skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Popularizing testing methodologies is a good subject, but you're way off base in terms of what A/B testing is and how it should be used. Hopefully you're just going for a dramatic point of view to drive responses, but as a point of professional courtesy, that's ok in your lead, not your actual content.

1. AB is not about determining the effect of various factors in isolation. Its about quickly reaching a solution that is close to optimal in situations where you can't feasibly generate the kind of data you'd need to build a model.

2. AB is not poorly suited to dealing with "externalities," confounding variables, etc. It is the only method that is suited to dealing with them.

3. This does happen, but it is more of a failure in the selection of WHAT to test, than it is a failure of the methodology itself. An understanding of optimization strategies is helpful in avoiding this trap. In practice I think what most people are doing is closer to simulated annealing than greedy anyway.

Ping me @TC_Davis on twitter if you want pointers to resources on any of the above.
Not only they get free upvotes, but the people who disagree with them sometimes get free downvotes.

See here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5033743
I don't think he knew what he was doing.

I've written on my blog about my own encounters with him; but the biggest thing that stands out was his naivete, his childlike perspective.

It's telling so many eulogies of him describe him as a boy.

IMO, it was his innocent perspective, combined with what he thought was the clear and obvious path, that drove him to do what he did, not understanding the consequences.
I'd like folks to stop posting every conceivable article written on it. I've cut back my visits since it happened as the home page is dominated by Aaron's stories.
Ask HN: Anyone have a github repo they'd like someone to contribute to?
I'm finding it difficult to explore repos on Github for the purpose of finding one to contribute to (yes, I went to the "Explore" page).

JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Python, and Ruby are all fine with me. Does anyone have a repo and a feature that they just haven't gotten around to?
> The Taliban doesn't have the resources. Qatar did have the resources to build al Jazeera, which is much in demand.

Are you really likening the owners of Al Jazeera and the state of Qatar with the Taliban? Please tell me I've missed something.
Large parts of it even use GE's font, making it even more clear.
> When you start with the point of view that we are all reasonable, and well intentioned.. the problem then becomes about process and culture, and you can actually start making progress.

In my studies of nonviolent resistance, this was the core message: People act on what they feel is the right thing to do at the time. If the world deems that wrong, that's a different discussion, and a learning experience for both the world and the actor.

In order to make progress, you must empathize with that person, communicate with them on their terms, and open a discussion on both of your beliefs without judgement.

+1 jonmc12 for your point of view.
Nope. At least Lenovo (via the front door of lenovo.com) and HP (if you know where to look) permit this, as of the last time I priced out a laptop anyway.

There are also smaller shops that will do highly customized builds (and often have web configurators since they're "cheap" these days), but I suspect you didn't intend to include them regardless.
Except Arabic is a living language and has 300 "expert" speakers :-P
They didn't address it in the slightest. They mentioned "social good" in a sentence and then demonstrated that they either didn't understand what that meant or decided to completely ignore it by then talking mostly about individual happiness. Society is more affected by your behavior and your drain on its resources than by how happy you feel.
Prevent someone who gets read access to the token DB from either highjacking sessions or resetting passwords.
The Atlantic isn't what you think...

http://shameproject.com/?s=atlantic&x=0&y=0
I think we just got a lot more monkeys
its a hack
the beauty is its only the beginning.
The spouse's income is described in para. 7 (depending on how you count):

"Our married women's husbands worked too, earning $51,000 and $103,000 respectively."
That's an important distinction. Certainly suffering from a degree of mental illness does not hinder many of the kinds of decisions needed to maintain personal freedom and dignity, etc.
I fear what will happen when the market for pure misinformation is fully realized. When it can be delivered as seamlessly as the real thing, the opportunity for profit is massive. The Atlantic is an example of media engineering for profit that fails to trick us -- but it is much closer than sponsored content has been in the past and certainly more effective at getting me to consume it than a regular ad.

Call me a conspiracy theorist but one thing the future holds for us is more of this. Except it will take place in scientific literature, respected publications, maybe in our own homes and (purposefully or not) by the people we know and trust. We'll need a factcheck.org for regular news.

"Sponsor post" is probably as good as we will ever get from The Atlantic.
I bet that some programmers' brains need those orderly columns in order to be able to parse the code effectively, overwhelmed by the chaos of rivers of whitespace otherwise. In that case, it sounds like an editor that displays in columns but stores in compact form would be helpful.
Ed commented in the general tone of HN. His comment was unexceptional, except that later events called it out as such.

Focusing on Ed is counter-productive. What should be the topic is the harmful, negative and alienating tone that HN comments adopt. The upvotes that such comments garner show that they are not individual actions, but rather the result of community incentives.

