skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a really insightful article that contains a number of points that qualify the result and present lessons for any one interested in data science.

A few points that stand out to me:

!) The 11% number comes not from a randomized sample of cancer papers but from attempts made by AmGen to reproduce results that might be useful in drug development. This means that they made good effort to reproduce these results but there is also a strong selection bias that needs to be acknowledged.

2) They point out that using survival time as the measurement complicates things. I've done a lot of machine learning and statistics on cancer and medical data and, in my experience, this can not be overemphasized. and There are loads of confounding factors that contribute to survival time. I expect that big break throughs will come as we develop rigorous ways for measuring the behavior of a tumor (does it metastasize? how does it feed itself?) and use those as the targets of our regression. (Currently these thins are measured by human visual inspection if at all.)

3) They point out that the studies that were repeatable were the ones that were careful about using blinded controls, and eliminating investigator bias. This is basic stuff but easy to overlook. In terms applicable to a startup, a data scientist needs to me motivated to vet existing and proposed practices and identify flawed ones as much or more then they are motivated to maximize gain.
First, not all free licenses require you to share changes. See, for example, the MIT and BSD licenses. They only require that you preserve the copyright notice, and refrain from suing the original authors.

Second, even the GPL doesn't stop you from using a modified version, just from distributing modified versions without the source code. From the preamble to the GPL "if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received."

The fact that web services don't actually distribute software at all is what inspired the AGPL license in the first place.

Finally, "open/free" refers to the distinction between "open source" licenses as defined by the Open Source Initiative (opensource.org) and "free software" as defined by the Free Software Foundation (fsf.org). As a practical matter, they are similar, but the two organizations have different philosophies.
As the previous discussion of the actual NSA document (kindly submitted in the HN thread linked here by brown9-2, and also linked in the article submitted here)

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/Untangling_the_Web.pdf
notes, the NSA document is old, and thus dates from an earlier era of Web research. For all that, applying the Google tips mentioned in the document, specifically domain-restricted searches, would improve the quality of links submitted to Hacker News and thus improve the quality of discussion here.

The previous discussion of the actual document link seems to have missed the process by which the document was released. The document was an internal document of the National Security Agency, requested by a Freedom of Information Act request. Some parts of the document had to be redacted, and of course "official use only" had to be struck out in the copy released to the public. The editing process apparently involved mark-up of actual paper printouts of the original internal document, which were then scanned again to form the released document. This makes for ugly formatting, but the content is still interesting.
The Vo-96 Acoustic Synthesizer
That tells us something about the nature of what passes for "law" in contemporary times, doesn't it? I mean, there's no particular reason that every single citizen shouldn't understand what is and what isn't illegal, without any need for a specialized class of judges, lawyers, etc. to interpret, debate, spin and mangle things.

Limit the scope of government very narrowly, to about what Bastiat argued for[1] and a lot of this problem would go away.

[1]: http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html
Good, the the incentive moves to kill the patient rather then try to save them from an accidental complication. Dead patients can't sue.
Fascinating Photographs Of Abandoned ‘Star Wars’ Movie Sets
WordPress itself makes a great platform for replacing feedburner: http://autoblogged.com/6602/autoblogged/feedburner-alternati...
Money. OnTrac is substantially cheaper than UPS and FedEx in their respective service areas. This was always a sore point amongst many people when I worked at Amazon - the company internally prides itself on being absurdly pro-consumer, and the use of OnTrac (among other sketchy small-time delivery operations) was a very big slap in the face on that philosophy.

It's a pretty blatant case of acting against your customer's interests to save a buck, something Amazon has traditionally prided itself on not doing.
I set up a test Facebook account while doing a Facebook app that uses an e-mail address that has never been used for anything else.

Yet it keeps suggesting people I actually know.

The second account also does not have my full name (if it had my full name it'd be less weird, as my name to my knowledge is globally unique - there's only a few hundred people with my last name worldwide)

The account has not been used for anything related to me. I've never searched for anyone from it. Never given my e-mail address there...

The only thing connecting the two is that the "fake" e-mail address is a "real-user-part+something@gmail.com" address, and that I've logged in to them from the same machine.

It took less than a day before that account started getting friend requests from people I know (clearly the "TEST" instead of my surname did nothing to dissuade them)
> It is for their benefit and against your benefit

Because immigrants just "take jobs" and add no value to the world, right? You can't think of any Americans who have become wealthy thanks to companies founded by immigrants?

> This is a struggle over how the pie is divided up.

This is economically illiterate. The economy is not "a pie", because it's not a zero sum game. The pie can grow, leaving more for everyone.
YouTube to bring in $2.5b in 2013, Needs Paywall - Analyst
After test driving a Tesla, I agree with much of what you said and one is the engine noise. I prefer sports cars and especially the sound of a V8/12. To me it's better than listening to music.

