skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I'm (attempting) a critical listening of music. I prefer to explore it in it's larger context (typically as an album). Some 'albums', definitely not all CDs, have a greater architecture than any one song can completely embody, and thus the work is more meaningful in the larger context. (Think conceptual albums, etc.)

But I would definitely consider my casual day-to-day listening as song based.
Sound familiar? Apple launches a revolution - and then gets overtaken
Generally people mean "the top 1% of society at the moment in time we are discussing".

IIRC, there is actually quite a bit of circulation in that set, but I can't seem to google up the studies on that I saw (I can't come up with non-generic search terms). This mollifies some people and others consider it irrelevant.
"And finally, I have to say that just because a topic seems annoyingly complex doesn't mean it morally has to be simpler."

I'm OK with complexity. What I'm not OK with is the impression I get that there simply is no option that won't get shouted down. "Making the right choice is complex" is fine when compared to "there is no right choice".
In 14th century Venice, Jews were only permitted to live in an area of the city known as Ghetto. The word has since acquired many more layers of unpleasant antisemitic connotations, yet Ghetto is marked on tourist maps of Venice today.

Maybe Tokyo will eventually become as open about its history -- but before that can happen, quite a few people will have to stop thinking about others by 17th century Edo period standards, it seems.
Wouldn't it be odd if, out of all the seemingly unrelated systems in the universe, none of them turned out to be governed by similar maths?
In what sense are the poor poor? (Louis XIV didn't have a single TV. Poor people in the US typically have two.) Income seems to be a fairly bad way to measure poverty.

Note that income is an especially bad measure if they didn't account for non-taxable sources of stuff, as is typically the case in such studies. Since those sources provide a huge fraction of the "support" for poor people, failing to account for it makes the results highly suspect. Moreover, since it is well known that non-taxable sources are significant, failing to account for them ....
Of course the responses to this voluntary response poll will not yield a reliable picture of the break-down of the whole community, for reasons well known to statisticians.

http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...

http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=4582549&t...
The fact that there's a defined term for something isn't in any way relevant to that thing's cause.

Random events, by their nature, should not follow a pattern. But we find time and time again that not only do they form a pattern but that they form the same pattern as otherwise seemingly random events.

Put it this way. If you can see gas particles following the same pattern as wealth distribution among people and not at least question your views about a higher power than it's you who is being irrational (Note: I didn't say change your view I said question)
1.to_s(36) #=> "1"
10.to_s(36) #=> "a"
100.to_s(36) #=> "2s"
123456.to_s(36) #=> "2n9c"

Ruby. Where the number is the id of the record in the database or something.
1/8 = one slice of pizza

How does this even answer the question that was asked?

(It's hardly likely that an elementary teacher would need this suggestion, as all elementary math textbooks show fractions as slices of pies or pizzas.)

Do you mean because one-eight of a whole is 0.125 of a whole? That would be a good reason to teach the decimal representation of that fraction, if that is what you are suggesting.

P.S. Some pizza restaurants I frequent here cut pizzas into twelfths. This probably depends on local custom and the size of the pizza.
Thanks. Now I feel justified in thinking it was a dumb "feature" at the time. :)
Some albums are very deliberately structured to have a narrative, or otherwise stand as a whole, while some really are just a collection of individual songs. It depends more on the particular album than anything, though.

Also, there are other factors affecting the album format besides just the musicians' intent. I remember John Darnielle (of the Mountain Goats) mentioning during a show that in the UK, a single with more than three songs on it doesn't count toward single sales in the charts, so there are often several versions the same single with different B-sides rather than one EP with a few more songs. (Or something like that. Then again, he also said it was probably in the Magna Carta.)

FWIW, I tend to listen to albums, but in many cases it's just because I get attached to the sequence of songs.
Take the train or fly, buy a bicycle or walk and take the bus. This city isn't that car friendly but the transit is alright. You're not coming here to sit in traffic or improve your parallel parking skills, are you? Thought not :-)
Are you suggesting internet polls are not reliably accurate?

They are definitely not reliably accurate as representations of the realities they purport to represent.
They are definitely not reliably accurate as representations of the realities they purport to represent.