I'd like to hear suggestions of how to cultivate useful, supportive, productive comment threads. That is, of course, if the community decides it wants to change, rather than just heaping scorn on a single instance of a systematic problem.
This doesn't seem worth the brand damage it causes.

I actually love the Economist "special advertising sections" about countries ("Mongolia: Open for Business", etc.). Those are clearly identified and also not damaging. Maybe Mongolia isn't worthy of 16-32 pages in the Economist on its own, but the content they do publish about it tends to be at least somewhat legitimate. Not sure if that's even possible to do about Scientology.
Don’t read the comments
Does this mean that The Atlantic is not a CIA front, or does it mean that it is? Semi-in-jest.
U.S. military suicides last year far exceed combat deaths in Afghanistan
Less than 1000 visits and we're already going to start chalking up the wisdom that's been learned? This is way too early and the traffic achieved is well down into the noise.

CPC is mildly interesting, but what was the real conversion rate to something that yields revenue? That's the only one that matters, at least unless your site is going to be an ongoing destination for repeat visitors that will allow you to sell them at other times ones they get hooked.

And that's your next step: figure out how to make this site a destination for your intended audience that they come back to again and again for the great content you're publishing there. Don't count visits unless they buy something or sign up for your email list and become repeat visitors.

Building the MVP is the easy part. Establishing a sustainable growing level of traffic that matters is the hard part. Before I'd even bother with an MVP, I'd focus on a blog and see how successfully I could grow traffic for some audience along the way. The area you're interested in, photography, is ripe with content marketing opportunities.

What sort of content will attract the kind of people who want to rent your products? What other products will they sign up for? What are the SEO parameters needed to get you that audience for free instead of via paid advertising?

Those are among the key initial questions to answer.
15. (Shea's Law) The ability to improve a design occurs primarily at the interfaces.
This is also the prime location for screwing it up.

So true. Parnas' paper on information hiding and decomposing into modules is of course also about choosing the interfaces https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.cs.umd.edu/cla... (bonus: he describes the genesis of the paper, see the "quick view" of the top of this google search https://www.google.com/search?q=filetype%3Apdf+parna+on+the+...)

Unfortunately, once you've chosen interfaces that hide the details and things likely to change, it becomes harder to change the interfaces, in case you were wrong in your predictions of what will change in the future... Or, if you just didn't understand the best way to approach the system... (how could that happen?)

It's hard to change because other modules depend on this interface. Unit tests operate on the interfaces between modules, so they need to change too... and you won't have the safety net they provide. Documentation must change. etc.

Therefore, in practice, interfaces are not changed.
I'd define having an extremely high IQ has having abnormal brain chemistry :) Surely living among people who are cognitively dissimilar would be very stressful, and living in stressful conditions can be bad for a person's mental health (mental health viewed as something that is fluid and that can change over time and in response to environmental changes).
This is a huge problem, and it's even worse because of the great point Klabnick makes about the vocal maybe-minority. When somebody says "nobody actually does it that way", they may mean that nobody who writes blog posts actually does it that way. It's very difficult to tell the difference between things nobody is doing and things nobody is bothering to talk about doing.
Contra the best article they ever ran... what's next? Why diamonds actually are scarce and valuable, sponsored by deBeers. ??!!
I am torn, because I want to upvote your first para which accurately addresses the points raised by the parent; yet your second para is all fluff, empty rhetoric, assertions totally without justification.

If you are a new kind of troll, I salute you.
This site reads an awful lot like a bunch of left-wing conspiracy nutters. I don't know if it actually is or not, but that's the impression I get after scanning through it a bit. Not exactly a bastion of journalistic neutrality.
You may be one of only a few. 'Diaspora' more generally refers to 'a body of those outside their group's ancestral homeland', and such communities aren't necessarily the product of suffering/persecution.

By the time such a group gets referred to as a 'diaspora' in this sense, it is often to emphasize the continuity-of-tradition-and-vibrancy in a new place, and thus mostly positive in its connotations.
< How should people who though like you and ed act differently now?

If his opinions have changed then he is free to express that. People say and do things relying on the information they have at that time. I didn't write anything because it was just a gut thought, which is why I didn't donate.

I'm sure that if Aaron had told his side of the story then it would have hurt him in court, but it may have garnered him public interest and funds.

For his immense abilities, Aaron made a lot of enemies due to his confrontational behaviour. This seems to be getting glossed over at the moment and having a close network of people may have been able to save him.

<Aaron did not receive enough help on his defense bills. This likely part of the reason he is now dead, but only part of it.

Definitely part of the reason, but he also had massive depression issues and talked and wrote about suicide long before.

