skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And your chosen simulation starting point highly influences the outcome of the simulation.

Yes, it does. The effect I am describing is real, and I simply haven't thought it through in detail until now.

1. The starting point for my simulation has both the cicadas and the predators hatching out simultaneously, in year zero. This obviously happens in nature as well as in my simulation (but only rarely).

2. Given that starting condition, what is the likelihood that the predator, with a range of reproduction cycles, will succeed in synchronizing with the cicadas again, or (the best of all worlds) over and over in perpetuity?

3. The answer is that, if the cicadas adopt a prime-numbered reproduction cycle, the predators are handicapped by the fact that a typical prime number has fewer divisors than a composite number, and divisors are required for synchronization:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_divisors

4. For cases in which the predators and the cicadas are out of synchronization, the outcome for a random difference in years is neutral -- not advantageous, not disadvantageous. I've shown this by adding a loop to my program that tests against a range of differences in years between cicadas and predators. When I do this, the difference between a prime and a composite nearly vanishes ("nearly" because the advantage of a prime numbered cycle is still present, but is almost completely buried by the much greater number of years where there's no advantage).

5. It is only when cicadas and predators hatch out in synchrony (for any one of a number of reasons) does this prime-number effect have any effect on the outcome.

6. In terms of natural selection, this leaves the prime-number effect, plus an initial synchronization between cicada and predator, as the only selection advantage, for which the prime-number effect works against the predators.

7. Nature, and natural selection, does something my simulation doesn't -- over time, by rewarding reproductive fitness, it amplifies the effect of small advantages, in some cases turning a chance, small fitness advantage into the entire population of a species in the future.

8. I could obviously write a more complex simulation that imitates natural selection, one in which a small advantage is eventually turned into a new species, but because of the complexity of such a simulation and the amount of tuning required, I don't think this would represent anything but confirmation bias.

My simulation greatly exaggerates the advantage conferred by a prime number, and it assumes something that's almost never true in nature -- that cicadas and predators hatch out in synchrony at the outset. But that set of circumstances does represent a small fitness advantage, and it probably explains the two primary reproduction cycles of the cicada species my paper describes (i.e. 13 and 17 years).
Kombi Servisi
Why wouldn't they be using Opera anymore? They will be used to Opera, and the brand will be well known to most people.

Why do you think Google is desperate to enter these markets right now?
Apparently in relex smile the laser operates inside the cornea, and as such will leave the surface untouched.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE6i7odO3PA there is plenty of marketing material about this out there
Its fairly stable, desktop and web clients, accessible for non-tech members of the company, decent UI, various API hooks and hubot access, easier and faster to get up and running/ maintain then a home rolled XMPP/IRC. If you just need a functional company chat client, its solid.
Curious if you determined that solely based on his post or you know more about OP ?
Ask HN: How did you select your lawyer?
As a startup in its early stage, how did you choose your lawyer? What are your most important criteria? Size of the firm (global law firm vs specialized local firm)? Costs? Reputation? Words of mouth (friend's friend's recommendation)? etc. Did you interview your lawyer before committing? Do you regret your choice?
Sounds like fun for about 1-2 weeks, and then it would be a sucky life. Gotta have mental stimulation sometime.
Unfortunately, I suspect Musk gave Broder and the NYT a little too much ammunition with some of his weaker claims. That's certainly what their response will be, proudly refuting one or two things while dancing around the blatant lies.
If their purpose is so focused on newsreader formatting, they should tweak their robots.txt to keep from polluting SERPs.
> Opera having low tolerance for that

Except that is not true. Opera has a high tolerance, probably much higher than any other browser (out of necessity). But that doesn't help much if you're being blocked or sites constantly find new bugs in other browsers they decide to work around and thereby breaking it in any browser that is not one of the top 3.
Hi Daniel, why was it not opt-in? You describe it as a "revenue sharing" program, but did not ask your customers if they wanted to be part of it. You assumed their silence meant that they did.
I would tend to agree, except that Rails can't be all things to all people. Experienced developers don't find it nearly as magical as most of the people being told to "just learn Rails" when they get interested in web development. I totally get that abstractions can obscure security issues, but some of the reactions I've been seeing to Rails having security issues are akin to a parent giving a child a dangerous toy without reading the instructions and then getting mad at the toy company when the child hurts itself.
Somewhat off-topic, but since people are using this to riff on the Electoral College I'll drop in a mention for the National Popular Vote: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/

Basically: The states themselves can require a fair election for the Presidency without any need for a Constitutional amendment or even a Federal law— this has been robustly defended by legal scholars, and it's already half-way to completion.

