skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, Tufte is a powerhouse: http://www.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/fileadmin/Redaktion/I...
Never mind - I've deleted my comment. You delete the parent to this one, I'll delete this one, then no one will know!
Show HN: Analytics for Your 2012 in Emails
Yes I have and been trying to contact Coursera. I had that in my original post but the 2000 character limit made me chop it down. They are building what I wanted and couldn't get to the right people.
Seconded. Neon green on black is very, very jarring to read. White on black causes strain for large amounts of text. (There's a reason no news sites use white on black.) Lowering the contrast is bad enough, but the green clashes with the black and is downright painful.
>Clearly the tyrants of today disagree with you. They would not be trying so desperately to ban guns if they did not fear an armed population!

I can't tell if you're serious. The world isn't out to get you. We've had sensible restrictions on guns in Canada for some time now without a resulting genocide.

Is it so hard for you to believe that one might want guns banned for reasons other than the oppression of fellow citizens? As a citizen I have nothing to gain by banning guns. If I became a politician and offered the same position, I'd be called a scheming tyrant by individuals like yourself.

Bizarre. Your comments remind me of: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2012/08/08/calga...
Perhaps the attitudes of Canadians and Americans differ more on this issue than I initially thought.
So, in other 2005 news, The Register still hates Wikipedia. Honestly, I just don't get it. Sure, the culture can be off-putting. Sure, the donation drives can get annoying. But it's still a massive, eminently useful site run on a shoestring budget. The constant intimation that editors should be paid, a rather ridiculous assertion given the realities of open source communities, gives this piece the air of someone's personal gripe. It really does seem like someone set out to write a hit piece, then decided after what details to cherry pick in order to make it as hitty as possible.

One of these days, I'd be interested in finding out just what it is that makes The Register hate Wikipedia so much. The kind of vitriol you see from them is usually only matched by the Wikipedia Review, which leads me to believe that there's a jilted ex-editor somewhere on their staff whose mission is to expose the nasty, evil, free and open source encyclopedia to the world.
Having just read this book, I believe that this commentary is wrong on nearly all points. Specifically:

- The ratings agencies...did not accidentally have bad underlying models.

He first talks about how the models were defective, and then goes on at length to describe the perverse incentives for developing and keeping these models, and holds the responsible parties to the fire for willful ignorance and unabated greed. He could have made some of these points more strongly, but I don't think that he skirted over the real issues.

- the only goal of a modeler is to produce an accurate model.

Actually he speaks quite a bit about the reasons that various forecasters generate models in the first place, and their motivations and responsibilities. For example, the Weather Channel's skewed "wet" forecasts. They will, for example, predict a 20% chance of rain if their models show only a 5% chance. On the one hand it is a bit dishonest, but on the other hand there is a net utility in doing so. Part of the problem is that the general public doesn't understand what the percentages really signify, so it may be of some benefit to emphasize that it really could rain, it's just not very likely, so it behooves people to at least have some backup plan for rain. The other side of this is that people will not remember the good forecasts as much as the bad, and the Weather Channel has business considerations in mind.

- He spends very little time on the question of how people act inside larger systems, where a given modeler might be more interested in keeping their job or getting a big bonus than in making their model as accurate as possible.

How much of the book do you suggest he devote to this? He addressed the issue directly, as the next couple paragraphs state. He also talks to quite a few institutional players at large organizations, both public and private.

- Having said all that, I have major problems with this book and what it claims to explain. In fact, I’m angry.

Really, stop with the faux outrage, because you don't seem all that angry throughout the post, you more seem to be disappointed he did not devote the book to your own pet topics. I find this kind of criticism to be mostly without merit. For me, there were three overriding themes in "The Signal and the Noise": Bayesian thinking (this being the primary one), the goals and motivations of forecasters, and examples of what forecasters have done right and what they have done wrong. I think it covered the bases pretty well, and it was an entertaining and lively read on the whole.
Hey dude. I work at Dwolla. Thanks for rooting for us.

I get what you're saying. I'd like to better understand what you meant by decreasing trust. I think social commerce is where things are headed and it's important that Dwolla is a part of it, but we need to find the best way to do/balance it. Can you email me at shane@dwolla.com and share your thoughts about things we've done that impacted trust? I'd be grateful. Trust is more important to us than...really anything.

Perhaps there's a way we can enable the social stuff that many Dwolla users ask us for in a way that doesn't bother the folks that don't want it. I thought we were doing a decent job of that now since everything is opt-in, but you might have ideas on how we can do it better. I'd love to hear them. Here's a crazy idea: literally one link in your settings that says "Turn on social junk" - if not toggled on, you don't see any of it.

