skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't realise until this article that Alpha != App.net. Now that I do, a couple of problems spring to mind:

* For startups, user acquisition often remains the biggest hurdle to success. Here they have to sting the user for a monthly subscription even to try the app. Asking people to open their wallets is going to massively reduce the people a startup get through the doors.

* There are billions of active users on Facebook. It is the de-facto platform for interaction for most people. Why does the user want to change? Saying "but now you won't be the product, the platform will be" won't make clear to most users what advantage their might be. They'll respond "so I have to pay to be connected to less friends?".

* The two above problems are cyclical and exasperate one another.

I like the idea, I just think there are a lot of problems that are going to get in its way.
I once took a medication through a skin patch. The same issue: the generic did not deliver the medication consistently at all. The patch was supposed to be replaced every three days, so I'd get a huge rush of medication the first day and next to nothing the last day. What was worse was that there were two generics. One was as described, the other actually was fine.

The moral, for me, is to be very cautious with generics. I believe most of them are fine (I would never pay full price for Tylenol :), but the more critical the medication is to me, the more research I will do on the generic.
Ask HN: Looking for a hosted job board solution...
I'm looking for a hosted job board solution for a site that I'm getting ready to launch. I would also consider an open source solution but only if it is quick and easy to deploy and setup. Can anyone make any recommendations? Thank you.
Excel's main limitations (disclaim: I haven't upgraded to 2013 yet)

- you can't easily audit a spreadsheet unless each cell only refers to cells immediately above or to the left. Otherwise it's GOTO and COMEBACK programming. "referentially opaque probabilistic graph programming"

- Control-] lets you see where a cell is referenced in other formulas, but only if the formula is on the same tab. Control-[ does take you to other tabs. Control-` shows you a wall of formulas

- there's no easy way to track significant digits and sources of floating point error, e.g. adding numbers that are orders of magnitude different.

- in the past, underflow has even been a security issue

http://www.checkpoint.com/defense/advisories/public/2011/cpa...

- you can't report bugs, or see their tracker, that I know of

http://connect.microsoft.com/ (i'll save you the time, Excel isn't on 2 lists

- you can't go to extended precision, Rationals or unlimited precision integers or floats when you need.
It makes them look like bozos instead of liars.
No use if the worksheet has thousands of rows.
Link for the curious:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+last+questi...
They didn't go into hiding or leave because they didn't think they needed to. It seems pretty clear they they didn't want to be caught.

From what I can tell, numerous people called in after the photos were released. Even if Thursday's events hadn't taken place, the police would have known the identities of both suspects shortly thereafter.

It just seems crazy to me not to acknowledge the role of investigators in all of this and chock it up to luck.

As for the edit you just made about the bombs in Hanover: are you implying there's a link to the Marathon bombers? Seems like conspiracy theory reaching - unless there's some sort of evidence you'd like to share.
> If you want to take this stance, you need to be criticizing psychiatry ...

When I talk to psychologists, they invariably say the problem is with psychiatrists. When I talk to psychiatrists, they invariably say the problem is with psychologists. But if human psychology were a science, this lame dodge would not exist, because both psychology and psychiatry would be united by a single theoretical framework, like the one that unites cosmology and particle physics (i.e. the Standard Model).

Particle physicists attend cosmology conferences, and cosmologists attend particle physics conferences, for the reason that both fields have the same theoretical framework and because discoveries in either field affect the other. And because physics is a science.

Psychiatrists don't attend clinical psychology conferences, and clinical psychologists don't attend psychiatry conferences, for the reason that there is no theoretical framework that unites psychiatry and psychology, and that, in turn, is because psychology is not a science.

> (and a psychiatrist actually is a medical doctor)

Yes, but a psychiatrist's medical degree is in general medicine, not psychiatry. There is no mental doctor, there are only physical doctors. The existence of a medical degree program in advance of psychiatric training is just a way to confer an unearned status to psychiatry.

When you call a psychiatrist "doctor", you are acknowledging his medical training, not his psychiatric training. If psychiatry were a science, of course, this would all be different.

Any questions?
4D Printing: Multi-Material Shape Change: MIT 2013
I don't want IRC. I want HipChat (inline images, ability to directly upload & share media, persistence, good searching, integrated video, HTTP API) but with non-shit native clients. IRC is a fucking dinosaur, I feel something like this doesn't have the capability to really improve the situation.
I might not be, but I also don't post on Hacker news saying that I am.
One problem of particular concern for many budding statisticians is the difference in the way Student's t-distribution and the Normal distribution are handled. The Excel functions for the t-distribution split the probability into two tails, but the functions for the Normal distribution did not. This made it quite a pain when doing some calculations with both large and small sample sizes. Newer versions of Excel have "fixed" this by adding a flag to the t-distribution functions that let you choose whether you wanted to use single tailed probability or two tailed probability. But this flag has not appeared on the functions for the normal distribution and thus the functions for these two similar distributions are still inconsistent.

