skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought it was kind of well known: don't use Excel for floating point math, statistical analysis, anything moderately involved that would have to be reproducible and auditable

http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~bdm25/excel2007.pdf

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/78113

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeric_precision_in_Microsoft_...
Because you won't consume it in less than a day.

For the present time, 1TB is enough for almost all home users.

As history has shown us, these limits will increase as demand does.

And iiNet overage at $0.10/GB is pretty favourable as well… what does AWS charge again?
Well facebook can recognize your friends right now, so I would think if you give them a couple of hours they could find a match on a random photo. Provided that photo has actual face
Yes, profile pics (e.g. side of face) are hard but it is definitely feasible.
The narrator doesn't say it's his name, another character claims to have found out via internet research that it's his real name.
This is something I've seen before, and expect more of.

Municipalities[taxpayers] paying to build out infrastructure, "mismanaging it"[then usually underfunding the administration because everyone wants 'small government', and then having the infrastructure scooped up for peanuts by a private company who makes a killing.

It's actually happening right now in slow motion in my hometown.
Oh, I'm not suggesting Apple blacklist an app entirely. Rather, remove them from consideration from the Top Paid/Free/Grossing lists (or put them at the bottom). Maybe even remove them from keyword search results in more severe cases.

So you could still find the app by direct link or searching for the app name, but paying to increase rankings would be for naught. Like Google, Apple could then accept reconsideration requests that demonstrate the app is no longer the beneficiary of app store ranking manipulation.
Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3640291
Can anybody determine if he is still wearing his backpack?
You know the bitcoin exchanges are taking a transaction fee in the same way the credit card companies are, right?
In those days, BoA was really still 3 banks... BoA, NationsBank and Fleet. They had parallel systems with minimal interaction.
i was a bit surprised seeing this on top of HN - i feel its out of place. anyone else?
BBC America & Twitter Announce Content-Sharing Partnership
I'm interested in using org-mode to take notes in class. Anyone have any resources for getting started? I'm using latest OSX.
Economists figure these things out by looking at how much people value their own lives (e.g. how much of a salary increase people expect for high risk jobs). The figures calculated are surprisingly low (IIRC ~$300,000 for an Australian in the late 90s). You need to do this kind of analysis to do cost/benefit analysis -- e.g. should we spend money on making a road safer or building a new hospital?

According to Wikipedia -- $6-7M per life in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life
Different from each perspective! For handsome, smart, educated, awesome, people such as myself, it is a lifetime of treasures, hidden within RSI-inducing key bindings, no matter where on the keyboard one puts C and M.

For leprous, primitivist, stinky, bottom-feeding, monkey-scratchers, it may be a befuddling plethora of options and flexibility that forces the user to form their own opinions regarding the pursuit of goals.

Plus, they both give me something to clean out and start over every ten to fifteen years.
I saw the headline and was thinking the exact same thing. I live in San Jose, CA and hear shots at night a few times a week.
Well, if you're really programming in a function way, then you're not using side effects (or at least, the side effects are constrained). That means things are local, and you can safely compose functions without causing the behavior of other parts of the program to change.
You are confusing 'different' with '10 years behind'.

Let's just stipulate that fiber-optic and mobile internet infrastructure is light-years ahead of the US, since you say you are only talking about utilization.

So no, Japanese people don't tend to do Facebook. On the other hand, they have 2channel, which was launched when Zuckerberg was still jerking off to Asian porn at prep school, and which 1 out of 10 Japanese people use. It's completely anonymous and pretty much the opposite of Facebook, but it's still the Internet.

Just about everybody you see on the train, old grannies included, is sitting quietly, not talking, accessing some type of Internet-delivered content on their phone -- and we doing so well before "smartphone" was a word and when people were still stocking up on canned goods for Y2K. (I was a "PDA" developer back then.)

My Japanese mother-in-law, as is typical, is fully conversant in using Skype, Flickr, Google+ or whatever... to check our the latest baby pics. Not to post her own stuff, because she certainly wouldn't want to do that.

So if by 'the internet' you mean 'moving large aspects of their lives online' (in public, where others can see what they are up to), then no, people aren't really into that here.

Privacy is a way deeper concept in Japan, both pre-Internet and in the present day. Even if people write blogs, they are often totally anonymous. They avoid putting their names on their apartment mailboxes and shun transparent garbage bags so that their neighbors can't see what's in their trash, too.

That's different, but it's not '10 years behind' any more than Japan is '10 years behind in watching Survivor and Hardcore Pawn reality shows'.

(Disclaimer: I'm not Japanese, but I don't use social networks either, and I like it that way.)

