charge goes straight to customers/insurance with even mundane things in healthcare - like paying $50 for a pair of plastic gloves as an extreme example.

I don't actually have any new novel ways to transport medicine though, I was just making an example. More than likely the high charges are because of the very small number of providers of mobile, certified and absolutely secure cold storage devices. I think my guess on asking about the certifications is probably the right aspect to tackle first if considering this, because the certifications are no doubt extremely challenging to obtain.

EDIT: Also want to add - if anybody finds the idea of cheaper medical transport appealing, please try and make it a reality! Decreasing the cost of medicine by any sort of factor is probably the single best thing that could be done for humanity as a whole at present, and will probably make you more money than some new social network.
I think what's getting people upset is that they are called 'motivating' posters. I would hang these up in my office for two reason:

1) They look nice and nothing wrong with having a nice looking off space.
2) They serve as reminders. Sure we all 'know' these sayings and try to apply them in everything that we do, but that doesn't mean we forget sometimes and stray off the beaten path. Just like saying we could all have someone tell us "do unto others..." every once in a while.
Anyone of reasonable intelligence can tell the difference between a fraud and the real thing.
I'm sure there are cases where it did, e.g. by virtue of offering something benign in place of something in the mainstream that might have killed.

When homeopathy was invented about 150 years ago, it was actually safer than real medicine, but that's because real medicine was quite dangerous, and homeopathy wasn't actually any treatment, so the "doing nothing" approach (homeopathy) was safer than the current real medicine.

However real medicine has gotten a lot better.
Conway's Game Of Life in Telnet
telnet gameoflife.erikzaadi.com 1337

Done in NodeJS (originally in python), as a part of the global Coderetreat day 2012.
Good question. Most winners use only laptops with R or Python (Matlab is also popular).

Feature engineering and common sense is definitely more important than computational resources.
Except it's wrong. It should be... Experiment. Learn. Repeat.

There's too much emphasis on failure. If you keep focusing on failure, you keep thinking about failure. I prefer to think of learning experiences. Learn. Learn. Learn. Eventually you find a combination that works!
I disagree that the GGP asked a genuine question (I've posted about this earlier), but just wanted to point out that the "genuine" question was about FreeBSD in particular, not BSD, and you're replying about BSD vs. Linux, rather than FreeBSD vs. Linux, so a bit of your answer is misdirected. That said:

> If you're talking about the entire GNU/Linux operating system, it doesn't make sense to talk about a "vanilla" version, because there are thousands of different utilities that can comprise a GNU/Linux-based operating system, and there are combinatorially many ways to create a Linux distribution.

That exactly WAS the GP's point about the difference, I think, and exactly what he said: There's no "vanilla Linux" you can run. There is a "vanilla FreeBSD" you can run. That's a huge difference.

> > All the distros that have varying degrees of incompabilities and infelicities between each other.

> This is vastly exaggerated. A properly compiled binary or a compatible source file should run on any distro

That's NOT vastly exaggerated. While it is usually possible to do so, it is usually painful unless you start from a source package. If you have a binary rpm or deb and want to install it on a distro it was not intended for (not easy even if its the same format, often hard if it's a different format), you have to be very familiar with both package standards to make it work. "alien" helps, but if your package has lots of dependencies, you really need to know what you are doing.
What I mean about Japanese Americans is that they were rounded up wholesale. There was no sorting. The immune system works like that. After years of being sick, as I grew stronger, exposures resulted in wholesale roundup of both the new germs and old ones which had been quietly flying below the radar for years.

I am not a big fan of vaccines, but that's a bear I usually try to not wrestle. Still, I appreciate the acknowledgement that the principle is valid.
You're right - I got the term wrong. I shouldn't be posting that early on a weekend.

So embarrassed...
Hah, all sane modern languages needs to patch LLVM for GC reasons :) The guys writing it did not really know a lot about that area and how to get those intrinsic features into the LLVM proper.
Agreed. I expect in a few years we'll see the "how to get a job as a technical cofounder" blog posts instead.
Can't sign up for nzb.su at the moment so it seems, together with a lot of others out there ... Nice, but not really.
I explained why the foundation should take an active role here: http://jessenoller.com/blog/2012/12/7/the-code-of-conduct - read the whole thing, especially the points about sponsorship and branding.
This is correct, logically speaking. But acting as if you control outcomes gives you the maximal chance for affecting what you CAN control.
Every one of those made me feel depressed.
Correct. And due to having things like this in place, our sponsorship for PyCon has grown, as has the number of female speakers and attendees. It's a net win for everyone.
Harassment is not a political issue.
Excellent point. This is called "data leakage". Analysis of this topic won the 2011 KDD best paper award: http://staging.m6d.com/wp-content/uploads/research_Leakage-i...
Except that wrapping someone in wet bedsheets has nothing whatsoever to do with homeopathy. Homeopathy might be a crock but this article is ridiculous.
I choose to ignore the idea that asteroids can destroy our planet by fatal, apocalyptic impact. The earth has not yet been hit by an asteroid. QED, asteroid impacts are a farce.

