skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, a good first step would be to analyse possible causes of Z and show they are not matching it. Quoting Feynman:

For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it; other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked — to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

I did not see such explanation done in this case - it looks like everything described talks about what matches the hypothesis, and no effort is done to look for alternative explanations and refute them.

>>>> Thus your hidden Z would have to move in sync not only with X and Y, but also with their widely varying rates in different states.

Use of gasoline is highly correlated with use of cars, which again is highly correlated with income, population density, business activity, etc. Any of which can be also associated with crime. I.e. if both effects are caused, say, by population density (I do not say it is, I just take it as an example), then gasoline use would raise and crime would raise when population density raises (say, because some economic factors attract people, like it happens now in North Dakota due to shale gas boom) and both would fall when some factors cause population to move away - as it happening in Detroit, for example. There might be also other factors.

>>> In fact, use of leaded gasoline varied widely among states, and this gave Reyes the opening she needed. If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that's exactly what she found.

And this is exactly what she would find if both were strongly related to some third cause Z, but completely causally independent from each other. The fact that the MJ author takes it as evidence confirming the causation means they do not understand how causation needs to be proven. It is not evidence for causation, since it equally applies to both when causation exists and when it does not.

Yes, this means causation is hard to prove. It is.
I think I'd still want them to be more akin to Sun's original vision of network appliances. The phone acting more as a session token to an external system and a thin client.

Just noting the size and always present aspect makes security a different problem.
SF/F author Peter David had a stroke. Here's how to help.
> I never understood why you have to take Erlang-the-language to get the distributed systems platform.

That is a very good observation. And I used to have the exact same question. It took a while to realize why Erlang is they way it is, and it makes sense to me now. I don't mean the parsed syntax, see Reia and Elixir, but its main features.

You have to go back to the roots and see why was Erlang created. Its primary focus was fault tolerance and secondary was concurrency. Everything else fell out of those.

For example:

* Actor model : it provides isolation in a large system so only a single actor process crashes on failure and it can be restarted. This means no large pool of pointers, shared data, etc. It means message passing. There is an anecdote that some systems written in Erlang are sold with contract that stipulate that any downtime longer than 4 minutes / year will be billed at $10K/minute. With these kind of goal everything has to change. Segfaults are not something that can crash the system. Too expensive. Stopping the system to upgrade and get a bugfix in -- no can do, too expensive. Also concurrency fits in here. Actors work concurrently and are responsive, their are designed to have responsiveness (low latency) over raw throughput.

* Hot Code Reloading : falls out of needing to have high uptime and fault tolerance. This means system gets updated while it runs.

* Functional Syntax : functional syntax encourages creation of referentially transparent pieces of code. This helps with hot code reloading as there is less state modified in place, rather it is passed throw the function calls.

* Single Assignment : pure torture for those coming from imperative programming. But necessary if values are to be passed between processes or if the code is upgraded on the fly. You gain a large amount of safety know that the variable X you just instantiated won't change behind your back.

* Multi-node (multi process and multi machines) distribution: for real world reliability you can't just rely on one machine, you need to have hot spares for fail-over. What takes complicated messaging and sync protocols, haproxy, message queues, zookeepers and other tools comes bundled in Erlang's standard library.

http://learnyousomeerlang.com/distributed-otp-applications#a...

As a bonus, it has one of the best pattern matching syntax I have seen. Once you start using it and get the hang of it you'll miss Erlang's pattern matching in every other language you use.

There are downsides to Erlang in terms of pure numerical performance. This is the other coin of fault tolerance and latency reduction. You can't have both there are some trade-offs involved.
I have two (Seemingly contradicting) comments regarding your question:

One one hand: I would say the most memorable experience I have from college for me had been.. Skipping class and feeding the squirrels. I am not being sarcastic here; This was in fact how I felt. The reason being: I took too long to decide what I wanted to major in and had accumulated too many units towards my Junior year. As a result, I had to pretty much pick a degree.. any degree.. to graduate. So to me, it felt like a big waste of time at that time.

On the other hand: If I were your age and do it all over again, I would have majored in Computer Science (Looking back in retrospect).

To summarize, I am glad I got my Bachelor's degree. But I wish I would have known more back when I was your age; I would have made a wiser decision in terms of what to major in.
Oh, I have atypical cystic fibrosis -- in short, I have a long, long history of ear infections (and I am still wrestling with how to explain how I recovered, which I am trying to document at healthgazelle.com). Probably not directly relevant to your situation. Though I spent a lot of time on alternative med sites. Off the top of my head, my recollection is that some people with capd benefit from magnesium. My son, who suffers less from capd than he used to, says chocolate helped him.

