skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please seek out a therapist to talk to. You can't be happy with the level of anger and resentment that you seem to have right now. At first I thought you were an attention seeking jerk, but after reading your comment history, I think you have gotten yourself into a bad place in life. Please consider it.
Because as soon as you release the spec, people will start building stuff against. This creates resistance to changing the protocol.
Is 0 really the same thing the sane thing as 'NULL' in the context of C? If you actually wanted a pointer to the begging of the memory, you would dereference 0, which has the well defined meaning of getting whatever is at memory address 0. When the programming attempts to get that, it is shut down by the system.
A few years ago I leveraged some reverse engineering to stream individual windows as GIF images.

More info if you're interested: http://zachcimafonte.com/GIF-Window-Server
Every 2 years, a new design trend emerges and a bunch of hipster know-it-alls pop up from the woodwork espousing how the new trend was right all along, and what were all you incorrect designers thinking for the last 50,000 years.

This deck is interesting and mostly a good way to look at many information presentation situations, but it is another instance of the recurring theme of annoying absolute statements from self-important designers.

There is bad design, there is good design, there is no "proper" design, and any designer who claims so needs to check their ego at the door before you hire them. Design and style evolve, and much of it involves fashion, fad, style, and preference. These elements evolve over time, vary between situations, companies, and products, and are part of the character of the statement design makes.

This presentation would be considered boring in some situations, depressing at others, ultrachic in others.

Not everyone wants to sit on purple glowing cubes with a fernet milkshake under mood lighting in tight pants. Some people enjoy sitting on saddles, twirling their mustaches, and line-dancing the cowshit off their boots.
Every 2 years, a new design trend emerges and a bunch of hipster know-it-alls pop up from the woodwork espousing how the new trend was right all along, and what were all you incorrect designers thinking for the last 50,000 years.

This deck is interesting and mostly a good way to look at many information presentation situations, but it is another instance of the recurring theme of annoying absolute statements from self-important designers.

There is bad design, there is good design, there is no "proper" design, and any designer who claims so needs to check their ego at the door before you hire them. Design and style evolve, and much of it involves fashion, fad, style, and preference. These elements evolve over time, vary between situations, companies, and products, and are part of the character of the statement design makes.
Bullshit. Flat design is a subjective fad just like skeumorphic design.

More amusingly, this very presentation has a (subtle) background gradient, text shadow, a gratuitous fading animation between different background colors for different sections, and a 3D flip animation when you hover over a link, none of which are exactly hallmarks of "flat design".
Concrete's bulletproof too and you don't see people calling it complex or expensive.
Didnt Touch a Computer? You May Still Have Broken the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act
With a decent air mattress you should be OK.

More back harm from failing to left. Squats and deads, my man.
You're not losing too much really. The few bits of useful information in that post are buried beneath a mountain of hyperbolic reasoning and incoherent associations.

Yes, the economical situation is pretty bad. The middle-class salaries never catch up with the inflation; in fact they get behind.

Also, the corruption in rampant across all power spheres. It's not only the politicians the ones who fuck the future of the country.

But it's not like giving money to the poor or politicians take more than it's expected of them are the greatest problems in Argentina; at least as i see it. We're really lagging behind in education and basic social services. I feel that if we can't get the basics right, there's no chance we'll prevent the people in the upper spheres from stealing or making shit laws.

Anyway, it's not that everything is lost or anything like that. There're many things that we should fix, but i guess that can be said about every country. We still got awesome people here. And i don't want to let all the negativity blind me from the good things that we have, and what we can work with :)
Belief in a lot of ridiculous stuff persists and is very mainstream depending on your stance on general religious belief. It's hardly isolated to PNG.

I read an article recently about suggestions that the Japanese PM wasn't moving into the prime ministerial home because it had a macabre history and was thought to be haunted by ghosts. The official response was a denial, but there seemed to be comments from other politicians suggesting that this was not a ridiculous position to hold.
I don't blame you. They don't teach it because actually teaching it would be a major side track, everyone would ask why you need to know it, and it would generally cause problems.

