skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probably the worse piece of advice in the article :

> 6.4 – Avoid mathematical notations in your variable names
Let’s say that some quantity in the algorithm is a matrix denoted A. Later, the algorithm requires the gradient of the matrix over the two dimensions, denoted dA = (dA/dx, dA/dy). Then the name of the the variables should not be “dA_dx” and “dA_dy”, but “gradient_x” and “gradient_y”. Similarly, if an equation system requires a convergence test, then the variables should not be “prev_dA_dx” and “dA_dx”, but “error_previous” and “error_current”. Always name things for what physical quantity they represent, not whatever letter notation the authors of the paper used (e.g. “gradient_x” and not “dA_dx”), and always express the more specific to the less specific from left to right (e.g. “gradient_x” and not “x_gradient”).

Especially when you're just starting out, creating your own naming scheme just creates more opportunities to do something wrong.
I grew up with the Atari 2600 as my game console. I played the shit out of Pitfall... and never once did I just snap and start swinging from vines over alligator pits. I played the shit out of Frogger... and never once did I just snap and start running around on the freeway or try to cross a stream jumping from log to log. I also used to play Army outside. Of course we just used a stick for a gun. Probably the same stick that was a sword the day before. To this day I have never killed anyone with a real gun or sword. We used to build sand castles in the sand box, and then take turns strategically placing/detonating fire crackers on the other kid's castle to see who could take it. I have never bombed anyone.

I'm not a big gamer these days but it seems like a huge cop-out to try to blame the games for the ills of others. Many, many people play the same games, own the same firearms, have the same history of being abused, are on the same psychoactive drugs, have done any number of things that a few random sickos have done... and yet they have NEVER committed such atrocities. Some times there is no better answer other than: Some people are just fucked in the head.
Doesn't work for my account :/
> How long have you been working on this?

Initial frontend prototype took about 30 minutes, and backend about the same. Then I spent a few hours polishing. Was mostly done in between other tasks over the course of a couple days. It's a tiny simple-ish project. But there's a lot of work to be done and things that can be added.

> I want a visually-oriented player with cover art very prominently featured

I'd love to have this!

Please feel welcome to submit any patches or improvements from your own project. It'd be nice to have some help on it.
Your CES Video Coverage Sucks. Do It Right Or Stay Home.
Let's say 1 million people bought the last Black Ops game, and that our Connecticut shooter was such a player. So far, 3 months in, we've had 1 mass shooting. Correlation ~ 1/1000000 = 0.00001% at 3 months in. Let's assume we're off by a factor of 100 in our violent video-game audience. That would require 100x the number of shootings to even match parity.
Ask HN: Does exists a simple menu bar app that uploads to Amazon S3 for Mac?
I've tried Dropzone, but I would love something simpler, like Droplr or CloudApp, that let me use my own Amazon S3 account.
This comment is gold, you nailed the issues that really hit ruby harder than most other languages. Minimizing dependencies in ruby land is an excellent mitigator for the effect of rapidly changing APIs, allowing you to at least approach having the best of both worlds: the latest APIs on the libraries you use heavily and avoiding dependency hell with incidental requirements.
Windows has had good high DPI support for a while. I prefer their method to Apple's wacky pseudo resolution.
>Any idea how generic this expectation really is?

[Omitting a longish rant, that once we give up Lorence invaraiance we do no longer know anything.] AFAIK it is essentially the fine tuning argument. So not really generic but in the absence of a good argument a reasonable default value.

> What's this timescale have to do with it?

The timescale was essentially meant illustrative, so a short everyday timescale compared to gigayears. ( And it is conservative, in the sense that I do not need to remember the exact details of a GRB spectra to use this one ;)
I asked Jack Groetzinger from Seatgeek.com, "what do web people use these days?" And he said, "Flask and Backbone, use Flask and Backbone," so that I did.
I think this is really cool. The price point will definitely deter random spammers who just want to talk to Mark. But it is low enough for someone who wants to reach out to Mark to be feasible.
If I had a brilliant idea I wanted Mark to know about, I'd be stoked. There is no guarantee that he will read it, but if someone paid 100$ to message him, he might be intrigued.

