skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does Hoppy Press just make posters? It would be cool if they also expanded into making labels / promotional materials for small brewers as well. I dabble in homebrewing and it is non-trivial for me to get quality labels for my batches.
Homo Bayesianis
He had some on a mailing list for his Company IIRC. He solved this for some teacher on the list and 60+ showed demand for it. It's in his podcasts or on his sites.

Ask them for problems/pain points and let them talk and you figure out how software can help.
It is not a matter of statistics. You can smugly measure water for 10 years and learn nothing about ice. No amount of data on Swiss shootings has any bearing on whether Joe Gun-Controlled will back a gasoline tanker up to a high school basketball stadium.

To predict unknown unknowns, you have to do RAND Corporation-style operations research and hypothetical projections. This has been done, and it turns out that mass killing is easy. Really easy. As in, the 9-11 attackers were a bunch of pikers.

That's why after 9-11 security for prominent targets shifted to a strange combination of bollards and guard patrols. Metal detectors and gun screening do not affect safety much. Intercepting truck size weapons does.

I'm flabbergasted that my comment was voted down and justified by "what matters is the past, not your ridiculous hypotheticals". It reads like the Microsoft buffer overflow manual circa 1998.
I don't have much experience at this level (CEO), but I've always had the impression that this is partly why CEOs join the boards of other companies/organizations (including non-profits), to find camaraderie with peers, give back some of their perspective/experience, etc.
Yes its easy to build what you are thinking if you are a developer. Founders should also be able to sell.
I'm not sure about the just fine. If you were not in a complete free fall you'd be smooshed (I'm guessing W = m · g is nasty at black hole gravities). I guess my question is how fast you'd be traveling by the time you got near/in the even horizon. Anywhere close to 'c' and things would look a lot different.
Linode is one of the cheapest providers of VPSes that are mainstream. I think you will have a hard time finding something comparable. I track web hostign companies for my startup ( http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting ) and the only company that jumps to mind is RamNode. But I haven't collected enough data on them to say anything meaningful. They seem to be offering high ram + ssd drives which would match what you're after.
I'm very surprised to hear this perspective. It's common respect: showing others respect for what makes them tick just as you'd like they to do to you.

Let me ask you this: if you were talking to a stranger and mentioned a passion of your's (I don't know, maybe astronomy, say?) would you feel better if that person looked interested and said "cool!" or if they shook their head and said "ehh that sounds like a waste of time"? It's actually easier to just try and empathise with others' perspectives most of the time, and has benefits. Not to mention it makes a more harmonious society.

I guess I'm weird for respecting others' interests that I don't see intrinsically as something I'd spend my own time on.
It offers a reduction in the time to get started; vagrant provides the wrapper script around vboxmanage that you would otherwise write & debug.

By effectively standardising that tool which many people would otherwise continually reinvent, the group as a whole benefits from sharing and moving things forward, e.g. The many pre-packaged system images, puppet config examples and the like.

If you're not using it, I don't think you'd be missing anything worth losing sleep over.

I looked into it a while back - I saw it as a potential way to save my time documenting our setup for others, but in the end I opted to make my own as we have other tools to be integrated with, and by doing it myself I didn't cost myself any extra time really. I would have had to adapt either vagrant or our machine provisioning setup which would have taken more time than writing a very thin wrapper over vboxmanage.
I feel like this has been said a billion times. (Isn't this what Steve Blank's customer development methodology is all about?) I do realize, though, that now matter how many times we say it, people fall into the trap of thinking their idea is enough.

In very rare cases where there is no market yet, ideas do matter (e.g., the automobile).
One of the areas where I disembark from the traditional Unix way is to replace "--dry-run" like flags with "--enable-destruction". That way I have to intentionally do the bad thing.
I interviewed with a Twitter search engineer and he told me that that's because their in-memory search index is not big enough hold all tweets ever posted. On top of that, their efforts to scale up the index are counteracted by the ever-increasing volume of tweets posted per day.
Since the predictive algorithms in use mostly come down to glorified dot products, I question their general validity.

Sure, it works sometimes, but just look at some of the wacky stuff Amazon, Google, and Netflix derive from such things. Now replace search results and product recommendations with waterboarding and extraordinary rendition based on the results of those dot products and hilarity ensues...
...do nothing. It seems to be working.
Writing closed-source Linux kernel modules is legally "difficult". It is generally believed that modules which make use of highly Linux-specific internal infrastructure can be considered derived works of the kernel and thus required to be released under GPL. It's not always perfectly clear what is allowed and what is not and hardware vendors are reluctant to find it out in court. Some kernel APIs are explicitly marked as not callable from proprietary modules and the module loader enforces this. As a famous example, NVIDIA claims that inability to use one of these APIs prevents them from supporting Optimus in their video driver.