Yet certain parts of the news media treat them like proper statistical polls.
As Artie Johnson might have said, verrrry interestink, (long drag on cigarette, turn back to camera) but risky.
"It is well known that wealth is shared out unfairly"

We know no such thing. We know that wealth is distributed unequally (see, for example, the Gini coefficient). Whether or not an unequal distribution of wealth is unfair is a decidedly normative question - and beyond the purview of economists.

One of the many problems that I see is they assume that various attributes are independently normally distributed - which many studies have shown not to be the case. An individual's performance in a wide variety of seemingly unrelated disciplines tends to be highly correlated (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_intelligence_factor). Simply put, a person who is a great at one thing is also more likely to be good at other things.

Furthermore, there is no reason to expect the output elasticity of intellect to be anywhere near 1. Someone who is just the tiniest bit smarter than me may see a shortcut that they I don't that saves them a tremendous quantity of resources.

Study after study has shown that 'overpaid' people (sports stars, actors, etc) get paid a wage that is almost exactly equal to the marginal revenue they bring in - that is they are paid perfectly appropriately.
This poll is probably meaningless, but it is a good indication of how many people read HN on Sunday afternoon. 80 votes in 20 minutes, or so.

Edit: OK, actually 85 in 19 :)
I haven't given up on them, I just see that part as a legitimate disagreement. And the only reason I made that assertion is because you appeared (to me at least) to have given up your earlier claims, when you said "Using unambiguous and factually accurate terminology in the interface is not arcane or secret just because the meaning is not immediately obvious to all potential users." Can we call this done now? :)
Is that matters online?
Up voting because I don't want to see your comment at zero... but, one man's underlying structure is another's approximate model. Approximate, precicley so that you can share the model between systems, while still having something you can imagine you understand.

Do we uncover truth in the motion of atoms, or create models in our minds as play things?
One Big Problem.
Warren Buffett's New Words of Wisdom
That was zen-like. The perfect 5 minute mind relaxer - like an interactive version of Eno's Oblique Strategies.
Of course a large number of random events do tend to form known patterns/distributions. Go read any introductory statistics books - and pay particular attention to the chapters on random walks and outcome distributions.
We keep hearing about, when is it going to be available (so we can see if all this hype is true or not)?

http://www.wolframalpha.com/ still says "Launching May 2009" and it's now May 3rd.
They released an update to allow adblock users to see adds on their site enabled by default.
Random events, by their nature, should not follow a pattern.

Just because you intuitively feel some concept is true, doesn't make it so. For example, the idea that heavy objects fall faster than light objects is very intuitive and was Aristotelian common sense until Galileo had the good sense to actually test the idea. Of course, it turns out that idea is not correct.

It is sometimes difficult to understand new abstractions like spontaneous order. But, I think it is worth trying.

Here are some articles to use as a starting point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_order
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automata
Zotero looks way cool- I'm going to check it out. I know you can view your notes online, but is there a Zotero iPhone/iPod Touch app that I could use to load my notes locally and edit them on my iPod Touch?
> Random events, by their nature, should not follow a pattern

When a woman gives birth to a child, it is random whether it is a boy or a girl. But there is a pattern: when 100 women give birth to a child each, we expect 50 boys and 50 girls.

This article made me question how we think about the interactions between people, that you could make the same distinction in economics as we do between statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.
Again, the nature of this conversation is "why" something happens. So saying it happens and it's statistics is not a rebuttal to me suggesting a possible explanation as to why it might happen.
I don't think so. As with any drug abuse, your body develops a tolerance to caffeine. Over time, you develop a drug dependance on caffeine; you require more caffeine to feel as awake as you did before your drug dependance developed. Thus, there is no net beneficial effect.
FTA: "Community ... If you want to use Prgmr you are pretty much on your own."

That alone is reason enough for me to stay with Slicehost.

This article is weighted towards performance aspects. When judging any service provider, I'd hope people here are wise enough to consider other factors as well.

I've heard great things about Linode and may try them if I ever get a chance–but between Slicehost and Prgmr, nothing I see would make me consider switching (I have 9 slices with SH).

