skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know, I didn't understand that comic when it was posted (despite feeling like I have an understanding of Bayesian vs. frequentist statistics) and I still don't. So, I looked it up and apparently I'm not the only one.

It seems to me, and the commenters on stats.stackexchange [1] that this comic both misinterprets frequentist statistics and misrepresents Bayesian statistics. I realize that XKCD is a nerdy comic meant to be entertaining - I just wanted to leave this discussion here in case anyone else is confused; I think this is an important distinction and one most people interested in statistics should spend some time thinking about.

[1] http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/43339/whats-wrong-w...

Edit: I can't edit my first comment now, but gweinberg's post (sibling to the grandparent of this) words the problem perfectly.
I don't think they pose as applicants as much as they use the contact method (usually email) to solicit their services, even sometimes ignoring when the hiring company specifically says "please no recruiters." If they are posing, it would be pretty easy as well, as they could send in resumes & CV's of job seekers they represent.

Recruiters also pose as companies posting 'jobs', and from what I've seen when looking for gigs it's likely they solicit in the other direction as well. How low they sink, who knows.
The number of levels doesn't matter, because players don't generally play (or decide to not play) games because one has more or fewer levels than another. Levels are shorthand for accomplishment. Level 51 is the highest in WoW because that's how much content and accomplishment they could determine. It's entirely arbitrary based on your application.

All of the reasons are entirely arbitrary based on your application. It doesn't matter because they are manifestations of psychological principles. You could have levels, or you could have ducks. You could have points, or you could have dogs. Every time you hit Submit in your app you get a dog, and every six dogs you get a parrot, and every three parrots you get a duck, and you need to email that duck to support@yourapp to unlock a new feature, or you can paint that duck a particular color and save it in your right sidebar, but you can't do both.

It doesn't matter, because it's not a recipe or a formula. They are representations of attributes to poke a person's psychology to tell them they are making progress (dogs to parrots), to reassure them (ducks being emailed), to give them investment (ducks being painted), etc.

You need to understand the psychological principles involved before any of it will make sense. The questions you're asking have no answers because they're ultimately nonsensical questions.

Gabe Zichermann's book is crap, and maybe that's why this doesn't make sense to you. None of those books you listed are by psychologists, mainstream video game designers, or research academics.
The /ask page lists text posts, i.e. those which include a text body rather than a link (what reddit calls "self-posts"). It's named "ask" because "Ask HN" posts are one of the more common kinds of text posts, but it treats all text posts the same.
I was thinking about maximum times, not minimums. There is no opposite of parole to extend their sentence, that I know of.
Well, when we're talking about human beings as targets, the legitimate civilian use is "stopping" them. Not killing per se, that's the remit of the judicial system.

Unfortunately it's very difficult to stop a determined opponent without using "lethal force", in the case of guns a maiming or deadly central nervous system hit, or causing them to lose enough blood (a large fraction of opponents, though, will stop combat upon getting hit the first time). There aren't any other practical options.

If your question includes hunting, I can continue about it.

For target practice, they don't need to be "lethal", and generally aren't used with ammunition designed for increased effectiveness in live targets. The exception is practicing for self-defense, you need at least some of that to be with service ammo for a bunch of reasons. Lots of government units buy in bulk where the price difference for service ammo isn't large and use the same thing for all purposes, which I'm sure saves in administrative costs and ensures no one accidently goes out on the street with less effective target ammo.
Does anyone know the current status of this effort? I love the idea, but the mailing list has no activity and I didn't see any evidence that w3id URLs are currently usable.
Fuduntu Project Ends
The HN community tries to avoid this sort of political/economic trolling.
TC article - http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/28/startup_common_application_...
There's so much code here.

If I weren't sick, I'd submit a new version that:

1. Didn't reimplement io.Copy

2. Didn't avoid io.TeeReader

3. Didn't do weird things to avoid regular channel ranges.

4. Didn't do non-standard date formatting.

5. Didn't reinvent the log package.

6. Didn't try to convince anyone runtime.GOMAXPROCS(runtime.NumCPU()) was a good idea (it's not)

In fact, maybe I will anyway. brb
Chop them down and you have a cabin!
Thread usually means an in-process concurrency construct controlled by calls to the operating system. A goroutine is managed by the Go runtime.

It's an important distinction between using many (read: hundreds) of OS threads in a single process isn't performant, while using hundreds or even tens of thousands of goroutines is just fine.
Except in Perl where it is a synonym for dictionary.
The entire episode in question is available online here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/retirement-gamble/

It delves into a few issues worth understanding beyond fees, such as the difference between a typical Series 7 advisor and an RIA.
Yeah, not trolling.