Correlation != causation. I'm happy you have lived through your medical problems. But you are a data point of n=1, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who have ignored solid medical advice and died because of it.

Lastly, "medicine" doesn't happily sentence anyone to death. Doctors and nurses are people too. People who got into their career to help other people. Do you think they become a doctor just to write death pronouncements?
The industry is still growing faster than the number of computer science graduates. Don't wait for it.
Silicon Valley’s big, dumb angel bubble
This is a really old post that has already been on HN.
Not being inclined to donate six months of unpaid work to someone you just met is being "smug"?
I alluded to this in my initial comment: I find it hard to believe that Asimov's publishers would have agreed to a license deal that permitted public domain distribution of the derivative work. If this recording truly is public domain today, I should be able to type a transcript as a novel and sell it, right? What sane publisher would sign such a deal?
Stephen Colbert.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwIL3Tr3N9Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSE_saVX_2A
Something like this appeared in Good to Great. In a study of CEOs who lead their companies to significant improvement that lasted after the CEO stepped down, they found a common personality characteristic. The best CEOs constantly were watching for problems, took responsibility (aka fault) for everything that went wrong, credited everything good to others, and then anything that could not be credited to someone they said was luck.

This is a useful attitude. As news goes up the corporate ladder, it inevitably is colored in the most positive possible light. (http://www.davar.net/HUMOR/JOKES/SHIT.HTM is a funny, but true, take on this phenomena.) You need a constant vigilance for problems at the top to counteract it. And the common willingness to rest on your laurels and deflect blame elsewhere is not going to lead to that willingness.
> Homeopathy has never kept anyone alive.

I bet there are an awful lot of dehydration survivors that would disagree with you, there.
I'm absolutely certain that "modern medicine" doesn't have all the answers, and is woefully incomplete. I'm absolutely certain that there are things currently considered as "alternative medicine" that will turn out to be valid when practised correctly, and on suitable patients with suitable conditions. I'm absolutely certain that there are people for whom the prescribed treatment from "modern medicine" was, in fact, wrong.

I'm also absolutely certain that the vast majority of "alternative medicine" is not, in fact, better than "modern medicine." Exceptions will exist, and true scientists would use them as stepping stones to better knowledge, better practice, and better medicine. The fact that your experience indicates otherwise is a clear indication that things not only could be better, but should be better. The true failure is not that modern medicine was wrong and that you appear to have been saved by "alternative medicine", but that your success is not taken seriously, and is basically ignored, by those in whom we ultimately place our trust to find and implement cures.

That doesn't stop it being true that there are people who seek "alternative treatments" when they would be better off going with "modern medicine", and all evidence suggests that they are the vast majority of cases.
Show: Bfore.me want to send a handwritten christmas card to world, join them
No, it's not your fault. And this is just a mechanism of deflection.

Step back from your solipsistic convictions for five minutes and realize that your rationalizations here only serve the purpose of avoiding forgiveness. You have decided that not only are you not a victim but in fact you and you alone are responsible for everything and therefore you don't ever need to forgive anyone. Moreover you have now implicitly made the rest of the world victims. Hm...
Julian Assange, Wikileaks and Information as a Weapon
Thanks for the heads up.

Seems legit. Flagged as well.
> Living in a [...] gender-equal country [...]

Which country is that?
Sure, but keep in mind that people paid to attend this conference, they need proper legal protection against claims. Let's say I go to a conference and someone claims that I did harass them sexually, it would be up to a few local programmers to decide what is the truth and not. That is not OK.
And, at the end of the day, the patient is just suffering from a cold. Medicine or no, they will get better in a week. Placebo can help alleviate discomfort and pain to some degree, because that is something the mind has some sway over. So in cases of simple illness...placebo is a somewhat valid medicine.

Now, when people start taking homeopathy for cancer or whatever, that's a different story.