Another annoying issue was the autocorrelation in the random number generator (a very bad thing for a random number generator). The main rand() function is now corrected but the problem lives on in the randbetween() function, which shows that these two related functions are using separate RNGs instead of them both tapping into a single good RNG. It's very frustrating if you want to do any real work in Excel because you can't trust the built in functions.
Browser marketshare is not a constant, it totally depends of your business. At my current job it's:

- ~55% Chrome
- ~35% Firefox
- ~5% Safari
- 1.5% IE 9+10
- 1% Opera

So for us it make sense to use API even less supported than WebWorkers, like http://caniuse.com/pagevisibility

But if I was working for a chinese market place, or a bank intranet I'm sure it would be 80% IE6.
It didn't take over the world, and I don't expect to either.

Some people go live on a farm and herd sheep, I herd servers.

Another thing I took away from that is that closed source software dies with their author. Open source lives forever.
What BS - Gunpowder is not the only way to make a bomb (see TX fertilizer plant explosion).

I bet everyone in Boston wished they had a gun the day the terrorism suspect was on the loose in their neighborhoods.
Like getting by for 24 hours until I can put shoes on? I need the government to tell me I can't ease things for a day?
Re-write your post. You said Molyneux showed something about the average human. You can't backpedal that into a statement not involving Molyneux.
What are Tesla's wrong/a bit off predictions?
How to Overcome Information Overload: The Death to Bullshit [PRESENTATION]
In business terminology, a common English phrase would be "first-mover disadvantage".
I think he meant

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+may+entropy+be+rev...
I agree that you should not immediately write off something, but there is definitely a need to lead/mentor people in the right way. When pg says, "I am worried..." he is doing the same thing as these quotes: expressing doubt.

That is what makes it so tough. As an entrepreneur you are hearing criticism often, sometimes it a super helpful and you need to change direction, other times it means you are onto something HUGE. It is difficult to decide which one it is.
I'm no expert on this, but just guessing here: have pills been around longer than patches? Perhaps manufacturing pills is better understood/easier to get right, so you are probably safe with generics in pill form, but will want to double-check on generics in any other form.
Not all studies are effectively blinded, nor effectively randomised.

Merck-funded researchers trivialised the problems of Vioxx. Those researchers were not evil or stupid. Subtle influences are hard to spot in yourself.

When you look at the data there's a remarkable gap between independently funded studies and company funded studies. It's very clear that studies funded by companies more often show benefits and less often show harm. (There are several published studies on this.)

And even if the blinding and randomising is effective there's no requirement to publish. Thus, a company can run ten trials and only publish the one that's positive.
By asking the right questions. In this case by aiming to find no significant difference between the 3 drugs under study then making sure the sample size was too small to find a difference no matter what.
But the R&R error had almost nothing to do with Excel. The same mistake could have been made with R or pen and paper. They were careless in a way I wouldn't expect a high schooler to be careless. Not in some way that Excel did something unexpected.

It would be like blaming C# because you did foreach over collection A, rather than collection B.
That's way cooler, you're right.
Fair point.

TRC offers persistence via ZNC. Some of the other points are offered by some clients.

File sharing is a work in progress for TRC, but a very important feature to me.
Unfortunately, this only seems to work on the remote named 'origin'. If your branch corresponding to GitHub is named something else (ie, 'github'), it won't work.

Nice work otherwise, though - I've been thinking about writing something like this for my own purposes in Go for a while now; glad to see someone else had the same problem.

If I have some time later today, I'll put in a pull request... unless someone beats me to the punch.
As someone with a family history of mental illness, I try to keep a close eye on my mental state, and it's surprising how much can affect it. Apart from drugs that shouldn't be affecting mental states, even different types of food and how much exercise I get can have noticeable impacts. Those EFA fish oil pills? Not just good for your heart . . .
On the $(document).ready call change:

var d = new Date(element.name);

to

var d = Date.parse(element.name);

This will solve the "undefined NaN, NaN:aN PM" issue.
Basically this alone may have significantly change the course of several European nations for the next decade because of policy made on the that paper. NPR's Planet Money team just released a podcast [1] that goes into the basics of that.

Last year my company was having supply chain issues. We have complicated 3 tier supply chain for a critical component with odd shipping restrictions and mix of batch and continuous process and other items. We don't control the the vendors but pay on yield and know what material enters and leaves each supplier. We desperately needed insight into why we had delivery issues as the suppliers were not very forth coming understandably.