Hardware vendors who don't want to open their drivers need to work around these issues. They can either divide the driver into open-source Linux-specific part and closed-source "hardware support library" which avoids calling suspicious kernel APIs, or simply move the whole driver to a userspace shared library and give userspace processes access to the hardware.
> Apparently there's something about guns that makes them an attractive weapon for these people.

Thousands of exciting movies and TV shows about guns as a tool for "justice".
I like it.

Clicking on "Create New List", when I am not logged in, should ideally show the overlay without taking me to a different page. At least thats what I think.
That's a terrible UI. I wanted to add some data, but couldn't work out how to, and gave up in frustration.
I'm not saying that beating your children will necessarily ruin their lives, or that children who are beaten can't grow up to be functional adults. But two things are true, to the best of my knowledge:

- Beating does a worse job of correcting behavioral problems than more humane methods

- Beating contributes negatively to how your children feel, in general

Again, this doesn't mean that beating makes you sick, or that it never corrects a specific behavior. Only that it's not a good idea, and, however mildly on a case-by-case basis, it probably means you're mistreating your kids.

I wouldn't suggest it to anyone regardless of whether or not you consider violently threatening to kill yourself and your parents, to the point that they are afraid for their lives, to be evidence of mental health issues.
Any discussion of Myers-Briggs always makes me remember this quote attributed to Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord.

"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord
You've just said that human brains "are not wired to understand exponential growth" but then made a prediction based on understanding exponential growth. Plus, you haven't established the doubling factor for the growth - it might be exponential but needing 20 years to get twice as good.

"Perfect instant translation" requires full AI. Consider the Borges story "Hombre de la esquina rosada". That translates directly to "The Man of the Pink Corner." But the "corner" here means also the corner store, so it's not just the physical corner but also the "hangout for the low-life of the barrio." (I'm quoting from the translator's notes here.) Moreover, the "pink" refers to the pastel hues popular in earlier decades, so the pink implies an older neighborhood "populated by toughs and knife fighters."

If you knew Buenos Aires of 100 years ago then you would infer that directly from the title. But without the context you just know it as "the pink corner."

I've thought that "The Hood of the Pink Corner" would be a better translation, given the double or triple meaning of "hood" to mean "hoodlum", "neighborhood", and more specifically "poor neighborhood." It's not as direct, but it might be better.

How do you explain those nuances to a computer?

Douglas Hofstader gives more examples of the difficulties in natural language to natural language translation. How does one translate a nonsense poem like "Jabberwocky"? One French translation starts "Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux. Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave..."

Or, and I quote from his Gödel, Escher, Bach: Take a look at the first sentence of Dostoevsky's novel 'Crime and Punishment' in Russian and then in a few different English translations... The first sentence employs the street name "S. Pereulok" (as transliterated). What is the meaning of this? A careful reader of Dostoevsky's work who knows Leningrad ... can discover by doing some careful checking of the rest of the geography in the book ... that the street must be 'Stoliaryny Peteulok". .. should we keep the initial so as to reproduce the aura of semi-mystery which appears already in this first sentence of the book? We could get to "S. Lane", ("lane" being the standard translation of "pereulok"). None of the translators took this tack. However, one chose to write "S. Place". [The second] gave the translation as "Stoliarny Place". What about number 3? That's the most interesting of all. The translation says "Carpenter's Lane." And why not, indeed? After all, "stoliar" means "carpenter" and "ny" is an adjectival ending.

He then goes on to argue that perhaps we should just read Dickens instead, since Dickens is, at some level, a "translation" of the Dosteovsky novel.

BTW, Google Translate gives "S. Lane", which none of the three translators used. As that's the obvious and most direct translation, which the humans didn't choose, I assume that we can say it's not the perfect translation.

How would an automatic translation system, without AI, look at "С. Переулок", figure out that it's supposed to be "Столярный Переулок", and translate it correctly?
If by "sources that actually work" you mean nuclear, I'm all for it. All civilization would run on nuclear if government weren't in the way.