But it isn't that hard to prove for yourself for the simple case of the binomial curve if you're willing to supply some elbow grease. Here is an outline of how I did it when I was an undergrad.

1. Prove that log(n!) = n log(n) - log(n)/2 + k + o(1) where k is some constant. (Trick: approximate the integral of log(x) with the trapezoidal rule, that gives you n log(n). You wind up with log(n)/2 + log(1)/2 left over. Prove that the sum of the errors to infinity converges to a constant, which gives you, to finite n, k + o(1) where the o(1) term is the sum of the rest of the errors that you haven't reached yet.)

2. Suppose that X_1, X_2, etc are an identically distributed independent set of random variables that have probability 0.5 of being +1 or -1. Prove that each X_i has mean 0 and variance 1.

3. Consider the random variable Y_n = (X_1 + X_2 + ... + X_n)/sqrt(n). Prove that it has mean 0 and variance 1.

4. What is the "density" (in quotes because it is discrete) of Y_n around x? Well you can calculate an exact formula in terms of the binomial formula, and stick in your approximation from step 1, then show that the point weight of the nearest point to x is going to be e^(-x^2)(c + o(1))/sqrt(n) where c is a constant that can be derived from k in step 1. Remember that that's the only point for a distance of sqrt(n), so the density is proportional to e^(-x^2).

5. Look up the standard argument that the integral from -infinity to infinity of e^(-x^2) is sqrt(pi). Note that Y has to sum up to a total weight of 1 (because it is a probability density), substitute that fact in then you get both the standard normal distribution out AND as an unexpected bonus, Stirling's formula!

(If you wish you can do the same for a biased coin, the derivation is slightly more complex but follows the same lines. However to get arbitrary probability distributions you need to use different approaches. People usually don't encounter that proof until graduate school.)
I was in the process of typing that up. It takes time.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5766387.
14-Year-Old Prodigy Programmer Dreams In Code [video]
I've surfed around on this article several times while trying to find a distribution I needed in order to make my rejection samplers work better for distributions that have no name or are obscure (posteriors in Bayesian inference often generate some totally whacky distributions--especially once you get out of the realm of using conjugate priors. Here, there be dragons!).

If you aren't reading probability from a textbook, this article isn't going to tell you which distributions are the most useful. The Beta Distribution receives half the amount of space as the Dirac delta function, but for you folks who want to take a Bayesian approach to A/B testing, the beta is going to be far more useful (The beta is the conjugate prior to the binomial) than the dirac, though one might argue that the Dirac is interesting from a mathematical perspective, it being a degenerate distribution and all...

It turns out though that many of the "useful" distributions (by which I mean the ones that many classical problems were devoted to) share very similar properties. If your aim is to get familiar with the most common distributions encountered in the wild, the article on the exponential family will serve you better than this overwhelming article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_family
Would Rutledge be less interesting a person if he shaved off his facial embellishments?

Does his substantial beard take away, or add to his persona?

I wonder how he would fare if he were given the chance to design the website for the next Halo game.
Point being, Catholic missionaries who succeed in replacing one superstition with another may seem to fix the immediate problem, but the rest of us are facepalming hard enough to leave marks.
This strikes me as a rather lazy analysis of human behavior. We have had consequences for senseless violence for as long as we have had sense, and while it has been slowing it shows no signs of stopping. Can't we do any better than that?
It is easy to write a computer simulation of specific cases, and watch the bell shape emerge out of it. All that tells you is that the mathematicians are telling the truth, but not WHY it happens.
I didn't see any mention of Bitcoin in the article.
TV shows are written in "acts", they are designed to be broken up. Ads may be a horrible distruption (so I suggest muting them and blocking or averting from the images), but for a good TV experience, you should take a break for a minute to let the previous act sink in before watching the next act.
Isn't it obvious? I don't want my time I slot for entertainment interrupted with shit that doesn't entertain me.