I haven't tried to design for exactly that, but my first shot at it would be independent pairs of app servers and redis instances, with redis used as an expiring cache, fronted by a load balancer with affinity, backed by centralized regular SQL. Something like MySQL has no trouble hanging onto a scadload of records it mostly doesn't touch, and you can scale the expiry time on redis down as it gets more heavily loaded, so only the hottest tip of the hot set is kept in RAM.
The sort of people who tend to excel at raising money from VC's and gain media attention tend to be the more assholish sorts. I've seen this also.

Raising VC is a human process. You need to convince some high status individual(s) that your plan has more upside than risk. The most successful way to do that is to sell something. So the sorts of people that succeed tend to be more salesman, than engineer.

Now add in huge amounts of money, plus some ego and you have a recipe for drama and backstabbing.
Please explain this, I'm not sure what kind of activity you're talking about.
I am looking for ways to beef up my passwords. This was mainly conceived as an alternative to Passpack.

The idea is that hackers who obtain a server's hash do not expect the plaintext password to actually be a base64 encoded SHA512 hash. It also encourages salting to prevent password reuse.

What do you think?

Too much security?

Too time consuming?

Too awesome, must download GreaseMonkey script!
I wonder if you have trouble giving your email over the phone.

I have a <name>@<name>.net email. And every time I'm spelling my email to someone, I say: name, n a m e @name.net, 99 times out of 100 they ask me if the second "name" is spelled like the first one.
Exactly. This is just a web-oriented version of "fizz-buzz".
No. Two reasons:

A. Poverty is always relatively defined. There will always be a bottom n percent in the population.

B. A high bar for immigration acts as a filter to select the hardest working, most intelligent, most willing to take risks, and sometimes the richest. Take that filter away and the profile of immigrants looks quite different.
I'll second Envy Code R; I use it in bold for better readability at small size.
False. The Go designers have explained many times why they made unused imports an error. In particular unused dependencies slow down compilation. There's even a FAQ: http://golang.org/doc/faq#unused_variables_and_imports.

A trivial workaround to silence the compiler errors during development is to use blank identifiers (http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#blank_unused). I use them all the time.

You may disagree with their decision, but it's disingenuous to claim that it's because they didn't think it through.
No one should ever be hired for one thing, but advertised another. I think that's just wrong, but i also think its the nature of early stage companies you're complaining about. Things change, that's part of finding "product market fit" as a startup. If you like something that is constant and doesn't change, there are always jobs at companies like IBM waiting for those with a great work ethic (to be abused, in different ways).
Yep, dealing with it. Hit the Rotten Tomatoes API limit and they don't have a way of increasing it :-(
Um, you do know that the problem is that the system in place to help prevent these legitimate problems are done by the prisons themselves. That's a huge, pretty corruptible system. I've seen prisoners go days without getting their medicine because the guards couldn't be bothered. Nothing the prisoner did that should have caused such a retaliation. (according to everyone in the block who talked about it. Naturally, asking the guards wouldn't have gotten me anywhere.)
"The revelation of the two-thirds wealth transfer machinery was delivered by none other than John Bogle, the legendary founder of The Vanguard Group, a low-load mutual fund firm, ..."
Of course John Bogle will try to sell his low fee index funds. With new products like ETF's and low index mutual funds very few people pay 2% fee. 0.1% to 1% is more realistic.
Please stop and consider taking some time away from HN.

The stories posted here clearly anger and upset you. This comment you just posted is a strawman argument and you posted a variant of it the other day in another thread, and another variant of it in another thread before that and....you've been posting variants of it on HN almost daily for months now.

As a founder, my ears always perk up with I find pointed criticism of founders on HN. I read carefully to see if there's any ideas or advice I can come away with. But for months now, every time there's been really aggressive criticism of founders on HN, the comment always turns out to be written by you. And it's always the same complaint or variant on it every time. It's gotten to the point where I have to screen comment threads ahead of time in case you've posted already.

Is it really healthy to keep returning to a well you find so poisonous? Jason wrote a well-intended article here and you're using it to post your same ideas for the 10th time this month. Is that fair to him? Is that fair to Hacker News readers?

Take some time off. Find things that excite you, captivate you, and make you feel joyful to be live. VC-istan is clearly not a place you want to spend time in, so go explore and find a better place.
Others have mentioned it too, but I was blown away with the speed of the renderer! By the time the return key sprang back up, the visualisation was displaying on my screen. How did you do that?
You seem to have missed the bit where they ran massive, obnoxious ads for months begging users to donate. And all for a pittance in donation revenue.
Just like you wouldn't make it hard to pay for your product, I think making it hard to apply for jobs at your company is a bad move.

Because most people are applying to a 'better' job than the one they have now (Cooler? More money? More responsibility?), they know that most initial applications will come to nothing.

If you believe your CV will get a reply 1/5th of the time, spending more than the 5 minutes it takes to send over a slightly customized CV is foolish. There are a lot of other people that don't require this much effort. Time is better spent writing to them.