I do understand that those purchasing a luxury vehicle have different expectations. Those in sedans appreciate cabin silence more than others.
By your logic every high-end car should have a near perfect rating...
Let me know how that works out the next time you drop a quarter million dollars for a treatment that costs a couple thousand in another OECD country because the hospital you went to is trying to make up for all the money they lost treating uninsured or bankrupted patients.
Free licenses always restrict use. You cannot use them without sharing your changes.

You managed to compress several errors in just two sentences. Free licenses aim to unrestricted use, that's their very reason to be. Search for "software freedoms". You're not forced to share changes, except in very few licences like MPL. Some (not all) free licenses ask you to distribute source for derivative works. Most ask you neither.
Server Data Backup Saves You Money
Explore New Internet Startup.
It's not mine, but the guys I stole it from for this post died 200 years ago and weren't major fans of long-lived copyright.

The good news is that 95% of historical progress comes from the most talented people (the "cognitive 1%", that Jefferson called the "natural aristocrats") overthrowing the entrenched elite. This time around, that's us. We are the ones who'll come up with what replaces VC-istan.

VC-istan isn't that terrible. Neither was George III. (No, I'm not suggesting we use violence as was done in 1775-83. Electoral systems and markets are designed to allow nonviolent overthrow. I'm suggesting we outperform them on the market regarding the use of talent.)

The bad news is that when the rising elite wins, they have an onerous tendency to become hypocritical (see: American slavery from 1776-1865, company towns and Pinkertons from 1866-1939, the failure of Fordist paternalism beginning in the late '70s, and the failure of VC-istan to provide something better than regular old Corporate America circa now). We need to agree not to do that. Historical cycles run faster now and if whatever we build sucks as much as what we replace, then we'll see it torn down within our lifetimes.

It's also not the "American Dream" anymore because whatever we are is trans-national.
Ask HN: Volunteer (remote) jobs for a sysadmin?
Hi everybody.

Sometimes, when tasks at job are quiet and I have a bit of free time, I would like to collaborate on an FOSS project. But I'm not good at programmin; my skills are in linux systems administration.

I guess that a volunteer job in system administration task would be good for me for developing new skills. And also would be great to be able to help other people working on cool and open projects.

So my question is: any ideas/suggestions about how I could collaborate with my sysadmin skills? (the collaboration should be remote, because im located in northern Argentina)

Thanks.
Data Science Labs: Predictive Modeling to Detect Healthcare Fraud, Waste & Abuse
So, is any of this actually backed with usability studies, or is it just pontificating?

The implicit advocation here is "design for the least common denominator". That means no hovers, no gestures, no secondary/tertiary clicks, no modified clicks, no long-presses, no multitouch, and big fat click targets that allow for lots of slop. That's all well and good until you realize that this leads to designs which are wildly inefficient on certain classes of devices and drive users away because the information density sucks and the interaction models are stunted. If you can get away with it without damaging your UX, then by all means, go for it. Device-agnostic design is awesome, but it's myopic to damage the UX for the vast majority of your userbase because someone might access your website on their XBox and use their Kinect to navigate it.

Know your audience and design appropriately. You're never going to design a perfectly futureproof website; make sure that your users today and tomorrow have a great experience, and then just keep iterating on that.
It has a plug for a wallbrick, and I don't think the author optimized his hardware or code for ultra-low power - ie small batteries.

(Running 80 FFT's every second isn't going to be great on batteries.)

The Kinetis K10 he used WOULD BE an excellent processor choice for an ultra-low power design, though.

You could have a low-power comparator monitor for noises and only wake the processor up when it heard something interesting.

With some simple tricks like that, you could probably run for months on a couple AA batteries.
The solution I found for my photo workflow is that I've installed AeroFS on my computers and I store my latest photos from the last several months in that folder. It syncs across all of my computers, that way my wife and I can use Picasa or Lightroom and the photos load fast since they are on our local drives.

Since we store folders in a /year/month/ file structure we can easily move those to an external hard drive.

The whole thing backs up to CrashPlan. My entire collection is over 1.5 TB of photos.
How to let developers do your job
lol... Readme.md is empty!
If you have to go five minutes out of your way then spend five minutes filling up, that's fifteen minutes. That's not uncommon, not everyone has a gas station on their route to and from every place they go.
Don't release it on a Friday unless you're willing to give up your Saturday to fix bugs
Ask HN: How does LinkedIn know my connections?
I don't know about anybody else, but I find it eerily creepy how accurate LinkedIn knows my connections. Any guesses how they are able to show seemingly accurate results?
I thought I was having extreme deja vu because I've read this before, but the the article was dated May 8th.