Most likely he has some folks to review those messages, and bring a (select) few to his attention.
I could imagine this would be worth it, on the guarantee that you get a personal, thoughtful reply. Not "ok" or "no".
How did you not draw this same inference?

The problem I have isn't with the inference that the photons came from GRB 090510, but with the idea that anything can be inferred about the medium they passed through.

If quantum-foam fluctuations can be assumed to be uniformly distributed along the paths of all three photons, then the number of disturbances encountered by a photon is proportional only to the photon's path length. Here, the path lengths of all three photons are enormous and essentially identical, so it seems reasonable to assume that each one encounters a similar number of quantum "potholes," and that no difference in their arrival energies/times/whatever would be noticeable on a millisecond scale.
No no, I get the basic idea of making estimates based on dimensional analysis. My question is: how generically do we expect the dispersion relation to be of this form? I could imagine, for example, that differences in speed are exponentially suppressed by the ratio E_gamma/M_p.
Ask HN (Boston) - Good coffee shops or day working locations
I just moved to Boston after selling my startup to company here and am looking for some good day working locations in the city where startup minded people congregate.
The Schedule of Python  FOSDEM 2013
You are right to be suspicious of plausible sounding hypotheses that aren't backed by empirical evidence, but you are failing to correctly account for prior probabilities. The prior probability that any particular phenomenon is causally linked to a given phenomenon is very low (and as a corollary, the probability that one phenomenon is not linked to another is very high).

Unfortunately, humans are pretty bad at handling Bayesian inference implicitly, so we have to use some tricks to keep ourselves in line. A particular problem that we face is that once we start investigating a hypothesis, we seem to upgrade our prior for that hypothesis, and so when we find weak evidence, we become overconfident in the hypothesis. This is related to the prosecutor's fallacy[1], and is also known in rationality circles as "privileging the hypothesis"[2].

The other bad thing about privileging the hypothesis is that we only have so much time to investigate hypotheses, and we have a ton of bad hypotheses. In fact, because of Occam's razor, we actually have way, way more bad hypotheses than we have decent ones.

So investigating hypotheses with low priors has a low ROI

So in summary, we don't really need to (and shouldn't) gather evidence to see if video games can be linked to mass shootings because the hypothesis "video games aren't linked to mass shootings" has such a massive head start over "video games are linked to mass shootings". If, however, simply surveying the data available at the outset revealed significant reason to believe that video games might be linked, it would be different. That's why it is worth investigating the link to guns, even though the prior for that connection was also low.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy

[2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/19m/privileging_the_hypothesis/
I would be highly surprised if he lets other people manage his Facebook account. He seems to firmly believe that the type of social interaction that facebook facilitates is the way of the future. By not using it himself, he would be admitting that maybe its just a waste of time... which is something that I doubt that he would let himself do.
We just need a new JavaScript library for adding animated "under construction" icons.
This would be pretty cool. I hadn't considered it. But you say application support is widespread for their API. If so, it could be a worthwhile one to implement.

> I run subsonic server on my home server and it's quite resource hungry.

Yea, that's the thing about subsonic -- big bloated app. Lots of features, but it needs to start fresh and lean.
"You say that like it is an accident that just about every major OS today is written in C or C/C++"