[1]: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2010/04/06/reference/2chann...
Good to know. The package management is going to be particular interest to me.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/thelede/posts/susp...
Given your derision for the term "small government", I'd guess you think this is a corrupt practice and that such infrastructure shouldn't be sold. But--at least to a small-government-er like myself--this seems like even better evidence that the municipality shouldn't be trusted with building these things in the first place.
Random Number Generation in JavaScript
An MIT police officer was killed.

A university police officer has died after being shot on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge late Thursday, according to state police.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/18/us/cambridge-gunshots/index.ht...
That's been my feeling about it, too. Headcount and control rather than actual productivity. Also, I feel like middle managers have a terrible incentive profile. If an underling really shines, then it reflects well on the underling. If one underperforms or makes a mess, boss gets shat on for not keeping them in line. It's easy to rip on middle managers, but they have a shitty job and it's not their fault. It's just structured badly.

I think it's easier to understand why middle managers are the way they are once one understands their incentive structure. They participate in an employee's downside but not upside (she did it herself) so of course they're going to be the way they are.

I may be radical but I think open allocation is the only answer for software development. All the nonsensical process that grows up around closed allocation seems archaic and stifling. I think typical middle management is useless. What you really need are HR-independent mentors. Aside from mentoring, the other thing managers can do (firing) should be so rare in a well-run company that you only need one per few hundred people.
Thanks for this.

Kinda feels weird sitting in Jamaica listening to the police scanner around MIT.

Kinda awesome too - I know the tech is simple...but actually experiencing it, gives you this "world is small" feeling.
2% for all the fraud management seems like a fairly good deal all around.
Would this enhancement technique work since there is movement in the photograph and metadata may be available?:

http://robertgawron.blogspot.com/2011/01/super-resolution-al...
More details on it here: https://github.com/RobertGawron/supper-resolution/wiki
A redditor apparently worked out how tall one bomber is
I think the issue is that the city paid a bunch of money to build the system but still cannot run it for a profit. So the city has to keep paying ongoing losses for the system in order to run it. They can shut it down of course, but that would be a big black eye for the politicians. So they gave it away to Google, who promised to run it and provide free internet to people for a very low setup fee.
Facebook Launches Cost Per Action For Advertisers
The photo puts the suspect running down Fairfield street from Boylston Street running away from the second explosion scene: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/04/15/us/site-of-the...
I don't think he is.

Ref: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/thelede/posts/susp...
80% of life is just showing up.
.. brought to you by her Majesty's Civil service.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Minister
New way to browse Apple apps
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCYvc9F838E
Then shouldn't my original comment be the one that gets down-voted which is where I originally said IE's market share is minuscule, not my response to someone else's comment? I standby what I said. Considering Google does not support versions of IE below 9, Google too deems 1/3 of the Internet to be a minuscule proportion of users if they're fine dropping support.
P.S. It's not him.
I came here to say dwarf fortress but someone beat me to it. I will also suggest you look at The Wotch. It is a web comic. At one time the main author was getting enough in donations for it to be their sole or primary source of income. (I do not know the current status.) Another site that at least at one time supported the author in spite of their longish list of limitations is Hyperbole and a Half. Kind of webcomic-ish, kind of unique. She did not take donations or use ads. She was only comfortable selling merchandise and, at least for a time, that was her source of earned income.
The easiest thing to do is to install a variant of emacs on your machine (aquamacs is fine but stuck at version 23 of emacs). It probably comes with org already at this point.

I assume the things you'll want to track are facts and tasks. You'll want to capture as quickly as possible for later organization.

It really is as simple as typing to get started. Then you can go back later and re-organize your notes, tasks, etc. according to whichever system you prefer.

Some tutorials that seem to be well-paced for org newbies are available at http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/.

http://sachachua.com/blog/2008/01/outlining-your-notes-with-... (old, but you probably want the basics to get hooked first :-))

http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html (includes a good guide to the state of tasks, among lots of other things to orgify just about every aspect of your existence)
The "elders" never said that. They invented inheritance because there was a need for it.

Inheritance is a great way to maintain encapsulation in the face of a messy world. Unchecked composition quickly gets you to a world where everything has to be public anyway.
I'm not familiar with VC deals and such but how would something like monthly "stock-like" points work? each member of the team would earn points based on their time commitment for that month (year/week/whatever) and as their commitment or schedule changes, so does their point allocation. For example a cofounder who works fulltime for a year will still have some points/shares even if he leaves. If you recruit someone new then they start at 0 and gain more percents of the company the longer he works there. A persons total percent ownership would then be simply his points divided by the total outstanding number of points. The one downside would be the extra effort required to determine everyone's contributions but this system would allow dynamic allocation of the company ownership over time.
The reality isn't quite so simple.

