skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You could do a Poisson limit graphic. The result is at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_limit_theorem

Basically, you need a whole lot of events which occur in an essentially independent way, and each one is rare. You add up the number of events that happened, and it is approximately Poisson. Something like tossing 1000 marbles into a 100x100 tile floor, and counting the number of marbles that landed in some 10x10 tile area.
The thing is, I could probably find a pretty substantial percentage of Americans who wouldn't have a problem with any of that, as long as the offender "learns his lesson" or some other similarly-trite authoritarian nonsense.
Do the bigtable performance characteristics look kind of like cache line ping ponging? My intuition for scenario 3 outperforming scenario 2 (100% remote vs 50% local + 50% remote) is that there are more mutations of data and therefore more interconnect traffic is required to maintain coherency across sockets.
It's more neutral because it takes out a bunch of useful information and leaves practically nothing left, like a news story that's unbiased because it doesn't bother actually saying any facts. The original title doesn't even explain that Google is changing their policy. I understand wanting to remove editorializing, but there's a difference between that and adding some detail from the article itself to a rather contentless title.
I misunderstood. I thought the startup had to pay that.
From the bug:

> What should happen:

> A majority of the PCs for sale should include only free software.

So exactly what definition of "free" are you using to believe this bug is now fixed?
I'm not a gmail user, but if the following filter is available, I will move:

* Put all newsletters in a tab so I don't see them
* Delete all but the latest five unread of any particular subscription
* Delete anything older than 180 days -- even if I've read it, unless I've 'starred' it.

Can it do that? Coz that would absolutely kill for subscriptions. iTunes does that sort of thing for podcasts. How can newsletters be harder?
There is a form of argument which is essentially to take all incoming facts, pattern match them against your existing beliefs, then spit out a matching statement with no evidence of comprehension. This is very common in certain subjects, including politics.

This form of argument is not wanted here. Please do not engage in it.

If you read the article with comprehension you'd find that global warming is happening as predicted, but on the conservative side of those predictions.

Go out and investigate for yourself. You'll find that the error bars on those predictions remain large. Though smaller than they were. And the conclusion that it is human-caused has only become better supported with time.
What is it with this recent, rampant meme anyway? "Oh, startups, it's all luck". Some people just seem determined to denigrate even the idea that hard work, blood, sweat, tears and sheer force of will can lead someone to success.

I don't buy it. I don't think that was ever true, and I think it's even less true today.

Today we can run startups with far less overhead and at far lower cost, thanks to open-source, cloud computing, social media and other developments, and we can build profitable, successful startups without necessarily needing to build "the next Facebook".

Thanks to @sgblank and others in the Lean Startup community, we have developed much more detailed processes for going from Idea -> Company -> Company with Customers, leaving less to happenstance than ever before.

The Internet - Angel List, Twitter, LinkedIn, Hoovers, and other resources, make it easier than ever to find customers, partners, investors, resellers and the like.

I keep coming back to this old saw, which - despite being a total cliche - has the ring of truth to it:

The harder I work, the luckier I get

or maybe this one:

Luck is where preparation meets opportunity

Closing thought:

They're sitting out there waiting to give you their money. Are you gonna take it? Are you man enough to take it?

...

The money is out there, you pick it up, it's yours. You don't, I got no sympathy for ya[1]

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kZg_ALxEz0
It's very difficult these days to not violate federal criminal statute in one way or another, doubly so for someone who works for the government in a high security environment. The fact that most people never get prosecuted for these crimes boils down to discretion and investigatory focus. Based on my experiece I doubt more than a tiny fraction of intelligence workers haven't violated secrecy laws in some mild form, such as casual conversation between coworkers or ex-coworkers.
I have no input for you, but this is a niche I would love to get in to. The Open Government movement has made a ton of information accessible, but citizens aren't using it...I'd love to build apps in that space.
Sorry for the trouble here -- can you email this in to privacy@quora.com so we can figure out why this is happening.

Additionally, you can always view posts without logging in, and if you want to view a question and all its answers without logging in, just add ?share=1 to the end of the URL.
While I agree with the general idea of the analogy (that great programmers are effective, no matter how many specific years of experience they have with language X), it doesn't quite hold up. It would really only be accurate if learning to be effective with brown/walnut/etc. could take several months, as is the case with some programming languages/tools/methodologies.
Some really good shots here, they will come in handy at some point in my current projects release span. Thanks for the free images. I don't get why everyone here is being so negative? You are getting free high quality images to use for your startups, be grateful you are getting anything at all. I know for a fact you could get money for these images on a paid stock site.