I don't subscribe to TV or Hulu or anything but Netflix for this very reason. I would cancel Netflix if they inserted ads. I would rather pay $50 a month for Netflix if that meant being ad-free.
Really? This hipster crap again?

Flat design is just design. It's a type of design like anything else; there's nothing "proper" about it. It's not "proper" when people screw it up because they don't include sufficient visual interface cues which result in a drastic drop in usability (I'm looking at you, Microsoft). It's just design. People can execute it horribly, and other people, like, say, Google, can execute it remarkably well.

What I find is that design is far too polarizing. There's no middle ground between skeuomorphic, three-dimensional, and flat interfaces. Why can't we have something like OS X 10.6, where there were elements of all design trends, and the result was a clean and very usable interface? Why did they have to fuck it up with 10.7 and the awful skeuomorphism? Why can't we have drop shadows? What is so "unproper" about them? Why can't we have gradients? Is it "unproper" to have those too?

This conversation has gone on long enough, and I'm tired of it. Flat design is just design.

End of story.
Mild, or self-limiting or otherwise transitory. I know (closely) three people in two different countries who have a 15/100,000 disease that is self-limiting.
The leading stood out so bad. More line-height needed.
"It's not bringing your friends to a new network that's the hard part - it's bringing your data (mainly photos). Getting thousands of photos out of Facebook that are nicely tagged and commented on and into another network is impossible."

I'm constantly surprised that people actually care about the commenting part; tagging I can sort of see the value in, but only from the perspective that Facebook becomes your main photo library. Granted I'm not the most sentimental kind of chap, but once uploaded photos have been commented on, liked, +1'd etc, how many people really care about that sort of thing? Presumably people have copies of photos they care about or are deeply personal.

Of course, maybe this is the part of me that always goes "Oh yeah, I do that, and that, and..." when I go to seminars on Autism rearing its head. I'm also somewhat bemused by people's film-era photo albums for the most part, so I guess there's that.
There was a talk at PyCon US this year covering several of the questions you have.

How (Not) to Build an OSS Community

http://pyvideo.org/video/1742/how-not-to-build-an-oss-commun...
Sorry, by data, I meant the percentages add up to one (so that the integral equals 1), not the data it was derived from.

Thanks for the correction. My method would be more fair, but is incorrect when applied to standard normalization. It should be percentiles. In a strict bell curve, if the top 20% get A's, then the bottom 20% would also have to fail (even if they didn't really get an F) so a pretty unfair system as you mentioned as grades are already predetermined :(
Here's a possibly interesting idea: in a game, randomly select from some of these distributions to generate objects (e.g. powerups, enemies, game balancing constants) whenever the player appears to be doing well. You'd initially give them the impression that the behaviour is non-random, but then suddenly everything changes.

Just thinking out loud here. =)
In practice you'd probably need a solid game to begin with to even get the player to notice changes in the distribution used. I'd say lots of times you don't need more than a plain old uniform distribution though.
My understanding is that the Hulu subscription pays for fixed overhead (and profit), and the ads pay for marginal licensing. That might be a lie, though.
Thank you! I didn't consider what he would want would be an actual logical proof instead of metaphors/analogies.
Most of Netflix doesn't have ads.
Not to mention the fact that there are many people in this world who have become millionaires off bad content, so excoriating it isn't necessarily useful, depending on your goals.
I was just thinking to myself how annoying the typography in this presentation is. Line height changes all over the place and is generally vertically cramped and annoying. The colors he chooses are chosen as if to be actively unpleasant (dark gray on blue?).