If you mean fossil fuels, then your lifestyle is subsidized in part by the destruction of my environment. I consider that an unjust initiation of force. Remove that involuntary infringement on my property rights, by paying to clean up the trash you're dumping in the atmosphere, and then we'll see what solutions really succeed best in the marketplace.
(3266 unread) - mapdyvann - Yahoo Mail
Don't wrestle with a pig in mud because the outcome is the same whether you win or lose, you'll get all muddy, waste your time, and the pig will enjoy every minute of it.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wrestle_with_a_pig
"We constantly collect news, blogs, and public social media.
We identify the events: past, present, and future.
We help you find predictive signals in the noise of the web."

sounds like...anyone doing information extraction or sentiment analysis from the web? If investment is the only thing to raise a red flag, you have to worry about a lot more companies than that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel#Investments
$ git clean
fatal: clean.requireForce defaults to true and neither -n nor -f given; refusing to clean
Yes, just posters. We've been asked about expanding in to labels before but we're happy sticking to screen prints for now (currently it's successful enough to make it worthwhile and it's a fun side business, but no plans to take it further).

You aren't alone though, the need for label/promo materials has been mentioned a few times over in the homebrewing subreddit.
Ask HN: Do QR Codes work?
I see QR codes around all the time, but I've never actually seen anyone use them. I generally see myself as being excited to try out new apps or services that connect technology to the real world, but I've never felt compelled to use a QR code. Never even spent the time to download a QR app (that's how they work, right?).

Have any of you had success/failure in using QR codes with your service?
I had thought in the past that storing the index of a database (not the data, just index) on the card and using that to handle complex queries, might be interesting. Not sure if that has a practical, real-world use though.
I don't think it matters whether WBC 'wins' or loses, as long as the families are protected.
Monads are important, but I don't think it's fair to call them the "crux" of Haskell programming

That may be overstating things a little, I agree. On the other hand, a programming language that can't model ordering of events along some sort of timeline isn't useful for many practical applications, and monads have so far proven to be the most effective way of introducing those concepts into Haskell's naturally timeless environment. They're also absurdly overcomplicated for modelling simple but not trivial cases, relative to just writing the code in the order you want things to happen in an imperative language. So if the goal is to get more people to use Haskell to write useful software, I would expect a lot of emphasis on monads and related concepts.
You have a really valid point, and I appreciate the feedback. (If we're way off the mark for how many people would use this, that's obviously a good thing to know.) PGP encryption can indeed work with any mail service but it's way too cumbersome for the average person, and "deleting any non-encrypted incoming email" wouldn't really be sufficient--to my knowledge there's no public data on the amount of time between Google flagging an item as being deleted and the time where it actually disappears from all disks but due to backups, etc, I would expect it to be a really long time.

Either way, for external (non-gmail) messages unless both parties are using PGP the whole exchange can easily be intercepted at any point along the way (users are connected to gmail over SSL but external email servers typically aren't). Many people send sensitive information over email without any hesitation (eg. it's probably the most commonly used method for exchanging passwords) and the amount of ways your benign emails could be used against you (in court or otherwise) is probably scarier than you think. You don't need to be plotting a violent overthrow of the government for your words to be used against you.

EDIT: FWIW, it's really hard to talk about this stuff without sounding like the guy on the street corner with a placard. I don't think a rogue employee at Google is going to destroy your life, nor do I expect the thought police to someday arrest you based on your email history. I do believe that we have a legitimate right to privacy in our communications which just isn't being met today, and I think that if more people were aware of the current reality they would agree. Protecting our data is ultimately our own responsibility, and I think there are better options for "normal" people than what's currently out there.
http://cryptome.org

http://publicintelligence.net

http://landonf.bikemonkey.org
The problem is primarily that the MBTI is misapplied and misunderstood.

It is misunderstood by most people as a set of absolutes without any nuances, whereas it's generally intended to simply classify dominant modes of thinking. i.e., most people will have some problems that they approach one way and other problems that they approach another way, but they will also have a tendency to approach most problems in one of a few ways.

Think of it as handedness: most people have a dominant hand, but that doesn't mean that they use only their dominant hand for everything, and that doesn't mean that people can't change their handedness.

Because of the way that it's misunderstood, it's also misapplied by a couple of groups of people: those gullible people that are seeking either self-understanding or validation without putting any real effort in, and those people that make a living by going around selling snake-oil psychology.

So, while certain professional fields do exhibit certain MBTI trends, it should not be used as a way to determine what profession someone would be best at, or what relationships they should have, or any of that other nonsense. Likewise, all of that "ABCDs behave like this or that or the other thing" stuff is all bullshit too.

That said, MBTI can be a useful tool. I use it to listen for certain cues in conversations, and then I slightly change my behavior in the conversation to communicate better with the other person. For instance, I listen to whether the person tends to say, "I feel like ..." versus "I think..."; one tells me to communicate with them emotionally, the other rationally. Another cue is in paying attention to whether a person tends to communicate action or observation. In a management context, you can generally rely on an "action" person to let you know if they think something needs to be done (or they'll just do it, if you've granted them the freedom); conversely, an observant person might be even more useful in a group, but you're going to have to take some initiative to find out what they see.