This is going to get plenty of replies, because it's on Hacker News, but if it was getting the traffic more organically (i.e. if this was widespread), I'm not sure it would get a single one.

Yeah sure, for the applicant he wants, this is solved with, notepad, curl, 10 minutes, but it's still more effort than emailing it to his rival.
Whether or not they had recruiters posing as applicants in mind when designing this, it doesn't change the fact that this particular task is ill advised. The first person that becomes remotely disenchanted with them will flood them with random applications. I'd bet almost anything that they will have to scrap this exercise and start over.
Which is why as soon as you get a chance you immediately transfer your 401k into a self managed IRA account, which if you did nothing but put all the money into an S&P 500 index fund you would do better than having these guys pilfer your account over time. Not a big issue for you young folks but it does add up. What is worse is that there is a lot of double dipping that goes on, for example BigBank1 manages the 401k and gets 2% per year for that, and they offer you an investment in XYZ Fund which gets its own 2% management fee on that part of it.

An interesting (but impossible) structure would be 20% of the return which is to say if the overall account went up by 7% then 5.6% goes into the account and 1.4% to the manager, if the account loses value the manager is on the hook for 10% of the loss reducing the account loss.

The current system is the bank always makes money every year on your account the only question is how much. Which isn't good for you.
Perhaps multiple hash collisions?

I had a mysterious document appear in my Google docs once.
I assumed it was due to a hash collision.

I reported it to Google but never heard back from them.
If you know anything about it, how would you/he propose fixing the problem from an institutional perspective?

Section V of that paper suggests that being more precise in language choice (an important problem in statistics) is his main advice there, but perhaps making the data and conclusions open in some "anonymized" form would support this endeavour?
Don't get too hung up on that, it was the least of the problems. Closing the connection works fine, it's just a bit unorthodox. The basic structure of the problem was much more problematic to implement.
There as many kinds of websites are there are types of paper publications. Nobody cares about old TV magazines, but there are plenty of books that are older than me and still relevant. The online version of SICP, for example, has incoming links from many universities that I hope will never break.
Reading some other comments in this thread, I feel that I really ought to have included some more stuff here. There isn't actually such a thing as "the odds that the coin is fair." Either it's fair or it's not. What we can talk about is what probability we should ascribe to it being fair given what we know. Even a single coin flip will have a single result, uniquely determined by the way in which it is launched into the air and caught. Probabilities only exist in the presence of our ignorance of the actual facts, and some people consider probabilities to be themselves a measure of our ignorance of the world.
That's exactly what I was accomplishing by having redis do key eviction to LMDB ;P. To be clear: it wasn't that LMDB wasn't awesome for the purpose of adding disk persistence and key eviction to redis, it was that having unclustered copies of redis with disk persistence turned out to not nail what I wanted to accomplish. I figured I'd reevaluate redis's cluster support at some later time, or build something more custom now that I've figured out what primitives I needed with more certainty.

(The other comment I made about "plain LMDB" was to address a question posed by snaky, where I was assuming either embedding it into my app server or having a thin wrapper; I was assuming the suggestion was that LMDB could handle "append to key" in a durable and fast manner without relying on redis to first buffer the data to be written en masse as larger chunks, which is pretty much what it is doing in this architecture I was designing.)

(BTW, I've never talked to you, but I knew one of your former students. Hello! ;P)
D3 Visualization of Browser Feature Support
Wildly inaccurate. What the article is doing is comparing the 40 year return at 7% to a 40 year return at 7% minus 2% management fees, and noting that your total return in the second case is about half as much as your total return in the second case.

Of course all that tells you is that it's stupid to pay 2% management fees if you can get the same return with lower management fees. That's obvious. Whether you can get the same return by yourself is a separate issue. Now, in the long run, your typical investor is going to get the same return (pre-fees) with active management with 2% fees as he does with an index fund at 0.1% fees, hence he's going to come out ahead using an index fund. But at least in theory what Wall Street is selling you here is better return than what you could make on an index fund.

In a way, it's the same as every other product that drives the modern economy. They're selling you an idea (in this case, that active management will yield higher returns). In reality, its the same cheap Chinese crap everyone else is selling.
I hope the interview goes well, but I'm all tapped out this weekend. I wrote this piece as my contirbution to helping the folks I don't have time to talk to one-on-one!
You really should go start a company already and show everyone how it's really done. Half of Hacker News and Google awaits it with bated breath. Michael O. Church, "1.8 level" god programmer who is the only smart one in a land of idiots!

It might even be true. You might actually be that special guy. But until you show us all how it's done, you're just ranting on a blog while actual startups somehow keep getting built (and sold) left and right.