The HN community has really deteriorated in the last year or two.
Prisons are long overdue for disruption.
Neither of those links address the issue the author mentioned, nor do they describe the need to use your own local copy of a package in case the package authors introduce non-backwards compatible changes. Yes, it needn't behave like NPM, or RubyGems, or Aptitude, or Homebrew, or any of the dozen or so systems out there for install remote packages that let you indicate version.
What You Should Cut from Your Marketing Budget
Define "fatal". Go-the-language and the standard library sometimes panic in situations that are bad but non-fatal for a long-running server process.

I have no issue with an argument that a panic making it out of a library meant for general external use is usually a bad thing -- that's not a "reasonable use of exceptions".

But my own applications are deliberately structured so that most of the outer layers can safely assume most operations will just work, as inner layers, to which interaction with external libraries is largely confined, will log.Panic() if they don't. It's the right choice 90% or more of the time, and leaves us with shorter, cleaner code.

In any case, I severely dislike arguments based on whether something is "idiomatic" or not. It's one thing when you're talking about loops and switches, and something else entirely when you hit someone over the head with it on architectural matters, especially in a language this young.
Not great television? It often ranks as one of the top ten sci fi series of all time. It's in my top three. Season 3 and 4 in particular are almost without peer.
The number of times I've seen someone say, "Apple sucks", "The iPhone sucks", "Apple are tax evaders" without recourse I seriously doubt Apple can or would do anything when someone is expressing their opinion. Free speech buddy.

Libel and slander laws are more directed at individuals... large corporate companies are free game in my opinion.
This reminds me of Eclipse's support for native hooks to detect file updates (in case something was changed from outside the eclipse session). Watchman would then be like a deconstructed ide.
I think you have some colorblindness. They are very distinctly different to me.
Do you mind adding the build instructions to the README so I can run it locally? Rails holds my hand with coffeescript and I dunno anything just from looking at the Makefile.
There's lots to enjoy about it, and certainly I was more or less obsessed with it from the first time the pilot aired as a "Movie of the Week", well before it finally started syndication. But the writing, acting and direction all average a B+ at best, and that's being generous. Maybe we have different definitions of "great television", but mine requires a fairly low incidence of cringe-inducing dialog and stilted acting.

Again, that's not to say there weren't some great performances and beautiful, memorable scenes. I could watch Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas (RIP) spar for hours.
Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons
I don't see it. In the game, you pick one key, right? And it either works or it doesn't. It's totally binary, and total chance.

Success in business doesn't work like that. As long as you're alive and aren't dead broke and destitute you can keep trying (keep pulling another key) and there are degrees of success... you might only build a multi-million dollar company and not a billion dollar company. OK, how sad. Or maybe you get acquired for just enough where you, as a founder, walk away with a million even. What a tragedy.

And finally, I believe that skill matters, and that business success is not just a question of chance. Sure, and unlucky "black swan" negative event can short-circuit you, but you don't necessarily need "good luck" to succeed. You can chip away at it slowly, grind, build, grind, build, sweat, bleed, grind, build, and work your way up.
But don't the climate models that predict global warming take into effect the ocean's heat absorption and the resulting ice melt and the resulting change in the earth's albedo and so on?

I know it is complicated but the 'conventional wisdom' has been that the best climate models take all these feedback mechanisms into consideration and predict a catastrophic increase in temperatures and that the science is 'settled' on this. We've been told over and over again that the models are trustworthy and beyond criticism. All the radical regulatory and economic policy recommendations are based on these models being correct. Anyone who doubts this is labeled as a 'denier' and politely escorted out of the room.

And yet, you say that the land temperatures are not increasing as predicted by these trustworthy models. Hmmm.
That seems to be the approach of skytree, another entrant in this space.
The carpenter made the mistake of answering the question he was asked, instead of the question the interviewer wanted the answer to.

LOTS of interviewers are going to have zero experience in the field they are hiring for. It will behoove the (carpenter|programmer|car salesman) to learn the language of the interviewer, so he or she can answer the questions the interviewer wants to ask, but doesn't have the vocabulary for.
Testing pentaho kettle etl jobs
The one graph that explains why copright is too long
Sounds like Shawshank Redemption in parts of this letter. How did this letter even make it out of the prison?
This is the funniest thing I've seen on HN in a long time. So true -- a good programmer (carpenter) is a good programmer. Who cares what the latest language (wood) they've worked with?
Litterati Is Eradicating The World Of Trash Through Instagram
It was innovative. It was epic. It had a huge effect on Sci-Fi television (which was largely Star Trek:TNG and nothing else at the time).

But it was cheesy and uneven. Yes, seasons 3 and 4 were some of the best sci-fi ever made (at the time, at least). But season 1 was mediocre at best and has aged pretty badly. Increased production values for new TV also makes a lot of Babylon 5 difficult to watch, now.
I find this extremely saddening because Camino offered the best native experience for OS X, with all the polish of a well-designed Cocoa app, on top of Gecko.