I was tasked with writing an app that let analysts run dozens of scenarios and give allow them to tweak all aspects of our models to gain insight into yield and schedule. I could have written a python script or Java or C# app (since I dont have SCM or MES software) or I could write an Excel spreadsheet. In 2 weeks, I wrote a spreadsheet that modeled the basics including complicated recycling and exposed everything to analysts. We debottlenecked several logistics issues with that and kept the business running and that spreadsheet still is updated daily. I can guarantee writing an engine+ui+reports in any language and allow the level of flexibility Excel provides would have taken me 6 months or more. The SCM or MES software would ultimately serve all of companies better but who has $200K-$1M+ to spend on these things for every issue when $200 + 2 weeks can get you 80% of the way.

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/04/19/177999020/episode-...
I worked in clinical trials and you are totally out to lunch on how they worked. Saying the FDA has no power is the dumbest thing I have ever heard and belongs on a conspiracy website, not HN.
Economic majority will ALWAYS win by definition.
My Favorite Entrepreneur Story in a Long Time
The related term "mental load" seems to be a few years older, coming mostly from precursors to HCI, such as industrial ergonomics. Here's a use from 1961, also paywalled, but with the abstract available: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140136108930502

It's also used in this 1961 paper, which looks at spare mental capacity of car drivers compared to the mental load imposed by various driving situations: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140136108930505

Here's the crude Google ngrams view of some of the variant terms: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cognitive+load%... The "mental load" data is polluted by OCR errors like "supple- mental load" though, especially earlier on.
Yes, when I read that I made sure to note the year. It is true, he was not far off.

I would love to see what else he said around this sentence, maybe he did recognize the huge non-commercial potential but this is the only sentence that got attention.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2013/02/14/bad-pha...

This is a good critique of only one aspect of Goldacre's book, but it's a good one.

However, since was written by a former pharma exec, I'm sure people will dismiss it without reading it.
It's worth noting that stackoverflow has some wiki blood in it; if an answer is out of date, you can edit it.
Same here -- loving crouton, and development in general, on the ARM. I was already doing just about everything in the browser and terminal before I got the Chromebook, so I was happy to get a machine with, as simon_weber said, "Linux that just works." I assumed I would just ssh into my servers for development work, but crouton has given me a full local dev environment as well, so I have everything I need at this point.

Thanks for the article, Simon. My setup is pretty much the same, except that I haven't tried out mosh yet: https://gist.github.com/gsf/5377654.
> "FastR is can run the R implementation of the Language Shootout Benchmarks."

Can someone show us the results of these benchmarks? As recently discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5565056, http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/ lists only the most popular implementation of each language, so it seems like they'll never show up there.
I find it rather annoying that someone on HN will complain about the price of a service no matter how low it is. $20 per month is absolutely nothing. Most of the other team chat services cost more, and for good reason. Businesses are more than willing to pay a lot of money ($20 is not a lot) for software. Broke college students are not a good target demographic.
For some things (socialization, substance use patterns, etc.), you'd expect different results on college students than on other populations, so you'd need to run additional experiments to determine if being a college undergrad moderates whatever effect you study.

For other things, like perception, drug effects, etc., it seems less likely that this is actually a problem, because there's no reason to believe the neural pathways that acetaminophen operates over are different between any two humans.
Notes from AWS Summit NYC
So free is too little. The registration fee was what? $10, $50, $100? Anything above that is just domaining.
Two billion dollars on how much revenue? What are their capital investments? You have to remember pharma has laid off over 100,000 employees in the last few years due to a lack of new products.

I know a lot of people don't like drug advertizing, but you do realize that it gets a lot of people to their doctors talking about their health right? And it's not like a patient can prescribe a drug for themselves, its the doctor who ultimately decides which treatment to pursue.
Simpler workflow tools enable the rapid deployment of models
The struggle for existence being lessened, there should be development along ideal rather than material lines.

Insight into why he pursued his extraordinary ideas so passionately.
I just changed the format of the column to "text" from "auto" and kept using it for my thesis work. It's too useful to bail on because of a quirk like this.
> As for trust, what's wrong with writing the laws to assume less trust of institutions?

No law that has any utility can be written in a way where you can assume you don't trust the institution enforcing it. It's like writing an OS kernel assuming you can't trust ring 0 code.
I love companies that try to make modern use of IRC and monetize that :-) It's a dinosaur but it works and somehow still has a lot of users. Chicken egg problem? Network effect? Nerd 1337ness?

shameless plug: We're offering hosting for Quassel(cores), a distributed IRC client that enables access to the same user/backlog from multiple different devices: http://woboq.com/quassel.html
I just upgraded, and it seems quite snappy. Definitely see the performance upgrades working. Good job Ember team!
Don't see this as me putting you down. I just wish people started working on the next generation of group chat (which is a HUGE field) rather than just piling more of the same on top of old stuff.
Nice image, but what is its source?
The cheapest Campfire plan is $12 per month and the second cheapest is $24. HipChat is $2 per user per month. 20 euros per month with no user limit is entirely in line with this pricing.
It's good to educate the buying public about how much it really costs to make something like this and how hard it is to recoup that. I hear people grousing about $3 apps and it drives me nuts.