EDIT: To be clear, I think it's kinda ridiculous they are allowed to sell it too. But I suppose it isn't too different from "nutritional supplements" that have ambiguous value.
Keep in mind that if you crawl this site your ip will be banned. At least mine was when I was playing around with a web crawler i built.
Uhh... FreeBSD is on EC2...
That reasoning would lead you to conclude seatbelts should be optional. Fundamentally, the reasoning goes like this: (a) you have an obligation to protect friends and family from their own bad decisions, and (b) there's no fundamental difference between a friend and a stranger, hence (c) some things should be enforced by law for the good of everyone.
I'm pretty sure you're talking to someone who has tried pretty much every possible avenue to get people to listen to her, failed, and is now rather bitter about how she is treated over the whole episode. Mz can speak for herself, but I suspect your advice is well-meant, but badly misplaced.
arguably, apple just provided the future default C/C++ compiler (clang) with a BSD license that the BSD folks wanted for years.
However real medicine has gotten a lot better.

It hasn't gotten better enough. Homeopathy is, in a certain sense, propaganda for modern medicine, because instead of people contrasting modern medicine with what it could and should be, they compare it to something that's obviously worse, and then they feel pleased with themselves for being so smart and become complacent about further improving modern medicine.
Any place where interested readers can learn more about your proposed alternatives?

Your arguments here makes it feel like there is a prerequisite of knowing your (comment?) history to understand what you really mean.
> Have you asked a native speaker?

Yes. I have been taught how to count correctly in Japanese in a college class by native Japanese instructors with graduate degrees in the instruction of Japanese to foreign learners.

And as for my experience not being "a sufficient credential", I don't think you realize (and I really do mean this in the nicest way possible) how ridiculously absurd your suggestion that anyone counts "eight, two, four, six, seven, five, one" as "ya, fu, yo, mu, na, i, hito" in Japanese sounds. It can be considered (very) roughly equivalent to suggesting that English speakers would memorize numbers using Latin or Greek prefixes.
Torrentfreak isn't exactly an unbiased source in this case.

While has has been held under restrictions it is not like he has been totally cut off from the world, he has still met some other people, gotten mail, been able to buy snacks etc.

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10pivx/pirate_ba... Offers a pretty good overview of how the Swedish judicial system works.

The key reasons why he has been held in restrictive custody are as follows (From the link above):

There is a risk the suspect destroys evidence or in other ways affect the investigation.

There is risk that the person might flee or avoid a future trial.
I don't support tax-funded homeopathy by any stretch (and think it is almost certainly bollocks in and of itself); however, the story about the bed sheets is not homeopathy.

Perhaps you could still claim homeopathy did the killing because the wife in the story 'misapplied' the "like cure like" conjecture; as wet bedsheets are not a diluted-herb-magic-water-solution.

I have spent more than zero energy talking with people about spending energy being anti-homeopathy. I think homeopathy is fine, and not harmful.

Every single person I know personally that believes in homeopathy also uses traditional western medicine (with far more vigour and enthusiam than myself); though I suppose if people are rejecting antibiotics and instead sprinkling magic water on themselves then it's a problem, but I would still have a hard time seeing Homeopathy itself as harmful. It's just a game.

My personal relationship to true homeopathy (diluted magic water substances) is something like this:

- Seems really unlikely to me anything is happening.

- I could sooo easily be wrong about this, I recognize revolutions in our understanding of the universe happen frequently, and the future winners are always dismissed/laughed at while the old guard remain in power positions

- The people who believe in homeopathy are also generally much, much more emotive / socially intelligent / free with love / full of what appears to be healthy energy.

This leaves me extremely skeptical; but in the end open minded enough that I don't see any benefit to spending energy demonizing the ultimately non-harmful act of diluting flowers in water and thinking its magic.

Anything anti-science is ultimately harmful if it is taught as science; and no one should have to subsidize other's childish fancies; but so long as we aren't teaching homeopathy in medical schools, or using tax money to subsidize its use; I really don't see anything wrong with its existing.

And I do see this article to essentially be propaganda; whose only primary purpose is to demonize homeopathy, and I think this betrays some sort of chip on the shoulder of the author. Maybe I am projecting because I have seen this chip so often elsewhere; I just don't understand it.

I mean, who the f really cares--and, if you really aren't humble enough to recognize that your understanding of the world is not so perfect as to absolutely eliminate the possibility of some unrecognized mechanism of 'imprinting information onto matter' through this likely quackery--then you should take a quick read of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Let me rephrase. I'd like to see it as a first class citizen along with Linux and windows.
What do you expect? They aren't ready.

I'm following the development of Rust with much interest. The design seems well-thought out, and occasional comments here by 'pcwalton, usually along the lines of “here's how we're trying to solve this problem in Rust”, are always worth a read. I wouldn't start a project in it, however, for at least another year unless my main goal was to experiment with the language.