Is there some technical feature of C or C++ that makes those languages good for writing OSes, or that made OSes written in those languages overwhelmingly successful? You might argue that the simplicity of a C compiler made Unix successful because it helped with portability, but C is by no means unique in this regard -- a Lisp compiler can be equally simple, and can be used to bootstrap a more sophisticated compiler. Really, Unix won because the only real competition Unix vendors faced in the minicomputer and workstation market came from other Unix vendors; C was riding on the coattails of Unix. One would be hard-pressed to argue that Windows won because C++ is a great language, especially considering how Windows was plagued with bugs and security problems during its rise to prominence in the 90s (many of which resulted from bad pointer mechanics, which is what happens when you use a language that requires you to juggle pointers).
You want to pay Mark $100 to take your idea?
Actually, blaming punching bags for people hitting other people makes way more sense than blaming video games for shootings. One of the primary purposes of punching bags, after all, is to make you better at punching people.
Hats off to you! This is simply amazing!
> "If anything it reduces the the urge for someone to do it by redirecting the urge into a simulation, kind of like a punching bag."

I'm an avid and pretty hardcore gamer, but come on, this is supposition. Is there really strong evidence that simulated violence is a deterrent to actual violence?

I've seen some "studies" trotted about gaming forums and the such, whose methodology and provenance are highly questionable. Has there been any real scientific evidence on this matter?
The Lighter Side Of The Cloud – Big Data
Enjoy the weekend and do not be boring! ;)
My hunch is that if Duplo was built out of ABS like the standard Lego bricks, they would be a lot harder, a lot heavier, and an order of magnitude more expensive. The softness of the cheaper plastic, as mentioned above, is a lot more friendly to toddlers as well.
To listen to it. Comment too pedantic.
Actually, Bruce Eckel goes over this in "Thinking in C++". Stroustrup chose not to use an object-based hierarchy, where everything inherits from one base class (like in Java and Smalltalk). This presents a problem when making generic containers (that is, a container that can hold any type of object). To solve this, generics (in the form of templates) were added to C++.
And knowing how clear Facebook tries to be (sarcasm) - they will surely let you know he might not be reading your $100 message or even hear about it, if that's the case.
There's quite a bit of empirical evidence available that have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of even correlation between playing violent videos games and being violent. It's all very easily available by praying to google, so I won't link them here.

The thing I really want to say is that this is all really obvious when you stop and think about it. If there was an actual causal link between playing video games and becoming violent, we would expect much more violence than we actually see. For some reason, no one seems to look at it that way, though.
I am a little bit worried what this can mean for security if everybody in the InterNet can easily reach every mobile phone.

Well, where there used to be NAT there should now be a carrier-grade firewall. So it probably won't be as bad as a bare connection to the internet.
Heavy 1st Amendment issues here. Also, interesting court decisions upholding the 1st in the context of video games.

This is clearly political, rather than based on any sound research or data. But if there was hard data, historically the legislatures haven't cared: It looks good to their constituents.

Looks like I'm going to have to give money to the games lobbies now, too.
Actually, "fetishes" would most assuredly come up in the same kinds of meaningless conversations in everyday life. "Oh, it's your anniversary? So you're going to go out for a nice romantic meal?" The assumption being that's what "normal" people do for such occasions. I do not feel compelled to correct their mistaken assumption simply because it's none of their damned business unless I decide they are important in my life.

You misunderstand the idea of "it's no one else's business" with "you must be silent!" Holding your partner's hand in public is already publicly declaring the very thing that would alter the direction of a conversation regarding the sex of your significant other, which has no bearing on the original post or my response. This is about feeling the need to actively correct the incorrect assumptions of people who have no meaningful value to you and your partner's life.

As for suggesting DADT, well when I suggest such a thing feel free to argue against it.
Making a hand-made animation short-film
Now if it were: "after consuming bread, 90% of the time the consumer will commit a violent act within 24 hours", we'd have to worry.
I’ve done something like this with multi-user support and uploading + tag edito. Django + NGiNX.
"Unfortunately, C++ is a language that fills a niche no-other does"

There are an awful lot of languages out there; I would be careful with statements like this. I am not sure there is any feature or combination of features in C++ that is not equally good or better in another language.
> I listen to a lot of foreign music and have had a hard time populating my zmusic database

Oh noes! I too have lots of foreign music in my collection, and it seemed to work fine. I'm using the tagging framework out of MusicBrainz' Picard application, so things should be pretty flawless. I wonder what happened... Maybe the encoding system-wide needs to be set to UTF-8 so Python picks this up? If you email me more information, I can take a look.