I'd love to brainstorm stuff like that with folks that care enough to post comments like yours. Hope you email me.
The author is a woman, just FYI.
Here's one opinion on that: http://www.mnot.net/blog/2012/10/29/NO_OPTIONS
Ah good. Nothing like condemning something you haven't read including the credentials of the author.
It wouldn't be the first time I read something like this, even in HN. You got me good.
Like the person above suggested, there are already sites like Coursera that are well advanced into offering free courses from top universities. A lot of this is now free. When I started the idea the start up budget was 3.5 million because of all the licensing needed for content. Much of it is freely available now.
Will do thank you!
There are some way to access this data with any programming language? like phyton or ruby ? Very interesting..
Good thing those records are durable: http://youtu.be/h4GYg-5AdRw
If you think the journalist spent less time researching this article than it takes you to read it, remember the 'flag' button.

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4948234
My problem is that for wikipedians, "independent reliable sources" means internet articles. If it's a printed book, it doesn't exist.
Rushed maths leads to 'superficial' learning, report says
She wrote this piece because she thinks he's only citing the proximate cause and not the ultimate cause. At least that's how it reads to me.

She doesn't appear to be disputing the idea that following bad models caused the crisis — instead, she just seems to be saying Silver missed the fact that the models were deliberately bad rather than simply a poor application of math.

A few quotes from the author herself:

"the entire industry crucially depended on the false models."

"Silver gives four examples what he considers to be failed models at the end of his first chapter, all related to economics and finance. But each example is actually a success (for the insiders) if you look at a slightly larger picture and understand the incentives inside the system."

She's not disputing that the models were false or even that acting in accordance with the models is what caused the crisis. She's disputing that this was accidental.
At first glance I'd think this was illegitimate. I mean, you expect people to deploy this before tomorrow, and the script tag isn't ready yet? Sure, I'll let you harvest my email address. If it weren't for the fact that this was created by the people behind causes.com, my alarms would be ringing.

Project creators should probably take some direction from sopablackout.org, or even modify the sopablackout snippet (it's not hard to do) to suit their needs. Since the users will be linking to an external resource, they can install it as soon as possible (and should, if they expect to have as many users as possible) and updates can be pushed out behind the scenes.

(disclosure, I'm responsible for the js snippet on sopablackout - yes, if anybody wants to ping me with questions about how it works I'm available)
IMHO the big breaks (40+%) happen at major transition points: Promotion, post-grad-degree & new job. Everything should be aimed at those big 3 for long term compensation increases.

It's very hard to generalize on specifics. If you're freelancing, contracting or consulting, it's largely a function of how much your billing rate increases. If you're in software it's more a function of how the firm is doing, and how much credit you get for it. (If it's a weak link to how you get the credit, it's hard to point to)

One other note - there tend to be caps at levels within firms, so you can catch up if you're underpaid, but it's hard to break above without one of the big discontinuous jumps I mentioned above.

ok - one last note... You get paid best if you succeed in "line" jobs where you are contributing directly to money coming in, rather than "staff" jobs. This means that good Sales people always do well, and they'll get better comped than someone purchasing advertising from outside vendors. Likewise, a developer on a core product with get paid better than someone with the same degree and experience working in internal IT.

Salary reporting sites frequently get their data from H1-B applications, so the #s are reliable, but you have to be careful about timing. Someone working in banking technology in 2007 will get paid much more than the same job today.
It's called "the rule of law". It's a concept that came as a reaction against a ruler make decisions based on his own opinion of what is right and wrong.

Yes, there is a place for a discussion of ethics outside of the current legal framework, and if the Constitution is found to be lacking in that area, then it should be amended. Until that happens, our government is legally bound to abide by the Constitution as it is written, and to judge whether or not that is happening, the document must be interpreted. One important aspect to interpretation of a document is to understand the circumstances under which it was written. To do that with a 200+ year old document requires a little knowledge of history.

The framers of the Constitution did not achieve perfection, but at least the idea of the "rule of law" does give us a relatively consistent and stable society in which to live. The disadvantage is that written law is static and cannot quickly adjust to changing circumstances. Ideally, we would have an enlightened leader who knew the right thing to do in every circumstance, and would govern with perfect justice. If we could be assured of that kind of government, we wouldn't need to worry about interpreting documents.
Optimal Python and Virtualenv Setup for Mountain Lion
> When an Application Service receives control, it loads an Aggregate and retrieves any supporting Domain Services needed by the Aggregate’s business operation. When the Application Service delegates to the Aggregate business operation, the Aggregate’s method produces Events as the outcome.

I'm genuinely curious: does anyone here understand anything about that? What do those words even mean? I mean, even if you assume that the capitalized words are what's being explained, what's a "business operation"?