When I did play with it a little, I indeed ran into problems with out-of-date documentation, but someone in #rust IRC (I think it was 'brson) very helpfully answered my questions and pointed me to some newer docs.

Perhaps your expectations are unrealistic. If you want a language you can use today for a real project, try Clojure or Go. I don't think you can fault the Rust project for being where they are now and communicating honestly.
> find somebody knowledgeable in the field or industry,

This, or actually get yourself into the field, work for some time.

In a lecture(startupschool), Jessica Livingston(Partner, YC) talked about a guy who made app that allows users to order food from their phone. She said that he was an example of 'a good founder' because he actually joined a restaurant as a waiter just to learn how things worked.

Take away? (Get your self involved in, know widely about, find spots which you should do better) in the field you want to start your company in[Joel Spolsky also said something of this sort in his lecture!]
It would be nice if this kind of lofty smear on a man who has just died, could be avoided on HN. You imply that we know, understand and agree that Moore was indeed xenophobic and sexist - as if a) this is inarguable presumably from the links you offer b) we all agree on what these terms actually mean in relation to Moore's views.

What you are really doing is giving us your opinion. Why should we care about that unless you're going to make a specific arguable point and HN is hardly (my impression anyway) the venue for that. He was English so try a comment in the Daily Mail.
I think about it analytically all the time. And I know it to be repeatable. Twelve years of steady improvement would be one helluva "coincidence".

I spent many years trying to learn to argue "correctly" in my martiage -- unemotionally, citing my sources, etc. I can do that. But it matters not how well I do it, I am still dismissed. You are dismissing me without knowing my story, and conveniently blaming me. I imagine you will never see my point, no matter how I present it.

I am working on trying to find the right presentation. But your approach is largely antithetical to mine and mine got me well. Finding a meeting ground is challenging, and most people make no attempt to meet me halfway.

Thank you for replying though.
> I suspect your advice is well-meant, but badly misplaced.

The advice to post a scientific description instead of an emotional one is never misplaced.
Five Ways to Reduce Identity Tracking Online
I did read the whole thing before writing my original reply. I see why you need to do it for PyCon, but I can't see why you need to demand it for the things you sponsor in PSF.
Google death results
Don't let the screen size stop you. I have an older version of the AlphaSmart and using it with Markdown is full of win.
And of course this thread fills up with more of the same negativism trying to justify itself.

PG nailed it with the term "middlebrow dismissal". Which is a politer term than what I think when I come across it.

I never think to myself "Wow, what a realistic, practical, well-informed comment that generic negative feedback was. My respect for that commenter has certainly increased!" Particularly when it's the 500th example of the same thing in the same thread. Why do people do that? You can't possibly imagine you're adding any value in that case.

It's a growing problem here, and for me at least it's completely contrary to why I visit this site.

In the end, I don't care if the dude is capable of starting his own cable company or not. For one thing, I'm smart enough to know it's not my place to judge that. It's completely irrelevant what I think about that. I can wallow in my own mediocrity without feeling compelled to assign it to someone else.

But the value of the post to me, and to the site in general, is to consider the question. How would you go about starting a cable company? The question of whether any particular individual is capable doing such is COMPLETELY lacking in interest for me. I don't care about that answer, and I especially don't care about some random internet commenter's opinon on that topic. But the question itself is of interest to me, and I hope to others on this site.

If it's not, then maybe there's less value in this community than I'd hoped.

Sorry, a little riled up here. The continuing attempt at justifying the attitude is a bad, bad sign.
I don't have time to look up any decent sources right now, and it's very possible that there are far more studies that disagree with this, but I'm sure there has been at least some research showing that placebos can affect more than just the most obvious things that the mind controls, e.g. pain. Obviously any placebo relies on tricking the mind, but the mind can have a subconscious effect on how your body does anything, including fighting cancer.
PSF isn't enforcing laws.

It's just setting a basic standard of behavior - be nice, don't be a jerk, don't harass people based on their personal characteristics.

And on the flip side, it's saying to people who otherwise might be reluctant to participate, thinking they would face prejudice, "hey, we got your back, prejudice against you is not allowed here".

Seems pretty innocuous.
I've been using Openresty (with Lua and Redis support) to collect a large amount of data from GET requests for a video sharing site. Having nginx push data directly into Redis is super fast, lends easily to real-time metrics, and makes it easy to batch everything up and push it into MySQL at the end of the day. Now that Redis supports internal Lua scripts, you can also do custom atomic functions and other neat things.

If you can get around the Redis SPOF, OpenResty + Redis is great for large-volume data collection. Thousands of requests/sec on an EC2 Small at < 10% load.