> why did you decide to use tab characters in your python?

I'm partial to Linux-kernel C-style. I like tabs. That's what they're for. Holy wars though. What else? I use VIM, KDE, and Gentoo. Death to Emacs, Gnome, and Mandrake! Ahh, preferences...
Insanity prevails.
Demystifying Pobelka; A technical intelligence report on the Pobelka botnet
This technical report describes the Pobelka botnet and puts it in the context of global malware operations. It provides a broader context in the ecosystem of botnets, Trojans, exploit kits, and the markets where infected computers are traded. It also details the identity of the people running the Pobelka botnet as well as a description of the origin of the botnet and the common methods of communication used.
Bitcoin exchange hacked via Rails exploit, funds stolen
From the site:

> Based on Java technology, ...

I stopped reading there. Bias? Maybe.
I think some credits-based system (Quora?) based on quality of some kind of internet activity would be better. I agree on the use of scarcity to remove noise from clogged communication channels, but there are fairer ways to do scarcity.

$100 is nothing for me (and astronomically more of a nothing for Zuck) if there's a career benefit, but it's a substantial amount of money for most people in the world.
I'm wondering if there's been an offer like this before on HN. It's so simple, reasonable, and plausible that I tried searching for more and couldn't find any.

hmexx, if there's a way a cofounder should find a technical co-founder, this looks to be one way. Please keep posting about your experience, I think it's eye opening and worthy of ongoing reflection.
The access to tools and open source resources for learning to program is phenomenal. I think the future will be collaborative programming.
> "But the brutal truth is that they are a part of the nature of our species, inherent and practically unstoppable. "

We may never stop all violence, but this debate is worth having specifically because other societies of our species (i.e., not American) have been able to achieve much lower rates of violence in their societies than we have.

Not everywhere is as violent as the USA. These mass shootings are statistical outliers no matter which way you cut it, but violent crime (involving firearms or otherwise) in the US is substantially higher than many developed nations.

The question remains as to how, and why, these other nations have been able to achieve a dramatically lower incident rate of violence.

BTW, there are ~7 billion people on Earth, not trillion.

> "People who are so mentally bent as to carry out heinous acts of violence against other humans will always find a way."

Violent crime is not in and of itself indicative of mental illness. There are many perfectly rational (at least at the local level) reasons to hurt or kill someone.
This reminds me of an installation by Mine Control: http://www.mine-control.com/mondrian.html
Ask HN: How can I make Hacker Newsletter better?
Last year I doubled the subscriber count for Hacker Newsletter[0] to 14,000 and my goal for 2013 is to double it again. To accomplish that, I have several ideas I'm working on, but thought I would check here as well since the newsletter exists because of this community.

If you already are a subscriber, I would love to know how I could make it better and if you're not, is there anything I could do that would make you sign-up and check it out?

Thanks!

[0]: http://hackernewsletter.com
It cracks me up every time I see a Microsoft+Linux headline.

Are most Azure users running Linux rather than Windows servers?
How about someone make a marketplace for this exact sort of thing? "Contact Y for $X now!"
Only gotten a few pages in, but what I've read so far was informative and understandable. Thanks
> If I had a brilliant idea I wanted Mark to know about, I'd be stoked.

(...)

> Zuck: People just submitted it.

> Zuck: I don't know why.