The new era of apps is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we've got these obscenely low prices... but on the other hand, people are actually buying software. That's a bigger deal than most folks realize. Before the iOS era, people basically just didn't buy software. I mean, geeks did if there was some specific tool they needed, and gamers bought games of course... but the run-of-the-mill normal person? At most they bought MS office and maybe got hoodwinked into picking up Norton when the trial expired on their computer.

Now? Jane Q. Soccermom buys programs and games. That's a huge shift.
I'm confused. Are you saying that the package ecosystem is what makes R attractive, or that it's what makes it inscrutable?
Before someone attempts to nitpick, 20 euros per month is nothing as well.
I still think in the long run Tent is the superior approach. App.net will do what every company does, and it doesn't matter how unevil they seem.

Open protocols like SMTP, HTTP, XMPP and Tent are the way to go in the future.
Programming is a mental juggling act. If I get distracted or stop unexpectedly, all the things come tumbling down to the floor and go bouncing and rolling to all corners of the room. It takes a lot of effort (and is no fun at all) to gather the things close, pick them all up, and start juggling again in an attempt to re-synchronize the moving parts in mental thin air.
A true classic. This comes up in discussions among my friends often. It's at the point where someone can just say "that's the Last Question," and everyone knows.
The problem is that any non-perfect automated system will wrongly convict so many civilians as being terrorists that nobody will trust it anymore.

Let's say that you want to catch terrorists creeping around in your airport. To do this, you have a magic camera that, when it takes a picture of a civilian, compares it to a picture of a known terrorist. If they're in fact the same person, it will flag security over. Let's say that it is indeed a magic camera and makes the correct decision 99.99% of the time, which is far better than the current state of the art[1].

Do you have any idea how much DHS or DoD would pay for such a magic camera?

But it won't be enough.

Consider a watch list of 100 terrorists that we're looking for in our airport. If our camera compares each civilian's picture to all 100 terrorists in succession, and if we model each comparison as a Bernoulli trial, then each civilian has a 0.9999^100 = 99.004% chance of getting through security unfazed, which means we flag innocent people as terrorists about 1% of the time.

This doesn't work in an airport setting. Assuming 5,000 people pass through your small airport per hour and you have a 14-hour day, that means your security people have to go through 0.01 * 5000 * 14 = 700 false alarms each day. That's about 1.2 false alarms per minute. Your security people will have to go through all their checks each time this happens. Before long, they're going to stop trusting your magic camera.

As you scale your watch list up, it gets worse. How well would it work for 1,000 people on the watch list? 10,000? Note that the current US watch list has 50,000 people on it.

Even if it were a perfect magic camera, it coudln't catch terrorists on their maiden crime who aren't on the watch list at all.

(Most of this post was adapted from: http://vast.uccs.edu/~tboult/tmp/IJCB11-tutorial-boult.ppt , which is a really interesting presentation if you're interested in these sorts of things.)

1: http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html
> but they do make uptake among regular people slower.

Which is not a problem at all! In fact it's good and a sign of bitcoin's success: a free market is self-regulated.

> Governments are not rational.

Well, even if they succeed killing bitcoin (which I doubt) bitcoin won by making a government spend millions of dollars (bear in mind $1.2M is the current price even before ASICs got mainstream) and a lot of time/effort killing a currency that will probably just migrate to an alternate blockchain in a couple days without much effort.
I work in Waltham (which is directly adjacent to Watertown) and it never even occurred to me to want a gun. Aside from the people hurt in the bombing, no civilians were injured. The police did their jobs admirably and having morons like me running around with guns would have made it harder for them.

We saw what vigilante justice looks like on reddit, 4chan, and dozens of other places where hundreds of people were falsely accused of being terrorists. What would have happened if the digital lynch mob had been a physical one instead? How many innocent people would they have killed?

Compare that with the professionals who quickly identified and apprehended the suspects without a single civilian being injured.
I think you're promoting a healthy degree of self-awareness.

A noteworthy risk however is that you'll make false connections -- ie. garlic is good for fight off HIV.
This.

Who cares if MtGox is down? The same people who already found out the hard way.
You might look into buying comfortable shoes.
It shares a lot of principles with Apache Flex. It's seen huge uptake by expat Flash platform devs.

After a year on a large project using Angular, I'm loving it more every day.
I'd be very surprised if Kiva don't have other ways of funding themselves - the microfinance institutions that make loans using Kiva money charge fairly substantial rates of interest on the loans, making it very profitable for those organisations at least.
Looks like an email campaign tracking url