<Given this how should actions change, if at all? If you think the world would be better if people that held similar opinions to you ed's were slightly different, how should they be different and what argument would have moved you in that direction earlier?

I had an opinion but didn't take action because it was negative and of no use. I had no idea about him other than he was a Reddit co-founder that I hadn't heard of before, that he made a bit of money, that he had broken the law and that someone was asking for money for his defense.

I don't think the world is a better place for having held those views, it is what it is.

I would say what would have changed my mind was either Aaron or his friends arguing his case in public. All the people he worked with are now vocal about how great he is, but where were they back then?

For one example: Reddit could have created a funding drive but didn't as far as I can tell. Do I blame them? No.

At the end of the day it is really sad. Nothing will change that.

Witch hunts only create a quick fix to our need to rationalise our anger and pain. Ed wrote a criticism that could equally have been written by Aaron, I'm sure the regret he feels now is far worse than anything you can say.
>_< thanks for the email. Thankfully just a free heroku postgres account with auto-generated credentials so I deleted it.
Never quit being this person.
So javascript is actually the fastest implementation of regular expressions, so I'm not sure why something's "obviously amiss."
Are you suggesting that marriage can be expressed as a contract between two people, without the government being involved? This is not the case.

For example, my earnings go into a account I hold jointly with my wife. If marriage carried no special privileges, then we would need to keep track of how much of the income she "received" from me, to pay gift taxes. "Ok, honey, we ordered a $20 pizza, and you ate four slices, so I guess that means you received $8 worth of income..." Fortunately, we are spared this insanity, because gifts to spouses are tax exempt. This allows us to share our money like we share our lives.

Spousal green cards, spousal privilege in court, and Social Security survivors benefits are other examples of privileges that cannot be granted through private contracts, but that require the government's involvement.
I am trying to collect small hacks like this that are popping up. I know everyone writes scrapers, but hardly anyone talks about it. But maybe talking about it would be helpful so that we can figure out what goes right and what goes wrong:

https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front

Someone contributed a small greasemonkey script that does something similar to the JSTOR memorial liberator, except for SpringerLink previews.

https://gist.github.com/4535401
Can you provide some more detail on the initial page? Definitely interested in this, and I'm sure quite a few early-stage inside sales teams would be too.
Cartoon about Aging - Wild Work Kingdom
If you haven't read Stephenson's "Anathem", one of the characters makes a reference to Bogons, false pieces of information inundating the Internet.

There are low-quality bogons (the example given is a file full of gibberish) and high-quality bogons, masquerading as legitimate data but differing in only a few places, and hard to detect as such.

This is definitely a fairly high quality bogon, at first glance.
yeah that was my thought.

Its hard because it is very difficult for our brains to realise the concept that Reddit was profitable but no-where near as profitable as companies that we've never heard about.
A sumo asked me do this: Invest in me please:)
This neglects "The Price of Being Married" which is rarely an instance of frugality and prudent fiscal discipline.

I'm not implying that ALL members of a married home are frivolous with their money, but it sure seems that way sometimes.

How much money does having a wife or husband cost? I'm willing to bet it's a sh*t load more - not to spread words of discouragement or anything.
Thanks. Corrected.

It's interesting they set the husband's salaries based on the idea that women earn $0.78 for every $1.00 earned by men, but fail to account for the fact that a woman who stays permanently single is far less likely to suffer the reduced lifetime earning power that comes from having kids.
What do you mean? Marriage licenses were issued in the American colonies, so state marriage licenses are in that sense older than the USA.
New MC Frontalot song and video (including Hacker News reference)
Ancient Migration: Genes link Australia with India
I'm pretty positive this was also the case in 2012. Check it out, the official link from data.gov does not resolve to an actual page. Ah, the government and open data, always a tentative relationship:
https://explore.data.gov/National-Security-and-Veterans-Affa...
Agreed. Aaron's passing is a tragedy, but the inundation of articles covering the same thing over and over is getting tiresome.

I understand people need to grieve, but I don't think Hacker News is the place to do it?
I love this panel!
HN seems to be much more active on this topic, if you check Reddit's posted links here, some links, few votes, few comments yet: http://www.reddit.com/submit?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlanti...
The human tendency to overreact should never be underestimated. The baby and bathwater idiom is not used often enough.
Often Mashable has How To articles that are sponsored, but the content is generally neutral.
Karma whoring is the new mourning.
Prosecutors reject Aaron Swartz's request for plea deal 2 days before suicide
it is socially unacceptable to say such things about thugs in other religions

It is? I didn't get that memo. To me it's socially unacceptable not to. People just ought to realize that being free-thinking, and in parts actually intelligent people gives them so much more power and so much more agility. Just look at scientology, look at their messiah, look at Tom Cruise.. they aren't that bright. They're bottom-feeding, they are preying on weak and/or vulnerable people.