Edit: iirc, chocolate is high in magnesium, so that might be why chocolate is one of the things which helped him.

Edit2: I have a long, long history of all kinds of cf related issues, but I think the ear infections are the likely connection to my history of miss-hearing things.
I explained the (simple) rationale in the second paragraph. I notice you didn't do the same. That tells me what I need to know.
Before this devolves into another farcical, Lisp arm-chair punditry: at 9 operators it's pretty much a kernel untyped lambda-calculus with pairs. And just that.

The implementation is as trivial as the concept is profound. The discussion should be about the lambda-calculus, not Lisp, which is a far more complex beast. And much less about Lisp dialects, Greenspun's, or the usual BS topics that invariably appear on any L-word thread.
But really the "why" is that it was fun. Also, it was my submission to the PLT Games. http://pltgames.com/competition/2012/12
One of the nice things about Waze is being able to switch the search engine it uses for locating things. I've used that several times when it's default search couldn't quite find what I was looking for.
In many ways, the Dropbox experience matches the user's current habits: it's a folder, on your computer, that you can drag files into.

There were other habits that people had as well: they were using external hard drives to schlep files from work to home. They were emailing themselves files. They were sharing large files on CDs.

What Dropbox did was take the pain out of all those things. Instead of burning a large file to CD, you just drag it to your "Public" folder.

I think the post has two main points:
- you can't always trust what customers say, you have to examine what they actually do.
- just because something seems "better" doesn't mean it's what the customer wants.

Technically, we could say Microsoft's SkyDrive is "better" because it offers more free storage than Dropbox. But there's something about Dropbox that users prefer.
Global growth probably doesn't matter as much if your app isn't hasn't been localized to all of those places. For example, growth of Android in a country where most people don't speak English isn't going to do much for an app written for an English audience.
You could say this is just another grammelot. So not really all that new although Celentano remains a great artist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammelot
If I had a little more time I would have written the uLithp eval in uLithp. The stark simplicity of that never fails to take my breath away.
Excerpt: "Tizen is a Linux-based operating system that arose out of the demise of Nokia's MeeGo platform. Intel and Samsung have taken over the development of Tizen, and the Linux Foundation is overseeing the project."
I like the way you time your releases, boy.
> I'm amazed at how much ground is already designed in OTP.

It is really like finding hidden treasure. And it used to actually be pretty hidden. There was no official book out there. Just had to dig through docs. There is OTP in Action now and I am glad to see others.

For example I had know idea about the existence of the distributed application controller, found out about it from a Learn You Some Erlang book.
"Ability to replace calcium in certain biochemical processes" is not nearly the same as "chemically similar to calcium". It's like saying if I stole your login for facebook I would look like you and nobody would be able to distinguish between us without DNA test. Completely different things. Biochemical processes are known for accepting a lot of substitutes, that's how a lot of drugs work. That does not mean all those are chemically similar in general - they just play similar roles in certain processes.
> Express them like this?

On Hacker News comments? What in the world are you going on about?
My s-expression reader is 34 lines. https://github.com/fogus/ulithp/blob/master/src/reader.rb

A minimal Lisp (the bare minimal) does not require sexprs though.
The distinction is presumably about whether clients have to be modified to accept a particular (organizational) root or whether someone gets access to a root CA that will work with unmodified mainstream browsers.

The "standard" way of doing enterprise network surveillance and censorship is by getting end-users to use client software with a modified configuration that (unlike the general public's browsers) accepts the surveillance and censorship without generating a browser warning. In the Trustwave case, it was done with unmodified software and hence could have been done against the general public, or unsuspecting corporate users.

There have been interesting policy discussions about the fact that HTTPS site operators may not "consent" to this surveillance, even if some end users are considered to have done so. For example, PayPal might not want corporate network operators to have access to employees' PayPal credentials or financial transaction data. Hence PayPal's preferences might be something like

employee doesn't use PayPal at work > employee uses PayPal at work without interception by employer > employee uses PayPal at work with interception by employer

while the employee's preferences might be

employee uses PayPal at work without interception by employer > employee uses PayPal at work with interception by employer > employee doesn't use PayPal at work

and the employer's preferences might be

employee doesn't use PayPal at work > employee uses PayPal at work with interception by employer > employee uses PayPal at work without interception by employer
Re-read that sentence. The government agency is the user in this case, not the CA.

| TURKTRUST [a private company] did not spoof the
| .google.com certificate. They accidentally issued
| an intermediate (chained CA) certificate to a user
| [a government agency], who happened to be a
| government agency, and that user [a government
| agency] accidentally spoofed
| .google.com.
I love their rider:

http://compressorheadband.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/com...