> Zuck: They "trust me"

> Zuck: Dumb fucks.
You proved that catchy titles can catch someone's attention. But I didn't learn anything.
Fotostat is now monitoring over 1,000,000 photos
Ha! Yea we agree. It feels like the concept shouldn't be that "new" but we couldn't find anything like it. Seems like people have been looking for task scheduling for a while.
Good question. I guess I meant that I'd be able to pay off enough of the mortgage such that my monthly payment would be close to my current rent. :) If it turns out that I do better than expected, then I'll pay for it in cash. If not, then I can work longer. In any case, the app is doing well enough that it's now my full time job.
Your phone is faster than Amtrak’s wifi
The good news is that they are going to cover the losses: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=135919.msg1448056#ms...
edit: I was wrong about the title, see below comment.
Your code style guide is crap, but still better than nothing.
There are currently several schemes for obtaining a full /128 address from a /64. One appends your device's MAC address and some other stuff to the network prefix. This obviously has some privacy implications.

The second appends a random number to the /64. This was added specifically to address the privacy concerns of the previous scheme, and does so as well as any easily routable scheme can. While it's obvious under this scheme what network traffic is headed to, it isn't easy to determine which device on that network is going to receive that traffic. Or that device's past network history, if it routinely switches IP addresses.

A /64 isn't a person any more than a IPv4 address is a person. It could identify you on your wifi, your phone, your friends phone, your friends laptop, the kind lady downstairs who you lent your wifi password... all it specifies is the destination subnet for communication.

If you're the least bit privacy aware, it's not any easier to track your device using IPv6 vs IPv4.

edit: IPv6 is arguably harder to track, because autoconfiguration proceeds without a central DHCP server. In order to log IP <=> client mappings, a router would need to listen for all Neighbor Solicitations to outgoing devices, not just add a couple printfs to the DHCP server.
True, but I'm trying to measure how many new followers I can acquire on Twitter with a very simple CTA.

Plus, I thought it was funny.
Linkedin Actually guarantees that they will read your message, or they will give your money back.
Dan Oved
CTO @ Tapactive
I think that's what he's trying to set up, because there's no way this is worth his time if he's actually being thoughtful about each message.
Clarity.fm uses phone calls in a similar idea.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1804959
No, some other site (https://bitcoin-central.net/) fixed it within 5 minutes, not the one that was compromised (https://vircurex.com/).
> Too bad mindstorms are ridicously expensive here in Brazil, I am yet to put my hands in one.

This is a lot worse than it seems. Protectionism in Brazil goes further than Mindstorms and protectionism in the world goes further than Brazil.

What stupid (and heavy lobbied and bribed) politicians will never get is that protectionism is also cultural isolationism. By keeping good and inspiring technology off the gates they are actually limiting engineering creativity and imagination. They're actually stifling innovation and progress, not stimulating it.

Brazilian culture grew so much when it imported other people's culture and modified it to their own. Jazz was imported and became bossa-nova. Soccer was brought in by British workers in the railways and became "jogo bonito". Corbousier's modernist architecture was assimilated by Oscar Niemeyer and changed into Brazilian architecture. If culture was walled by protectionism, these developments would never happen. Similarly, technological development will be repressed by protectionism.
Are You Eating Too Fast? Ask Your Fork
100% of all school shootings took place at school. Clearly school is the problem, right? :)
according to [1], Mark Zuckerberg makes $310.67 per second... so $100 will buy you under one third of a second of his time... I hope you are not expecting a long reply.

[1] http://www.best-reviewer.com/how-much-money-does-mark-zucker...
"I might add that Chimera -> Camino was the beacon of hope before Safari came out, and once it got going on Mac OS X, other folks got so excited they demanded a cross-platform version which eventually became Firefox."

I'd never heard this and I can't seem to find any references to it. Would you mind pointing me in the right direction?
Yet another score thanks to Hubble. The progress in Astronomy and Cosmology since the 90s is quite remarkable and fun to follow.
I didn't write it. I just found it. Maybe should have mentioned that. But I thought it was clear. Sorry.
I guess this is still the Wild Wild West era of Bitcoin; I'd wager plenty of banks got knocked off by bandits back in the day, too.

What happened to a bank's customer's funds if it got robbed prior to 1933?