If your state isn't on that list, do your country a favor and call your state representative about it.
So much for Amazon's risible old saw that "sales taxes vary so much among jurisdictions that calculating taxes would be an onerous burden for us". There is some business size at which that is true, but Amazon has never been that small. Lots of folks use Vertex: http://www.vertexinc.com/solutions/indirect/sales-tax.asp

Since Amazon has been growing its SaaS business for some time now one had to expect they were eventually going to want to make operating shopping cart checkout by yourself as tricky as possible. They might start lobbying municipalities to pile on the complications now that they're on the "right" side of this dispute.
I would like to hear your feedback.
First 8 days  kodify
The account manager at my company takes offense to this. Sorry, but even "nontechnical" people have setup mIRC when they were 14.
The way they described it, they used user auditing to track what the user was doing on the network and where, and compared it against the user's role.

There's lots of commercial software that will help you do this. First you have network appliances throughout your network that monitor traffic. Then you create rules and policies on the device that tracks the user, its defined role, what it should have access to, and what it is attempting to access. Then you define actions (logging, dropping the packet, ignoring it, etc) based on the rules/policies.

You can do this using open source software, too, but it takes a bit more glue code usually. A long set of iptables rules (along with free tools like Snort) could tag traffic based on the user, layer 7 protocol, and network access, and alerts could be mailed to the admins when a user over-reaches in their access.
No the goal is to have some regional balance, so one region of the country can't use the reins of power to exploit another region.
> But no matter what you do, you end up having to allocate more spare resources at it than what you would need with more intelligent routing.

I think we have to remember that the "intelligent routing" in question here is actually marketing-speak for "one request per server." Are you saying that when your servers can only receive one request at a time, you will necessarily need fewer than if your servers can handle three requests at a time but are assigned requests randomly?
This is fantastic, congrats. If I had an iPhone I'd back it!

If you could do a version for ancient Nokia phones (the kind with monophonic ringtones) I'd be all over it!

Though not sure about the reward tiers. The high-ticket ones just don't sound very appealing... Might have made more sense to have a slightly more expensive tier for your choice of colour, or for two or more bought together.
Brought to you by the letter Y.
Thanks Rohin! Your blog is one of my favorite things to read. Quite a change from the normal hacker news articles.
While the New York Times is a fine source of information I've learned personally that it no longer deserves a special designation of credibility.

In August 2012 a ProPublica article [1] syndicated by the Times made, at the very least, a contentious point (Sarbanes-Oxley didn't reduce the attractiveness of being public), written off with a link to a paper. I was dismayed to find the working paper [2] not only argued a different point ("the advantages of selling out to a larger organization, which can speed a product to market and realize economies of scope, have increased relative to the benefits of remaining as an independent firm") but in concluding remarks contradicted the claim it was quoted to have asserted ("although the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the 2003 Global Settlement have reduced the attractiveness of being public for small companies...").

Figuring it to be an intern's oversight I emailed the author and got the following reply (in its entirety): "Thanks, [first name], for your thoughts". I forwarded this to the editor of the Times column I received the article through and received a similar brush-off. The article, to date, remains unchanged.

The oversight was, in all likelihood, an honest blunder. The reaction's implicit intolerance of criticism, however, was jarring.

[1] http://www.propublica.org/thetrade/item/the-sox-win-how-fina...

[2] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1954788
Naive question: Is there a technical definition that differentiates a Seed round from Series A?

I used to think

- Seed round was raised from friends and family - but this one has tonnes of institutional investors.

- Seed rounds typically raise <1mm at <10mm valuation - but this one raised 6mm+ (at maybe 50-60mm valuation?)

- Seed rounds happen before the business is well defined - also not true in this case.

So why is this called a seed round and not a Series A?
This doesn't jibe with the current House and Senate, where the equal-population represented House has a substantial Republican edge and the Senate has a majority of Democrats.

Edit: btilly below is right, the House isn't technically proportional representation, it's equal-population districts. Still, state by state representation doesn't seem to be breaking reliably for Republicans.
Does anyone else find this really sad? It's not abject poverty, but it's a loss of talent to the world, and I'm old and honest enough to know that it's the world's fault.