It's writing like this that give C# and .NET their (mostly undeserved) image of overarchitected concept jungles.
For tools. You just need XCode. And I would recommend the WWDC 2012 videos. https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2012/ Most of it may go straight over your head but there are some more introductory sessions in there. And I believe most devs are using the Apple Developer Forums.
The author of the book is a man; the author of the commentary is a woman. Hmm...did I mix up a pronoun somewhere?
Duly noted. Thanks for the feedback.

edit: Deleted the ad at the end, replaced with a link to the front page.
Ugh, it ended just when I was getting really excited. I wish you'd incorporated more rules (or at least rules of thumb) on when to use and trust group level data.
Yes, I wondered about whether to reply to the GP at all. I posted for two reasons: first, I've never articulated precisely how I felt about Bush before, and second, I realized that it has a real explanatory connection to the patent problem. Ever since Bush started openly flaunting basic standards of decency it seems that many, many others have followed suit, and to devastating cultural effect. Myhrvold is just one particularly potent, obvious example.

Does stating that do any good, or help anyone other than me? Our sick culture of power makes modern venality feel like a scary, dark, unknowable trend that came out of nowhere and has no source and no solution. Connecting Bush makes it feel more like a normal (if unwanted) social trend that has ordinary, identifiable roots and solutions. I think we consistently underestimate the presidential influence on other leaders--perhaps because in our sophistication such influence feels cliche. But I believe that his effect was real, it is lasting, and it will take a long time and a great deal of effort to heal those wounds. Sharing that hypothesis is fundamentally hopeful - if we know what happened, we can fix it.

And I like fixing things.
He's a British Drudge for the technology world. He's an inaccurate, rumour-mongering, slanderous/libelous troll. He's not someone with a pet issue offering useful critique, he's a vicious little ankle-biter who wants everyone else to hate what he hates because it drives traffic to his site.
Then obviously I'm missing something, because this, to me, just looks like blogspam. From the link you've provided I can't find any more images without going and starting to click about randomly.

Unless that one image at the bottom of the small amount of text is actually a different, stitched together image of the same place. In which case this could really do with some explanation.

So maybe I'm wrong, but I honestly can't see anything new about this, given the existence of the other post. If I am wrong, feel free to provide some text to highlight why this page is better than, or even different from, the other.

Thanks.
Posts like this take the unfortunate (and very American) view of food as fuel, an absolute necessity that you have to get out of the way as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Good food, in that view, is anything where the taste isn't painful.

As a foodie, this pains me to see. You cannot cook anything good in a rice maker anymore than you can a microwave except, of course, rice. You cannot cook anything good with a bouillon cube (at bare minimum, buy some decent frozen stock from your local soup store) regardless of technique. Good food to me is worth the time it takes to make.

On the other hand, I can understand why people choose to optimize other parts of their life in this way. I constantly remind myself that not everyone wants to spend their Sunday making a quiche and an heirloom bean soup to eat for breakfast and lunch all week. Not everyone wants to roast a chicken every week, save the carcasses, then make a stock once a month. That's fine.

But I think everyone should experience it before settling for a life of rice-cooker meals.
T-Mobile’s decision to stop subsidizing devices suddenly makes a lot more sense
He's looking for uses beyond art galleries. I'm reminded of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" by Oliver Sachs.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...)
Why are We Here | Healthmad
I'm not sure you can get to the financial crisis without faulty models. Risk models, especially on packaged securities, are crucial to setting ratings as a proxy for risk. Those ratings are key to determining pricing, maximum leverage, and which portfolios can buy them.

If the models had been more accurate - for example, if they had more properly reflected the way that the value of a bundle of mortgages will suddenly lose value as housing prices decline - banks would not have been able to pile up such huge risks and high leverage.

You can only justify things like 30X leverage if you believe the securities in question have essentially no risk - because at that leverage, a 3% loss in value means you're wiped out.
Tips for getting the most from Google Maps on iPhone
Yes, this is sort of true, depending on the rifle. Some hunting rifles are as efficient as an AR-15, and some aren't.

The ease of reloading a hunting rifle depends on the type of magazine it takes. Internal box or rotary magazines will be slow to reload, since you've got to feed the bullets into the magazine. (Yeah, a stripper clip speeds this up, but only so much.) But there's plenty of hunting rifles with external box magazines, which can be reloaded as fast as any gun with detachable box magazines.

A semi-automatic's a semi-automatic. There's no real difference in rate of fire once the bullets are loaded. (I suppose a heavier trigger pull might slow you down a little.)

Aftermarket magazine capacity isn't that different if you're using a box magazine, but the bigger the magazine, the more likely it jams, making the big magazine sort of moot.

It's true that there aren't many (any? I've never seen one) high-capacity drum magazines for hunting rifles, but personally I'd rather leave those on the market as a honeypot for idiots. The damn things jam all the bloody time and clearing the jam takes at least as long as reloading a detachable box magazine (and possibly forever, if you're just some random sociopath with no firearms knowledge who just bought whatever looked scary).
> e.g. civil engineers know how to build a bridge and deliver it on time.