Great parallel is Ted Dziuba from Uncov. Total internet asshole with Uncov. Does Pressflip and flops. Not as easy as it looks. But then does Milo and succeeds. And finds he doesn't have as much time for hating online as he did. That could be your track, or else you could just philosophize about how great it would be if everyone listened to you. Go show us how it's done, get that 20% stake of Church Inc. and disrupt "VCistan" while others take the .02% of Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Palantir, Twitter, Dropbox, AirBnB and the like. Let's see how you do!
> There are some people whose email automatically gets re-routed to the 'correct' account with a note..

How does that work?
Have you created some sort of filter? (How do you make sure that it gets the correct emails?)
That was my initial reaction, and then I thought that they may be just trying to obfuscate the process a bit. The more "technical" terms they use, the more they deter non-target applicants.

Though, being too pedantic is certainly risks deterring the target applicants.
Why I Hate MLB.TV
Researchers find a completely new DNA binding protein
You may be interested in checking out an automatic summarizer I developed this summer. It uses numerous techniques to weight sentences for extraction - https://github.com/shanedownfall/CNGLSummarizer
Show HN: Weekend project - HTML5 Game Engines: which is right for you?
Here's the version I threw together in (what it says here), 12 minutes: https://gist.github.com/dustin/5478818
This is fundamentally wrong. The statement assumes the whole of the management fees is being reinvested at 7%, when in reality it is being used by those who have jobs in the financial sector to pay their bills. That is quite literally like taking the price you pay for anything and multiplying it by (1.07)*50 (which is ~30) and claiming that is what they are actually charging you, since you could have otherwise invested that money at 7% and had that much in 50 years. This completely ignores the time value of money. It is equating the value of money today with the value of money fully invested for 50 years.

The more important lesson here is opportunity cost. If you are willing to go out and take the time to invest your money on your own, there are potentially some enormous benefits down the road, but you pay the cost in terms of time spent not working on your day job, not spending time with your kids, etc. I do a lot in rental housing, which has a fair return, but I can tell you right now, there are a lot of days I wish I just accepted whatever return I could get from someone else willing to manage my investments for me and focus on other things.
And Ruby [1], apparently.

[1] http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.0/Hash.html
I don't see how it is more open to abuse than just giving an email address. You could send someone 1000 messages if you wanted.
Ireland (Which has heaps of money and time to waste unlike Pakistan which has aid programs to run) tried something like this years ago, the IRA just developed a way around it.

I suspect like all self made security experts they have created a product they can't crack but bomb makers quickly would.
Well this would explain why my phone has been going crazy all evening!

I'm the person who put this process in place for Hubbub (which incidently is a great place to work, you should apply). I'll quickly skim through comments and post some answers now, but it's 0014 here so I'll probably catch up with the rest tomorrow. If you have any questions feel free to drop us a line on developers@hubbub.co.uk (unless you're a recruiter!)

As a final note, we have much more detail at http://developers.hubbub.co.uk/, including information about the year's supply of bacon on offer to both successful applicants and the people who referred them.
With little amount of information Skype requires when signing up, I think fallback option is just not feasible. If you left the company or email provider out of business - and you forgot to switch your email AND THEN you forgot your password??!
Just sign up for new Skype account...
It's turned in to plain text that can be re-created in to the objects. From Wikipedia [1]:

"[...] serialization is the process of translating data structures or object state into a format that can be stored (for example, in a file or memory buffer, or transmitted across a network connection link) and "resurrected" later in the same or another computer environment"

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialization
I don't doubt that there are excellent for-profit hospitals. Chances are I've even used the services of one. One can find good things coming out of nearly every kind of business if you look hard enough. Please don't take the suggestion as anti-capitalist, because I'm not.

My argument against them is simple: it's very hard to align the two goals of 1) making as much money as possible and 2) providing the best care possible, which in my mind means making their stay as short and inexpensive as possible. Even as a youngish person (late 30's), I don't want to go in the hospital at all and if I do have to go I want to be in and out as soon as it is safe to do so.

The ultimate goal is to keep people as healthy as possible, and to spend the least amount of money to do so. This requires finding the right balancing point, but I'm positive it can be done if the political will exists.
How do you transfer from a 401k to an IRA? I work for a very small company, so my 401k investment choices are limited and expensive. I'd love to have a cheap index fund option.
Out of interest, what country are you from? I'm curious at the fact you called it 'grand-grand'. Here in Australia we use 'great grand(mother etc.)'. Must be a cultural thing.
Not Taking Risks is Risky
> 6. Didn't try to convince anyone runtime.GOMAXPROCS(runtime.NumCPU()) was a good idea (it's not)

So what is an appropriate GOMAXPROCS? As someone who has only dabbled in a few Go tutorials, I would imagine that you would want GOMAXPROCS to be NumCPU() (or even greater) so the goroutine thread pool could "fire on all pistons". Why does Go's scheduler default to GOMAXPROCS=1 instead of NumCPU()?