I'm not unsympathetic to everything in his presentation, but the broadside of self-importance coupled with the bad design decisions in the document is pretty lame.
Btilly outlined the steps of how you'd go about showing mathematically that a binomial converges to the normal distribution, but the reason you don't see this approach, even after two courses in statistics, is that it takes awhile for people to wrap their heads around the steps. At most universities, calculus (more than just a simple derivative and integral here and there, I mean) and real analysis isn't introduced to statistics until students take math stats, which is something you'd take after you were well-versed in the applications and shapes of several common distributions. The Bean Machine is usually a more intuitive way that students are introduced to "why" binomials become normal as the sample size gets larger.

The reason that _so many_ things have normal distributions is because of the Central Limit Theorem. If there's any reason to study math stats (other than understand the underpinnings of statistics at a deeper level than most of the population), it's that you get to become really familiar with how amazing this Theorem is.
Apple has a team devoted to making Apple products easy to use in productions, and aggressively courts producers. But they don't "pay". It's exactly the same as how companies send press releases (and demos) to lazy journalists to reprint as news.
Google would choose to lose "all that ad revenue" if they could replace it with sufficient, and probably more lucrative, non-ad revenue through paying customers.
No, I think I mean 70,000. It's 0.001% not 0.001.

(0.001 / 100) * 7000000000 = 70000
Not to toot my own horn, but yes actually. I was given a windows 6.0, 6.5 CE, 7.0, and I'm actually currently using the phone the gave me from their developer conference. 8.0.

seems like there is a lot of presuming going around. I'll apologize now and say I am sorry to have offended you.
Guess which wikipedia article has the higher Flesch-Kincaid Readability Level
The terminal window seems to abide by the principles quite well. I know Im looking forward to it.
Doesn't the combinatorial approach which allows you to directly calculate the probabilities of each bin show why it takes that particular shape?
Snow Leopard. It can't run anything newer.
....and you just said the manufacturer's name on a unrelated forum, so their ad campaign was a success.
Fair enough, though it is essential to remember that the problems with lynching are not just that the court system is not used. There have been many lynchings that occurred after the trial and a guilty verdict (for example, the infamous lynching of Jesse Washington, where he was dragged from the courtroom immediately after being sentenced to death.)

Of course trials at that time and place were anything but fair, but we don't generally refer to those state-run executions as lynchings (perhaps we should).
> I wonder how he would fare if he were given the chance to design the website for the next Halo game.

Very well put. The very idea that there could be a "proper" design is just patently false.
What Really Happens On A Teen Girl's iPhone
The method for outlawing specific drugs is stupid and arbitrary, but at the very least it's easy and unburdensome to follow the rule against trafficking. There is no risk to the average person, only risk to those that put profit above the law (you don't traffic for personal use, generally speaking).
Your oldest, most outdated device
I know its a little odd, but im hoping they take design cues from the password entry screen on the iPad, thats is by far and away my preferred aesthetic for the OS. Its pretty much perfect for its job, visually attractive, simple, uncluttered, easy to use and does precisely the job it was meant to do.

It could be simpler, but I think that would detract from it.
This reminds me of Microsoft's Office Suite. It seems the current colors are:

Access - Red

Excel - Green

OneNote - Purple

Outlook - Blue

Publisher - Teal

PowerPoint - Orange

Word - Navy Blue

New headline suggestion: "Apple Copies Microsoft Design Ideas"? Just kidding! Associating a color with each product in your lineup is an old practice.
Most of those Flickr users are dormant accounts, like mine.
To explain why is difficult in layman's terms except for a few cases (the binomial is the token example for classical CLT).

For the majority of the people I had in the intro statistics courses I TA'ed for, this was enough explanation. In undergrad, we didn't prove Lindeberg-Levy CLT until my third quarter of math stats, and the versions with weaker assumptions we didn't prove until graduate math stats.

When you're struggling to understand the fundamentals of hypothesis testing and simple combinatorics, going through the rigorous process of proving the CLT is daunting, mind-boggling, and largely unnecessary :).
I suspect that no answer will make you happy here, since a social network "getting it right" is where all the people are. You can't be getting it right if a significant number of people aren't there, and you can't be a competitor unless you're getting it right (the threshold for 'significant' seems to mainly depend on which network you personally use ;P).