Turns out I'm not a time traveler, the story was republished from the post masculine, which was posted July 10th, 2012.

http://postmasculine.com/america
You're missing the point. The OP is talking about a system for interpreting sentences in bulk and extracting useful keywords. "beautiful new" are not useful, and arguably, "dashboard" is not particularly useful. "Curating" and "discovering", while grating to our ears, are definitely descriptive words of purpose...because there are "dashboards" that have nothing to do with "curating"...so ostensibly, "curating" has some use as a keyword
Prediction: won't be as good as Sneakers.
I just did a test and opened LinkedIn and took a look at the suggested people.

They included: Several people with the same name as I (expected, not really creepy).
But also: People that I trained martial arts with, and I NEVER exchanged electronic messages with them, and I do not talk with them for 4 years now. Also I doubt they remember me to search me, I am not much remarkable.
People that I met at school and church 6, 7 years ago, and that again, I never exchanged electronic messages with them.

Yes, LinkedIn is very, very, very creepy.
This line is silly:

> you can just pretend you went into your experiment with different halting conditions and, voila!, your results become significant.

You can misrepresent your results regardless of the underlying statistic. But it's no easier to lie about p-values than to lie about any other statistical procedure.

Anyway, the post seems to be more about hypothesis testing than p-values per se.
What exactly has James Bond been drinking all these years? - Economic Times
India's Demographic Challenge - 1/5th of Global Working Population, Too Few Jobs
Just to play devils advocate, you could use both versioning schemes. For example, 13.01.24 could indicate it was the 24th revision of the 13.01 release (as opposed to being released on the 24th of the month).
A social network I used in eastern Europe would allow you to see people who viewed your profile if you paid a small transaction via SMS/phonebill. The functionality would last a month, I think. I thought that this was genius from a "how do we make money" standpoint, and all of my friends used it. Could you imagine the revenue possibilities for Facebook?
Transcoding is not a computationally cheap endeavor…
That was interesting, but how about some examples of the improved messaging, that does work to "create an emotional connection", etc?
This sounds interesting, but I'm not sure what it means. Could you explain what Google should have done more fully?
Facebook was originally written in PHP.

It's true there are awesome specific language tools for your specific problems, that when tied together to create a total solution creates an unmaintainable mess that even the creator doesn't understand.

Look at the web.

I saw Kerrnigan talk about 'little languages' and I fully agree that a specific language designed to solve a problem is the way to go for small problems, like the ones when Unix was designed. Tying all these text based interfaces together is a maintenace nightmare.

Maintenenace is a much bigger problem than the actual problems being solved, at least for businesses.

Then there's Lisp, which is a mini-language designer's tool kit and the super glue to tie them together all in one integrated package using a well designed, common binding agent. Unfortunately the market has choosen not in it's favour.

The market will improve languages and in end game is that they'll all have the same features, and then it comes down to syntax and performance. They'll all be 'better' by today's standards. The problem is at that point is that the better bar will have moved.

And the guy that truly innovated during that time won't be found until the next century.
>Cell Signaling will, eventually, have its Joseph Priestley, its Dmitri Mendeleev.

That's very optimistic, but not necessarily true (even ignoring the question of when). Priestley succeeded so well because he developed simple, reproducible experiments (expose mercury oxide to sunlight to produce oxygen etc.) that he was happy to share for no financial gain (even traveling to others' labs to help them reproduce his work [1]). The current environment of paywalls and competitive grants seems hardly conducive to the rise of similar figures.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_and_Observations_on...
So, basically, it's a combination between: A) A really hard problem to solve; and B) A heck of a lot of pressure to get it solved.
You can turn off your visibility when browsing other people's profiles. By default, it should be anonymized anyway, unless you switched it when trying to view profile stats:

https://www.linkedin.com/settings/wvmp-visibility?goback=%2E...

Personally I keep mine fully on since it is a good way of passive contact (I once browsed ~1000 VCs with a headline that was somewhat provocative as an experiment and about half looked at my profile back and 6 of them emailed me asking what I was working on).

Note: I actually designed this feature at LinkedIn after doing a ton of interviews with people and going to multiple privacy organizations and the EU to make sure it wasn't violating anyone's privacy by making it a tit-for-tat system that was by default anonymized (if you click on profile stats, it prompts you to switch your setting if you want to see who has viewed your profile (or did when I was there)).
To be clear, the bad guys are not the startup founders. They're the old school VCs and lawyers spoken of, who are used to taking advantage of startup founders.