I may be off base, but even though Slicehost is more expensive, that doesn't mean they aren't a better value.

1. Slicehost's support is great. Quick responses to tickets and very helpful people in the chatroom

2. Slicehost's articles–while free to anyone–make me want to support them for the willingness to contribute knowledge.

3. Their DNS tool is very handy

4. I'm sure the prgmr.com team is very competent and I hope they do well. But their site does little to instill confidence in me.
I don't, and could tell you bad stories about it. I used to manage another hostel (below) and we got quite a few 'refugees' who had had a bad experience at the Mason one. I rate the International Guest House at 2976 23rd street. Call ahead and see if they have a spot free. There's only room for about 24 people. It's cheaper, there's free coffee, and if you have the right attitude it's easier to extend your stay (frankly, this basically depends on whether you're cool or not). It helps if you make up some BS like you just came back from Europe or something - they want you to have some evidence of internetional travel if space is at a premium.

Downsides/danger include attractive people of both sexes, easy availability of booze and weed, failure to complete coding projects because you stayed up until 3am the previous night. The main benefit is that the place is low turnover, so your friendships there aren't transient like at a lot of bigger hostels. Mind you, I haven't kept in touch for about 4 years, and lots of places go through different phases.
Random thoughts:

If you're looking for summer sublets around universities, have you considered Davis? It's an hour and some away with no traffic, but cheaper, and uh, a lot hotter. I don't know anything about the department but I've been impressed by UC Davis recent grads in CS /EE i've worked wtih.

people start hacker houses at random intervals

http://searchyc.com/hacker+house
FWIW, Firefox + X11 uses about 80% of two CPUs to render the demos. (I assume it is trying to use as much CPU as possible to keep the framerate up, but it is only one thread. X is using the second CPU.)

I have not had Flash installed for many years, but I never remember it using much CPU to produce smooth animations.

I think this is a problem, as nobody wants their browser using much CPU. (Using the CPU isn't a problem unless you are running on battery power. The problem is that the framerate will become unacceptable when offlineimap or whatever kicks in in the background.)
As long as they gave you the ability to compose elements, I'd be all over a circuit simulator that started out with nothing but NAND gates. :)
I am surprised you haven't gotten -28 points for this response. HN used to be better than this. The death of Flash is critical to survival of the web as we know it.

The flash poses so many threats that I don't even know where to begin: it is closed, i.e. not controlled by the community, is binary and not text-based, puts new hardware platform manufacturers at Adobe's mercy, it violates nearly all common software "behavioral standards" on all platforms it attempts to run, i.e. configuration/control of basic things like scrolling, zooming, printing, font rendering, security, keyboard handling, etc. Flash ignores ALL settings in your browser with an exception of proxy configuration, just like their PDF plug-in.

Platform control is dangerous: we just beginning to escape from Microsoft hell, and the last thing I want is to depend on Adobe: imagine starting a new portable hardware platform business: you'll have to beg Adobe to release their fucking plugin for your new awesome phone, and hope it won't drain your battery in an hour, or annoy your users with "Time to Upgrade!" popups.

I am surprised that people from Mozilla, Apple, Opera and Microsoft STILL haven't gotten together and pushed out an emergency release of their browsers with an awesome built-in support for <video> and <audio> tags.

I, however, am certain that Flash will disappear. Eventually browsers will become good enough, that whatever else Adobe will come up with won't be enough to convince developers to steer away from HTML. Besides, Adobe doesn't have any engineering muscle, I'm sorry if this sounds too personal, but they just can't code and ultimately they don't stand a chance competing with Mozilla/WebKit or Microsoft's Silverlight - they're in another league.
Bah!

I thought it was an open source Google Bigtable project.

Noo, it is "Dot com meltdown survivor and restaurant reservation software company OpenTable".
Correlation != Causation

Is it any surprise that the kind of people who save up a huge amount of money to make a down payment and are consistently responsible enough to always make large mortgage payments are 'good' people?

By 'good' I simply mean the kind of people who abide by laws, encourage their children in their school work, take an active interest in local government, etc.