I'm one of those strange people who is perfectly happy on G+. I was 'friends' with a significantly larger number of people I knew in meatspace when I was on Facebook compared to G+, but they were people I had lost touch with for a reason (regardless if whether that was my fault or theirs). G+ has allowed me to follow and interact with a broader range of interesting people that I don't know personally or event tangentially, and so to me, that makes it a much more useful social network that Facebook ever was.
>Graphic embellishment should be as simple as possible without damage to its own clarity, contrast or textural purpose. Always try simplest first.

On the left, I see two luggage tags. On the right, an iPhone and an iPad.

Making your audience guess what your "deconstructed" visuals are actually supposed to be is not good -- it's mystery meat design.

Speaking of meat, don't get me started on the hamburger icon.
Why The Star Trek Computer Needs Open Data... and Scotty too
In actual games with random behavior, the challenge usually lies in convincing people that they are just having an unlucky streak but the game is random and unbiased. Therefore I don't see the point.

(I've encountered this at http://www.wargear.net/ - and I've sadly needed to convince myself that it is truly random.)
Can't we all just get along? There has to be a time and a place for skeumorphism (perhaps A/V controls) and flat design (an interface to an ATM).
Thanks for posting this. It's a good perspective to have in these discussions, which can otherwise veer too far in the direction of legal nuance.
The Hadoop team quit Yahoo to start HortonWorks last year.
Well, if the mob wants to drag a guilty person out of the courtroom and kill them via firing line or guillotine or proper hanging or some other quick method, it's less than ideal but acceptable. Torture is a completely different issue, and can never be justified as punishment.
I think ignorance is probably a simpler explanation, but thanks for bringing that up, I am not well-versed in medieval theology.
I understand that Bernie's trying to strike a good balance between safety and competitiveness but, as a long-time F1 fan, I believe it's killing the sport. I can't stand the new tires and the DRS and KERS have been a terrible experiment.

These teams all play by the same rules and must build cars to the same overall spec. Seriously, what happened to the best driver/car combination winning races? Get rid of the gimmicky doo-dads and just let these guys race.
> on some project destined for some African country that nobody will ever hear about,

Uh, bringing a billion people onto the Internet for the first time, and turning the 3rd world into the 1st world, isn't most people's definition of soul-sucking.
It can, but it takes a bunch of elbow grease.

It is slightly easier if you start off assuming Stirling's formula. However there is no need to assume that - you can derive it at the same time. Elsewhere in this thread I gave an outline of how to derive this simple case.
And yet, this is the most wordy Slide deck about visual design I've ever seen.

Seems the simplest way to convey the information would've been graphically.
I take it the example blog is in Chinese? 90% of the text is just that unicode block character that represents a character I can't see.
Replace Google Reader with a Raspberry Pi
"An allocator needs to chop up and slice a larger block of memory and give different segments to different callers. You cannot do this if something is enforcing bounds."

Sure you can -- if the enforcement of array boundaries is based on types, and is not applied when dealing with a generic, low-level pointer type. Take a look at the implementation of SBCL (a Common Lisp compiler) to see this sort of thing in action.

Yes, building abstractions is the right thing to do, but libraries are the wrong way to do it. The problem with libraries is that the programmer needs to expend their mental energy on using the library, and needs to remember to not just use what the language provides them. If anything, the programmer should be forced to use a library to avoid bounds checking -- extra effort should be required to do dangerous things, rather than to be safe.

"the languages don't force you into paying that cost."

Neither do high-level languages, if you can guarantee that the cost does not need to be paid (and if you are using a half decent compiler). If your compiler can deduce that your array index cannot be out of bounds, it should generate code without a bounds check. That is why Lisp has type hints, and it is one of the arguments you hear in favor of static type checking.