"NOTE: NO MONITOR SYSTEM REQUIRED"
Just a small clarificatation: the 2.x version of LuaJIT only compiles floating point operations to SSE2 (http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2010-03/msg00142.html). I'm not sure, however, whether it does vectorization or just operates on one float at a time.
SlackerScript - Programming Language For Playing With Numbers
I understand that 6 month is not a very big time for this new, but I think that this comment don't deserve so much downvotes (it's light gray now). It's not offensive and not wrong and not completely irrelevant.

I can't see how many points it has. I think that 1 or 0 could be fine, 2 or -1 are a little too much/few for my taste. But its points are now too negative. Please don't abuse the downvote button.
I wish someone had given me advice along these lines, long ago:

(a) Make sure you have a really strong grip on your finances. (You sound like you probably do but I'm mentioning it anyway.) Include worst-case planning like the scenario where you are pulling part-time shifts flipping burgers or whatever -- the more savings you can accumulate early, I'd bet the happier you'll be. This industry most definitely does have its "bust" periods when even many of the "best" can't find work.

(b) As long as you've got work.... nothing says that you have to be a full time student, or complete in four years, or go deeply into debt. Consider working on a BA or BS or higher part-time on a pay-as-you-go basis while still accumulating savings. And, especially if you'll be paying out of pocket -- even though you are only part-time -- be a really f'ing good student and really nail everything along the way. Dig in and enjoy it all. Shine.

(c) avoid the trap where you think you'll get started on that "part time student" thing next year (or the year after, or the year after).

With this path you'll be managing your money conservatively, dedicating a substantial amount of your life to guided learning, gaining a diversity of real-world experience at the same time, minimizing your dependency on some all-or-nothing guess about what future employers you care about will want.
I don't disagree with your premise per-say, but, I do think its pretty easy for me, personally, to dismiss some of these positions wholesale.

1) I agree with

2) Computer technology moves at such a breakneck pace and is generally so hard to reverse engineer that this point doesn't hold water for me. We know that google's search algorithm works, ok, but can we reverse engineer it from the outside? The answer seems to be no, so why protect it with patents? Even if we could, by the time we were done google would already be on to the 'next big improvement', there is no catching up in software short of a drastic stumbling in the incombent, should we really protect the incombant from messing up?

3) The entire concept of going to college for software related endeavors is in such peril straits that I don't think we should even consider the affects or impacts of academia on software development, it's well in past at this point regardless of the patent situation.
You're confusing two issues. Enterprises can MITM traffic without being issued an intermediate CA=YES certificate; they just add their own root certificate to all their desktops.
Personally if the implementation is simple given the task, and the idea is obvious, or combines two existing concepts in an obvious way... it shouldn't be patentable... Anything that is a virtual representation of something real, in terms of software is an obvious idea, and shouldn't be patentable. In fact, for the most part, I can't really think of anything in terms of software, that doesn't have corresponding unique hardware for the past 20 years that is worthy of a patent.
Microsoft Reports iPads Stolen From Microsoft Offices
Silicon Valley is one specific spot in America, so perhaps a specific city or region can get something for Silicon Valley but Canada is a very diverse and large place. So if you're in an urban center like Vancouver you may have very different issues than say a fishing village in Newfoundland. In fact even Toronto is a very different place than Montreal which isn't that far away. Also the secret to making a great company in Canada may not be the same formula as Silicon Valley.
Really? Lithp? Not that I'm offended, but the pun seems unnecessary.
Without going into too much detail, the guys that work there are really good at what they do. They purposely avoid PR, and for good reason, they don't want too much information revealed about just how successful they really are.

If anyone knows anything about Flash sales, they'll know that Zulily is one of the top contenders in the space.
Asking someone who has worked with Michael O. Church in the past about their experiences with him is not comparable to breaking into Michael O. Church's house.
A couple more comments for if you decide that college is for you and you want to save some money:

Fill out the FAFSA form; There is a lot of Grant money available that people do not know about. You may end up getting part or all of your tuition paid for.

Consider attending a community college for the first two years instead of going to a 4 year college.
Were the exact same servers reused?

I once interviewed a Rails developer who was bragging about a Java-to-Ruby conversion he'd worked on. He was proud that they went from 50 servers running the Java system to only 30 for the Ruby one.