I liked one of the signs. "You don't have to fuck people over to survive." That's what our positive-sum technocracy is supposed to represent: a world in which you can focus on getting work done and making society better. That's what it actually is if you have a degree of freedom, autonomy, and comfort that is (alas) very rare. Yet most of these "street kids" face a world of soulless, zero-sum, corporate status-grubbing where they do have to make that choice, and they're making the less approved but perhaps morally nicer one.
Bit more than just ‘not loading’ — certainly any email I receive that attempts to load remote resources is presumed to be malicious. (In this case, that presumption is correct.)
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OMG, a link to download a .doc!
Put it on the google docs someone^W OP please.
Scalability lessons from Google, YouTube, Twitter...
Do you mean the name? We refer to it as advertising pretty openly. That's what it is.
I don't quite agree that it's attacking his credibility. It seems that something happened, and we're trying to figure out what. Whether the author would have a reason to lie about it figures into the calculation, but is not the entire calculation. Thus, we must question him. It's intertwined with the issue at hand, no question.

I think HN is doing a fine job of arguing both sides.
Nice nostalgia. Now, where is my 100-core CPU?
What marketing speak? This is how I talk and I'm an awful marketer.
As a Disqus user, I did receive notification of this and did disable the new "Promoted Discovery" feature. I don't take issue with anything you have just said, except for the part where you call it "Promoted Discovery" instead of advertising.

Let's be real and call it what it is. I think that in this case, the "Promoted Discovery" term is confusing enough to where some users would think that the "Recommended" content really was selected by the content author. Jacques is irate at this, and rightly so. He did not pick the content, and it would appear to some users that he is endorsing things that he isn't.

That's all fun and games until something offensive or politically incorrect gets "Recommended"...
I don't think the politics break out quite the way you think.

For the 10 smallest states by population, 14 of the 20 senators caucus with the Democrats.

I think a radical electoral rewrite like this would probably help the Democrats in the Senate, but not by as much as you might think.
I would like to know what you can get in the Haight for $1500 / month. Not much I'll bet.
If a single person at Google understood/reviewed the 'Google OS', and then later also authorized/reviewed the 'Chrome OS', then the strong form of your (b) option, "absolutely no connection", is impossible.

Even without explicit sharing of code/people/documents, the earlier project would have served as an investigatory prototype and proof-of-concept, that indirectly encouraged or dissuaded certain later directions. So these 'true father' disputes get into shades of meaning and clashing-but-valid perspectives pretty quick.
Way, way better than the Adobe Air version. So satisfying to uninstall Adobe Air... Sure, it's got some bugs, but hey, it's beta! Love it so far.
Oh, he deserves a second chance. Just go ahead and stand in line, after those who have been doing their work honestly and still waiting for their first chances to come.
Steam for Linux Celebration Sale
Creators of Siri launch new iOS calendar app
I appreciate your response. For what it's worth, I like this map and I am a rural American (a citizen of "Shiprock," apparently). I'm aware of all and agree with most of your points.

What I am saying is that in the "rural bias" link they refer to the Senate as "overrepresenting rural citizens" and the point I'm making is that the Senate is not about representing citizens, it's about representing states. And it's meant to balance the House, which is about representing citizens. So the rural bias of the one ought to be adequately met by the urban bias of the other. The ethanol subsidy may be stupid and bad, I'd hardly put it in the top 10 problems we have. I think it would take a lot of spin to recast all our problems as inherited from the Senate and wide open spaces.

The idea that you're dominated by the whims of rural voters is a little absurd when we're both so clearly dominated by the whims of large corporations and special interests. To me, this is simply whining about the wrong problem, and a much harder problem to solve. It's not going to be fixed either by an amendment or by redrawing state lines, so what exactly is being proposed here? Nothing--it's simply a fun thought experiment. I just don't approve of fun thought experiments becoming vehicles for absurdist political melodrama.
Solely based on my post, I guess. I did apply to YC once with a stupid idea.
"Also, if we're playing the 'once upon a time' game, then I'd like to point out that historically, the US was one of the greatest users of slaves"

Nonsense. Slavery (or near-equivalents, such as serfdom) existed practically everywhere on the planet until quite recently in historical terms. Also, the number of slaves imported into the United States was dwarfed by the number imported into European colonies in Central and South America.