This reminds me of a program they had in Illinois where the state decided to send books to all new parents. Some study found that children who grew up in houses with lots of books did better on a wide variety of metrics so the government reasoned that sending books to parents would somehow help the kids. It never occurred to them that the key was that type of people who bought/read a lot of books where also the type of people who were better parents.
Again saying something exists is not a rebuttal to why it exists. Also, any intuitive feeling I have that something is random is irrelevant when discussing how something is not random.

Put it this way. Ask any atheist why we have religion in the world and they'll generally give you the same answer. Humans have a need to put order to the universe so they invent benevolent deitys to give them that sense of order.

But if we discover, as we gain more and more knowledge through science, that there in fact is an order to the universe doesn't that least SUGGEST that MAYBE there is a higher power?
At the time I voted, it was 96.6% male (143/148).

I find it hard to believe that our community (hackers) is 96.6 % male.

I don't find it hard to believe that hacker news readership is 96.6% male.

Does hacker news "attract" a more male readership?

Or is the population already this skewed?
Of course, these could eventually be fixed, but I think Adobe's smart enough to make sure that Flash doesn't stand still.

Flash has the same problem as IE -- nobody upgrades it, so you can't use new features unless you have something very cool to offer. (YouTube may convince people to upgrade Flash, but your advertisement sure isn't going to.)

Anyway, Flash's big advantage is its IDE. A non-programmer can produce simple animations... and I don't think that's possible yet with Processing + JS.

The performance issue is not too worrying -- the new JavaScript VMs should make this problem go away.

It would also be possible for browsers to support most video formats natively, and allow JavaScript to control the playback.
About who and why, back in 1985. Didn't know someone had actually 'tested' the message length.
I take it you don't. Is it because you think there are no meaningful differences across sexes? Really, give this a shot: http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm.
The thing that made it click for me while watching Wolfram's presentation was emphasis on computable knowledge. Google excels at finding anything that someone, somewhere, has explicity written out. With a few narrow exceptions, it does nothing to help you synthesize information. Alpha is likely to be a poor source of finding most kinds of information but an excellent source for synthesizing what information it has.

In other words: Google can help you find things like a phone book can help you find things, Alpha can help you find things like a calculator can help you find things.
Sound familiar? <AnyCo> enjoys success and gets copied. Yawn.
Certainly both are heavily skewed to males. For example, in my Internet & Web Systems class, there are 25 guys and 3 girls.
and make sure to redirect with a 301
Well now I really want to see the uncensored maps. Anyone got a link?
Google search tricks
Slightly related PG quote:

I didn't realize it till I was writing this, but that may help explain why there are so few female startup founders. I read on the Internet (so it must be true) that only 1.7% of VC-backed startups are founded by women. The percentage of female hackers is small, but not that small. So why the discrepancy?

When you realize that successful startups tend to have multiple founders who were already friends, a possible explanation emerges. People's best friends are likely to be of the same sex, and if one group is a minority in some population, pairs of them will be a minority squared.

Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html
He did this by including obfuscated code that modified the internal state of Adblock Plus without notifying the user.
Not a bad idea for a restaurant name in SV... The Open Database, 24 tables, no waiting.
If you believe Roy Baumeister, men are more invested in broad, shallow social networks. Much like this one.
Don't know about Amex Blue, which a business certainly isn't using, but all charges on Amex Gold and Business cards are due when the statement arrives. I'm pretty sure you're wrong about Amex's idea of a perfect customer.
Perhaps your first query to Alpha should be "how many days in May"?
I just tried to add a url to your service and a captcha popped up saying I am trying to add URLs too fast.

Never seen a url service require a captcha. Especially not on first use.
It's tough even to get on the hill, but someone has just
gone top. I've removed email addresses.