I'll miss Camino.
Tech startup ShepHertz raises funds from Kae Captial, Mumbai Angels & Blume
If mankind is causing it, then we're likely to keep causing it, and be fucked in the way you describe.

If mankind is not causing it, then we don't know what's going on and our predictions about the long term (next 100 years) trend are likely wrong.
I'm accustomed to seeing this kind of garbage on Drudge-linked articles, not on HN.
If you're referring to the "what is more useless" question, the answer is "nothing"
What is this language you've been using that is so terribly different from what people learned in college that it takes the months to be effective, not even efficient? Off the top of my head, I produce.... prolog and haskell. It's very, very unlikely you'd apply for a job that was looking for those languages without realizing it.

If you know java, you know python, and you know c, and you can think in algorithmic rather than implementation terms, then you're good for pretty much anything. The hard problems are the same everywhere: cache invalidation and naming things. (I'm only partially kidding.)

EDIT: Besides, if you're hiring for 3-5 years, the advantage language knowledge grants candidates becomes minimal, and the ability to apply old lessons, to learn, to adapt, dominates. If someone has issues learning a language, there are probably more striking problems that would prevent them from getting the job anyway.
I wish you the best :)

I'm impressed it was built by two dudes in such a short timeframe. I've been working on my webapp for almost an entire year.
Hi,

Thanks for your interest. You can try it yourself by downloading a trial edition of the software. The page http://about.wise.io/wiserf/ mentions the algorithm we're using.

As for the stats, you can reproduce the numbers yourself if you're interested. The ML codes are written in C++ with a very strong emphasis on performance and a low memory footprint.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Damian Eads
Director of Engineering, wise.io
Why? I think climate change is happening personally,but why the need to cling to it like religion.

If evidence comes out, look at it, revaluate, repeat...
Really, people will most likely skip the #1 search result? Please, teach me web marketing.
0. Lua is much simpler, with a much smaller WAT-quotient, without loss of power.

(For what I'm doing that's outweighed by the convenience of direct browser support, but to me that's the big attraction.)
answer '<script>alert("xss")</script>'
please tell me most people aren't this silly when they interview folks.

have the carpenter build something (of trivial scope) while you watch. somewhat analogous to coding on the whiteboard in the interview.

come to think of it, it might be darn hard to interview carpenters. but if you watch them work for 2 hours you know everything.
He makes me think a of modern-punk cicero, with a sense of justice for others (tortured people) above his own self. Give this guy a break for his broken oath: he pays a harsh price already.
Watch this HN thread devolve into a battle of contrarians, in real time!
If you are wondering what the methods on an object are, use this.

keys = (k for k, v of obj when typeof v is 'function')

alert(keys)
> and put import ("github.com/go-gl/opengl/gl") directly into your code. Viola! Thus hilarity ensues.

Of course it does! All they had to do is fork the project (which they have) and reference that it instead. Viola, problem solved!
> There is a form of argument which is essentially to take all incoming facts, pattern match them against your existing beliefs, then spit out a matching statement with no evidence of comprehension. This is very common in certain subjects, including politics.

This is very true on both sides of this argument though.
Have you tried opening the page on a device you consider as worthy of clients with big wallets?.. say, an iPhone, iPad, or top-of-the-line Android?

It completely crashed Chrome on my iPad 3.

Progressive enhancement is a cornerstone of good web design. There is no excuse for this.
This should be funny, however it's closer to the truth. Sadly, many people who are hiring for a tech position have no concept how to actually do the work. So they can't evaluate talent of a programmer.
PLEASE STOP THE METAPHORS!!! (shouting justified by how many of these have been written)

They don't add anything to the discussion. Do you need special techniques to work with walnut? I don't know and I bet the author doesn't either.

And where do you draw the analogy? What's the programming tool that's too specialized to be worth asking about? MSVC++? C++? Manual memory management?

This article doesn't make any useful claim about what level of precision interviewers should be looking for, and certainly doesn't make any convincing argument that it is the correct level.
Random Forests are nice in having few parameters-- number of trees, number of restricted features to sample on at each decision node.

It's the variations on the standard RF that have interested me. Rotation Forests, where features are partitioned randomly and rotated (by PCA or random projection) before decision boundaries are drawn. Extremely Randomized Forests, where the node splits are completely random and not based on best possible Gini/Entropy gain along some feature. There's even an interesting use of deterministic annealing out there for incorporating unlabeled data points in an attempt at semisupervised learning.

These each have their own parameters to tune, but have had slightly different performance on different problem domains. Even models require different data-- most decision trees have a quite natural way of imputing missing values, but something like a Rotation Forest can handle neither missing values nor categorical data (unless you map it to m binary features). And that complexity spooks me away from Machine Learning as a Service, where one could start failing to understand his or her models. (Plus then I'd probably be out of a job.)
I think those that use Mt Gox aren't so concerned with anonymity. They've had some level of verification for a couple of years.