Upon further questioning, he admitted that those 50 servers used by the Java system were from 2003, and the ones powering the Ruby-based system were from 2011! They didn't even halve the number of servers required, but the new servers were many, many times more powerful than the old ones.
Winding down a startup, have leftover tech like the day after thanksgiving.
We're in the process of winding down a startup (we're working on another simultaneously). One thing that's bothering us is that we built a really, really awesome mobile user experience. Better than everything that we see out there, and we're in a space that's currently inundated with startups. They're all focused on building a mobile product, but many are early-stage and don't have the development muscle to do so yet. Others do, but are really falling flat on user interface design.
Is there anything that we can do with this labor of love, or should we just throw it away?
Note that immediately after that point in the article:

But is that really what American English sounds like?

"Yes," he says. "Exactly like that."

I apologize if it's not totally clear in my original comment, but I was referring to Celentano's affirmation that American English sounds like anger born out of resignation.
Google Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HiRysAG...

I'll post my comment separately once I've looked at it.
I wouldn't say it's a joke in the IT field notwithstanding whatever people on HN say which is just a very small slice of the world.

There is not enough detail in your question to even give any specific advice to you. Like "what car should I buy.." Most importantly you haven't given any reason why you can't stay at the startup and continue to go to community college (cost, time from what you write don't appear to be a problem). Consequently (once again from the info you present) seems to be more of a downside to quitting then an upside to not finishing.

It's possible that going forward you will have to go beyond a BA so if you don't get that now where will you be? I'd stick it out and get the degree.

What do you do with the web hosting business? How many accounts do you have?

I don't think you can expect (with the limited info you are providing) though for anyone on HN to give you advice specific to your situation.
Even then, it should inspire people to study the fundamentals, not go into big-language punditry :-D
Angular model is just any normal js object you want, then via two way binding it gets displayed without you doing any work. Freakin awesome.
Yes, provided you collect all the required library headers and either sources or binaries: the generated C++ still requires run time libraries and the top level driver if it's a program.

There is actually an option of flx, --bundle=dirname, which puts the generated C++ in a single directory, to make it simpler to ship the generated C++ to another platform.

This does not do a full bundle, i.e. it doesn't package all the run time support code as well. That's on the TODO list, so you could literally copy the target directory to another machine and run "make" or something and only need a C++ compiler to build it.

There's another aspect to your question: if by "use" you also mean "modify" then the current state is that Felix generated C++ is a bit hard to read. The code is "good enough" to add debugging prints but not much more. It would be good to improve this so the code is more readable.
Chrome could warn "XYZ CA is scheduled to be marked untrusted in 30 days". The sites large enough to have economic impact if they were unsecured would notice and scramble to get new certs. Other browser vendors would follow. A warning shot is fired paving a path for harsher penalties in the future.
Keisuke Kuwata doesn't sing gibberish but he has a very distinctive vocal style based on the American blues/folk/rock singers he grew up on. The lyrics are littered with English of course but even the Japanese lyrics are delivered with a pseudo-English rhythm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p3iNFsiv9Y
> Folks seem unbelievably harsh on accents they know not to be the native one, which is every time a famous actor does an accent

Either Hugh Laurie isn't famous, or you don't have any idea he's British. ;)

Every time he plays House, he's doing a fake American accent. He just does it really, amazingly well.

Here's Hugh Laurie as the Prince of Wales (the total idiot) in a short segment from the series "Blackadder the Third":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOSYiT2iG08
I know of this company through my wife and her sister. In the last year, my wife's sister has purchased over $1k worth of goods and my wife has spent close to $400 for our new baby. Zulily is taking mom's by storm.
Bizarre.

I wonder if, in 10 years, WebKit will be viewed as the next IE6 when the latest/greatest HTML rendering engine comes along?

What happened to standards compliance?
Can you show a demo or give a hint as to what it is? You might be able to sell the assets to another startup in this space.

However your post begs the question...if it's so awesome, why are you winding it down instead of supporting the millions of users who also think it's awesome?
The mobile web version of Google Maps is optimized for WebKit browsers such as Chrome and Safari.

Does it work with mobile gecko?
Site is down due to overload. Here's the paper:

http://www.ofc.org.uk/files/ofc/papers/mark-lynas-lecture-ox...

Here's the video:

http://www.ofc.org.uk/videos/2013/mark-lynas-changing-perspe...
How the government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences
right now only the turkish government can do MITM - other parties can't.
Performance problems like these early on in a product's adoption (yes, I know Scala isn't exactly new, but it still isn't widely used) can really give it a bad reputation that is extremely hard to shake.

I hope that they don't fall into the trap that the Mozilla folk have with Firefox. Although Firefox is still slow, it isn't as bad as it once was. Even after substantial effort and some moderate improvements, it still has a very bad reputation. I don't think it'll ever overcome this.

The same could easily happen to Scala, if they aren't careful.