The Euros have had large-scale genocide and wars of conquest rather more recently than the U.S., too.
Hipchat is incredible. Simple, but for our company - it basically is the MAIN form of communication internally. It keeps our team connected in real time, around the world, in the office and on the go. It's a rare day when I get an email from anyone on our team because we're in constant communication via Hipchat all day, every day. Very excited about this native version - much faster.
The legalization of marijuana will utterly destroy this community. From the article, it sounds like weed facilitates a significant part of the economy as both a trade good and a consumable while LSD is a luxury item and hard drugs are not tolerated. Cheap weed will probably induce a net loss of value (that being the value of knowing how to procure it, and trading that value).
You are right. VirtualBox needs to load several Windows kernel drivers to function. So if the drivers are not already installed you’ll need administrator rights to run it. Portable-VirtualBox loads and then unloads this drivers when you use it, so it isn't truly portable in that way.

There are no way around this if you want to run the quest os directly on the cpu as VirtualBox dos. Otherwise you would have to use a emulator like Qemu, but then you would only get 1/20 of the speed or so.
Flowdock has its own issues, but it was still a better overall experience than what I had on [the previous] Hipchat.
I agree - I feel like the time would have been better spent implementing Adium/Pidgin plugins first.
Sorry, Geeks, Microsoft Excel is Everywhere
Too bad his message was lost by writing a 1,211 word article, explaining 2 different suspicious reviews, with multiple graphics, each with way too many words to read.

Would have been the perfect time to sit on his hands and hire a PR firm to tell the story. The details may be important in a courtroom, but potential customers just want to feel safe.

Now the story is two guys who don't like each other, screaming at each other.

Great lessons here for office politics. Or the playground.

Liar! You are! No, you are!
Nothing is free.

If it's free you, or the attention you provide / facilitate is the product.
Microsoft in fact LOVES Linux :)
I'll add a link to the HN discussion.

edit: ok link added at the bottom of the article. I hope that helps, I figured out belatedly that this may have been your way of making a joke but it is a useful addition so thank you for the hint.
Also note that Rails 4 will have threadsafe! on by default, too, so if you didn't have it on here, that'll make it different for those apps.
I'm sorry but I'd classify quite a few of my peers as non-technical and even as 20-somethings they don't even know what IRC is.
Success has many fathers ... although I guess it remains to be seen how much of a success Chrome OS turns out to be. I for one am rooting for it.
We're a biased set, in that most of us have, at least, the option for mentally stimulating work. As fucked as the software industry is, it's better than most other places.

Most of them are choosing one (purportedly, although I think I'm right that neither of us has tried it) brain-dead lifestyle over another one.

That's why I get irked when people talk about housewives becoming "braindead" from being outside of the economy. What makes the typical mind-numbing office life superior to a (supposedly) mind-numbing domestic existence?
s/talent/a worker bee/

it's not the world's fault there exists free-will.
My post showed that the OP was wrong -- it showed that using a trademarked name is not in and of itself actionable. There has to be a basis for action apart from the simple fact that the names are the same.
Wondering many make the move from GG park to Market Street... Where the homeless are a whole different breed.
Python trademark at risk in Europe
My bad. I guess Gecko isn't prolific enough to have major difference between versions/forks.
Oh for crying out loud.

Language is technology, clothing is technology, vegetables are technology, houses are technology.

The author is talking about people usurping modernity, not stretching the definition of technology to the point of absurdity.
Yeah this is pretty much it. The senate is there to help preserve the state's rights equally. Without it the larger states get an unobstructed bigger say over the smaller ones. Remember the federal government was setup to be very limited keeping most of the power in the hands of the states.
This says quite a bit about VT as well...

I disagree in this instance. This is about a large corporation acting in an anti-social manner.

In almost a reflexive manner, we've come to blame ourselves or local government for this type of action but that blame is misplaced. Corporations have obligations to society the same as individuals do.
Ok I'm taking your word. Amazing how a just few words can be so comforting.
It's probably a seed round and not an A round from the terms the round was raised. Typically an A round comes with different terms like boards seats, lead investors, pro-rata right etc. Also A rounds are always priced rounds with stock issued. Seeds are normally not priced and instead debt (convertible note) is issued.
A Chinese Hacker's Identity Unmasked
sure,

127.0.0.1 disqus.com

127.0.0.1 www.disqus.com

127.0.0.1 mediadcn.disqus.com

127.0.0.1 parsley.com

I also use a slightly modified hosts file from here:

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

it does a pretty good job of cutting out the crap but I had to add things to get rid of any facebook links, disqus links, etc...
I posted a feature request here, if you also care about this, please vote it up: http://help.hipchat.com/forums/190031-mac-beta-client/sugges...