YC is a force for good in that without doing anything, bad actors are weeded out because nobody wants to be mean / do bad things to a YC company.
Some are good points, but others seem entirely depending on the view of the culture passing judgement. For example, the remark about Anglo culture being seen as "cold and passionless" by Latin cultures is meaningless. The Latin cultures are seen by Anlgo cultures as "uncomfortably and inappropriately intimate". Just ask any American or British woman who has visited Italy and has had random men talk to them.

I find the empirically verifiable statements, like those on health, or economics much more interesting.
I think that 'bad' part is that these things may be mandated by law, which limits freedom.
The contact-address-book-thing works both ways, I believe. If YOU let them access your contacts, or if anyone who's contact book you are in lets LinkedIn access their contacts, they will pop up on "People You May Know"
I hooked up Ctrl+Shift+M to create new notes.
The automatic links are one of the reasons I don't use LinkedIn. I have worked at places with people that I do not under any circumstances want to be associated with. I work in a completely different city now and will be moving to another town, which will make as clean a break from them as possible. A social network continuing to track that is a significant issue.
I have learned cynicism and skepticism about a lot of media, but Consumer Reports remains one of the few sources -- the only one I can think of offhand -- that I trust without a second thought.

I like their business plan and focus on doing what they do well.

Their reviews mean something (even to someone like me who lives in Manhattan and doesn't drive).
Lessons from Pixar: Why Software Developers should be Story Tellers
Show HN: Quick and anonymous salary "surveys" at lunch
Hi all,

I made this site for the situation where you and your colleagues are all at lunch and the discussion of salary comes up. While a lot of people don't feel comfortable discussing specific numbers, they're all still curious :) So this site lets someone start a 'secret' with just a few clicks (no registration etc.). That 'secret' has a code that other people can enter on the site, too, and then by telling the site your salary it will show everyone on that secret the minimum, maximum and average salaries.

As per the 'privacy' page, I'm not storing any personal information... it is anonymous.

It was also a good chance for me to learn Silex (the PHP "micro-framework") and Twitter Bootstrap (though not so well), practice 'progressive enhancements' with Javascript and play with PaaS via Openshift.

Anyway, thanks for any feedback, flames or criticisms...
Where is Erlang used?
IOS7 traffic from 2K unique devices confirmed says MoPub Insights Report
> and that I've logged in to them from the same machine

Wouldn't that be a dead giveaway?
Agree.

As a hardware design engineer, I can't say I miss it too much though.

Run the signal right into a DSP and call it a day.

Doesn't work right? Must be a firmware problem.
New York (City) is, quite simply, a very different market than California. Most people who park on the street want a car they are comfortable taking a lot of damage on (and can't charge the car), and most garages in NYC are very old, very tightly packed (by valets that move the cars around often), and unlikely to have electrical charging stations.

Moreover, many cars are mostly used for weekend road trips, when range is a paramount concern.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but there seems to be an element of that already in LinkedIn.

http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/42

>You'll see profile stats about who's viewed your profile if:

>You have a premium account. This will also give you access to Profile Stats Pro.

>You have a free basic account and have set your privacy settings to show your name and headline.

In other words, as long as you shell out some cash you can avoid detection while viewing other people's profiles but still see when they view yours.
So, your problem isn't simple ease of communication. Your problem is willingness to communicate. You even recognize that, because you say that doctors in the same hospital don't talk to one another.

That's not easily solved with tech. It's solved with hospital policies that foster communication.

I'm sorry for your loss. Unfortunately, the doctor would still have to recognize that a neurologist needs to be brought in, even if communication was facilitated.
In practice, this is a non-issue. Aside from drivers (without which you can't run your hardware), you really don't want that code. My years in the Enterprise side taught me that the more upper-management worries about "protecting the IP", the less actual value said IP has.
"Going Green" does not equal to switch to renewable energy at the cost of poor people's lives for gods sake. It simply means that recognizing the global warming and have a plan to switch to renewable energy, for example, take some of the hundreds of billions of dollars of the oil companies' profits to invest on renewable energy.
If you can't log into Facebook from a public/shared computer without them disclosing your relationships to everyone else who uses that computer, they should make that very very clear.
Clarification: This is not an ad for Codecademy. Compylr has no affiliation with Codecademy, or any of the other companies we review or write about. Compylr is completely independent. The site is maintained by an independent collection of people who happen to work in technology, and the content is contributed by those same people.

If you're upset about a positive story because you simply don't like the company yourself, that seems like a personal problem. Not everything is a conspiracy.
I am curious why this is supposedly creepy. I think the main premise of a social network is that you reach out or get reached out to people who might know you or you might know. Now, you have the option of not reaching out to those people, and I think it is fair game that the social network assumes that other members might reach out to you, a member of the network.

If you do not like that aspect of the social network, do not join it.
Huh? If the FBI busts into someone's house without a warrant there are going to be more repercussions than just "we can't use this information in court."