Take the email case for example - while it's mildly annoying to the user to have to click on the link to read the message, it may be proven by data that by doing so they're improving their experience with the product in the long run.

Take a dating site as an example - you click on the link to read the message, which causes you to browse more profiles, which causes you to message a few more users - improving your chances of success overall and creating more interactions for other users. For a service whose goal is to get as many people interacting with potential partners as possible, the slight bit of anti-user design serves a greater purpose and improves the end experience not only for you but for the userbase as a whole.
There are things at play other than life or death. Let's say you work on campus. There's a shooting and you're freaking out and there all kinds of rumors circulating about what you should do. When's it safe to leave? Should you evacuate? etc. Having a central place where all of that is available is valuable to a huge number of people. Multiply that number by whatever monetary value you attach to that peace of mind and you end up with something that certainly justifies the cost.
I have no problem with the community helping to shape the language. But I think the difficulty in getting started with the language, due primarily to documentation problems and lack of good introductory material, is going to make it harder for people to get involved.

I know when Go was first released I immediately jumped in and started using the language. I was even the first non-google, non-@golang person to get their name in the CONTRIBUTORS list (because I wanted to modify the emacs go-mode, but still). But I feel like I can't even get started with Rust because I have no idea what I'm doing and the documentation isn't helping.

For example, right now I'm trying to whip up a really tiny program to test out the FFI. But the libc module's documentation is completely nonexistent. It's just a series of nested modules, which end up having nothing in them. I'm sure there's actually stuff in the modules, otherwise they wouldn't exist, but the documentation claims that they're empty. So I have no idea what I'm doing.
L1 regularization can also be used for feature selection[0] and hence dimensionality reduction. I've in found practice that the speed of this can compare favorably even to fast implementations[1] of svd.

[0] Feature selection, L1 vs. L2 regularization, and rotational invariance, Andrew Y. Ng. In Proceedings of the Twenty-first International Conference on Machine Learning, 2004. http://ai.stanford.edu/~ang/papers/icml04-l1l2.pdf

[1]"Augmented Implicitly Restarted Lanczos Bidiagonalization Methods", J. Baglama and L. Reichel,
SIAM J. Sci. Comput. 2005.
I agree the "on campus" line for MIT can be pretty fuzzy (between the open campus, frats/ILGs across the river in Boston and so on).

That being said, there are more objective measures we could use, such as "made The Tech" (outside the police log), which this already has.
The errors in question has nothing to do with inherent flaws in Excel (beyond, perhaps, the difficulty of reviewing Excel code). The problems were in decisions made to exclude data, arbitrary "analysis" with no basis in statistics or common sense (19 - IIRC - years of data from England were given the same weight as one year of data from New Zealand), and an egregious formula error that simply ignored several rows of data.
Hey guys, my name is Spencer Hawkins, I'm the co owner of hawki games and a google glass explorer. We've got a medical app for google glass that you would be perfect for. And are you interested in selling that anatomy app? I'm going to be a med student next year and could sell the hell out of it. I'd be interested in buying equity either way. You should change the name to something descriptive yet simple and make a big push into social media. All med school classes have Xxxxx school of medicine class of 2017 groups on Facebook this time of year. Infiltrate! Advertise. Your product is amazing and I'm going to sign up myself.

spencerhawkins@gmail.com
> I haven't read the book and dunno about PG's definition of spaghetti code, but "we can make all these types of modifications without even looking at the rest of the code" sounds like the opposite of what all people I know call sc.

That was exactly my thought as well, I had to reread the part twice to make sure. This is the definition of maintainable (or maybe even well-designed) code when all its parts are carefully isolated.
The Tech is "MIT's oldest and largest newspaper". https://twitter.com/thetech
Again, it's not arithmetic that's the cause.
No, Fuck Off
Somewhere around 2004 someone was shot in the head at a restaurant across from Random Hall as part of some drug related dispute. I heard the shot, but thought at first it was part of a video game my friend was playing. And that cook at the student center was stabbed not that long ago in some other dispute not related to students.
Sure, but recognizing a picture of one of your friends is a matter of searching O(100) people. Recognizing a picture of any Facebook user is a matter of searching O(100 million) people. It's a totally different problem, and there's no reason to think Facebook, which hasn't solved the smaller problem perfectly, could solve the larger problem at all.
It's looking highly likely this guy in the white hat could be the culprit. He was seen with a backpack earlier and in the newer high resolution image he does not appear to have his backpack any more. There could be a perfectly legitimate explanation for this: in the heat of the moment, his instinct was to run and leave his bag behind. Much like your instinct in a bad building or house fire is to run and save yourself. But then that would mean his bag would have been left behind and someone would have found it or reported it as being lost/authorities discovered it.