What gets me about Scientology is how stupid it is, how obvious, and how white middle-class. It's hard to accept it was taken seriously for a second decades ago, but that they are expanding? It's like Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor, sometimes I really really wonder what kind of planet I'm on.

Maybe the idea is to make it all so crazy and horrible that people will cling to any story? I mean, let's just assume scientology was 100% true and correct: why has nobody successfully achieved their god status yet? They're just recruiting, never arriving, besides being super selfish assholes(oh yeah, those "body thetans", deported and mass killed people.. they are causing problems, let's get "rid of them"... just wow) on that never-ending way .

And yes, you could say exactly that about many other religions as well, and certainly Christianity and Islam; but that isn't reason to criticize any individual one less, the opposite is true. I say lean into it. It can be ugly, or even scary, but I believe appeasement would have scarier results.
"By running the script ... a public domain academic article is downloaded to the user’s computer, then uploaded back to ArchiveTeam in a small act of protest against JSTOR's restrictive policies." -- Ars

"At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content." -- JSTOR

The contention that JSTOR is acting as a faithful steward of public domain works -- having established any sort of restriction or barrier to prevent the public from accessing those works -- truly examines the widths and depths and bounds of intellectual dishonesty.
Smashing Pumpkins website hacked
You cannot use nginx as a proxy in front of websocket backends currently if you have need for that. nginx 1.3 has it on the roadmap though.

HAproxy works correctly for websocket backends today.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell all just retroactively disavowed any connection to The Atlantic.
"The husbands' salaries to reflect the fact that a woman earns 78 cents for every dollar a man earns"

If that were actually true, why would any business hire a man when they could get the same work for less?
You are right that marriage currently cannot be expressed in this way. However, I would like to see it be able to be expressed this way.
Someone is trying to delete downvotes as fast as they can, except more votes are arriving even faster. Stare at the counter for a few minutes, and you'll see the vote count go up and down.
Without delving into the specifics of Scientology, I am reminded of a grellas quotation: "The most valuable asset of a lawyer is his reputation."

This applies to some journalistic endeavors as well. In some cases, I seek out the thoughts of those whose facts are unreliable, because their opinions are interesting or novel. But just as often, I seek out long-form, descriptive pieces to learn what reliable people believe is true. I cannot validate every aspect of the outside world, so I trust others to do this. When they are frequently right, like Nate Silver, say, I trust them more. When they lend their brand to more bizarre groups, I trust them less, not because the sponsored link itself changes the truth of the rest of the articles, but because it signals a lack of judgment that might have a common source with many other important and difficult decisions a magazine or newspaper must make.

For instance, when I read the Economist, I feel rather confident in their facts. They have a particular fiscally conservative slant, but in general they have proven to be realistic and relevant. They might not espouse particularly novel solutions, but they lay a solid framework for further thought. As it is, The Atlantic is reasonably trusted. That's almost surely the reason Scientology would like to place a sponsored story there, in addition to, or in lieu of, more popular outlets.

In the coming transformation of journalism, institutions like The Atlantic, or newer upstarts like Svbtle, will have to consider sponsored posts and similar "brand-lending." When they do, they'll have to decide whether they want to be a trusted brand, or an interesting one.
I love #6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

People say lol a lot when they didn't really. But I really did at that one. Because I know exactly why it is true. What's going on is that you have a high order term that dominates the big-O. As long as that is anything of the form x^k it will be linear, and the lower order terms will show up as minor deviations, which the magic marker smoothes out.

Since big-O scaling terms of that form arise in a lot of different equations, it is very common that real data DOES show up as a (reasonably) straight line on a log-log graph. And the slope of that approximate line tends to be very useful to know.

But if you see data set after data set plotted on log-log with magic marker lines drawn, it is easy to ridicule the phenomena. :-)
The keyword here is want.
And for this system to work (I support it, by the way), we need to remind judges and prosecutors that their discretion is key to making the system work appropriately. Which means holding them accountable for misuses of the system.

It's for this reason that, after significant wavering, I've supported the petition for the removal of Carmen Ortiz, despite strongly supporting her prosecution of other white collar crimes. She simply lacks appropriate discretion for the position, especially in light of JSTOR and MIT's not pursuing independent legal action.
The vast majority of rails positions out there seem to prefer the Prime stack. If I'm looking to make a career out of working in rails, then that's what I'm going to start with.
It's not fair to single out one individual, particularly when the not so subtle (and completely speculative) inference is that the discussion led to Swartz's suicide.