Program Name Score W / L / T Age
================ ===== =========== ===
1 dani 687 229/ 21/ 0 1
2 medusa2 675 225/ 25/ 0 37
3 penfold 657 219/ 31/ 0 110
4 noddy 639 213/ 37/ 0 109
5 stingray10 624 208/ 42/ 0 113
6 stingray2 612 204/ 46/ 0 175
7 stingray3 609 203/ 47/ 0 116
8 stingray 600 200/ 50/ 0 218
9 finiculo 579 193/ 57/ 0 75
10 wilma 571 190/ 59/ 1 394
11 evader 546 182/ 68/ 0 216
12 edgar 526 175/ 74/ 1 642
13 wotcha 521 172/ 73/ 5 161
14 quaver 507 169/ 81/ 0 256
15 tommy 479 158/ 87/ 5 823
16 fox-014 477 159/ 91/ 0 716
17 ths7h5 444 148/102/ 0 939
18 radar 441 147/103/ 0 24
19 polarbear 438 146/104/ 0 736
20 wobble 417 139/111/ 0 441
21 girosculo 405 134/113/ 3 185
22 v3 381 127/123/ 0 771
23 whiper++ 369 123/127/ 0 686
24 jelly 339 113/137/ 0 439
25 mi5 333 111/139/ 0 614
26 snaylle-11 332 108/134/ 8 307
27 pipes 322 107/142/ 1 474
28 crbot 317 105/143/ 2 970
29 megatron 316 105/144/ 1 14
30 v 308 98/138/ 14 382
31 ratchet 303 101/149/ 0 55
32 razor 291 97/153/ 0 376
32 minim 291 97/153/ 0 259
34 whiper_v2 289 96/153/ 1 887
35 phoenix1 252 84/166/ 0 340
36 wolfhound2 249 83/167/ 0 448
37 duelo 246 80/164/ 6 186
38 5150 244 81/168/ 1 776
39 phoenix 240 80/170/ 0 345
40 kamikaze 237 79/171/ 0 901
41 pugna 229 74/169/ 7 362
42 wrobot 223 74/175/ 1 332
43 testy 221 73/175/ 2 471
44 goodness1 220 73/176/ 1 330
45 noob_out_2 218 72/176/ 2 336
46 zquare 215 69/173/ 8 348
47 robo_basic-03 213 71/179/ 0 368
48 vugluskr 212 62/162/ 26 238
49 losango3 106 35/214/ 1 2
50 losango 97 32/217/ 1 4
They seem to spend a whole lot of time describing how Apple "launched a revolution", and very little on the key point in the headline which is that they've supposedly been "overtaken" (a couple of very vague and unenlightening closing paragraphs, along with a lazy and completely inappropriate comparison to the Apple II).
"pairs of them will be a minority squared"

A mathematical answer to a social question. Beautiful!
There are a lot of women who get involved starting companies as someone's significant other, though, so I don't think that's entirely true.
The true magnitude isn't the point, the relative change is, and limiting the graph to a specific sub-range makes it easier to read because it is is more straight forward to following the tick lines to the actual label numbers on the Y-axis. There are a lot of ways to misrepresent data, and data on graphs, but this isn't one of them. These graphs are especially nice because the Y-axis labels are in a largish font, so it's more difficult to misinterpret the scale.

I do have a minor problem with the last graph though, "Monthly supply of homes for sale". Since this is meant to compare existing homes to new homes, the line graph and the thickness of the line doesn't convey enough of the target information; this would be better done as a bar graph, with two bars, one for existing and one for new, for each year.

I had a boss once who made graphs with three Y-axes on them (two on the left and one on the right) and multiple X-axes, all in different scales, mixed linear and exponential. He tried to use different colors, but would then print it out in greyscale. They were extremely hard to read and get anything useful out of, which I always thought was part of his goal.
Do women hang out in online hacker communities?

Generally, no, and here's why: http://xkcd.com/322/
Do you really need a poll for this? Just like every other tech site it's a bunch of 18-35 year old dudes sitting around clicking reload every 20 minutes.
The poll author did forget the 'dog' option (as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_y... )
I agree about the disk access. Disk is by far the weakest part of my system. I do provide you mirrored disk, putting me ahead of the low-end ec2 stuff, but you are sharing that mirror with a lot of people.

Fortunately, more ram can usually make up for slow disk.

I am working on a zfs based network storage system that just might solve the problem and then some, but it's not anywhere near ready yet.