It's not looking good for whoever this guy is and if he's innocent, it would be in his best interests now we have a high resolution photo to turn himself in before a member of the public or worse members of the public find this guy and potentially harm an innocent person out of irrational anger. Another incriminating fact is Jeff Bauman the guy who lost both legs in the blast woke up heavily drugged in the hospital and said he had looked into the eyes of a bomber (which is no doubt what helped the feds narrow down the search). Lets keep level-headed about this and assist the authorities the best we can and let them do the investigating. If we all start jumping to conclusions and taking the law into our own hands we could do more harm than good. They'll find the culprit, it's only a matter of time.
Better Gmail Experience
Yes, the direction was created by ignoring swathes of contrary data and arbitrarily weighting the data that was included. The paper was unworthy of publication in a credible journal. Just correcting the latter eliminates their result, while the former would probably suggest the reverse effect.
Risk management.

Assuming the PHB can hire 10 junior devs or 1 senior dev at the same cost:

If you have 10 junior devs and 1 decides to quit, the PHB can swap him out fairly easily - he just has to wait for graduation day.

If you have 1 senior dev and he decides to quit, the PHB's hands are severely tied, especially if the company is located in a place where talent is lacking.

This is also the reason why mainstream languages will likely remain popular forever in the enterprise world - no one wants to take a chance on a language that only 5% of devs know.
But what could be the underlying reason, seeing as 10x programmers are only 1.5-3.0x as expensive?

I'd venture that it's because something like less than x% of all programmers are elite; where x is some number between 5 and 10.

In this case, if you are PHB and have a budget of y for staff (where y <= average) and time variable of z (where z <= average) for a release date - it would appear that you are an incompetent PHB if you believe you can hire an elite programmer to solve your problem(s).
What? Most of the business world runs on spaghetti code sold by successful software companies. Success has almost nothing to do with technical skill.
Some of our best programmers are well over 40. They're too smart to join ramen startups.
MIT has under 50 violent crimes per year.

They do have several hundred non-violent crimes per year.
This is a wonderful write-up.

I think I want to try, but given the current front-page status of this I think I will wait a week or so before emailing for my instructions.
I think you're grossly misrepresenting what they said. They didn't say you can't lose weight. They said that genetics dictates your general body shape, and that you're never going to end up looking like Adonis no matter how much you work out. You can certainly lose weight, get yourself healthier, and look better. But, as they said at the end of the video, you're probably not going to end up looking quite as good as you'd hoped, and it won't happen as fast as you hoped.
Tax day is a factor, but other anniversaries are likely to set off right-wing assailants. OKC and Waco both occurred in mid-April. Hitler was born and died in April (relevant only for certain brands of right-wing assailants).
From what I can tell, the actual issue in this case was that they simply summed the wrong thing, rather than ran into some floating point error.

Also, I haven't gone through the first paper, but that second link just seems to show how they generally conform to IEEE 754, except for three cases (div/0 errors instead of infinity, NaN errors immediately instead of allowing further computations, and [this one is a bit more important] they don't implement denormalized numbers). I'm not sure why that would mean Excel is terrible at floating point math.
Wow.

Next time take some effort to design a better shirt.

What's to stop you from taking the money and running?

Perhaps that's something Teespring could implement/enforce one day, for people collecting money for donations.
That sounds like a rather credulous statement in the face of regularly imposing restrictions in the ios ecosystem that punish or restrict users to damage a competitor. It's difficult to believe the ebook war was pro-customer for example.

They clearly usually make decisions in good faith, and generally fuck with the user less often than the competition. Unless it's a core strategic goal in which case they're arguably the worst.
Backporting bugfixes has a cost. Requiring 1.x to support IE15 pushes that cost onto the jQuery developers instead of where it rightfully belongs: migrating your app to a recent version.
I'm concerned about the creation of the infrastructure, rather than the operation of it. And no, I don't lose a lot of sleep over this, any more than I lose sleep over having my mail opened.
Facebook Prineville, OR Data Center Dashboard
Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt
Best sales pitch I've read in a long time. Makes me want to cancel everything for the next week and take a crack at them.
The figure was negative 0.1 percent (contraction) vs 2.2 percent (growth). Furthermore, Reinhart and Rogoff were careful to not link correlation with causation. Neither should we.
Many of these people don't care about "support" from Microsoft. They care about compatibility with some piece of mission critical software, whether it's a DOS-based app, an old FoxPro database that won't run on a newer release (compatibility mode what?), or an ancient version of Peachtree that can't be upgraded without going through ten intermediate versions.

Whether it's XP, 98, 95, NT, OS9, SCO, OS/360, etc. isn't really the issue. It's that customers need a reason to upgrade, and making life easier for a web developer is usually not that reason.
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