I could have learned to do these things without ever learning about the MBTI, but the MBTI made it easier for me to figure out what I should watch out for.

That said, I have exactly zero identity as a particular MBTI type, and it has otherwise zero guidance on my life or relationships, as it should.
One of my favorite stories about this was from the guys at 500px.com.

When they first launched, their only server was a Mac Mini in a second-tier colo that was run by a friend of theirs. After about six months, they did their first major server upgrade - buying an external USB hard drive for more storage. They bought another two (and a USB hub) a month or so later. This lasted them another four months, until the got to the point where the USB bus was being constantly saturated. Only then did they move to some more enterprisey hardware.

Moral of their story was to use only as much hardware as you need now (while having plans on how to scale up in the short- and medium-term which don't cost you money now), and to worry more about getting users and building a product. Worry about scaling after you've got customers (and data that will show you actual use patterns), as opposed to paying for a complex scaling infrastructure before you've got any users.
> It is a founding principal of america for individuals to maintain and own weapons.

Are you referring to the second amendment? Because as far as I can tell, that is about state militia as opposed to a standing federal army - and after the Canadians burned down the white house that whole concept got scrapped in favour of a federal army.

Much as I sympathize with the idea of a People on the same footing as the government - you would have to be hopelessly naive to think that the right to own a semiautomatic hand gun will significantly help your fight against the current US Army -.should that be needed.
We can prevent overfitting by adding a regularization term to the expression we are minimizing, such as the sum of the squares of all coefficients scaled by a factor.

Also, if you do testing (using a separate test dataset to determine how well your model works on unseen inputs) you can determine if you are overfitting (learning even the noise present in the data - which is detrimental) or underfitting (not learning enough from the data - which is detrimental, too). In the end it's a sweet spot, and many times the features number in the hundreds or thousands, so you can't analyze by hand.

Automatic feature selection and disentangling is an amazing new advancement that came 7 years ago with the deep learning papers. Watch lectures on Restricted Boltzmann Machines by Geoffrey Hinton and Andrew Ng for this. It's what allowed Google to achieve the best speech recognition and image recognition results ever recorded.
They don't draw similar criticisms at all...

I actually have heard similar criticisms to the ones that Dijkstra made of every one of the modern equivalents. For similar reasons. And I believe that my comparison touches on why each of those criticisms is paralleled.

I freely admit, though, that the weakest parallel is to Java. Programmers who are not enamored of deep object hierarchies despise those designs when Java programmers try to implement them in any language. But love of deep object hierarchies is not unique to Java (though it does tend to be extreme there). Nor is Java as crippled as COBOL.

As for COBOL and other use cases - I would be willing to bet large sums that it would have had many other use cases had the people programming in it had access to computers that could run it for a reasonable price.

And finally, I did not post that comparison to slag on languages. I posted it to provide context for Dijkstra's quote. In fact I, personally, have spent a lot of my professional life programming in Perl - which is one of the languages that I offered up for criticism. And I freely admit that the criticism is not entirely unfounded.
a very smart physicist turned quant's take on many topics - always excited to see a new entry

http://scottlocklin.wordpress.com
I sent you an invite.
Somehow unrelated, but here is a nice poetic definition of a INTP in a roadtrip (compiler vs amputee)

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/11/05/at-home-in-a-car/

I guess it pays to know you can live like that.
For anyone else who is having the same issue, I found a brilliant article on verifying email addresses without sending an email.

http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/how-to-check-if-an-email-...
Respectfully, I don't think your analogy holds. I think the situation here is more akin to keeping a muddy pig out of a concert hall.
Manipulating C++ Containers Functionally
Black ops 2 Kill Confirmed Shoutcast
MLG
And those dot products come down to glorified FMUL and FADD machine instructions! Specious reductionism goes all the way down.
Google Chromebook and Ubuntu
I love the idea behind this. The issue is that the questions are not MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECE_principle). Perhaps counterintuitive, but fewer questions would actually lead to a richer dataset were they MECE.
I'd like one, too, to the address in my profile.
Think about the friction:

- See ad, say for a movie, in the subway

- Take my phone out of the pocket

- Unlock it

- Find the app...

- Launch it

- Loading...

- Snap the QR code, which redirects me to the movie website

Versus:

- See the ad

- Google it later (if interested) when I'm in front of the computer
Unfortunately, due to people and the media responding to Westboro's antics, they have made themselves into a household name. They have accomplished what they set out to do. It takes millions of dollars to get this much publicity.