Tell that to the Texas Department of Transportation, where any given highway project will typically run over time and budget.
This seems to be some kind of ASP.NET thing. It has nothing to do with the C# language, as far as I can tell.
Show HN: Ember Table by Addepar
While it's true that you need to turn things like a NodeList from js into a clj seq you don't need to write these utilities yourself; clj->js and js->clj can both be found in cljs core:
https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript/blob/master/src/clj...
College Senate passes "Meatless Mondays" Resolution
PechaKucha Night site renewal
From what I know 2 days is on the extreme side but stated in the delivery policy. Should be much quicker albeit some delay due to the volume of orders.
Help HN: Developer laid off 5 days before Christmas, have kids
Hello HN,

I was just informed that a key investor pulled support for a startup I am working fulltime for. Thus, people are being laid off 5 days before Christmas. Bummer.

I am reaching out to the community as I am on the hunt for Developer-related position.

About me: Berkeley Grad, 7 years of development exp, 4 years at startups. Held titles: Developer, Sr. Developer and Lead Developer. Great team-player, active communicator, can step into leadership as needed.

Skills: Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, MySQL, Postgres, SQLServer, API's, JS, HTML5, PHP, Python, Linux system admin (AWS, Linode etc), DBA, Product Development, Team leadership

Experienced in domains: Ecommerce, Saas, Social API's, Analytics, Finance, Health IT

Currently Learning: Objective C, Node.js

Seeking: Remote Fulltime opportunity, willing to travel occasionally. I am great as a technical co-founder in early stage scenarios, helping to define product and rapidly build it. Also great as part of a dev team. Open to possibilities.

Shoot me an email at: prgrmr75@gmail.com if you have any leads or want to talk about opportunities.

Thanks and Happy Holidays!

EDIT: I am located in the Midwest about 2.5 hours from Chicago.

I greatly appreciate the heavy response to this. This is a great community to be a part of.
I'm not sure this makes sense - digitizing entails "not analog". Can you expound on what you mean by preserving "the entire medium"?
"Hypermedia APIs" are just "Real REST." Arguing over terms isn't productive, so many RESTafarians just stopped: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2012-02-23-rest-is-over

HATEOAS sounds big and scary. "include some links" is much more understandable.
What're we in court here? Does pg come in at the end and bring up the highest-voted comments at his next illuminati meeting? The original article lists lots of pretty bad things. The fifth amendment is relevant to the extent that it should be improved to prevent those bad things. I don't think the word of the law is the biggest problem here.
You might be wondering why your submission hasn't sparked any discussion. There was a discussion over here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4945181

The discussion is still there, but the submission is dead. No idea why. The initial comment is excellent:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4945449

The story has also been broken from other sources:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4946026 (groklaw.net)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4945174 (slate.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4949109 (readwrite.com)
I'm 100% sure one cannot get a certificate. It's not clear whether one can submit homework via sbt to the automated test suites on the server. Have you tried that as an experiment?
Well, that is obvious: I certainly knew that while writing this, which is why I provided the comparison between schemaless and with-schema newer database systems and the trajectories they seem to have (such as Cassandra becoming more rigid as time moves on), and looked at the kind of people who are interested in both. Database systems that involve schemas seem to be mostly on a downturn in money spent on them because free alternatives are improving in quality and are becoming easier to support: not because their demand has slowed.

However, it isn't clear to me that companies making schemaless systems are really making any real money at all, and they seem to be marketing themselves towards people who don't even have budgets for database tools, and probably have no people dedicated to database administration. (Does UbiSoft even pay for CouchBase support? It didn't sound like it ;P.) Can you demonstrate in these other cases that Oracle, for example, was first used by people who thought it was "cool" and insisted on it being free, and worked their way up to "people should pay $150k a year on this"?

FWIW, I really am curious about this, and would be perfectly happy being wrong. It just seems like a weird decision, and it isn't clear that it is base on "the needs of people who have budgets for this sort of thing is or will change" (which is what I'd argue was the case for "eventually you will outgrow your filing cabinet and even your spreadsheets and yes, even your mainframe"; the business case for these earlier shifts was clear: "large companies spend $Xm per year on record retention departments, those could be replaced by computers!"), as much as "people who don't spend money on database systems at all find this more exciting".
it's domain driven design, quite some new concepts ey ?
Fifty Shades is pornography for women. IMHO that's the only reason everyone is clutching their pearls about the bad writing. Your typical male pornography storylines/cinematography are much, much worse - and yet they are typically spared the high-brow literary scrutiny.
Does a good stripe-like service exist for Europe today?
Its part of DDD (Domain Driven Design) universe, an attempt to have standard patterns for large enterprisy software.
Luvit 0.6.0 released (asynchronous I/O for Lua)