For those that are concerned with it, they use other means.
It can get pretty silly in any technical field:

Q: So, your resume says you've been a systems administrator for 10 years. Have you worked much with Linux?

A: Sure, almost all my experience has been with Linux.

Q: How much experience do you have with Red Hat. That is what we use here.

A: Hmmm. Red Hat. Most of the servers I've worked on are Debian based. But I worked a lot with Fedora in college.

Q: But not Red Hat?

A: Well I have some Red Hat experience. I had a temp job where I was setting up Red Hat servers back in 2008.

Q: How long was that.

A: About six months.

Q: Well, perfect! We have an internship available to someone with six months of Red Hat experience! But wait a minute... What version of Red Hat was that?
Which is why politics is the wrong tool for trying to solve this kind of problem.
Eating soap that doesn't get rinsed off is pretty bad for you top.
What was your thesis?

It was particularly difficult a few years ago when recurrent c diff was relatively unknown. At that point, I had to find a compounding pharmacy to get the oral vanco.

When things would recur, docs who clearly did not know what to do next would recommend doing the same thing and surprise! they'd get the same recurrence when done. Idiots.

Finally, I ended digging into the literature in order to make sure that whatever infectious disease doctor we were talking to was up-to-speed. There are few who are. I worked out some population dynamics on my own, but most of the medical community is not diffeq friendly.

As the wife dropped to under a hundred pounds, we found someone who recommended Cholestyramine during the post-vanco phase. It turns out that Cholestyramine binds one of the toxins (B? iirc) which gives the rest of the intestinal flora a fighting chance as the spores germinate. Effectively, it reduces the coupling coefficient in a population dynamical system preventing the c diff population to grow and overcome other populations. Perhaps old news if you did work in this field. At least, I hope things like this are better known than back in 2005.

Anyway, it worked but her health has never been the same.
I didn't find this very insightful or humorous. I guess it's trying to imply that specific prior experience is not very important which I would very much disagree with.
You're using two terms which are propositions (that is, they can be either true or false), and demonizing them as if they're subjectively defined and able to be manipulated for individual or group gains. That's simply not the case.

Global warming is the fact that the global temperature of Earth has been rising since the 19th century. It either has been warming, or it has not been warming. By fact, it has.

Climate Change is a statical fact. If the Earth is in a state of Climate Change, then there is a significant change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over a given time period. Whether or not the change is hot or cold is irrelevant, as both cases are alarming.

It's called Climate Change now because it's better defined, characteristic, and accurate than the rather obvious and uninformative term 'global warming.' The planet is not just warming, it's warming at a rate that is statistically significant. If that warming slows, but still stays above a significant rate, then we're still in a state of Climate Change and should still be alarmed.

Now, if you want to have a conversation about the validity of Climate Change with integrity, you would need to focus around the merit of the statistical thresholds defined. It could be the case that the thresholds in which leading climatologists have set are too low to merit being alarmed about. Make that case if you can. Otherwise, there's really no basis to make an argument against it.
This is funny, but also painful, because I feel like this is me. I've been working on every kind of computer problem I came across for 13 years, and I wasn't thinking about how any of it would look on my resume, and that much work is very hard to summarize.

I think of myself as a guy who can create or improve text files for computers. I think everyone needs this, but nobody wants this. I'm doing a terrible job of selling myself, and it's actually starting to hurt.
It's tragic that there's not enough interest in the property to re-do the CGI in higher res. They saved all of the assets so that they could be re-rendered later.

Warner Bros lawyers demanded all copies, and promptly lost them.
Right, we don't fully understand it. Our models have large error margins, and while they all agree on the trend, the specifics are relatively vague. More research is needed.

What we do understand, on the other hand, tells us we should be extremely conservative when it comes to the environment, and avoid pumping it full of greenhouse gasses, because having the planet heat up may lead to really bad things happening.

I don't get this "We don't understand what's going on, therefore we can keep making a mess" argument that so many people seem to be making.
I loved Camino back in the 10.1 / 10.2 days. It was truly epic , and so much better than the god awful IE for Mac.
I think it's kind of sad that they mention "GOG.com" over and over without a hyperlink. The author links to two games on their site (Might & Magic and Night of the Rabbit), but not their home page. Why do old media companies avoid linking to sites they write about?
Sorry, everyone, it was a bug I introduced. I wrote some code that looked at the ratio between two hash table entries, and I forgot to specify that I wanted the first hash table reference to return 0 rather than nil if it was empty.
>If you're not trolling, then you didn't understand the article.

Not only did he not understand the article, he doesn't understand any part of climate science.